Only when I started to sculpt again did I realize that my business beliefs and practices were still heavily influenced by those early years in Rome. In particular, the study and discipline of classical art and the remarkable conversation between the shoemaker and his customer both played pivotal roles in the development of my business mind-set. These two experiences gave me a creative, analytic, and customer-centric lens on which to base my business approach/philosophy.
In hindsight, I believe my formative time in Rome not only contributed to my past success but also will be even more important to me tomorrow. We all know the age of the customer is here to stay, and while its arrival has had a rather disruptive impact on the world economy, I believe it will continue to drive exponential change in the foreseeable future. Innovation and information are at the heart of this shift, and there is a lot of both. Enabled by a constant stream of new digital and social technologies, customers sit in the middle of an information tsunami. Their instant and convenient access to information has empowered their decision-making abilities, and their immediate access to community helps them confirm their choices and influence others. Pity the business that still uses only traditional marketing communications methods; it must be struggling to keep up with this pace, and its long-term prospects are dim.
Conversely, the current marketing ecosystem offers us many exciting opportunities. I'd like to share with you some of what I've learned in navigating these waters and how you can use this fundamental change in customer relationships to enhance your brand's marketing efforts and thrive in this new marketing environment.
This book is slightly different from the current crop of business books describing how to connect with customers in our transparent digital world. Don't get me wrong; there are many great books out there from renowned authors backed by first-rate research. But I'm more of a practitioner than a researcher, so you will find my observations and insights come from the realities of the street. With over three decades of hands-on, eyes-wide-open experience to tap into, I've accumulated lots of “lessons learned” and, with them, some ideas on how businesses, even individuals, can thrive in this new marketplace.
I certainly don't have all the answers. Sorry, I have yet to find the “silver bullet”; in fact, I still have lots of questions myself. That is what's so remarkable about this environment. If you're willing to get out there and take some risks, you'll find that today's digitally powered analytics systems will very quickly tell you how you're doing and will provide immediate and continual feedback, and with those answers will come even more questions.
My shoemaker tale started me thinking about how my insights and experience could help move brands forward in this new age. To face an enhanced level of customer centricity, we need a new marketing approach, a game plan, that encourages and rewards customer involvement. We may need to reconfigure our organizations, and we definitely need a new mind-set – one that is built on attracting, engaging, and retaining customers at every touchpoint, on and offline. This will be the new definition of success.
So that's what this book is about. Who are these new customers, why are they behaving so differently from the past, and how can we build long-lasting relationships that work for them and our business going forward?
Welcome to Customer-Centric Marketing. Please feel free to contact me at [email protected] or through any other social channel. I'd relish hearing your thoughts once you're done reading.
While often interchangeable, there is a small difference between the terms customer and consumer. Using customer implies you (or a competitor) already have established a relationship – she's no longer just a prospect for your product or service. Consumer, as used in the advertising and marketing world, implies someone who could use your (or a competitor's) product or service. Given these minor distinctions, let's use customer– I think it's more desirable.
CHAPTER ONE
THE AGE OF THE CUSTOMER
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Every year, as part of staying in touch with our clients' customers, I visit retail locations to observe how customers behave in-store and how well the floor staff and sales associates are interacting with them throughout the sales process.
A couple of years ago, on a warm and sunny Saturday morning, I visited one of our automotive client's dealerships to spend a morning observing customers in order to get an idea of the car-buying experience from a customer's perspective. I watched for a while and then spent some one-on-one time with several of the sales associates to discuss how the sales process was working. On this day, the dealership was filled with customers shopping for new vehicles, always a welcome sight, but it was really how they were shopping that caught my attention – it felt completely different than just a few years back.
Customers were less interested in product information and more interested in taking a test drive, deciding on the spot, and negotiating an offer. This differed from just a few years ago, when the average customer would visit a dealership at least three times before beginning to negotiate a price. They needed these multiple visits to build up their product knowledge prior to making their final decision.
Today, the opposite holds true. Before visiting a dealership, customers have spent countless hours online researching brands. They've gathered information, read consumer reviews and influencer opinions, and used their social networks to get first-hand experiences from known third parties. They've probably also spent time on the brand's website, maybe building a car online with their desired, optional features, and perhaps they have even reviewed multiple financing options as well. They've done their homework. Armed with the information needed to make an informed decision, only then do they visit the dealership (whose customer reviews they've also checked out), arrange for a test drive, and negotiate a deal based on their pricing research.
Yes, these are the new car customers – sometimes more knowledgeable than the salesperson who waits on them! So that is our challenge: How do we influence these new customers, give them the information they need to make decisions, and anticipate their questions before they arrive at the dealership?
For our automotive client, we've tried a number of things such as making online content more interactive, linking to external reviews and blogs, monitoring social forums (including online communities) to see what people are talking about, and training product specialists and sales teams to be up to speed with current trends. Essentially, everyone on the sales floor needs to be confident, knowledgeable, and prepared to meet the needs of every customer who walks into the showroom. And while these seem to be working, we've only just scratched the surface – we know there'll be more changes to come.
The dealership story is a micro-example of what is happening today. The last decade has witnessed a massive shift in how we market products and services. Driven by digital technologies, social media, hyper-competition, product proliferation, globalization, and changing customer behaviors, a new marketing era is upon us with a vengeance. And the most dramatic element of this new era is an empowered customer who is leveraging information through all things digital at a frenzied pace, making the world of marketing a much more challenging place for marketers. Just keeping up in this customer-driven, real-time environment requires a huge commitment.
The digitization of daily life has acted as a catalyst for the emergence of new customer behaviors, and as a result, has created fundamental changes in how business is done today. I've spent a lot of time in the trenches, not just in the auto market, but with other consumer and business-to-business (B2B) products and services, and with this field-tested experience, I have developed different strategic approaches on how to connect with this elusive, discerning customer. My hope is to reduce the confusion and shine a simple but powerful light on how