Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: customer value, gimmicks, marketing
Don Peppers, the visionary author, speaker and consultant who brought us The One-To-One Future is now warning business leaders that it doesn’t matter how many products you have; if you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business (apologies to Peter Drucker, who I believe stated this back in 1958).
Peppers and partner Martha Rogers had a great run with the one-to-one approach to marketing for more than 15 years, eventually selling the 1:1 magazine and consulting business to Carlson Marketing Group, which itself has since been sold. Don seems to have disappeared from the scene, though he’s still active on the speaking tour; in fact he’s got a gig coming up in the UK, where he spends a fair amount of time — he’ll be speaking at the Call Centre and Customer Management Expo on September 21.
Filed under: Business Models | Tags: auto industry, customer value, public relations
More than ever before brands are built on trust, not image. Trust is an emotional state, founded not just on the products but on the integrity of companies that produce them, and the CEOs who lead them. In a consumer-driven marketplace, where public trust has been rocked by numerous incidents of corporate greed and situational ethics in a brutal economic recession, even seemingly invincible brands have become volatile.
This blog has extolled often the wisdom and foresight of Peter Drucker, and the lack thereof shown by so many business leaders who have failed to heed his sage advice. Those of us who have followed the long and illustrious career of Drucker — who would have turned a hundred years old this month — have to wonder what the legendary management guru would have to say about the current state of business, on the heels of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. In all probability he would have said, “I told you so.”
Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: customer value, push-to-pull, taglines
Dick Damrow was a long-time friend and associate, and one of the better marketers I’ve had the honor to know. We worked together in the ad agency business back in the mid-1980s when he was a top exec in one of the larger agencies in Minneapolis, before he decided to get into database marketing. We remained close friends over the years and when I started my own marketing agency a decade later, I engaged Dick as a consultant to help define a competitive position in what was then a market driven by advertising and brand development.
He asked what my vision was for our fledgling little agency and I told him I believed the Internet was going to empower the customer in a way never seen before, shifting the market dynamic from push to pull. This would require companies to stop obsessing about their own brands and adapt to a more customer-centric business model, focused not on selling but helping customers buy. It also would create the need for a different agency model designed to help companies adapt to a pull marketplace, driven by data insight rather than creative intuition. The challenge, I told him, was communicating this in a credible way to potential clients.
There’s a lot of talk about word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) as one of the fastest growing marketing disciplines. There are even people marketing WOMM — like the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), which will happily sell you a standard membership for $3,000 a year. I’m not sure what all you get for that.
But I delved a little deeper to WOMMA, the “official trade association for word-of-mouth marketing” and I read a book by its President Emeritus, Andy Sernovitz, entitled Word of Mouth Marketing. The organization offers research, best practices, webinars and the promise of measurable ROI. Whoa. They even have a manifesto: “Happy customers are your best advertising.” It seems I’ve heard that before, like a long time ago.
Anyway, they have these four basic rules of word-of-mouth marketing: 1) be interesting; 2) make people happy; 3) earn trust and respect; 4) make it easy. I’m thinking these aren’t rules for word-of-mouth marketing — these are rules of life!
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits the need and sells itself.” – Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management, 1954.
Marketing is broken because business is broken, within the context of a customer-centric marketplace—still pushing in a pull economy. And marketing has become a function — rather than a driver — of business. This is basically a lapse in the market evolution as the two disciplines have become disconnected, one dragging the other down.
Marketing is trying hard to be customer-centric but is trapped in a business model that was built in a push economy, evolved from the Industrial Age, and driven by a purpose that is no longer aligned with a pull economy. In some cases it’s polar opposite.
