Ahaebook.com
The stock market is a perfect example of an undifferentiated market.
If you want to buy 100 shares of IBM, you will buy it at the lowest
price. There may be 1,000 people ready to sell shares of IBM. All you
care about is who will charge the least. No characteristic of the
seller—how long he/she has held the shares, whether he/she cheats
on income tax or spouse, what his/her religion is—matters to you
Design is a big idea, covering product design, service design,
graphic design, and environmental design. Design provides a set
of tools and concepts for preparing successful products and services.
Yet too few managers know what design is or value it. At
best, they equate design with style.
At the heart of CRM is database marketing. Your company needs to
develop separate databases on customers, employees, products, services,
suppliers, distributors, dealers, and retailers. The databases
make it easier for marketers to develop relevant offerings for individual
customers.
Most companies pay more attention to their market share than to their
customers’ satisfaction. This is a mistake. Market share is a backwardlooking
metric; customer satisfaction is a forward-looking metric. If
customer satisfaction starts slipping, then market share erosion will
soon follow.
We now live in a customer economy where the customer is king. This
is a result of production overcapacity. It is customers, not goods, that
are in short supply.
Everyone is talking about customer relationship management (CRM)
as the new panacea. Yet it is an empty term until it is defined. Some
people define it as the application of technology to learning more
about each customer and being able to respond to them one-to-one.
Others don’t see it as a technology issue but rather a humane issue:
How do you get your whole company to think and breathe customer?
Jan Carlzon, former CEO of Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), wrote
Moments of Truth, in which he described how he got his whole workforce
to focus on the customer.21 He would emphasize at meetings that
SAS handled 5 million customers a year and the average customer met
about five SAS employees in connection with a single journey
Marketing’s original mantra is to “find needs and fill them.” The company finds needs by listening to or interviewing customers and then prepares an appropriate solution to each need. Today, however, there are few needs that companies don’t know about or address. Pietro Guido, an Italian marketing consultant, wrote a book called The No-Need Society to make this point.
Companies formerly won their marketing battles through superior
efficiency or quality. Today they must win through superior creativity.
One does not win through better sameness; one wins through uniqueness.
Winning companies such as IKEA, Harley Davidson, and Southwest
Airlines are unique.
There is great payoff in building a strong corporate brand. Sony can
put its name on any electronic device and customers will prefer it to
the competition. Virgin can enter almost any business and be successful
because its name means brings a fresh approach to that business.
