I was inspired to write this post when I saw at the grocery store a can of lemon juice that said “contains no chemicals”, then I wondered: Isn’t lemon juice just citric acid with other bunch of chemicals? Even a freshly squeezed lemon is just a mix of chemicals that make what it is. Now, what does this have to do with CRM? Well, it immediately reminded me of a company marketing CRM as “no software, no hardware”! They certainly do not sell a bunch of notebooks, telephone books and pens that they call CRM, it is just a tricky marketing strategy for their product (which I fully admire and respect). But of course CRM is software and it should be sold as such. Whether the software is on the cloud or in your premises is a different story.
Perhaps I am being too up-tight, but sometimes I feel marketing blurs the line between advertising a product for what it is and tweaking words to give a deceptive impression, I imagine someone might buy that lemon juice thinking that it is healthier than the competitors.
In the case of lemon juice, they typically add preservatives or sometimes it straight citric acid with lemon oil to give it that lemon flavor.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of Cloud based CRM, I think they simply mean that there's no software or hardware to manage.
But the term "cloud" and "software as a service" "On-Demand" are, in and of themselves, a marketing terms to gussy-up the concept of essentially renting access to hosted deployments over the internet; so I can't really blame Marketers from adding to the mystique in this manner.
The more honest term would be Renting Software On Someone Else's Servers, but RSOSES is a sillier acronym than SaaS.