The Fallacy of Loyalty
Do you believe in lifetime customer loyalty? I don’t. Granted, there are exceptional cases where it does exist, but that’s like marriages that weather the time for five or more decades; the exception rather than the rule. I don’t understand how consultancies can freely abuse the term loyalty, even throw around a term even more audacious: ‘customer ownership’. But doesn’t that show their real attitude towards the customer? Isn’t that why real loyalty is so hard to ‘achieve’? I certainly think so.
As long as companies regard their customers as something ‘they own’, rather than something they have the pleasure of sharing a mutually beneficial time with, they will wonder why they can’t achieve loyalty – or only at great cost.
Read More»Do benefits really benefit?
Before you think I’ve had too much South African wine, let me explain. Databases are there to help us: in Marketing, in Production, Administration, Logistics, you name it. A nice example of how technology properly applied makes our business decisions more accurate and predictable. We can now access information in seconds or minutes where before we had to wait weeks – if it was accessible at all.
We have also used technology to make it easier for the customers to communicate with us; to identify themselves to us; to tell us what’s right and what’s wrong.
Read More»Have I lost it? A contribution to the dbm_rm dicussion group
A contribution to the DBM_RM mailing list I founded and was maintaining at the time.
I don’t know if you read Gerry McGovern’s New Thinking newsletter, but the latest one dealt with customer ownership, owning the future and such like.
What I read couldn’t be left unchallenged, so I wrote back. Now I would like to ask you whether I have lost it completely or whether you, fellow professionals, sympathize with the general notion of my response.
Would love to hear from you.
Helmar
Read More»Database Marketing & Relationship Management: 10 Steps to get you started
The following is my understanding of WHAT should be done in order to create the right environment for Database Marketing and Relationship Management. The HOW largely depends on the company’s individual circumstances. Database Marketing is just one term used to describe the way organisations look for improving and streamlining their marketing activities in a world of increasing competition, fragmentation and uncertainty – the computer database as a marketing tool.
Read More»An Imperfect Look at a Perfect Marketing Future
The virtues and benefits of Database Marketing have been explained in numerous textbooks, but have rarely found proper application in the business world. This can partly be attributed to the confusion revolving around the definition of both database and marketing, the latter in this country often used to describe Advertising and Sales Promotion.
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