Guest Blogger Jim Champy: Developing Values-Based Relationships
During hard times it's even more important to keep your customers. Markets have shrunk and competition for remaining customers is becoming more intense. But, it's possible to add customers during hard economic times if you are very good and consistent in what you do.
I have always believed that the secret to keeping and adding customers goes beyond having the best product and service. There is nothing more compelling than sharing your customers' fundamental beliefs and values - and authentically demonstrating those values in your products, service, and operations. In my most recent book, INPSIRE! Why Customers Come Back, I write about two companies that do just that: Stoneyfield Yogurt and Honest Tea.
Stoneyfield is deeply committed to the environment. Its products and operations are all highly sensitive and respectful to the environment. It promotes this commitment in its marketing. Customers who buy its yogurt know that the cow at the source lives a good life. And Stoneyfield is not a boutique company. It keeps it commitment to the environment even at its large scale.
Honest Tea shares that commitment to the environment, but goes even further in its commitment to truth in labeling and delivering healthy, sugar-free beverages. It's so honest in how it operates that one customer writes on its website, "I wish that you could be my bank."
But a strategy of values or cultural alignment with your customers is risky. You cannot drift from your values. The "Internet police" will catch you quickly. Your image will be sullied. Consumers go to the Internet to read both the bad and the good about companies and their products - and to render their own testimony of how they experience the quality of a company. Authenticity - being true to what you profess to value - is critical. Here are four principles to guide your actions:
- Authenticity must pervade everything you do, from formulating products to relationships with associates, customers, and suppliers, to how the company operates. A consistent commitment to values is critical. Recognize that today everything you do is visible. If you drift away from your values, your customers will drift away from you.
- Being authentic requires openness and full transparency. Customers want to develop real relationships with values-based companies - so they expect to hear and know what's going on.
- Promises must work in a business context. Values usually contain a degree of altruism, but remember that most businesses must still make a profit. So don't make promises - or declarations - that you cannot respect and keep.
- From a marketing perspective, customers define, in their own minds, what a company stands for. So put more effort into truthfulness and commitment than into spin.
Tough times can be good times, for companies with good values.
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Jim Champy is chairman of consulting for Perot Systems. His latest book is INPSIRE! Why Customers Come Back.
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