Relationship marketing strategy
OLDER MARKETING MANAGERS FIND CUSTOMER NEEDS "OUT OF LINE"
NEW BRIEFING URGES THEM TO FOCUS ON KEY CUSTOMER VALUES
Customers' "relationship needs" are getting "out of line" with what older marketing managers expect in many different kinds of companies, says a new management briefing. Relationship Marketing Strategy says customers now expect more from the companies they do business with.
"Time is in danger of passing some older managers and their companies by," says Professor Merlin Stone of Surrey European Management School, Surrey University, who led the team that researched and wrote the briefing. The briefing is based on in-depth interviews with more than 50 companies about their plans for managing customers.
As an example of the out-of-date manager, Professor Stone quotes the old-style branch bank manager who still looks on the customer as a "supplicant". "Today, customers think in terms of the 'bank as servant'. No wonder, then, that so many attempts to tell customers what products they ought to buy hit the rocks."
Professor Stone says that examples of managers "out of line" with customer needs can also be found in retailing, utilities, manufacturing and other industries.
The way managers can come up-to-date is to focus on key value issues, argues Professor Stone. There are three key issues -- the value of individual customers or segments of customers, the value the customer derives from his/her relationship with the company, and how the company delivers that value to the customer.
Relationship Marketing Strategy explores in detail how relationship marketing planning -- at the heart of delivering value to individual customers -- can be grafted on to traditional marketing planning. The briefing includes a detailed overview of the main stages in relationship marketing planning as well as several case studies.
Professor Stone says: "Building relationship marketing capability is like putting
together a jigsaw which contains pieces of strategies, policies, processes, people and
system initiatives."
Relationship Marketing Strategy
, a briefing in the Close to the Customer series,
