As a new day dawns?

BusinessWeek in their March 3 issue devotes their cover story and several additional stories inside to customer service rankings. They first did this a year ago and must’ve received a strong response for them to continue the series this year.

Believe me, this is much more important than the Fortune 500 rankings. For too long, customer service has been the dirty end of marketing, those small group of people over there who handle the malcontents. Companies have failed to realize that each reasonable call to a customer service rep presents a failure of marketing. Each call could represent the end of the customer relationship. And companies have failed to address customer service. Even after professing that terribly high cost of bringing in new customers.

Peter Drucker, in 1954, recognized that customer service should not exist if marketing is successful. That’s over 50 years ago. Do the BusinessWeek articles herald new attention to customer service? I hope so; it’s way overdue.

If you look down your nose at customer service, if you wonder why your marketing is moving at the speed of molasses, you should pick up this issue and read the articles. Pay particular attention to the article entitled, “Love the customers who hate you.”

Just what is marketing?

During a presentation of my new book, The Failure Of Marketing, we discussed the appropriate definition of marketing. Most agreed with me that marketing was about a relationship while sales were about transactions. However, most also defined the relationship as one in which the marketer provides a product or service and the customer provides money. I suggested that this was no more than a transaction that looked like this:

My audience argued that when a customer continually repeats the transaction over time it becomes a relationship. But, I countered, this still is not marketing. It’s simply a transaction repeated again and again and again. Here's the difference. When another company comes along with a new product that better meets the needs of the customer, the customer will shift allegiance. If this were truly marketing, the first company would always be looking to improve its product whether by meeting changing needs or adopting new technology.

This customer relationship looks like this:

Notice here that the customer is at the top and provides to the marketer a discussion of needs and wants. The marketer now understanding the changed needs of the customer creates a new or improved product that better meets those needs.

This is a dynamic model of the marketplace that reflects the reality that customer needs and technology are continually evolving. If the marketer is going to gain and maintain the loyalty of the customer, he must continually monitor these changing needs and create innovative products that better meet them than his current products.

That’s how you create customer loyalty. That is marketing.

Old Wine in Old Bottles?

Ad Age published a book review this week. The book, Stopwatch Marketing, a tome on marketing strategy, appears to highlight time as the key differentiator in the consumer's buying decision. The authors propose that there are four classifications of shopper: impatient, recreational, reluctant and painstaking. Their key differentiator, according to the review, is time.

Now the four typecasts they create are nothing new. But time as they fashion it is a dependent variable and hardly the most important variable in the mix. For example, their last classification, the painstaking shopper, is "characterized by fear of making the wrong decision." Their thesis is that because of that fear the marketer has more time to convince the buyer. But because of the fear, the buyer may leave with remorse.

They then offer a case history featuring Lexus, which due to their dealer training, reduces this remorse by recognizing the fear.

Just what does this have to do with time?

I have several friends who purchase cars every two years. They take their time because they really enjoy the process of shopping -- the test drives, the comparison of specs, talking with the sales people. They can shop for weeks before their purchase. After they purchase, they have little remorse.

Yet another friend is terrified of purchasing a car and always asks friends to go along. He is just not confident about evaluating cars. But once he decides he's going to go out and buy a car, he takes considerably less time than my first friend. And afterwards he, too, has little remorse.

Then again, I've had lunch with friends who have buyer's remorse after ordering a sandwich at Subway. Hey it's a sandwich. It's only a few bucks. But there's remorse.

Time and again in the examples highlighted in the review (and this assumes the review accurately reflects the book) time is just not a critical factor.

So much has been written about purchase behavior, and so many consultants have proffered hypothesis on why and how people buy that I'm not sure we need another. And when that other is parsing purchasing behavior based on time, well, there seems to be little that's new.

And somehow I think I've read this before.