Era of Customer Engagement
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Loading ...In a recent meeting I was posed with a different version of a question I’m constantly asked, best articulated as “Are you selling companies a vitamin or an aspirin?” The reason this question always comes up in its various forms is that the theory is companies only buy aspirin. I’ve found this to be mostly true, except only in the best of times economically. The extrapolation is that companies are perpetually not-well or hung-over, or a liitle of both. Good to be an aspirin maker the theory goes.
The rearticulation of this question led me to think more about how we position Kalivo and how to best describe the problem we solve. We firmly believe it is an aspirin that we are selling - i.e. addressing a real pain. We believe the problem we’re addressing represents a fundamental shift that is in its early days of presenting itself. The point of this blog posting is to articulate in simple & clear, yet powerful terms the nature of the shift and the importance of it to all companies. Let me attempt to provoke some thoughts here and then read on:
Customer Engagement is the new Mass Marketing. It is no longer a strategic choice, but it is in fact a competitive necessity.
Why? Technologies have existed to enable customer engagement strategies in the past, and those strategies have been profitable. The difference now is that we’re in the early innings of a major power shift from companies to individuals. This power shift creates the pain (many would say opportunity) of needing to engage directly with customers.
The commercial Web continues to progress in compelling and interesting ways, from more sophisticated and effective search technologies - Google, Yahoo!, etc.- to personal publishing platforms such as Weblogs (e.g.TypePad, Wordpress), to self-aggregating communities (e.g. MySpace down to industry-specific communities ). This progression has empowered individuals with a compelling voice that can be found and amplified with little effort. Some refer to the current shift as Web 2.0, however I will refer to it hear as the Read/Write Web, a slightly more descriptive term that has also been coined at Richard MacManus’ blog to describe the movement. (For the geeks reading, Paul Kedrosky points us to IBM’er James Snell’s comment about referring to Web 2.0 as “chmod 777 web”).
Companies must take notice and embrace this change, for we believe this represents a tectonic shift in the way they will market to and interact with their customers. This shift is as profound and significant as was the past shift from personal relationship marketing in the old corner store to mass marketing, which was enabled partly by the rapid widespread adoption of the automobile.
For years much lip-service has been given to the notion of relationship marketing, customer loyalty, and 1:1 marketing. While the value proposition could effectively be articulated, and some companies such as Intuit, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Vanguard took heed and drove significant value from their efforts, doing so was more a competitive differentiation strategy than it was a competitive necessity. With the advent of the Read/Write Web, embracing and engaging with your customers is not longer a strategic choice, but a necessity for survival. In years to come, not having a customer engagement capability will be akin to not having an outbound marketing plan today.
Engaging with customers will become a table-stakes initiative for companies in order to even exist. Those that do not pursue this path of engagement will be left to flap in the wind as competitors meet their customers’ needs by effectively engaging with them on a mass-scale. These competitors will generate better products and/or services on an increasingly quicker pace, while also maintaining lower costs to serve their customers and decreased customer turnover. What’s more, they will be serving these customers the way they demand to be served.
The will of the customer makes engagement a competitive necessity.The choice of whether to engage for strategic benefit is gone …. customers are now capable of truly demanding engagement from the companies with which they do business, and those companies must respond. If you’re current headache pains have been relieved, worry not, because a new one is in the making.
The good news is that the aspirin is being produced today.
– brian
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