Ask five people in luxury marketing what “CRM” means and you’ll get five different answers. To one, it’s the email platform. To another, it’s the clienteling app the boutique team uses to log a client’s shoe size. To a third, it’s a dashboard of retention and CLV numbers nobody outside the data team ever opens. All three are right, and all three are incomplete, which is exactly the problem I want to start this Forum with.
I’ve now sat on nearly every side of that table: as an analyst at Ipsos (BVA), reading NPS and CSAT scores for brands like L’Oréal, Chanel, Richemont, Tiffany, and Estée Lauder; as the person at Chanel running the actual EMEA email, SMS, and mail campaigns behind those scores; as part of the team rolling out a Salesforce Clienteling platform across three regions at Byredo; and as the person who owned CRM end to end including strategy, database, budget, and the ambassadors on the floor at ICICLE. What that path taught me is that CRM stops being useful the moment a brand treats it as one of those three things instead of all three at once.
The two halves brands keep separating
In practice, many luxury and beauty organizations split CRM into two departments that rarely talk to each other:
Campaign CRM: the marketing team’s world of segments, sends, and A/B tests, measured in open rates and revenue per campaign.
Clienteling: the retail team’s world of one client, one relationship, measured in loyalty and lifetime value, and often running on a completely different system than the one marketing uses.
Split like that, campaign CRM optimizes for the many and Clienteling optimizes for the few, and neither one is looking at the client as a whole person. The client who gets generic promotional emails most frequently is often the same client a boutique advisor is trying to treat as irreplaceable in store. But the brand never notices the contradiction, because the two efforts sit in different tools, owned by different teams, reported in different meetings.
Why that split is getting more expensive
It was always inefficient. It’s becoming actively risky. Clients now form their opinion of a brand’s CRM in seconds. One over-frequent email, one boutique visit where the advisor clearly doesn’t know who they are, and they don’t distinguish between “that’s the marketing team” and “that’s the retail team.” They just experience one brand, badly coordinated. Meanwhile, the tooling to unify these two halves - proper Clienteling platforms, cleaner client data, real segmentation - has never been more accessible, which means the brands still running CRM as two disconnected functions are choosing that gap, not stuck with it.
What I mean when I say “CRM,” then
For me, CRM is the full loop: the data infrastructure that makes a client recognizable across channels, the campaign discipline that reaches the right segment with the right message at the right cadence, and the Clienteling relationship that makes the highest-value clients feel individually known… all treated as one continuous system rather than three separate jobs. A KPI dashboard is only in good use if it’s feeding both the campaign calendar and the advisor’s next conversation. A segmentation model is only as good as whether it changes what actually gets sent, and to whom, and whether the in-store team sees it too.
That’s one of the lenses this Forum will keep coming back to: not “which CRM tool should you buy”, but whether your organization is structured to let mass personalization and one-to-one relationship-building inform each other, instead of competing for budget and attention.
A question for you: if you work in or with a luxury or beauty brand, is your CRM function actually one team’s job, or is it split the way I’ve described? I’d genuinely like to hear how it plays out where you sit. If you are willing to share, please don’t hesitate to reach out and tell me.