Customer Marketing

It seems odd that we are often tempted to look beyond our boundaries before we have really discovered what lies around us. We have no idea what makes the oceans tick yet we are hurling ourselves at the moon and beyond.

Without wanting to sound a little bit Radio 4 Thought for The Day….marketing is a little like space exploration you know….

Huge sums are spent projecting brands into the market with all forms of advertising from TV to email to door drops. No expense is spared in creating brand awareness so that your product or service is top of mind with consumers.Huge teams of marketing professionals with titles to die for and  letters after their names that take up a page are hard at work to create campaigns and methods of delivery that keep the brand evolving and growing.

This is of course all part of the marketing mix and the sexy part of the equation.The less exciting part but as vital are the oceans of customers that reside back on planet brand and understanding what makes them tick.

The business would be nothing without these customers and it is vital to find out what sort of customers you have before embarking on finding new ones. Knowing what you already have should give you important information in what to look for in new customers.

Customer profiling enables you to keep a check on the balance between those customers that are actively promoting your brand and those that are not.

Customeyes have identified three broad categories.

Generators – Customers that are your best friends and tell their friends just how good you are. These will make sure that new customers get to try your brand and will be the first to embrace new products and be tremendously loyal. The accepted truth that it is cheaper to hold onto good customers than attract new ones rings true.Certainly new customers that can become Generators is where the attention should be placed.If marketing budgets could be optimised to deliver higher proportions of likely Generators then marketing costs would fall and marketing as a function would be less likely to be a casualty of downturns.

Upsetting the Generators is a costly exercise.No one should ever forget the Coke experience of not paying attention to your loyal followers and assuming that the company knows best.Companies make brands but customers own them…

Acceptors – these are your middle ground customers who just bounce along without any direct influence on the outside world.

They are in themselves hugely important as they represent the constant in your sales, the Steady Eddy’s who will bring in the revenue.Satisified as they might be is OK in the short term but long term a conversion excercise is needed.

This middle ground is subject to flux and potentially disruption.Acceptors are on the whole by their nature less likely to do anything dramatic but are increasingly susceptible to acting irrationally.

A new player in your market may temp these laid back spenders with cheaper alternatives.Slick marketing may turn their heads and before you know it they are off to join the middle ranks of another brand portfolio.

Acceptors are dangerous and need to be managed and enticed into the Generator camp for their own safety…. There is the chance of course that they join the last customer camp…

Resistors - Customers that you can rely on not to be helpful.These will not actively spread good news about your brand and will suck in resources that will be needed to defend against their negativity.

Bad news always seems to travel faster than goood news and if several negative issues are circulating at the same time then it can cause problems.This is not to say that this group is actively trying to de stabalise your positive marketing intentions.The reality is that they are fickle and will jump ship faster than Acceptors as they are generally more price sensisitive.

More resources are spent to keep these customers happy especially when they complain or engage in returning product that would be considered good.

Resistors  generally increase your cost to serve as they demand more attention both during a transaction and after.Trying to upgrade a Resistor to Acceptor and on to Generator may well be counter productive in terms of resource allocation and it may be  better to let them go rather than divert resource.

Chase the new customer but do so with a full understanding of what you want and long term keep checking…