Go ahead, let it contribute directly to your business strategy. Consider all business relationships to be partnerships. Customers are sales partners. Suppliers are procurement partners. Shippers are logistics partners.
Dealers are channel partners.
As partner managers, marketing people maintain the company's face to your entire business network, and only full organizational support can keep that face from crushing. Their failure wasn't in sucking in lots of data, it was in retailers' failure to capture and use that data as an organizational asset. Knowing your customer is not enough. You also have to get that knowledge to the marketing department, so it can use that navigational data to chart the right course. From the customer's perspective, your lack of Web presence or bad Web site is a liability, but just being online doesn't necessarily earn you brownie points, especially if you can't conduct transactions online.