| Relationships and a single customer |
|
|
This article is based on the part of the book "Relationship Marketing - New Strategies, Techniques and Technologies to Win the Customers You Want and Keep Them Forever," by Ian Gordon,
|
|
|
Relationship marketing is a widely used term. Often, though, it is used interchangeably with names such as customer loyalty, database marketing, predictive modeling, data warehousing, one-to-one marketing, relationship selling, retention, mass customization, customer intimacy or customer bonding. While relationship marketing includes these practices, it is more. Much more. A company using database marketing, for example, as its relationship marketing approach may find itself no more able to forge deeper bonding with customers than previously, with mass marketing or market segmentation techniques.
|
|
|
Let's start with a definition of relationship marketing:
|
|
Relationship marketing is the on-going process of finding and creating new value with customers. Then sharing the benefits of this over a lifetime of an association. The process involves the understanding, focusing, and management of on-going collaboration between suppliers and customers for value creation and sharing through organizational alignment and interdependence.
Many points flow from this:
|
|
|
Relationships are the main asset of the enterprise and not the machines that make the products. The products or even the intellectual capital inherent in people, patents, or know-how are essential though all these might be. A relationship provides the company with long-term revenues and the opportunity to grow both revenue and profit in many ways.
|
|
|
Relationship marketing affects the entire enterprise. This is not just another layer on the marketing onion, but this is the onion. The organization fully adopting relationship marketing will find itself quite different after the adoption than it is today. There may be no functions called Sales or Marketing, in the relationship marketing company, for example.
|
|
|
Relationship marketing is a process, not a program. As such, its work is never done as long as the customer has money to spend, a willingness to pay it, and a supplier that can profit from the expenditure.
|
0 Comments