Strategic thinking is an emerging phenomenon guiding business managers to look beyond the point of decision-making. It has three unique dimensions, viz. time, substance and cardinality. It helps business managers to take dynamic decisions to implement it in the changing business environment. Customer relationship management programs and data warehousing platforms support the strategic decision-making process by enhancing the scope of strategic leveraging, building a strategic paradox and increasing the strategic maneuverability through a common window of consumer information across the organization.

When your calculations are far and in-depth then, what you acquire by your presumptions is much, so you literally win and take the advantage before even you go for a battle. But when your presumptions are shallow and near-sighted, then what you acquire by your calculations is so little, so you lose before you even enter the battlefield. Courageous soldiers win first and then go to the battlefield and fight, while lost and defeated warriors go to war first and then see to win. These few lines are taken from the famous book The Art of War by the great strategist Sun Tzu, as a prelude to this article. This is because strategizing a customer relationship management process helps the marketer to be proactive and design marketing programs, which are destined to be successful at the subsequent stage of implementation.

Application of strategic thinking in the context of Information Technology (IT) for effective customer relationship management augments the strategy of taking an all around view of customer interaction data and building programs for each customer on one-to-one basis. There are four key subjects dominating the IT landscape namely IT architecture with client server technology for enhancing maneuverability, electronic commerce through Internet technology for enhancing reach, increase in developer's productivity through objective-oriented programming to leverage technology and learning about consumers through data warehousing technology for improving managerial decision-making and effective resource management.

Advertising Express Magazine, Strategic Thinking, Customer Relationship Management, CRM, Decision-Making Process, Client Server Technology, Managerial Decision-Making, Resource Management, Strategic Thinking Models, Strategic Planning, Strategic Leveraging, Economic Liberalization, Global Marketing.