Abstract:

GDPR, a trendy subject in academic and practical research papers, is a new legislation which impacts on different business domains such as management, human resources, accountability, commerce, information security and nevertheless, marketing. Marketers will have to acknowledge the new directives and they just can not afford to ignore any part of it. As a first step for an ampler empirical research, in which we intend to find out how GDPR affects the customer relationship management (CRM), this paper aims to identify which are the main marketing topics that can be related to GDPR. We considered specific activities from marketing practices and tried to figure out if there are any correlations between these activities and GDPR in the online environment. In order to do so, we used some online instruments for measuring the frequencies a marketing topic is related to GDPR, instruments such as google trends and leximancer. The main marketing topics we proposed to analyze in correlation to GDPR were: branding, sales, marketing research, marketing strategy, social media, databases and, of course CRM. Research findings proved that there are a series of marketing topics correlating to GDPR. Besides our search list of supposed words correlating to GDPR, we noted some other topics such as: “mailchimp”, “wordpress” and / or “amazon”. We analyzed the GDPR searches on the internet considering the geographical area and we showed it in a graphic representation – “The map –interest on GDPR by regions” The results of this research will be a foundation for our academic future research and a starting point for marketing practitioners preoccupied with respecting the personal data of their clients.