Quality Service Marketing

Marketing's 4 P's: Then & Now

As I refreshed my training material in preparation for my next AMA Marketing Boot Camp, I got to thinking about the ways marketing has changed since I started teaching this program more than ten years ago.

Marketing's traditional “4 Ps” framework – Product (what you offer), Price (what you charge), Promotion (how you communicate it) and Place (where the customer obtains the product/service) – has changed significantly over the past 10+ years with the rapid growth of social media. Here are a few highlights of these changes.

Product
Then: consumers depended on product information primarily from the manufacturer. Satisfied and dissatisfied consumers shared their joy or frustration with traditional word-of-mouth – influencing dozens, maybe even hundreds of people in their local network.

Now: consumers rely on word-of-mouse to obtain product info and instantaneously share their experiences with millions of people in community-based and global networks.

Price
Then: comparison price shopping took serious time and effort.

Now: it’s much faster and easier to obtain pricing info with online research and mobile apps.

Place
Then: consumers enjoyed new-found convenience as shopping opportunities grew from bricks-and-mortar to clicks-and-mortar.

Now: consumers enjoy the any time/any place convenience of shopping and entertainment, including downloading music, movies, and books. They can also acquire knowledge via an infinite number of podcasts, webinars, and (my new favorite) TedTalks.

Promotion
Then: consumers were no longer passive recipients of promotional messages as they enjoyed skipping over commercials using technology offered by digital video recorders.

Now: some consumers are increasingly immune to marketing messages, although some enjoy participating in message development (“make-your-own-commercials”) and brand advocacy (fan pages).

Beyond CRM
Technology and social media have enabled customer relationship management (CRM) to evolve from “What more can we sell to consumers?” to “How can we more effectively engage them?” Hence, the new 5th P of marketing: Participation.

I welcome your thoughts on how marketing has changed in the past 10+ years.

"The Pursuit of Customer Insight"

[Note: I’m delighted to share this post from co-authors and consultants, Chip R. Bell and John R. Patterson. Their latest book, Wired and Dangerous: How Your Customers Have Changed and What to Do About It, is being released this month.] 

 
The mayor of Santa Clarita, California annually holds a hairdresser’s luncheon. The goal of the special event is a focused one--to learn what citizens are really concerned about. The mayor knows citizens will tell their hairdressers what they would never report in a city-wide survey.

The general manager of a large midtown hotel held quarterly focus groups with the taxi drivers who frequented his hotel property waiting to transport departing guests to the airport. He knew the taxi drivers would get a more honest earful than the hotel front desk clerks could extract from their way too familiar “How was your stay?”

Organizations around the world make it a practice of seeking customer feedback. One major study estimated at least 95% of all companies engage in customer inquiry in some form. Armed with reams of surveys, focus group reports and suggestion box forms, the marketing department slices, dices and presents to leaders “what we know for sure about our customers.” Nods of confirmation from the tippy top of the organization tell the data presenters they have hit another home run--all is well on mahogany row. But, is information and understanding the best goal for this well-played game?

The enormous investment by organizations in gathering customer feedback is primarily to gain either confirming or corrective information. Data collection is to provide answers to two questions: how are we doing and, what do we need to fix. But, today’s customers are bored with business as usual. They show their allegiance to innovative companies---those with a passion for the inventive. And, traditional customer feedback and evaluation will not effectively inform innovation.

What Did You Really Find Out

We were consulting with a large construction company in the Northeast. They had asked us to help them better understand what drove loyalty among their business customers. The CEO was unexpectedly delayed and joined the results presentation after we were thirty minutes and twenty PowerPoint slides into our story. We were at a transition point and, as he took his seat, he asked a show stopping question: “What can you tell us that I do not already know or can figure out from your written report?”

At first we assumed he was being either cute or caustic. But, this was not our first rodeo with this client so we did what we learned to do in consultant school when confronted with an uncertain client situation--ask a question! We politely asked him: “What is behind your question?”

“I appreciate the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of your research work,” he continued, realizing he had sounded curter than he had intended. “I am looking for insight, not understanding. What were the surprises in your loyalty study? What are our customers communicating without saying? What is a big aha that we can translate into a competitive advantage…or, at least a deeper customer relationship?”

His barrage of questions was more rhetorical than accusatory--intended for everyone in the meeting room. And, the queries got us thinking. How do we push our pursuit of understanding to the point of insight? Does insight emanate from great rapport with the customer, smart questioning, or shrewd analysis? What if we completely rethought the “ask a question, get an answer” process of customer intelligence gathering? How can customer input help inform innovation? “Breakthroughs,” said Andy Grove, former Chairman of Intel, “Come from an instinctive judgment of what customers might want if they knew to think about it.”

We are in a new era of customer requirements. Today’s customers are not only picky and fickle, they are “all about me” vain. Their “have it your way” orientation means successful organizations will need to remain on the hunt for creative differentiation. Retooling the organization to effectively approach the marketplace with imagination requires rethinking the means and methods for gaining customer intelligence. Success will come only when the recipients of customer input are able to say as our construction company CEO would say: “We learned something that surprised us.”

--- Chip R. Bell and John R. Patterson are customer loyalty consultants and the authors of several best-selling books. Their newest book is Wired and Dangerous: How Your Customers Have Changed and What to Do About It. They can be reached at www.wiredanddangerous.com.

What's in YOUR Office Library?

In the spirit of observing National Library Week (April 10-16, 2011), I want to thank libraries and librarians everywhere for their invaluable service in encouraging reading for enlightenment and enjoyment.

I love libraries – public, school, corporate, and private. Over the years my husband and I have created our own home library with a collection of books on art, management, business, food, investing, historical biographies, local history, religion, classic literature, and fiction. We’ve even kept a few of our favorite college textbooks.  

I also have my own business library that reflects my professional interests. My book shelves include books on:

• Marketing and branding, with emphasis on services marketing
• Employee engagement and HR/talent management
• Nonprofit marketing, management, and leadership
• Facilitation and training
• Writing reference and grammar guides (my favorite is J. I. Rodale’s classic, The Synonym Finder)
• Humor and creativity (mostly cartoon collections from the New Yorker  and the Far Side; Gordon MacKenzie’s Orbiting the Giant Hairball is another favorite)

What types of books do you keep in your office?

What's Involved in Delivering the Brand Promise?

• It’s an integrated process that bridges marketing, human resources, and operations …
• It’s helping employees understand your brand value, then engaging and enabling them to deliver the brand promise as a positive customer experience …
• It combines elements of internal marketing and internal branding to strengthen your brand and drive business results …

And you can learn about it in a special one day program: Internal Branding & Internal Marketing on February 24, 2011, in Atlanta GA, that I’m presenting with Debra Semans.

We designed this hands-on workshop to help you better understand these two approaches and how you can apply them to enhance your employee and customer brand experience.

Hope to see you there!

Valuable Career Insights

2011 year marks my 36th year in the workplace (excluding part-time and summer jobs I held as a teen). I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed most of it, especially these past 23 years in business as Quality Service Marketing.

I’ve learned a tremendous amount as my career evolved. Reflecting on my experience, I can highlight valuable insights and lessons learned in the key roles I serve.

• As a services marketer, I learned that customer-focus begins with employee-focus because, quite simply, employees ARE the brand. The need to recognize and reinforce employee value continues to drive my passion for internal marketing.
• As a speaker & trainer, I learned:
  • It’s all about respect for my audience – understanding who they are and what about the topic appeals to them so I can target my presentation accordingly.
  • Equally important, it’s all about application – engaging and enabling audience members to consider how the information applies to their situation and how they can use it.
• As a facilitator, I learned it’s all about the questions. I believe my clients have most of the answers they seek, they just don’t realize it. So my primary role is to engage them in discovery by asking the right questions.
• Above all, as a business professional, I learned it’s all about demonstrating respect and integrity in working with my clients, my colleagues, and all the other important professionals (suppliers, printers, accountants, etc.), I partner with.

These valuable insights have served me well throughout my career, and they continue to influence how I do what I do.

What insights and lessons have made the most impact in your career?

Help for Improving the Customer and Employee Experience

When it comes to managing the customer experience in corporate America, it’s a sad state of affairs. That’s the news from the Temkin Group's research based on four core customer experience competencies:

• “Purposeful Leadership” – consistently communicating and modeling company values and customer-focused strategies
• “Compelling Brand Values” – translating how brand attributes can be applied in customer interactions
• “Employee Engagement” – gaining employee buy-in to company values and goals
• “Customer Connections” – using customer insight in operations and decision-making.

[Note: For more information, check out Temkin’s Customer Experience Competency Model assessment.]

I first read about this research in a MarketCulture blog post, and two selected stats caught my attention:

• “95% [of the respondents] want to improve profitability, but only 43% want to improve the work environment for employees.”
• The highest scoring competency was “Senior executives regularly communicate that customer experience is one of the company’s key strategies.” Yet, “Marketing does as much brand marketing inside the company as it does outside the company” was the lowest scoring competency.

Seriously, how can you focus on the customer experience and the bottom line if you don’t first focus on the employee experience? Especially since it’s the employees who deliver the brand!

For those interested in getting it right, consider attending this fall’s Internal Branding & Internal Marketing: Strategic Integration for Market Leadership, an AMA Spotlight Forum. Debra Semans and I will be co-presenting this special one-day event November 11th in San Francisco. Debra will share her expertise in internal branding, and I’ll share mine in internal marketing … and we’ll help you put both approaches together to enhance your customers' AND your employees' experience.

Grow Your Expertise in Services Leadership Here

The ultimate learning & networking forum for service excellence will be here soon, and I’m honored and thrilled to be a part of it. This year’s 21st Annual Compete Through Service Symposium, sponsored by the Center for Services Leadership (CSL), will take place November 3-5, 2010, in Phoenix AZ. (My long-time blog readers know that I’ve recommended this program as THE best place to learn about the latest ideas and best practices in services management and marketing.)

Top-notch speakers will share their expertise in areas that include customer engagement, employee engagement, innovative service design and strategy, transitioning from a product-based to a service-based organization, and effective service recovery. I’ll be presenting my session, From the Front Line to the Bottom Line: Strategic Tools of Engagement, on Thursday, November 4th.

I’m looking forward to taking in as many sessions as I can, including that of my Zappos friend, Donavon Roberson, Zappos Insights Culture Evangelist, who’ll be speaking on The Value of Values! I’m also excited about catching up with one of my long-time mentors, CSL Director Dr. Stephen Brown.

This year’s Symposium is an incredible opportunity to network with senior-level service executives (attendees and speakers) and CSL staff. Hope you can join us!

 

New Report Outlines Priorities for Service Research

I’ll never forget how frustrated I was in my first MBA marketing course. I was working in bank marketing at the time, and the course focused on consumer packaged goods and industrial products that had little relevance to what I was doing on-the-job. Back then (in the late 1970’s) there was no mention of marketing “intangible” services. Now, fortunately, there are complete textbooks, courses, and even graduate concentrations in services marketing.

As my career evolved, so did the emergence of services marketing as a field of study – one that I eagerly embraced in my professional development. The applied science of services marketing and management has grown tremendously thanks to a strong international academic-practitioner partnership. 

So I’m happy to share the latest service research priorities developed by academics and business executives that will drive thought leadership to advance the science and practice of service. Why is this important? Because “all businesses are service businesses.”

Here are the top ten overarching service research priorities compiled by the Center for Services Leadership that spearheaded this important endeavor:

• Fostering service infusion and growth.
• Improving well-being through transformative service.
• Creating and maintaining a service culture.
• Stimulating service innovation.
• Enhancing service design.
• Optimizing service networks and value chains.
• Effectively branding and selling services.
• Enhancing the service experience through co-creation.
• Measuring and optimizing the value of service.
• Leveraging technology to advance service.

While all these research priorities are important, here are the two that I’m most excited about (along with related topics identified for further exploration).

Creating and maintaining a service culture:

1. Recruiting, training, and rewarding associates for a sustained service culture.
2. Developing a service mind-set in product-focused organizations.
3. Creating a learning service organization by harnessing employee and customer knowledge.
4. Keeping a service focus as an organization grows, matures, and changes.
5. Globalizing a service organization’s culture across different countries.

Effectively branding and selling services:

1. Effectively branding service and solutions and identifying ways to assess brand value.
2. Developing consistent brand experiences across touch points.
3. Harnessing social media’s impact on service brands.
4. Achieving effective solution selling and defining the new role of the sales force.
5. Forging closer relationships between employees and the brand.

You can learn more in the Research Priorities for the Science of Service CSL Business Report 2010.

Regardless of which topic(s) appeal to you, the study of these “global, interdisciplinary, and business-relevant research priorities” will help advance the science and practice of service management to the benefit of business and consumers.

 

Memo to Senior Management: Take Care of Your People

I found this great quote from Dr. Judith M. Bardwick:

“When people are perceived as a cost and not a resource, when they are treated as a liability and not an asset, when no one seems to know or care that they are there, they don’t work well, and they don’t stay.”

Who are these ‘people?’

They’re your employees … your contractors, vendors, and consultants … your partners … and ultimately your brand advocates or - depending on how you treated them - your brand adversaries.

New Book Integrates Marketing, PR and Social Media

Just released – Marketing Public Relations: A Marketer’s Approach to Public Relations and Social Media by Gaetan Giannini, a new textbook that covers a truly integrated approach to promotion using both new and traditional media.

Wait – a textbook? Why would I be excited about a textbook? Two reasons:

1. While the subject of public relations (PR) is usually taught in schools from either a communications or journalism perspective, this book covers PR from a marketing perspective. Gaetan, a former marketing exec who is now an assistant professor and department chair at Cedar Crest College, wrote the book because he was unable to find a suitable text that integrated current PR and marketing practice in the new media landscape.
2. It’s a great reference for business practitioners – those new to marketing and marketing generalists who know the value of PR but don’t apply it everyday.
   According to Gaetan, this book “recognizes the similarities between PR, word-of-mouth, and social networking media and creates a framework for constructing marketing strategies that incorporate these highly credible and cost-effective tools.”

The book explains current PR applications (“Non-Media Connectors and Word-of-Mouth”) and updates traditional PR practices (“The Press Kit and Press Release,” “Selling the Story,” and “Crisis Management”). It also features a full glossary (in addition to defining key terms throughout each chapter) and index.

The book is reasonably priced for a textbook - around $90. Quite a bargain for a business reference book considering the price of a costly PR mistake.

To learn more, check out Gaetan’s book-related blog on Marketing Public Relations.