“Don’t believe everything that you hear, and half of what you see,” goes the old saying which brings me to something of interest this week: Spin. PR. Marketing. Call it what you will, how we feel about certain things, and the items that we buy and sell, have a lot of thought and energy behind the creation of an image.
In his new book Deadly Spin, Wendell Potter writes about corporate spin-manship and industry. In his previous role as chief of public relations for CIGNA, Potter pulls from vast experience with corporate culture and the ability to make the sausage of information into the Andouille of desire. More importantly, the book gives thought to the ethical considerations of public relations and the need for a bit of soul-searching.
The spin or the ruse has a rich history. Think about the Trojan Horse and the spin that some smooth talking Greek Soldier created as he left the gift of a giant wooden horse at the sealed gates of Troy. Deadly Spin reviews the history of spin, which he traces back to the Potemkin Villages of Catherine the Great. According to myth and legend there were fake settlements erected at the direction of the Russian Minister Potyomkin to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to Crimea in 1787. According to this story Potyomkin had fake villages constructed along the desolate banks of the river in order to impress the monarch and her travel party. Seeing the value of her new conquests, his standing was enhanced in the empress' eyes.
There are many examples of this type of spin or what is now called “Potemkin Villages” many times in history from the Theresienstadt Ghetto in Nazi Germany also called the “paradise ghetto”, to the work supported by New York Mayor Ed Koch in 1982. Koch had a team affix decals with plants and venetian blinds over the windows of abandoned buildings in the Bronx to hide the blight. The contemporary urban shopping center has been called a Potemkin Village Shopping center as it works to mimic the feel of a village as opposed to a mall atmosphere.
Modern PR was greatly influenced by Edward Bernays, author of the 1923 book Crystallizing Public Opinion, the first book entirely dedicated to PR. Among his clients were the cigarette companies for whom he orchestrated a campaign equating cigarettes with “thinness, grace, and beauty.” An insufficient number of women were smoking, so he began an early PR project to encourage women to smoke.
Just a little bit of research has led me to some of these ideas today, and to ask you to please do one thing: Think. Take the time to consider why something is being said, and what it means to the speaker. Follow the economic trail to discover true motivation. Even great philanthropy, or health care, or politics or buying a particular type of milk, has had great effort placed into creating how you feel about the purchase or the contribution or the vote. Caveat emptor or Let the Buyer Beware.
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Showing posts with label Relationship Marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Relationship Marketing. Show all posts
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Customer Loyalty
The essence of marketing isn’t about goods and services. It isn’t about selling. It isn’t even about profits or beating the competition. It’s about developing a relationship with customers so that they will grow loyal to a company’s goods and services. It’s about developing trust between customers and the firms from which they purchase goods and services. Let’s face it, getting and keeping customers is an expensive endeavor. The average U. S. business loses half its customers in five years. Generating a new customer costs five times as much as keeping a current one and firms pay a steep price when customers stray to other brands. In a slow economy, creating unsurpassed value for a customer so that they stay with you is even more important. Contemporary Marketing, Boone & Kurtz, p. 3.
How do we keep our customers? An important trend in marketing planning is relationship marketing. Relationship marketing looks at customers as equal partners in the buyer-seller transaction. When this process works the way that it should, what you see is a motivated customer entering a long term relationship in which they repeat purchases and buy multiple brands from the same firm. This allows marketers to get a more clear understanding of their customer needs. This intern leads to better customer service and improved products. The end result is increased sales with lower marketing costs.
You can develop an intentional approach to retaining customers by cultivating your relationship marketing plan. Your plan can be centered on some straight forward strategies such as routinely offering small, but noticeable, favors for your customers. Fulfilling orders early, upgrading software before it is requested, thank you notes, calling customers when sought after items arrive in the store, answering the phone with a person instead of an automated system, all of these are just a few ideas of an intentional strategy to understand and manage your customer preferences. Don’t stop there. As we have discussed before in this opinion, empower your first line sales people or service representatives to creatively add value, boost referrals, and create retention. Think about how you feel when you go to your favorite restaurant and ask for “YOUR” waiter or waitress; the one that really takes care of you, and makes your visit unique.
An important measure of relationship marketing is the “lifetime value of a customer.” This refers to the revenues and intangible benefits such as referrals and customer feedback that a customer brings to the seller over an average lifetime, less the amount the company must spend to acquire and service the customer. In keeping with our restaurant theme for example, let’s suppose that a customer eats at O’Charleys in Fultondale twice per month and spends $25.00 each time over five years. That business translates this calculation to revenues of $600 per year or $3000 in five years. When the business owner then subtracts out the average cost for labor, food, and overhead, she is left with a per-customer profit. This type of information helps the business owner to focus on drivers to enhance the customer relationship, control marketing costs and ultimately lead to increased sales.
Bottom-line is this: If you have an infinite stream of potential customers you can probably keep them happy only once and perhaps still grow your business just fine. But, if you are like the rest of us, a strategy to include some relationship marketing strategies that will keep your customers coming back could really help to drive your sales, fine tune your customer service, decrease your marketing cost and sell a good bit more.
Remember to take care of your customers or someone else will.
How do we keep our customers? An important trend in marketing planning is relationship marketing. Relationship marketing looks at customers as equal partners in the buyer-seller transaction. When this process works the way that it should, what you see is a motivated customer entering a long term relationship in which they repeat purchases and buy multiple brands from the same firm. This allows marketers to get a more clear understanding of their customer needs. This intern leads to better customer service and improved products. The end result is increased sales with lower marketing costs.
You can develop an intentional approach to retaining customers by cultivating your relationship marketing plan. Your plan can be centered on some straight forward strategies such as routinely offering small, but noticeable, favors for your customers. Fulfilling orders early, upgrading software before it is requested, thank you notes, calling customers when sought after items arrive in the store, answering the phone with a person instead of an automated system, all of these are just a few ideas of an intentional strategy to understand and manage your customer preferences. Don’t stop there. As we have discussed before in this opinion, empower your first line sales people or service representatives to creatively add value, boost referrals, and create retention. Think about how you feel when you go to your favorite restaurant and ask for “YOUR” waiter or waitress; the one that really takes care of you, and makes your visit unique.
An important measure of relationship marketing is the “lifetime value of a customer.” This refers to the revenues and intangible benefits such as referrals and customer feedback that a customer brings to the seller over an average lifetime, less the amount the company must spend to acquire and service the customer. In keeping with our restaurant theme for example, let’s suppose that a customer eats at O’Charleys in Fultondale twice per month and spends $25.00 each time over five years. That business translates this calculation to revenues of $600 per year or $3000 in five years. When the business owner then subtracts out the average cost for labor, food, and overhead, she is left with a per-customer profit. This type of information helps the business owner to focus on drivers to enhance the customer relationship, control marketing costs and ultimately lead to increased sales.
Bottom-line is this: If you have an infinite stream of potential customers you can probably keep them happy only once and perhaps still grow your business just fine. But, if you are like the rest of us, a strategy to include some relationship marketing strategies that will keep your customers coming back could really help to drive your sales, fine tune your customer service, decrease your marketing cost and sell a good bit more.
Remember to take care of your customers or someone else will.
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