The importance of understanding the exchange context when developing a decision support tool to target prospective customers of business insurance

Companies use decision support tools that enable them to efficiently manage their customers. When targeting new prospective customers, companies need to be able to select those customers who are not only more likely to respond to their marketing activities but are also going to buy their products. There is a lot of research about customer relationship Management and the analytical models that can be used to effectively select and manage customers. There is however less attention that is given to the actual process of developing and building a marketing decision support tool. In this paper, we pay particular attention to the construction process of a marketing decision support tool. A key contribution of the paper is that we propose that companies should pay more attention to studying their exchange context and its unique features when they are developing analytical models to support marketing decisions. We illustrate the research contribution through the story of a company that is involved in the direct marketing of business insurance and faces the need to implement a better targeting model.