Research Outline/Proposal Proforma

1. Research Title:

Relationship between Customer Relationship Management and Customer loyalty

2. Research Aim:

In the current business world, it's not just convince customers to buy whatever they sell. They need to understand their customer what they want, expect and identify their preference. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can help company to know their customer and build up the good relationship. However, traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) focus on using call centre and web sites to solve their customer complaints and provide the after sales service. It's difficult to retain the customer and maintain their loyalty.

Nike, Inc. is one of the world leading sports brands, incorporated in 1968. It en-gaged designs, development, markets and selling of athletic footwear, apparel, equipment, accessories and service worldwide. It sales the products through 3 major channels: wholesales, online sales (www.nike.com) and global brand divisions. Nike start to develop social media integrated with Customer Relation-ship Management, like NikeiD(2005), Nike+(2006) and Nike Digital Sport (NDS) (2010) recently.

The aim of this research is to find out how Nike's use Customer Relationship strategy improve customer loyalty through social media.

3. Research Objectives (between 2 and 4):

First, we will study the concept and definition of Customer Relationship Man-agement (CRM). Next, we will explore the relationship between Customer Rela-tionship Management (CRM) and social media. Then we will investigate how social media can assist Customer Relationship Management, and hence to im-prove customer loyalty.

4. Key Literature; Models & Theories (the Theoretical/Conceptual Framework):

1. What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

According to Srisamran, P., & Ractham, V. V. (2014), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can assist firms to know their customer better and develop good relationships with them. Besides, Arman, S. M. (2014) states that CRM as a part of the business strategy is designed to ensure profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction

2. What is Social Media?

According to Ang, L. (2011), Social media define as 'dedicated websites and application used to communicate with other users, or to find people with similar interests to one's own'. It includes sites and application like blogs, forums, Twit-ter, Facebook, etc.

5. Research Methodology

Philosophy: Positivism

Research method: Generally, research methods include Primary research and Secondary research. In this research, Secondary research method will be used because it is cheap and easily accessible than primary research.

Research approach: Generally, research approaches include Deductive ap-proach and Inductive approach. In this research, Deductive approach will be used because it's times saving and able to explain the theory more clearly.

Research strategy: In this research, case study, websites, journals, textbooks, newspapers will be used for reference purpose.

Ethical declaration: Secondary data will be used in this research, thus, there is no ethics concern.