Wilson Sporting Goods Embraces Online Marketing

ByDoug Bartholomew Despite the dot-com blowup, online marketing remains an important area of interest for manufacturers that sell to consumers via retail outlets. A leading vendor in this area, Blue Martini Software continues to have success helping manufacturers establish and cultivate an online dialogue with customers. "Blue Martini Relationship Marketing is a great enhancement and can enable us to market to our consumers, and at the same time support our channel," says Rick Kerpsack, director of interactive marketing at Wilson Sporting Goods Co. "This application would enable us to better manage our online warranty registration and update process from beginning to end, allowing us to optimally service new customers through the life of their products. It would also provide us with valuable customer data to help us market to our customer base." Blue Martini monitors customer behavior across channels, triggering "dialogues" based on customer events. These include customer-triggered events, such as buying a specific brand of merchandise in a store, calling a call center with a complaint, returning a product, or searching for a particular product on a Web site.