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RELATIONSHIP MARKETING
Multiple Relationship Strategies
Along with using multiple channels of distribution, many companies are segmenting their customers on the basis of the relationship the company has (or wants to develop) with the customer. The relationship can vary from one in which the sale is just an individual transaction to one in which the company develops a close long-term relationship or even a partner¬ship with the customer.
In transaction selling, salespeople emphasize the product, its quality, and the price. Generally, this kind of sale involves products that are not very complex, and the rupee amount of each sale is low. In relationship selling, salespeople develop in-depth knowledge of their customers' company and business. They help customers identify prob-lems and they work with customers to find mutually beneficial solutions. In a partnership, companies form strategic alliances in order to achieve joint goals. In a partnering relationship, the salesperson is re¬sponsible for overseeing the coordination and integration of the efforts of the two partners.
Multiple relationship strategies
These relationships vary in terms of the degree of commitment to the customer and the cost of serving the customer, as outlined in Figure above. In a transaction sale both the commitment and the selling costs are at a minimum, whereas in a partnership the commitment and costs are very high. Therefore, many companies are using different relationship strate¬gies to serve different customers. DuPont, for example, segments its cus¬tomers according to the relationship strategy, which it has identified as being the most effective for that customer. Motorola has three different sales forces, which serve its business customers, its major customers, and its partners
Relationship Marketing
Marketers want customers for life. Effective marketers work to build long-term relationship with their customers. The term relationship marketing communicates the idea that a major goal of marketing is to build a long-term relationship between the company and the parties who contribute the company's success
Effective managers view making a sale not as an end of a process but as a start of an organization relationship with a customer.
Relationship marketing means the marketing activities aimed at building long term relationship with people (especially customers) and organization that contribute to the company’s success. The focus of marketing has shifted from one single transaction to over all buyer-seller relationship - a focus known as relationship marketing.
Relationship Marketing is the ongoing process of identifying and cre¬ating new value with individual customers and then sharing the bene¬fits from this over a lifetime of association. It involves the understanding, focusing and management of ongoing collaboration between suppliers and selected customers for mutual value creation and sharing through interdependence and organizational alignment.
Marketers try to build a long term, a trusting "Win-Win” relationship with valued customers, dealers, distributors, and suppliers. Relationship marketing results in strong economic, technical and social ties amongst the parties. The ultimate outcome of relationship marketing is the building up of a unique company asset called “marketing network".
By establishing strong working relations suppliers and customers can work together to improve distribution process and other joint activity. Many organizations form strategic alliances or informal partnerships with their customers.
Relationship Marketing draws from traditional marketing princi¬ples, yet is quite different. Marketing can be defined as the process of identifying and satisfying customers' needs in a competitively supe¬rior manner in order to achieve the organization's objectives. Rela-tionship Marketing builds on this, but has six dimensions that differ materially from the historical definition of marketing. Taken togeth¬er, these differences have the potential to transform a company's view of the marketing it undertakes and almost everything about the enterprise, from the work it does to the technology its employs to the products it produces to the structure by which it achieves its objec¬tives.
Characteristics of Relationship Marketing
o Seeks to create new value for customers and then share the value so created between producer and consumer.
o Recognizes the key role individual customers have not only as purchasers, but in defining the value they want. Previously, companies would be expected to identify and provide this value in what the company would consider a "product." With Relationship Marketing, the customer helps the company provide the benefit bundle that the customer values. Value is thus created with customers, not for them.
o Requires that a company, as a consequence of its business strate¬gy and customer focus, design and align its business processes, communications, technology and people in support of the value individual customers want.
o Is a continuously cooperative effort between buyer and seller. As such, it operates in real time.
o Recognizes the value of customers over their purchasing lifetimes, rather than as individual customers or organizations that must he resold on each purchasing occasion. In recognizing lifetime value, Relationship Marketing seeks to bond progressively more tightly with customers.
o Seeks to build a chain of relationships within the organization to create the value customers want, and between the organization and its main stakeholders, including suppliers, distribution channel intermediaries and shareholders.
This has a number of important implications. With Relationship Marketing, the company now focuses on six areas: technology and individual customers, scope of the business, selecting and rejecting customers, a chain of relationships, rethinking the 4 Ps of marketing and using relationship managers to help companies build new value with others.
Relationship Marketing focuses on processes and whatever else is need¬ed to advance the customer relationship, not just front-line involve¬ment with the customer. Relationship Marketing recognizes that the traditional 4 Ps of marketing — product, promotion, price and place¬ment/distribution — change fundamentally in a world in which tech¬nology can mass customize all these aspects in virtually infinite variation at close to mass-marketing costs. Relationship Marketing seeks to change the company into one that is more comfortable with manag¬ing as a digital enterprise in which the traditional "laws" of marketing are very much passé. In this digital world, customers are individually important, and served that way with mass-customized and -personal¬ized products, services and communications processes.
The figure given below displays the various areas of Relationship Marketing and shows how many marketing techniques or principles fit into the larger context of Rela¬tionship Marketing.
Selected Relationship Marketing Elements
THE EIGHT COMPONENTS OF RELATIONSHIP MARKETING
Relationship Marketing comprises eight main components:
1. Culture and Values
2. Leadership
3. Strategy
4. Structure
5. People
6. Technology
7. Knowledge and Insight
8. Process
1. Culture and Values
Companies with dissimilar cultures can create value together but the similarities and differences between cultures need to be understood at the outset. Extremes of cultural difference can work against the formation and maintenance of a relationship. For example, where the culture and values of one company is to maximize the value of today's transaction and use whatever combination of competence, guile and cunning to achieve its ends, it is unlikely that an enduring relationship can be formed with a company geared to building gen¬uine, longer-term value. Deal-making companies do not typically co¬exist happily with companies categorized as patient builders.
The message: The customer's culture and values must be con¬ducive to the formation of an enduring relationship.
2. Leadership
The leaders within your company and those of your customers must be prepared to focus on the value that can be unlocked through Rela¬tionship Marketing and on the mutual interests of individual cus¬tomers and suppliers. Leadership, both customer and supplier, must be prepared to choose those companies with which each will engage. And both must be prepared to forego certain types of customers/sup¬pliers and the possible value they will create if they are to focus their firms on just one type of relationship. They must then align their companies in support of this type of relationship.
Nypro, one of the largest plastic injection molding companies in the world, is a highly quality-focused company determined to bring uniformity to its processes. It has narrowed its customer base to only those with which it chooses to do business. In 1987, the company had 800 customers. In the next ten years, they jettisoned 750, explaining with care its strategy to these "fired" customers. Nypro wanted to do business with large purchasers who themselves wanted a relationship and valued both quality service and the provision of solutions, rather than just products. By September 1997, Nypro had sixty-five customers after cutting the rest. Sales had grown from less than $50 million in 1987 to over $450 million a decade later. Only strong leadership could have caused this focusing to be considered and to be implemented successfully.
Importantly, no organization will successfully implement a Rela¬tionship Marketing initiative as long as the leadership in the compa¬ny is focused on winning at the expense of others. In some companies, executives try to ensure that they maximize the value of each deal with every customer. In these firms, it is regarded as smart to sweep all the chips to their side of the table. Companies trying to forge relationships with this underlying approach to customers will find, for obvious reasons, that customers have no interest in long-term bonding with such suppliers. The opportunity to continuously create new and mutual value over time will go to competitors more amenable to sharing.
Companies with greater bargaining power than their customers and suppliers have a special role. They have an obligation to lead both their own firm and those of their customers and suppliers to a higher state of relating, one in which new value can be created and shared rather than the more traditional model of a zero-sum game in which players bargain to cut a bigger slice from the pie.
The message: Leadership must view sharing as a virtue and understand the real meaning of a relationship before committing the company to Relationship Marketing. Where companies have bar¬gaining power relative to customers and suppliers, it is their role to initiate Relationship Marketing in the interests of their firm, cus¬tomers and suppliers.
3. Strategy
Strategy needs to occur at multiple levels. This includes customer strategy and strategies to devel¬op the underlying capabilities needed to advance the customer rela-tionship. The customer - not the product, research and development or other competencies - must be central to the business strategy if the firm is to implement Relationship Marketing effectively. Many companies remain locked into the product management era, applying the principles of consumer-packaged goods to their industries. In an era of sophisticated customers choosing from products with limited differentiation, product management strategies have less value than strategies geared to creating the value customers want. And they may not always see the product as central to the value they want their ven¬dors to create. If timely, responsive service, for example, is a key dimension of the value they seek, then the company would do well to consider organizing around individual customer relationships in a "customer-centric" strategy rather than by product.
Strategy also needs to be aligned between the company and its customers to ensure that both understand the direction of the other, enabling each to assess the other in its role as long-term partner, and to create the value each wants. Over time, this means that the sup¬plier must become very familiar with its customer's customer, and be in a position to advance initiatives proactively, perhaps even before its customer does.
The message: Strategy needs to be customer-centric, with rela¬tionship objectives and strategies geared to individual customers.
4. Structure
The structure of a company should facilitate its strategy. In fact, the easiest way to see if a company has strategy problems is to review how often they reorganize. Companies that reorganize frequently, without strategic context and rationale, often have difficulty defin¬ing and implementing a winning strategy.
Relationship Marketing, impacting as it does the entire firm, can result in an entirely different way to structure a company. A compa¬ny organized according to Relationship Marketing will have man¬agers who own a specific category of relationship, such as that of current customers, new customers, employees, suppliers, investors and so on. So, rather than having a sales and marketing department, for example, it may have a department to create new value with cur¬rent, important customers, while another may be charged with gain¬ing new customers whose profile matches the firm's best customers.
In addition to management of relationship categories, the Rela¬tionship Marketing company will have executives in charge of improving and focusing the capabilities that advance relationships, such as people, process, technology and knowledge and insight.
The message: Go beyond considering traditional organizational structures such as business units organized by product or market. Consider organizing by relationship and capability. Have managers in charge of each material category.
5. People
People are key to any relationship. Business is still people, but now these people must be supported by technologies and processes to mul¬tiply their capabilities and make them even more effective. In the prior marketing era, market and customer knowledge was centralized and the marketer sought to involve others in the company in strate¬gic marketing programs. Now customer information is pushed to the front line where customers and the company interact. The people at the front lines should have the ability to communicate with cus¬tomers in a manner that recognizes them, remembers their contact history, understands the current customer issues, predicts anticipated behaviors and suggests appropriate responses, solutions or sugges¬tions. Increasingly, the front-line people are becoming consultants, working with customers to add value to their company.
This is a marked departure from historical practice and requires recognition, reward and incentives that support this redirection.
And when your firm does not directly control the people serving the customer on your behalf, human resource systems become even more complex. This is the typical case of companies selling their products through distribution channel intermediaries such as retailers and dealers. We have recently helped a car manu¬facturer / assembler to recognize and reward individual salespeople in dealerships. We compared what other car and consumer durable companies do to link their customer relationship strategies with the way salespeople perform. Dealers often pay more attention to mov¬ing units than engaging with customers to create new and mutual value. The car companies reward this practice in their internal mea¬surements and in the way they recognize and reward dealers. The salesperson who sells the most units goes to Hawaii. The customer relationship has received secondary attention and is not fully con¬sidered over his purchasing lifetime. Thus, dealers have specific ini¬tiatives geared to improving service, leasing, sales of new and used cars, but there is little evidence of the car companies facilitating an integrated approach to the customer relationship that applies the principles described in this book For example, while all car compa¬nies have programs that recognize the performance of the dealer's sales staff, none link reward and recognition effectively to the over¬all business and marketing objectives of their companies, such as cus¬tomer retention objectives and associated activities
Many, if not most people in a company focused on Relationship Marketing should move from being functional experts to being process owners for specific categories of relationships Their role is to work with others within the company, its customers and suppliers to develop the new value which customers want In the Relationship Marketing era, selling, marketing, servicing and supporting cus¬tomers become integrated processes incorporating the eight dimen¬sions of Relationship Marketing discussed here The Relationship Marketing process owner must be geared to being the integrator and rewarded and recognized for successful integration
But how do we measure success? Specific people can be measured according to the extent to which they advance the objectives of the firm with each category of customer If the objectives are to bond more tightly, this can be defined and measured Measurements can include long-term revenues and profit Ask customers regarding their favorability towards the company, not their satisfaction with the firm Customers that are merely satisfied with their suppliers may not buy from them again, a finding which has challenged more than one marketer They may be even more satisfied with a competitor If they favor a firm, they are more likely to buy again Find out what your share of business is with each customer and what the trend of this share is Establish what the role of your firm will be in the customer's strategic initiatives This can help establish your share of their future business
The message train, develop and grow people into owners of a process that seeks to build customer bonding and purchase favorability
6. Technology
Technology can serve multiple roles within a company and between a company and its customers, including
External Communications
Internal Communications
Computing
Content
External Communications
o facilitating two-way interaction between individual customers and the company about every aspect of their requirements such as collaboration in product or service design, product co-development, pilot testing, ordering, reviewing the inventory levels in one another's warehouses and account status information;
o providing a more rapid or informed communication than was possible with manual intervention;
o opening new approaches to communicate with customers such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) with customers and distribution channel intermediaries and using the Internet to communicate with customers, channel members and other partners;
o communicating with other stakeholders including investors, board of directors, employees, management, suppliers and distri¬bution channel intermediaries.
Internal Communications
removing "stove-pipe" functionality from the many individual internal processes and technologies that face the customer, including call centers, Internet access, order, shipping, billing, field sales forces, dealer sales, direct mail and mass advertising so that the customer relationship can receive clearer attention;
tying together diverse communications systems, call centers, communications channels and databases so that the company becomes a more informed supplier with whom it is easier to do business.
Computing
The role of computing in Relationship Marketing is to provide organizational memory for customer relationships, a predictive ability and current content needed by Relationship Marketers to add value to the account.
Computing is used primarily to facilitate storage and retrieval of huge amounts of data which provides the history of a number of factors important to the advancement of the customer relationship.
Content
Content includes customer information, customer context, cus¬tomer behaviors and customer profitability.
Customer information includes data describing customer demo¬graphics, locations, usage patterns, order frequency, favorability and preferences.
Customer context captures information to describe the priorities the customer emphasizes, the decision-making unit, criteria for buying and the purchase processes.
Customer behaviors captures information reflecting interactions before the sale, during and post sale; the number, nature and scale of orders; and other behavioral information.
Customer profitability tracks the financial performance of the account with a costing methodology that recognizes all the costs and time associated with selling to, servicing and financing a customer, not just the cost of goods sold.
In the early 1990s, Wal-Mart required that their customers, even fairly small ones, begin to take and send orders on-line. Even com¬panies with minimal experience in this form of electronic interaction found that their investment paid off. After catering to the needs of Wal-Mart, suppliers were able to leverage the investment with other retailers. Cedar Works, an $18 million manufacturer of bird feeders and mailboxes, was able to improve both cash flow and customer sat¬isfaction as a result of complying with Wal-Mart's leadership.
The message: Deploy technology to provide a better customer memory. Give customers the communications options they want to help them repeat the purchase experience.
7. Knowledge and Insight
Technology must enable the Relationship Marketer to develop new knowledge and insight about the customer relationship and facilitate action on the information. The challenge is to do this economically, of particular interest to companies with wide-spread customer databases and modest margins.
Software, modeling and reporting tools can help add value to the underlying data and even predict what an individual customer will do, helping the marketer to be proactive in customer man¬agement.
A key challenge to the marketer is to secure resources for invest¬ment in individual customer knowledge and insight over the longer term. Digital Equipment has elaborate customer knowl¬edge and insight systems. The firm acknowledges that "manag¬ing upward" can be a real challenge in securing needed resources at a time in which overall resources available within the compa¬ny can be scarce indeed and when management and structure of the company is in a state of flux. Yet Digital has continued to make progressive investments, incrementally, rather than in one master plan, to advance the cause of its customer knowledge and insight.
Fingerhut Companies (annual revenues of $1.9 billion) is a data¬base marketing company that sells a broad range of products and services, through catalogs, telemarketing, television and other media. Fingerhut has six terabytes (a million/million bytes) of customer information, the equivalent of almost 100 pages for each of its customers. Through good times and bad, Fingerhut has maintained its investment in customer databases and it has recently been reaping considerable reward
The message: Invest in customer knowledge and insight, and do it through thick and thin.
8. Process
Reengineering, applied as it has been over the last decade, excluded the customer and the individual customer relationship as the core around which the business should be engineered. Firms struggling for survival may have found a reengineering effort productive, but others may now find that reengineering cuts off their feet. They are now being asked to run in a different race than that originally intended — for profitable revenue growth. Relationship Marketing requires that processes be engineered around the customer, which may require essential changes to existing processes. For example, communications processes may currently be developed to broadcast to a market segment, when interactive or narrowcast communica¬tions may be used instead. Current selling processes may adopt the traditional view of the sales person as a combination of hunter and artist, to be left alone to bring back the big game. Perhaps sales force automation processes have been attempted, and perhaps they are not achieving their desired ends. Why? Because the role of the sales per¬son as historically defined is of value only when the company wish¬es to bring onboard new customers. However, it has less merit when the company is focused on creating value for existing customers, and having the relationship managed in an integrated way, tying togeth¬er the various processes, people and technologies with which the cus¬tomers can relate.
The message: Focus processes around existing customers, giving each the value they want and communicating as every one wishes to be engaged by the company.
The process involved in attracting and retaining the customers is as follows:
The goal of Relationship Marketing is to align all these aspects of a company with its chosen customers and stakeholders. This view of Relationship Marketing is illustrated in Figure below. Each of the components presented in this figure represents a challenge for the Relationship Marketer.
Relationship Marketing Components
The steps in establishing relationship marketing program in a company are -
Identify key customer meriting relationship marketing.
Assign a skilled manager to each key customer
Develop a close job description for the Relationship Manager.
Appoint an overall manager to supervise all Relationship Managers.
Each Relationship manager should develop long range and annual customer relation plans
To practice relationship marketing, companies must place a priority on four major elements of their marketing and sales efforts: under¬standing customer expectations, building service partnerships, empow¬ering employees, and total quality management. Each of these is dis¬cussed below.
1. Understanding customer expectations.
Companies must be able to identify what customers want and market a product to them that exceeds their expectations. To do this, it is necessary for firms to sys-tematically collect precise information about their customers' needs and desires. Salespeople are often responsible for collecting this in¬formation.
2. Building service partnerships.
Companies must work closely with their customers to add information and services beyond their tradi¬tional products to increase the value of their offerings to customers. This means that salespeople must develop close, collaborative relation¬ships with their buyers in which both parties work toward a common goal. Salespeople must be open and honest with customers. They must be "bias free," making only those recommendations which are in the best interests of both.
3. Empowering employees.
Companies must encourage and reward their salespeople for taking initiative and using creativity in helping solve customer problems. Thus salespeople must have the skills, re¬sponsibility, and authority to make decisions which better serve their customers. Further, managers must foster an environment in which salespeople do fear losing their jobs if they make a mistake.
4. Total quality management.
This is the process by which the com¬pany strives to improve customer satisfaction through the continuous improvement of all its operations. All decisions are made for the ex¬pressed purpose of improving customer satisfaction. These decisions are based on the information that salespeople and selling teams col¬lect from their customers and transmit back to their companies, such as product inquiries, specifications, problems, and changing customer needs. This information is provided by salespeople to various depart¬ments in their own organizations, such as product design, production, accounting, and / or shipping. People in these departments who use this information to make improvements are in essence the salesperson's internal customers. To compete effectively, salespeople must provide both their external and internal customers relevant, accurate, and timely information.
If a company is successful in implementing a relationship marketing program, it can expect to have higher quality products, higher customer satisfaction, more loyal customers, and greater profitability.
One-to-One and Customer Relationship Marketing
The tools and techniques of direct marketing also facilitate personalized customer communications. Using information in customer databases about customer behav¬ior or demographics, companies can target the wants and needs of individual customers, thus building stronger customer loyalty and individualizing the total customer experience. This kind of marketing has become known as one-to-one marketing.
Many people use the terms one-to-one marketing and direct marketing interchangeably because many of the same tools and techniques are used for both. The difference between them is mainly in how solutions are approached. One-to-one marketing often involves direct interaction with an individual customer and then some form of mass customized treatment of that customer.
Don Peppers, a chief proponent of one-to-one marketing, believes that a dili¬gent application of one-to-one marketing principles will prompt a business to find products and services for the customers it knows rather than finding customers for the products it has on hand: "The one-to-one marketer looks at the entire mar¬keting proposition from the other end of the binoculars . . . from the customer's perspective."
Pepper's point, that the one-to-one marketer finds or creates product(s) for the customer rather than finding customers for the product(s), is valid. This is how traditional direct marketers built their businesses. Gaining customer insight through research that identifies the wants and needs of customers is key to the success of direct marketing. Mining the data that organizations already have about their cus¬tomers is another.
Much information about customers has been locked up in databases created for purposes other than marketing. In the past these large mainframe "legacy systems" remained difficult if not impossible for marketers to gain access to. Marketing, sales, and customer service staffs were also often separated by hierarchies and silos that kept them from sharing information and ideas. This changed as top management in cor¬porations began to adapt a concept known as Customer Relationship Marketing.
CRM practitioners use many of the same data technologies used in direct and database marketing. But they use this technology to seamlessly integrate every area of a business that affects customers, including marketing, sales, and customer ser¬vice. CRM strives to make information a driving force within the organization, not just within the marketing department. Recovering, managing, and using informa¬tion from legacy or from new systems becomes a goal of CRM. This is a funda¬mental shift in control of the demand side of business.
CRM uses contact strategies based on defining customer needs; iden¬tifying the value of a relationship; investing in customers according to their worth; integrating all contact channels in the plan (advertising, direct mail, promotion, sales, call centers, E-mail, Internet, etc.) supported by sophisticated information systems, capable staff, and quantifying and measuring results.
These systems allow organizations that might not consider using "direct mar¬keting" to market directly to consumers with ease. Pharmaceutical makers, tobacco companies, and automobile manufacturers have adapted CRM, as well as firms marketing directly to businesses. CRM communications programs use the tools and techniques of direct marketing to efficiently use the information that they have mined from their vast databases.
These concepts have gained rapid acceptance on the Internet. Popular web-sites have millions of click-throughs (CTRs) a day The ability to capture new pieces of data about each user creates an astounding opportunity for direct marketers.
Successful CRM programs are a convergence of traditional direct marketing techniques, database marketing decision support tools, and digital marketing capa¬bilities (see Exhibit). This convergence is creating new genres of direct mar¬keting that approach the individual communications promised by customer relationship marketing.
The convergence of direct, database, and digital marketing is resulting in new forms of mass customized, customer-centric promotions. It is a way of linking strategic creative, and techni¬cal expertise to develop stronger and more profitable customer relationships by enabling the tools of Customer Relationship Marketing.
Mass Customization: Key to One-to-One Marketing
One-to-one marketers are increasingly using mass customization to provide cus¬tomers with products and services that meet their needs.
In mass customization, mass-market goods and services are individualized to satisfy a customer need at a reasonable price. Mass customization starts with a customer-company dialogue in which the company helps the customer articulate his or her needs and to identify the precise offering to fulfill those needs. The com¬pany then uses mass production techniques to create interchangeable parts, which keeps costs down while still giving the customer the choice that makes the prod¬uct created for a market of one.
Motorola has used this collaborative built-to-order model to offer pagers in hundreds of combinations of cases, colors, and storage technologies. Dell has used this model for computers.
On the Internet, mass customization enables consumers to compile music CDs containing any combination of songs, obtain customized financial services (e.g., mortgages, investment services, credit cards, etc.), or design a one-of-a-kind Barbie.
Mass customized communications combine information technology, the creativity of advertising with skill and focus of manufacturing and industrial engineering. Marrying these tools and techniques enables low-cost, totally customized messaging to deliver the “right message to the right person at the right time”. This can be done through direct mail, e-mail, banner ads and some form of personalized print ads.
Multiple Relationship Strategies
Along with using multiple channels of distribution, many companies are segmenting their customers on the basis of the relationship the company has (or wants to develop) with the customer. The relationship can vary from one in which the sale is just an individual transaction to one in which the company develops a close long-term relationship or even a partner¬ship with the customer.
In transaction selling, salespeople emphasize the product, its quality, and the price. Generally, this kind of sale involves products that are not very complex, and the rupee amount of each sale is low. In relationship selling, salespeople develop in-depth knowledge of their customers' company and business. They help customers identify prob-lems and they work with customers to find mutually beneficial solutions. In a partnership, companies form strategic alliances in order to achieve joint goals. In a partnering relationship, the salesperson is re¬sponsible for overseeing the coordination and integration of the efforts of the two partners.
Multiple relationship strategies
These relationships vary in terms of the degree of commitment to the customer and the cost of serving the customer, as outlined in Figure above. In a transaction sale both the commitment and the selling costs are at a minimum, whereas in a partnership the commitment and costs are very high. Therefore, many companies are using different relationship strate¬gies to serve different customers. DuPont, for example, segments its cus¬tomers according to the relationship strategy, which it has identified as being the most effective for that customer. Motorola has three different sales forces, which serve its business customers, its major customers, and its partners
Relationship Marketing
Marketers want customers for life. Effective marketers work to build long-term relationship with their customers. The term relationship marketing communicates the idea that a major goal of marketing is to build a long-term relationship between the company and the parties who contribute the company's success
Effective managers view making a sale not as an end of a process but as a start of an organization relationship with a customer.
Relationship marketing means the marketing activities aimed at building long term relationship with people (especially customers) and organization that contribute to the company’s success. The focus of marketing has shifted from one single transaction to over all buyer-seller relationship - a focus known as relationship marketing.
Relationship Marketing is the ongoing process of identifying and cre¬ating new value with individual customers and then sharing the bene¬fits from this over a lifetime of association. It involves the understanding, focusing and management of ongoing collaboration between suppliers and selected customers for mutual value creation and sharing through interdependence and organizational alignment.
Marketers try to build a long term, a trusting "Win-Win” relationship with valued customers, dealers, distributors, and suppliers. Relationship marketing results in strong economic, technical and social ties amongst the parties. The ultimate outcome of relationship marketing is the building up of a unique company asset called “marketing network".
By establishing strong working relations suppliers and customers can work together to improve distribution process and other joint activity. Many organizations form strategic alliances or informal partnerships with their customers.
Relationship Marketing draws from traditional marketing princi¬ples, yet is quite different. Marketing can be defined as the process of identifying and satisfying customers' needs in a competitively supe¬rior manner in order to achieve the organization's objectives. Rela-tionship Marketing builds on this, but has six dimensions that differ materially from the historical definition of marketing. Taken togeth¬er, these differences have the potential to transform a company's view of the marketing it undertakes and almost everything about the enterprise, from the work it does to the technology its employs to the products it produces to the structure by which it achieves its objec¬tives.
Characteristics of Relationship Marketing
o Seeks to create new value for customers and then share the value so created between producer and consumer.
o Recognizes the key role individual customers have not only as purchasers, but in defining the value they want. Previously, companies would be expected to identify and provide this value in what the company would consider a "product." With Relationship Marketing, the customer helps the company provide the benefit bundle that the customer values. Value is thus created with customers, not for them.
o Requires that a company, as a consequence of its business strate¬gy and customer focus, design and align its business processes, communications, technology and people in support of the value individual customers want.
o Is a continuously cooperative effort between buyer and seller. As such, it operates in real time.
o Recognizes the value of customers over their purchasing lifetimes, rather than as individual customers or organizations that must he resold on each purchasing occasion. In recognizing lifetime value, Relationship Marketing seeks to bond progressively more tightly with customers.
o Seeks to build a chain of relationships within the organization to create the value customers want, and between the organization and its main stakeholders, including suppliers, distribution channel intermediaries and shareholders.
This has a number of important implications. With Relationship Marketing, the company now focuses on six areas: technology and individual customers, scope of the business, selecting and rejecting customers, a chain of relationships, rethinking the 4 Ps of marketing and using relationship managers to help companies build new value with others.
Relationship Marketing focuses on processes and whatever else is need¬ed to advance the customer relationship, not just front-line involve¬ment with the customer. Relationship Marketing recognizes that the traditional 4 Ps of marketing — product, promotion, price and place¬ment/distribution — change fundamentally in a world in which tech¬nology can mass customize all these aspects in virtually infinite variation at close to mass-marketing costs. Relationship Marketing seeks to change the company into one that is more comfortable with manag¬ing as a digital enterprise in which the traditional "laws" of marketing are very much passé. In this digital world, customers are individually important, and served that way with mass-customized and -personal¬ized products, services and communications processes.
The figure given below displays the various areas of Relationship Marketing and shows how many marketing techniques or principles fit into the larger context of Rela¬tionship Marketing.
Selected Relationship Marketing Elements
THE EIGHT COMPONENTS OF RELATIONSHIP MARKETING
Relationship Marketing comprises eight main components:
1. Culture and Values
2. Leadership
3. Strategy
4. Structure
5. People
6. Technology
7. Knowledge and Insight
8. Process
1. Culture and Values
Companies with dissimilar cultures can create value together but the similarities and differences between cultures need to be understood at the outset. Extremes of cultural difference can work against the formation and maintenance of a relationship. For example, where the culture and values of one company is to maximize the value of today's transaction and use whatever combination of competence, guile and cunning to achieve its ends, it is unlikely that an enduring relationship can be formed with a company geared to building gen¬uine, longer-term value. Deal-making companies do not typically co¬exist happily with companies categorized as patient builders.
The message: The customer's culture and values must be con¬ducive to the formation of an enduring relationship.
2. Leadership
The leaders within your company and those of your customers must be prepared to focus on the value that can be unlocked through Rela¬tionship Marketing and on the mutual interests of individual cus¬tomers and suppliers. Leadership, both customer and supplier, must be prepared to choose those companies with which each will engage. And both must be prepared to forego certain types of customers/sup¬pliers and the possible value they will create if they are to focus their firms on just one type of relationship. They must then align their companies in support of this type of relationship.
Nypro, one of the largest plastic injection molding companies in the world, is a highly quality-focused company determined to bring uniformity to its processes. It has narrowed its customer base to only those with which it chooses to do business. In 1987, the company had 800 customers. In the next ten years, they jettisoned 750, explaining with care its strategy to these "fired" customers. Nypro wanted to do business with large purchasers who themselves wanted a relationship and valued both quality service and the provision of solutions, rather than just products. By September 1997, Nypro had sixty-five customers after cutting the rest. Sales had grown from less than $50 million in 1987 to over $450 million a decade later. Only strong leadership could have caused this focusing to be considered and to be implemented successfully.
Importantly, no organization will successfully implement a Rela¬tionship Marketing initiative as long as the leadership in the compa¬ny is focused on winning at the expense of others. In some companies, executives try to ensure that they maximize the value of each deal with every customer. In these firms, it is regarded as smart to sweep all the chips to their side of the table. Companies trying to forge relationships with this underlying approach to customers will find, for obvious reasons, that customers have no interest in long-term bonding with such suppliers. The opportunity to continuously create new and mutual value over time will go to competitors more amenable to sharing.
Companies with greater bargaining power than their customers and suppliers have a special role. They have an obligation to lead both their own firm and those of their customers and suppliers to a higher state of relating, one in which new value can be created and shared rather than the more traditional model of a zero-sum game in which players bargain to cut a bigger slice from the pie.
The message: Leadership must view sharing as a virtue and understand the real meaning of a relationship before committing the company to Relationship Marketing. Where companies have bar¬gaining power relative to customers and suppliers, it is their role to initiate Relationship Marketing in the interests of their firm, cus¬tomers and suppliers.
3. Strategy
Strategy needs to occur at multiple levels. This includes customer strategy and strategies to devel¬op the underlying capabilities needed to advance the customer rela-tionship. The customer - not the product, research and development or other competencies - must be central to the business strategy if the firm is to implement Relationship Marketing effectively. Many companies remain locked into the product management era, applying the principles of consumer-packaged goods to their industries. In an era of sophisticated customers choosing from products with limited differentiation, product management strategies have less value than strategies geared to creating the value customers want. And they may not always see the product as central to the value they want their ven¬dors to create. If timely, responsive service, for example, is a key dimension of the value they seek, then the company would do well to consider organizing around individual customer relationships in a "customer-centric" strategy rather than by product.
Strategy also needs to be aligned between the company and its customers to ensure that both understand the direction of the other, enabling each to assess the other in its role as long-term partner, and to create the value each wants. Over time, this means that the sup¬plier must become very familiar with its customer's customer, and be in a position to advance initiatives proactively, perhaps even before its customer does.
The message: Strategy needs to be customer-centric, with rela¬tionship objectives and strategies geared to individual customers.
4. Structure
The structure of a company should facilitate its strategy. In fact, the easiest way to see if a company has strategy problems is to review how often they reorganize. Companies that reorganize frequently, without strategic context and rationale, often have difficulty defin¬ing and implementing a winning strategy.
Relationship Marketing, impacting as it does the entire firm, can result in an entirely different way to structure a company. A compa¬ny organized according to Relationship Marketing will have man¬agers who own a specific category of relationship, such as that of current customers, new customers, employees, suppliers, investors and so on. So, rather than having a sales and marketing department, for example, it may have a department to create new value with cur¬rent, important customers, while another may be charged with gain¬ing new customers whose profile matches the firm's best customers.
In addition to management of relationship categories, the Rela¬tionship Marketing company will have executives in charge of improving and focusing the capabilities that advance relationships, such as people, process, technology and knowledge and insight.
The message: Go beyond considering traditional organizational structures such as business units organized by product or market. Consider organizing by relationship and capability. Have managers in charge of each material category.
5. People
People are key to any relationship. Business is still people, but now these people must be supported by technologies and processes to mul¬tiply their capabilities and make them even more effective. In the prior marketing era, market and customer knowledge was centralized and the marketer sought to involve others in the company in strate¬gic marketing programs. Now customer information is pushed to the front line where customers and the company interact. The people at the front lines should have the ability to communicate with cus¬tomers in a manner that recognizes them, remembers their contact history, understands the current customer issues, predicts anticipated behaviors and suggests appropriate responses, solutions or sugges¬tions. Increasingly, the front-line people are becoming consultants, working with customers to add value to their company.
This is a marked departure from historical practice and requires recognition, reward and incentives that support this redirection.
And when your firm does not directly control the people serving the customer on your behalf, human resource systems become even more complex. This is the typical case of companies selling their products through distribution channel intermediaries such as retailers and dealers. We have recently helped a car manu¬facturer / assembler to recognize and reward individual salespeople in dealerships. We compared what other car and consumer durable companies do to link their customer relationship strategies with the way salespeople perform. Dealers often pay more attention to mov¬ing units than engaging with customers to create new and mutual value. The car companies reward this practice in their internal mea¬surements and in the way they recognize and reward dealers. The salesperson who sells the most units goes to Hawaii. The customer relationship has received secondary attention and is not fully con¬sidered over his purchasing lifetime. Thus, dealers have specific ini¬tiatives geared to improving service, leasing, sales of new and used cars, but there is little evidence of the car companies facilitating an integrated approach to the customer relationship that applies the principles described in this book For example, while all car compa¬nies have programs that recognize the performance of the dealer's sales staff, none link reward and recognition effectively to the over¬all business and marketing objectives of their companies, such as cus¬tomer retention objectives and associated activities
Many, if not most people in a company focused on Relationship Marketing should move from being functional experts to being process owners for specific categories of relationships Their role is to work with others within the company, its customers and suppliers to develop the new value which customers want In the Relationship Marketing era, selling, marketing, servicing and supporting cus¬tomers become integrated processes incorporating the eight dimen¬sions of Relationship Marketing discussed here The Relationship Marketing process owner must be geared to being the integrator and rewarded and recognized for successful integration
But how do we measure success? Specific people can be measured according to the extent to which they advance the objectives of the firm with each category of customer If the objectives are to bond more tightly, this can be defined and measured Measurements can include long-term revenues and profit Ask customers regarding their favorability towards the company, not their satisfaction with the firm Customers that are merely satisfied with their suppliers may not buy from them again, a finding which has challenged more than one marketer They may be even more satisfied with a competitor If they favor a firm, they are more likely to buy again Find out what your share of business is with each customer and what the trend of this share is Establish what the role of your firm will be in the customer's strategic initiatives This can help establish your share of their future business
The message train, develop and grow people into owners of a process that seeks to build customer bonding and purchase favorability
6. Technology
Technology can serve multiple roles within a company and between a company and its customers, including
External Communications
Internal Communications
Computing
Content
External Communications
o facilitating two-way interaction between individual customers and the company about every aspect of their requirements such as collaboration in product or service design, product co-development, pilot testing, ordering, reviewing the inventory levels in one another's warehouses and account status information;
o providing a more rapid or informed communication than was possible with manual intervention;
o opening new approaches to communicate with customers such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) with customers and distribution channel intermediaries and using the Internet to communicate with customers, channel members and other partners;
o communicating with other stakeholders including investors, board of directors, employees, management, suppliers and distri¬bution channel intermediaries.
Internal Communications
removing "stove-pipe" functionality from the many individual internal processes and technologies that face the customer, including call centers, Internet access, order, shipping, billing, field sales forces, dealer sales, direct mail and mass advertising so that the customer relationship can receive clearer attention;
tying together diverse communications systems, call centers, communications channels and databases so that the company becomes a more informed supplier with whom it is easier to do business.
Computing
The role of computing in Relationship Marketing is to provide organizational memory for customer relationships, a predictive ability and current content needed by Relationship Marketers to add value to the account.
Computing is used primarily to facilitate storage and retrieval of huge amounts of data which provides the history of a number of factors important to the advancement of the customer relationship.
Content
Content includes customer information, customer context, cus¬tomer behaviors and customer profitability.
Customer information includes data describing customer demo¬graphics, locations, usage patterns, order frequency, favorability and preferences.
Customer context captures information to describe the priorities the customer emphasizes, the decision-making unit, criteria for buying and the purchase processes.
Customer behaviors captures information reflecting interactions before the sale, during and post sale; the number, nature and scale of orders; and other behavioral information.
Customer profitability tracks the financial performance of the account with a costing methodology that recognizes all the costs and time associated with selling to, servicing and financing a customer, not just the cost of goods sold.
In the early 1990s, Wal-Mart required that their customers, even fairly small ones, begin to take and send orders on-line. Even com¬panies with minimal experience in this form of electronic interaction found that their investment paid off. After catering to the needs of Wal-Mart, suppliers were able to leverage the investment with other retailers. Cedar Works, an $18 million manufacturer of bird feeders and mailboxes, was able to improve both cash flow and customer sat¬isfaction as a result of complying with Wal-Mart's leadership.
The message: Deploy technology to provide a better customer memory. Give customers the communications options they want to help them repeat the purchase experience.
7. Knowledge and Insight
Technology must enable the Relationship Marketer to develop new knowledge and insight about the customer relationship and facilitate action on the information. The challenge is to do this economically, of particular interest to companies with wide-spread customer databases and modest margins.
Software, modeling and reporting tools can help add value to the underlying data and even predict what an individual customer will do, helping the marketer to be proactive in customer man¬agement.
A key challenge to the marketer is to secure resources for invest¬ment in individual customer knowledge and insight over the longer term. Digital Equipment has elaborate customer knowl¬edge and insight systems. The firm acknowledges that "manag¬ing upward" can be a real challenge in securing needed resources at a time in which overall resources available within the compa¬ny can be scarce indeed and when management and structure of the company is in a state of flux. Yet Digital has continued to make progressive investments, incrementally, rather than in one master plan, to advance the cause of its customer knowledge and insight.
Fingerhut Companies (annual revenues of $1.9 billion) is a data¬base marketing company that sells a broad range of products and services, through catalogs, telemarketing, television and other media. Fingerhut has six terabytes (a million/million bytes) of customer information, the equivalent of almost 100 pages for each of its customers. Through good times and bad, Fingerhut has maintained its investment in customer databases and it has recently been reaping considerable reward
The message: Invest in customer knowledge and insight, and do it through thick and thin.
8. Process
Reengineering, applied as it has been over the last decade, excluded the customer and the individual customer relationship as the core around which the business should be engineered. Firms struggling for survival may have found a reengineering effort productive, but others may now find that reengineering cuts off their feet. They are now being asked to run in a different race than that originally intended — for profitable revenue growth. Relationship Marketing requires that processes be engineered around the customer, which may require essential changes to existing processes. For example, communications processes may currently be developed to broadcast to a market segment, when interactive or narrowcast communica¬tions may be used instead. Current selling processes may adopt the traditional view of the sales person as a combination of hunter and artist, to be left alone to bring back the big game. Perhaps sales force automation processes have been attempted, and perhaps they are not achieving their desired ends. Why? Because the role of the sales per¬son as historically defined is of value only when the company wish¬es to bring onboard new customers. However, it has less merit when the company is focused on creating value for existing customers, and having the relationship managed in an integrated way, tying togeth¬er the various processes, people and technologies with which the cus¬tomers can relate.
The message: Focus processes around existing customers, giving each the value they want and communicating as every one wishes to be engaged by the company.
The process involved in attracting and retaining the customers is as follows:
The goal of Relationship Marketing is to align all these aspects of a company with its chosen customers and stakeholders. This view of Relationship Marketing is illustrated in Figure below. Each of the components presented in this figure represents a challenge for the Relationship Marketer.
Relationship Marketing Components
The steps in establishing relationship marketing program in a company are -
Identify key customer meriting relationship marketing.
Assign a skilled manager to each key customer
Develop a close job description for the Relationship Manager.
Appoint an overall manager to supervise all Relationship Managers.
Each Relationship manager should develop long range and annual customer relation plans
To practice relationship marketing, companies must place a priority on four major elements of their marketing and sales efforts: under¬standing customer expectations, building service partnerships, empow¬ering employees, and total quality management. Each of these is dis¬cussed below.
1. Understanding customer expectations.
Companies must be able to identify what customers want and market a product to them that exceeds their expectations. To do this, it is necessary for firms to sys-tematically collect precise information about their customers' needs and desires. Salespeople are often responsible for collecting this in¬formation.
2. Building service partnerships.
Companies must work closely with their customers to add information and services beyond their tradi¬tional products to increase the value of their offerings to customers. This means that salespeople must develop close, collaborative relation¬ships with their buyers in which both parties work toward a common goal. Salespeople must be open and honest with customers. They must be "bias free," making only those recommendations which are in the best interests of both.
3. Empowering employees.
Companies must encourage and reward their salespeople for taking initiative and using creativity in helping solve customer problems. Thus salespeople must have the skills, re¬sponsibility, and authority to make decisions which better serve their customers. Further, managers must foster an environment in which salespeople do fear losing their jobs if they make a mistake.
4. Total quality management.
This is the process by which the com¬pany strives to improve customer satisfaction through the continuous improvement of all its operations. All decisions are made for the ex¬pressed purpose of improving customer satisfaction. These decisions are based on the information that salespeople and selling teams col¬lect from their customers and transmit back to their companies, such as product inquiries, specifications, problems, and changing customer needs. This information is provided by salespeople to various depart¬ments in their own organizations, such as product design, production, accounting, and / or shipping. People in these departments who use this information to make improvements are in essence the salesperson's internal customers. To compete effectively, salespeople must provide both their external and internal customers relevant, accurate, and timely information.
If a company is successful in implementing a relationship marketing program, it can expect to have higher quality products, higher customer satisfaction, more loyal customers, and greater profitability.
One-to-One and Customer Relationship Marketing
The tools and techniques of direct marketing also facilitate personalized customer communications. Using information in customer databases about customer behav¬ior or demographics, companies can target the wants and needs of individual customers, thus building stronger customer loyalty and individualizing the total customer experience. This kind of marketing has become known as one-to-one marketing.
Many people use the terms one-to-one marketing and direct marketing interchangeably because many of the same tools and techniques are used for both. The difference between them is mainly in how solutions are approached. One-to-one marketing often involves direct interaction with an individual customer and then some form of mass customized treatment of that customer.
Don Peppers, a chief proponent of one-to-one marketing, believes that a dili¬gent application of one-to-one marketing principles will prompt a business to find products and services for the customers it knows rather than finding customers for the products it has on hand: "The one-to-one marketer looks at the entire mar¬keting proposition from the other end of the binoculars . . . from the customer's perspective."
Pepper's point, that the one-to-one marketer finds or creates product(s) for the customer rather than finding customers for the product(s), is valid. This is how traditional direct marketers built their businesses. Gaining customer insight through research that identifies the wants and needs of customers is key to the success of direct marketing. Mining the data that organizations already have about their cus¬tomers is another.
Much information about customers has been locked up in databases created for purposes other than marketing. In the past these large mainframe "legacy systems" remained difficult if not impossible for marketers to gain access to. Marketing, sales, and customer service staffs were also often separated by hierarchies and silos that kept them from sharing information and ideas. This changed as top management in cor¬porations began to adapt a concept known as Customer Relationship Marketing.
CRM practitioners use many of the same data technologies used in direct and database marketing. But they use this technology to seamlessly integrate every area of a business that affects customers, including marketing, sales, and customer ser¬vice. CRM strives to make information a driving force within the organization, not just within the marketing department. Recovering, managing, and using informa¬tion from legacy or from new systems becomes a goal of CRM. This is a funda¬mental shift in control of the demand side of business.
CRM uses contact strategies based on defining customer needs; iden¬tifying the value of a relationship; investing in customers according to their worth; integrating all contact channels in the plan (advertising, direct mail, promotion, sales, call centers, E-mail, Internet, etc.) supported by sophisticated information systems, capable staff, and quantifying and measuring results.
These systems allow organizations that might not consider using "direct mar¬keting" to market directly to consumers with ease. Pharmaceutical makers, tobacco companies, and automobile manufacturers have adapted CRM, as well as firms marketing directly to businesses. CRM communications programs use the tools and techniques of direct marketing to efficiently use the information that they have mined from their vast databases.
These concepts have gained rapid acceptance on the Internet. Popular web-sites have millions of click-throughs (CTRs) a day The ability to capture new pieces of data about each user creates an astounding opportunity for direct marketers.
Successful CRM programs are a convergence of traditional direct marketing techniques, database marketing decision support tools, and digital marketing capa¬bilities (see Exhibit). This convergence is creating new genres of direct mar¬keting that approach the individual communications promised by customer relationship marketing.
The convergence of direct, database, and digital marketing is resulting in new forms of mass customized, customer-centric promotions. It is a way of linking strategic creative, and techni¬cal expertise to develop stronger and more profitable customer relationships by enabling the tools of Customer Relationship Marketing.
Mass Customization: Key to One-to-One Marketing
One-to-one marketers are increasingly using mass customization to provide cus¬tomers with products and services that meet their needs.
In mass customization, mass-market goods and services are individualized to satisfy a customer need at a reasonable price. Mass customization starts with a customer-company dialogue in which the company helps the customer articulate his or her needs and to identify the precise offering to fulfill those needs. The com¬pany then uses mass production techniques to create interchangeable parts, which keeps costs down while still giving the customer the choice that makes the prod¬uct created for a market of one.
Motorola has used this collaborative built-to-order model to offer pagers in hundreds of combinations of cases, colors, and storage technologies. Dell has used this model for computers.
On the Internet, mass customization enables consumers to compile music CDs containing any combination of songs, obtain customized financial services (e.g., mortgages, investment services, credit cards, etc.), or design a one-of-a-kind Barbie.
Mass customized communications combine information technology, the creativity of advertising with skill and focus of manufacturing and industrial engineering. Marrying these tools and techniques enables low-cost, totally customized messaging to deliver the “right message to the right person at the right time”. This can be done through direct mail, e-mail, banner ads and some form of personalized print ads.