Making the Connection

It's frightening to hear from clients about how little or infrequently they connect with their customers. This is not just a select group of companies I am talking about; these are ones with millions if not billions of dollars in marketing budgets. If they do communicate, it is merely passive via an email newsletter or at best a staged event. And of course it is done one way en masse with no personal message what so ever.

You want to know the real reason? This is a quote from a client prospect we were pitching not too long ago: “No, I don’t think we can do that. It will require a lot of work and time”. It’s true and it unfortunately captures much of what is wrong with corporate America today. We left the meeting shaking our heads in disbelief.

Yes, maintaining relationships with customers is hard and it does take time. You need to have a long term strategy, constantly updated plan and more importantly a commitment by the entire company. It has to be part of your culture. Change is hard, but communicating is not.

No longer do we need to depend upon expensive direct mail and in person visits to interact with customers. There are infinite electronic tools at our fingertips, which we can cleverly use to track customer behavior, send messages, extend rewards and solicit feedback. Companies we work with take advantage of some of these tools, but far too often they are done as one-off promotions with no overarching plan.

Think about it another way – via the customer. She leases a $50,000 car and the first thing she receives is a bill from the leasing company. Then she gets a call at around dinner time a couple weeks later from an offshore survey company asking about her experience at the dealership. Months later she may get their company magazine and assorted direct mail promotions. Of course when her lease is about to expire, the auto maker begins to get real friendly sending discount offers and upgrade promotions on a weekly basis. This person was recently my wife and she had no problem moving her business away from the original dealer. She went to different very prominent foreign brand and guess what happened? . . .the exact same experience.

Hearing these stories makes me cringe, because I know the marketing folks really want to change, but the corporate culture where they work usually gets in the way. - JR

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