It’s the role of the marketer to understand the products and services a business provides and the perception that customers and potential customers have of those products and services. According to John McKean, executive director of the Center for Information-Based Competition, Ohio, “Most marketers are more focused on ‘selling better’ rather than focused on what truly drives brand equity and loyalty, i.e. how customers are treated in the process of selling, marketing, and servicing. Most marketers approach their craft with the objective of ‘selling or marketing better’”.

Quite frequently, marketing campaigns are approached as a probability game, where a list of prospective customers are targeted, and then the response rates are measured. “This type of approach”, says McKean, “has little or no effect on building long-term brand equity and loyalty because people don’t recommend to friends that they should buy from a particular firm because of being ‘sold better’”.

“Every top salesperson in the world understands that ‘selling better’ is actually about treating customers better than the competition, not about more sophisticated selling and marketing techniques”, says McKean. After all, branding is simply an ‘unproven’ promise until there is a good product and a positive interaction.

“What customers, as people, remember about interactions are the human elements of those interactions. Branding is essentially an activity based around either building trust or decreasing trust. When a promise is proven, it has created conditional trust. When a promise is disproved, the brand messages are empty lies”.

Marketers are challenged when it comes to understanding the customer dynamic in relation to traditional marketing principals and practices. That challenge lies that creating values for customers and building relationships and loyalty with them requires the involvement of all departments within an organisation. Professor Francis Buttle, Professor of Management at Macquarie University, comments, “The traditional marketing function has been focused on the technologies of marketing - how to advertise well and how to execute successful sales promotions. What we are now realising is that value creation is not the preserve of marketing departments”.

David Haigh, chief executive officer of Brand Finance (UK), concurs, “Determining the needs and wants of the customer is the key to understanding the dynamics of your audience. The traditional marketing principles still hold true, however, it is the way in which they are implemented which has changed”.

The discipline of marketing is centred on the traditional techniques and strategies focused on reaching a mass market. With the development of mass production companies needed to reach a mass audience, where the marketing focused on selling massive amounts of product to a massive amount of people. According to McKean, “The fundamental challenge facing traditional marketing principles and practices is that most of these approaches (CRM included) are product based and products only drive 30 percent of the decision criteria”.

The wholistic picture
For marketers to truly appreciate the customer dynamic and how it can contribute to brand loyalty, they must understand the processes, involved across the entire organisation, that affect customers. Buttle says, “Cross-functional processes such as the innovation process, logistics process, order-to-cash cycle are significant producers of customer value”.

Traditionally, marketing managers and executives rarely saw eye-to-eye with financial managers and executives. One group is focused on being creative and visionary, the other on balance sheets and the bottom-line. Slowly, each is starting to respect the role of the other in building the performance of an organisation. Haigh comments, “Most investors and bankers have little idea what makes a strong brand that is likely to deliver the expected benefits. Which under performing brands are dogs waiting to expire and which are the down trodden stars. What they need is a robust appraisal of a brand expressed in business valuation terms, covering all the legal, financial and commercial angles”.

For some time marketers have been aware of the extent to which the customer relationship and services dynamic, helps build brand equity and loyalty. Each company scenario is different and requires a different approach to not only building brand equity and loyalty, but also tracking this equity and loyalty.

“Whilst maximising on the customer dynamics and appreciating the customers role, marketers have developed the ability to measure both equity and loyalty by collecting, measuring, understanding, monitoring and maximising brand value and marketing performance and communicating that wider”, says Haigh.

Technology
The advent of the Internet and various other communication channels has increased the complexity, yet opportunities, for the marketing practitioner. Gary Lembit, national director Finance and Business Services Research, Taylor Nelson Sofres, says “Channel management will naturally become increasingly difficult as it is relatively easy to open new channels yet extraordinarily difficult to completely close old ones as there are always some customers who wish to stay with what they know.”

One of the main objectives of CRM and web self service has been to move less profitable customers to lower cost channels. Lembit comments, “The migration of customers to more cost effective channels does not simply mean older, less used channels become cheaper to operate. The trick therefore is in knowing how to allocate resources to the various channels available”.

“In a society where choice is becoming increasingly important it appears likely that channel management will become one of the major cost management issues for all large organisations and getting the mix right may well lead to a significant competitive advantage”, says Lembit.

The multiplicity of channels increases the options customers have of interacting with an organisation, thereby increasing the number of information systems and the amount of data organisations need to keep about their customers. The vast availability of information, not to mention the numerous channels of communication and techniques, which are now available, means that more and more ‘personal’ data is being filtered into the marketing web.

More than ever marketers have access to a range of information sources about customers and their behaviour. Francis Buttle states, “The problem always was that there wasn't enough data. Now, the problem is too much. Some companies are drowning in it, and the challenge is to convert the data into useful information. Retailers, for example, have access to transactional data, loyalty card data, competitive store audit data, lifestyle and geo-demographic profiles and more”.

Michael Barnes states, “The amount of exertnal customer and market data available has increased over the past decade. However, the most important information now available about customers is actually internal data which is now accessible in a cost-effective manner”.

Haig advises, “Despite the fact marketers have access to such a mine-field of audience information, the key to collating, filtering and eventually utilising this information, comes back to understanding the consumers needs. Once the consumers needs have been established, the information can then be used effectively. The scenario of one-size fits all no longer applies”.

He continues, “Skill and category management needs to be bought into play in order to ensure this information can be utilised effectively. Traditionally companies employed brand managers who manage brands across the board. Now, it is much more matrix based – brand managers one way and category managers the other way”.

Marketers still need to apply the traditional bricks and mortar principles and build on their foundations. The same product can be sold to many different consumer sectors and it is important to realise that consumers are different people at different times.

Technologies such CRM, call centres, the Web, self-service electronic kiosks, IVR provide a range of tools and decisions for marketers on how better to sell to, services and market to customers. Michael Barnes, believes that these technologies are evolving and becoming more integrated, giving marketers easier access to some formidable tools. But the biggest problem they will face is with the data, Barnes states, “While technology integration across the CRM ecosystem has improved, challenges remain in terms of data consistency and access across channels and business process automation.”

Recent developments in technology have enabled marketers to direct specific messages to target audiences more easily than ever before. Haigh comments, “Marketers are able to interact with target audiences, channelling messages, gaining brand recognition and receiving feedback, all in real-time. All online media services including data capturing, text messaging and photos messaging are new ways for marketers to entice consumers into playing the ‘Marketing Game’”.

“It is not simply the methods of communication, which have changed. Developments in channels of distribution have enabled marketers to fire messages incredibly accurately at members of their target audiences”, says Haigh.

He continues, “Brand recognition and brand loyalty can be built and secured at much lower costs. Online advertising and global access to a company website, means consumers have access to your brands whenever and however you choose”.

With the world at the marketers’ fingertips, there is a distinct inclination to inundate consumers with information. Haigh warns, “It is equally important to be aware that there is a fine line between building brand recognition / loyalty and bombarding consumers”.

McKean states, “Consistency is the magic word – a poor interaction with one channel will eclipse several positive interactions in other channels. This is the nature of what human beings remember. Therefore, it is important to put processes and technology in place that will enable the measuring and managing of key interaction criteria, which can then be embedded in processes consistently across every interaction channel”.

Haigh surmises, “Consumer expectations and needs have changed. Distribution channels have changed. Competition is more focussed to achieving higher results, faster. The challenge facing marketers stems from the ability to continue meeting the consumer’s expectations”. The traditional principles and the core elements of marketing practices still apply; the key is to adapt the offering according to customers needs.