Internalization in Technology Innovation: A Case of CRM Adoption

In today’s increasingly competitive economy, traditional marketing practice is thought to be out of date. Companies are driven to adopt the new practice defined by prevailing rationalized marketing concepts, because customer relationship management (CRM) is seen as the next marketing paradigm. Unfortunately, most CRM implementations do not produce expected results and even with technical feasibility many promised benefits of CRM have been rarely fulfilled. Using a case study, this paper examines why a company adopts a CRM technology but fails to buy into the technology’s real value and identifies the factors impeding the internalization process of technological innovation. The results of our case analysis show that the CRM technology diffused less rapidly than expected, because the underlying value of the CRM was incompatible with the company’s existing philosophy. This incompatibility has made the CRM deployment ceremonial. A discussion on the results of the case study is provided.