As a result of its online customer community, a company can get much more than basic product feedback. It gains deep insight into the needs of customers, and creates ever-greater customer loyalty by embracing customers as co-designers. Most importantly, the company goes directly to the source for product enhancements, pulling new innovations and ideas directly from the minds of the customers who use, buy, and recommend its products. This is the holy grail of customer-centered product design. Online customer communities can enable the connections, host the conversations, and facilitate the processes that make routine innovation possible. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

An engagement between a buyer and a seller begins with a single point of contact. It could be as a sale or an inquiry that, with the appropriate follow-up, can be converted into an ongoing experience for both the seller and the buyer. It is such an experience or set of experiences that create what we define as an engagement—or at least the potential of creating one. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

As a marketing professional, you likely work in a specialized function that may feel like a silo in your company. But you're also best positioned to break down the walls between your function and others (like R&D, sales, finance, and so forth). It's not an easy task, but the following five tactics can help. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Today's technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors, and the press—any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received. By some estimates, 85% of the information companies collect is not in a form that they can access or analyze—it is unstructured. The Gartner Group reports unstructured data doubles every three months while seven million web pages are published every day. This cacophony presents the one of the biggest challenges companies face today. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Blogging takes advances in marketing one step further by allowing businesses to initiate conversations with their audience. Gaining a better understanding of your customers allows you to more effectively and efficiently market to them. This, of course, lowers your marketing costs. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

You may or may not be using the basic segmentation strategy of RFM (recency, frequency, monetary): dividing your email mailing list into a few buckets based on recency in ordering or visitation to the site, the number of times they've ordered or visited the site, and the lifetime spend. But here's a better approach to segmentation. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Online users expect more today from Web sites, and competition is fierce. Marketers should be considering how to change their sites to keep up with customer expectations of the Web, and to increase conversions and enhance the brand experience. In fact, all companies with public-facing Web sites may soon be challenged with a redesign. There is opportunity for marketers to take the lessons of customer-centricity and put them to work to optimize customer relationships online. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

One of the biggest hurdles that many companies face in adopting a blogging strategy is that they aren't sure how to quantify the results of their efforts. But as blogging has evolved, and it has become much easier to accurately measure blog performance and tie those measurements back to achieving specific goals. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

With apologies to Philip Kotler, whose four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion—have been integral to any successful product or service marketing effort of the past 50 years, today's successful marketing hinges on five new Ps. Whereas the Ps we studied in college are all from the provider's point of view, these new Ps focus with laser-like clarity on the customer. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

If the Internet community didn't know its place in politics back in 2004, it certainly does today. Its "place" is to engage and educate us, promote candidates, help with fundraising and more... all through the use of new social-media tools that are increasingly vital to a candidate's overall marketing strategy. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

In this second of our three-part series on the six Cs of permission email marketing, we continue to define the permission fundamentals by examining the third and fourth dimensions of permission: Clarity and Confidence. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Despite all the talk, the mainstream media coverage, the conferences, courses, and books on social media marketing, there's quite a bit of ambivalence, fear, and (sometimes) outright hostility directed toward social media by CMOs, CEOs, and CFOs. All of this leads to the dreaded "we just want to stick our toe in the water, and see what this stuff is all about" and "we want to do a small, low-budget social media project and track the ROI." [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Over the past 15 years, business-to-business marketers have focused on the pipeline—leads converting to opportunities converting to wins. The reason was simple... [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

The Net Promoter concept and idea has taken hold the world over. The simplicity of one "ultimate" question is compelling. And it gives CEOs something to easily grasp and point to regarding a customer target. Those who have started to work through this concept have hit some walls, though none of them insurmountable. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Most marketers have email addresses for less than half their customers and prospects. If this is the case for your company, it might make sense to explore email appending. Let's first look at the process, and then we'll examine how one publisher implemented its communication plan. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Marketers are better served by liquid fluidity in their thought processes and approaches. That way they can adapt to sudden changes and new, hot technologies as social media continues its march forward. As this natural process continues to unfold over time and communities evolve, their information needs and consumption of media will evolve, too. With increasingly diverse and changing marketing environments, successful marketers will focus on social media principles rather than tactics. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

New technologies are becoming increasingly harder to ignore. Today's strategies must address the full spectrum of channels, as they offer unique opportunities for differentiation and for developing real competitive advantage. Mind these four key points to develop a winning digital strategy. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

So many brands and companies are constantly reinvigorating their businesses and positioning them for growth. There is a constant need to innovate, reinvigorate, update, recalibrate, or just simply fend off the competition in an effort to better explain "why buy me." To move forward, companies and brands need to first take a look at their current brand positioning. But for a moment, even a brief moment, it would make sense to go back to the brand drawing board to answer the question, Just what is brand positioning anyway? [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

There is a new wave of branding that aims to occupy every minute of the customer's day with an unbroken theme of branded experience rather than the momentary brand rush of purchase. Experiential brand building is taking on new and all-encompassing dimensions. IKEA, for example, is no longer just a flat-pack-furniture and homewares store. It's a construction company that builds IKEA houses, based on the IKEA promise of easy living and affordable design. Welcome to the world of living branding—a new breed of 24/7 brands that are likely to occupy more and more of our lives, from our waking moments to when we retire to bed. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

The scramble to justify budgets can result in a hyper focus on short-term ROI rather than a long-term sustainable path to continuous improvement. In truth, continually improving marketing effectiveness involves addressing three key interrelated, foundational areas. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

The role of the Chief Marketing Officer has evolved since some of the first CMOs, such as Mark Mears of Blimpie International and Phil Gospels-Strumpette of Coca-Cola, came on the scene in early 1990s. The CMO role—which initially tended to emphasize advertising, brand management, and market research—continued to evolve over the past 15 years as a result of the emergence of new media, the growing number of sales and service touch points, more complex distribution models, and the fragmentation of customer segments. The CMO has moved from focusing primarily on brands and clever advertising to a larger, more strategic role designed to enable a company to meet the ever-changing needs of a diverse and global customer base. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Just as city planners utilize master plans to promote healthy municipal growth, a "Customer Community Master Plan" enables marketing executives to determine an overall customer interaction plan that will allow your company and its relationships to thrive and prosper. In other words, such a master plan avoids pitfalls. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

There is an entire industry devoted to helping companies determine customer satisfaction levels through surveys and analysis. But how much real value does knowledge of "satisfaction" contribute to helping you keep profitable customers? The answer, unfortunately, is "not much." Though surveys do serve a purpose (primarily showing trending: "Are we doing better or worse than last year?"), they don't tell the whole story. The following are three fundamental reasons why it's dangerous to rely on customer satisfaction surveys to help improve your customer experience. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Increasingly, companies are beginning to reach out to their customers to help them with their marketing efforts; in some cases, companies are actually turning some marketing functions over to their customers entirely. Here is how companies have successfully turned at least one of the 4 Ps of Marketing over to their customers. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

In Part One and Part Two of this series, the author discussed using "voice of the customer" (VOC) in defining innovative core products and services. The focus was on breakthroughs in the basic product, on hitting the home runs. Here, we take a different perspective—using innovation to acquire and retain customers once the core product or service is defined. [Read the full story] Marketing Articles: Customer Relationships

Wacom's digital pens and their capabilities are well-known in the business world. To continue growing, however, the company needed to address the consumer market. Here's how it effectively reached a new fan community. [Read the full story]
Marketing Case Studies: Customer Relationships

In late 2006, Dollar's business was slowing at New York's LaGuardia airport. With some outside help, the local marketing manager developed an email survey, then used the answers to pinpoint Dollar's weaknesses. The resulting efficiencies helped Dollar grow its parking-related business by 24%.[Read the full story]
Marketing Case Studies: Customer Relationships

Marketing executive and consultant Lewis Green wanted to re-establish his company in January 2004 after moving across the country. With no professional network in place, he figured the best way to promote his business would be a blog. His first attempt failed. But not his second.[Read the full story]
Marketing Case Studies: Customer Relationships

By hiring an outside expert in lead optimization and leveraging its full range of data, San Francisco-based Objectivity increased turnout for its webinars an average of 10%. The quality of the leads is high as well: More than 30% of the leads typically score high enough to be handed off to sales.[Read the full story]
Marketing Case Studies: Customer Relationships

The e-newsletter has become ubiquitous. Almost a dime a dozen. How do you make yours not only stand out in the inbox, but make a positive impact on your bottom line? This guide will show you how. [Download] Marketing Downloads: Customer Relationships

This comprehensive, step-by-step how-to guide will help you assess the position in the market of your product or firm, by identifying the product's Strengths and Weaknesses, by considering the potential Opportunities the product has in the marketingplace, and by assessing the potential Threats posed by either the competition or the marketplace. [Download] Marketing Downloads: Customer Relationships

"This is a truth of the Internet," writes Seth Godin in a post at his eponymous blog. "When traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces. [Seventy-five percent] of all unfocused visitors leave within three seconds. Any site, anywhere, anytime." Godin calls it "silly... [Read the full story]
Marketing Quick Read: Customer Relationships

If you visit a new site called wowOwow.com —or, formally, The Women on the Web—you'll find a guided tour hosted by none other than venerable gossip columnist Liz Smith. She begins by explaining why a group of longtime friends—including Candice Bergen, Lily Tomlin and... [Read the full story]
Marketing Quick Read: Customer Relationships

On a recent visit to J. Crew, Jackie Huba asked the salesperson if a dress made her hips look big. The frank response, "Yes, it does," was followed with a swift recommendation for a more flattering alternative. In a post at the Church of the... [Read the full story]
Marketing Quick Read: Customer Relationships

When Disneyland first opened the It's a Small World ride in the mid-1960s, the catchy chorus of its theme song was largely metaphorical. No more. Advances in technology have made the world a much smaller place for everyone—and opened global opportunities for small businesses like... [Read the full story]
Marketing Quick Read: Customer Relationships

You probably know the approach pattern at your home airport very well. So what would you think if your plane were about to touch down when it suddenly jerked skyward, overshot the runway and headed out toward the ocean? Even non-nervous flyers would know something was wrong.... [Read the full story]
Marketing Quick Read: Customer Relationships