Cultivating Customer Relationships
Companies are using information about customers to enact precision marketing designed to build strong and profitable long-term relationships.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the process of carefully managing detailed information about individual customers and all customer “touch points” to maximize loyalty.
CRM is important because a major driver of company profitability is the aggregate value of the company’s customer base.
A touch point is any occasion when a customer encounters the brand and product—from actual experience to personal or mass communications to casual observation. For a hotel, the touch points include reservations, check-in and checkout, frequent-stay programs, room service, business services, exercise facilities, and restaurants.CRM enables companies to provide excellent real-time customer service through the effective use of individual account information.
Example: Touchpoints during the customer journey
Based on what they know about each valued customer, they can customize market offerings, services, programs, messages, and media.
Personalizing marketing is about making sure the brand and its marketing are as personally relevant as possible to as many customers as possible—a challenge, given that no two customers are identical.
To adapt to customers’ increased desire for personalization, marketers have embraced concepts such as permission marketing, the practice of marketing to consumers only after gaining their expressed permission.
According to Seth Godin, a pioneer in the technique, marketers develop stronger consumer relationships by sending messages only when consumers express a willingness to become more engaged with the brand.
“Participatory marketing” may be a more appropriate concept than permission marketing because marketers and consumers need to work together to find out how the firm can best satisfy consumers.
Although much has been made of the newly empowered consumer—in charge, setting the direction of the brand, and playing a much bigger role in how it is marketed—it’s still true that only some consumers want to get involved with some of the brands they use and, even then, only some of the time.
Consumers have lives, jobs, families, hobbies, goals, and commitments, and many things matter more to them than the brands they purchase and consume. Understanding how to best market a brand given such diversity in customer interests is crucially important
Example: Touchpoints Hunkemoller
Count the number of touchpoints in the video
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