Mathews&co

Yutong Hu

MKMR-311

Mathews & Co. – Case Write-up

        Mathews & Company is a nationwide chain of mall-based menswear stores. The company aims to build up their CRM system to get better understanding about their customers in order to increase profits. As described in the case, Barry Golding, the CTO of Mathews & Company, who is responsible for implementing the CRM plan, fails to persuade investors to sponsor his project.

        There are three main problems that prevent the investors from supporting the project. Firstly, the long and complicated fancy slides do not clearly clarify how the plan will guarantee the reliability of the data collected. In addition, Barry cannot persuade the investors that his plan can handle the common problem for CRM system, which is integrating the data collected. Secondly, since the plan has to take two years for preparation before it could indeed bring profits to the company, the investors may doubt the feasibility and profitability of this long frustrating plan. Thirdly, in Barry’s presentation, no evidence could prove that, by implementing the market plan, the firm could indeed earn more profits as they initially assumed.

        The four experts provide really useful suggestions for the company. By integrating those ideas, the company’s CRM plan could be much improved. First of all, since those investors invest their money for earnings return, a series of convincing data to prove the profitability of the CRM plan is necessary. By reading clear figures rather than complex and wordy slides, investors could get a better understanding about the potential of the CRM plan. Secondly, as also mentioned in the case description, the two-year preparation time is too long and inefficient for a marketing project that aims to differentiate a company from competitors. Barry better breaks his lengthy and ambitious big plan into segments and build up the system step by step. Each step should play its own role and bring some visible benefits to the company in order to reduce investor’s doubts about the whole plan. Additionally, I think the suggestions that Barry should have one-on-one meeting with each investors in order to demonstrate the thoughts of his team is crucial and much helpful. The process is to marketing the plan to those investors. The one-on-one meeting is like personal selling. By using this approach, every investor will be informed of the ideas from the plan instead of being surprised by the things they see for the first time during a presentation. Potential opposition could be avoided during the one-on-one meeting. What’s more, the one-on-one meeting is also a good opportunity to understand the expectation of each investor. Barry could adjust his plan by integrating those feasible ideas. Finally, outsourcing the CRM system is a really good idea for Mathews & Co. Since company mainly focuses on apparel instead of technology, outsourcing will provide the company with professional management and analysis of customer information. The company could simultaneously focus on improving their product quality or developing other costless marketing strategies to promote its product, instead of spending a great amount of money on an uncertain plan.