Last week in this spot I railed on about the lack of creativity and risk that too much process brings to a company. But I'm taking the other side when it comes to B2B relationships. When it comes to B2B, as you can see in our current Inside 1to1 story on the Tri-Arc Manufacturing Company's customer-centric effort, I think process is progress. I've worked for enough companies that sealed big sales with a wink, handshake, and promise of co-op dollars.
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"Word of mouth is an outcome and a philosophy, not a marketing tactic. There's no 'marketer' in consumer-to-consumer. But word of mouth can be treated like traditional media in many ways, like tracking its impact." This quote is from BuzzMetrics CEO Jonathan Carson. He was presenting at the WOMMA conference. This comment struck me because some marketers do talk a lot about word of mouth as a marketing tactic. I would venture to say that although most word of mouth
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I received a press release a few days ago announcing a new pay-per-lead service. Consumers sign up to receive information on product types, provide contact information, and, if they choose to, give other details to help match their specific needs. Companies interested in reaching those individuals bid for the leads. The four highest-bidding companies are given each lead, so prospects can do some comparison shopping. My first thought was, companies that contact a prospect are simply the highest bidders, not
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Hasbro this week released a British version of the classic Monopoly game that substitutes a Visa-imprinted debit card for the colorful play money. Now instead of exchanging paper money, children will swipe their cards into a palm-sized scanner. Hasbro spokesperson Chris Weatherhead said that the company responded to the fact that consumers now use more debit cards and carry less cash, so the game, he said, should reflect current trends. Hasbro is delivering on customer expectations, but are marketers ready
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Our Inside 1to1 story this week shows how successful CRM providers have been in emerging markets. That's all well and good because customer management and customer insight is being enabled by technology. Without customer insight any global initiative is bound to fail. But I think that too many companies have been lulled into thinking a global initiative and a Chinese initiative are the same thing. The complete saturation of the academic business press by thought leaders who say China is
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Have you seen the Jet Blue stories page yet? It's very cool. There's a collection of brief video stories of customers sharing their positive Jet Blue experiences. Not only does the site show customers' enthusiasm for the airline, but many of the stories illustrate Jet Blue's commitment to the customer experience -- and not just commitment designed by the marketing department that never permeates the rest of the company, but commitment from all parts of the airline's operations. Consider the
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With the countless number of blogs available to information consumers, is it really worth it to start or run one? According to a new survey, it seems the answer is yes -- with the caveat that it may take some time and effort to build the level of awareness that creates significant interaction. A survey conducted by analytics firm Cymfony and public relations firm Porter Novelli found that 76 percent of respondents' companies noticed an increase in media attention and
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The idea of electronic passports is getting closer to fruition, and it's got security and privacy advocates in an uproar. The new passports will include a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that will store all the information on the data page of the passport, including name, date and place of birth, and a digitized version of the photo. The State Department said last week that it is confident the right security and encryption measures will be in place. Critics argue
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Ginger Conlon asked the question in Inside 1to1 this week: Is there a seat at your table for the customer? There better be. The customer is definitely coming to dinner. And so are your biggest shareholders. I think the balance between how a company plays the politesse between the two guests is one of the hottest issues in business today. No better example than GM. I would argue that the company's current dinner party with Kirk Kerkorian and Carlos Ghosn
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No may be the favorite word of toddlers and parents everywhere -- heck, even most sales professional see it as an opportunity to learn about customers' real motivations -- but many marketers tend to shun it whenever possible. Think about it. How often do marketing communications offer a "no thanks" option? Some do, but it's rare and most often found in direct mail for such offers as a subscription to a specific magazine. Personally, I don't think I've ever seen
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Salespeople have a reputation for bringing in new customers then letting someone else in the company worry about keeping them around for repeat business. That may be true in some cases, but savvy sales professionals are also great relationship builders -- they know firsthand that it's easier to keep and sell to an existing client than to acquire a new one. Their efforts may not be enough. Companies that pay more than lip service to being customer centric should have
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Excuse me for twisting the Al Franken book title here. But one of the hot topics around the office lately has been the sincerity of bloggers. Business Week's media columnist John Fine has done a great job of documenting some of the more outrageous uses that PR pros have made of the blogosphere. Fine has also reported on the new practice of paying "normal people" to get out and blog away on their "favorite" products. Now, first of all I
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It's hard to get anyone to talk about it on the record, but it seems to me that a lot of executives whisper a lot lately about Six Sigma and Balanced Scorecard. The whispers say these processes lack flexibility, agility, employee innovation and a true customer focus. I agree. That's why I love the point that our Inside 1to1 story makes today. The point: A business can be all about process, but the people involved need to be humanists. Too
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In my recent entry "Getting to Yes" I discussed selling top management on the idea of treating different customers differently. The gist was to ensure that management understands that low-value customers will not be treated badly, but that higher-value customers would be treated accordingly. At the Gartner CRM Summit, principal research analyst Adam Sarner made another interesting point about the importance of creating a baseline for your customer experience that treats low-value customers well. According to Sarner, if you treat
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It didn't take the World Cup for me to see my global ignorance. But it sure helped. I always knew it was there, mind you. I never really got the obsession with royal families, regardless of what country they were from. Never understood why the French love Jerry Lewis or why the Irish or English drink so much tea, even though my heritage is Irish. So when I saw David Beckham in tears over losing in the World Cup I
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If you read 1to1 magazine and INSIDE: 1to1 articles it's likely that you're a proponent of treating different customers differently. However, that may not be the case among other executives in your organization. Even if you're the marketing chief, you likely need buy-in from other top executives to get the support you need from across the organization to make one-to-one strategies a reality. I attended a Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange recently during which one of the speakers provided insight
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I just read a terrific Business Week article on innovation. There's a lot to it, but the gist is that it's difficult to be innovative if your corporate culture has been process-perfected and short-term oriented to the point of being completely risk averse. One reason this article caught my attention is that we've been discussing this issue a great deal internally (as subject matter for articles), and have written about it as well. In the March issue, for example, the
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