Approaching Chinese Customers Building Legitimacy Through An Outstanding Customer Relationship Management

The luxury industry has not only endured the global downturn but performed remarkably reaping huge profit in exciting emerging market such as the Chinese one. Although the speed of the automotive market in China has recently decelerated, the demand for luxury cars doesn’t seem to have encountered any hold up.Nowadays foreign companies perceive China as a sort of Promised Land where everything is still possible. Since China entered the World Trade Organization in2001a "war" between aggressive and determined foreign car manufactures has been going on, reaching its peak in the past decade.Shifting the company’s policy from revenue-oriented to customer-centered seems to be the solution to lead and to rule over the competitors.Customer Relationship Management becomes a powerful tool in order to attract, to acquire and to retain customers. Throughout this thesis, CRM will be introduced not only as a mere system for data miming, storage, and handling but as a proper philosophy, a proper marketing discipline and strategy.A profile of the Chinese customer, underlining the importance of touch points and communication channels, will be traced analyzing the results of a survey I proposed to a sample of potential Chinese (Shanghainese) customers for luxury cars, interwoven with my personal experience as marketing assistant-CRM intern-in Porsche China (Motors) Ltd. Porsche China (Motors) Ltd will be treated as a Case Study and as an example of successful Customer Relationship Management.For confidentiality reasons I’m not allowed to show data, real figures and percentages coming from the company. Although the absence of the numerical results of the statistical analysis I conducted, I hereby present my considerations and my findings.