Merlin Stone
Merlin Stone
Merlin is one of the UK’s top marketing and customer management specialists. He is a Senior Associate Consultant at Customer Essential. He has worked in many sectors – whether as consultant, manager, director or educator. He is author or co-author of many articles and thirty books on customer management. The UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing listed him in 2003 as one of the world’s top 50 marketing thinkers, he was nominated as one of the 20 most influential people in the direct marketing industry in a Precision Marketing readership poll in 2003, while NOP World nominated him in 2004 as one of 100 most influential individuals for their input and influence on the development and growth of e-commerce and the internet in the UK over the previous 10 years. He is an active researcher on customer management issues.
He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and an Honorary Life Fellow of the UK’s Institute of Direct Marketing.He is also on the editorial advisory boards of several academic journals. He has a first class honours degree and doctorate in economics from Sussex University. In parallel to his business career, he has also pursued a full academic career, holding senior posts at various universities. He is now a visiting professor at De Montfort, Oxford Brookes and Portsmouth Universities and also teaches economics part-time for the Open University.
Merlin’s thoughts:
I’ve worked on customer management sine the late 1970s, starting in the engineering industry before moving to the office equipment industry, focusing on customer service. When companies outside the traditional direct marketing industry started to implement customer databases in the 1980s, I was there to help. Today, most of my work focuses on attracting and keeping customers through contact centres and the web. The technology has changed, but the management issues remain the same. Another big change is that today many more companies can draw on a range of internal and external experts in customer management in all its aspects. However, even the best companies like working with us, because it allows them to set the performance bar even higher.
 |
 |
 |
