Marketing Must Keep Pace With Customers
"Marketing needs a complete revamping," FreshDirect Chairman and CEO Richard S. Braddock told attendees during The Conference Board's 2009 Marketing Executive Conference. "Marketing as a discipline in woefully suboptimized in the digital age."
Although it's critically important to get close to customers today, few companies are marketing and managing with the intensity possible, Braddock said. They can't adapt to today's pace--largely due to cultural obstacles within their organizations. Companies need to completely revamp their approach, he said, and harness the real-time customer knowledge and opportunities for action that the Internet allows today. "You have to rethink your business proposition online," he said.
Most Internet marketing focuses on sales leads; too few companies use their websites to help build long-term customer relationships, he said. However, Braddock said, most visitors to a company's site are existing customers. This means there is a huge opportunity to enhance the loyalty of existing customers online, as well as to improve their profitability. "Even if you don't sell much or at all online, you can learn from the customer information gathered online to market through other channels," he said, adding that "customers will tell you virtually anything you want to know if they know you'll use the information responsibly."
Braddock emphasized that the future is online and offline continuing to come together. Unfortunately, for most companies, making that transition is "glacial," he said, "because many companies are in no rush to change--even if they profess to be customer focused."
According to Braddock, there are myriad tools available to provide marketers with real-time customer information--also noting that the pace of FreshDirect's marketing is day by day. The company adjusts its marketing daily, based on customer insight. "Few brace that intensity," he said. "Marketing processes are too lengthy and decision making too leisurely." Often, he added, there are too many analysts reinforcing that slow pace.
"Customers today operate more and more on a real-time basis," he said. "If you don't insert yourself into the process, you'll lose customers to competitors."
Related Entries
