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These businesses are not practicing what our agency has been preaching. Some people call it database marketing, some call it relationship marketing. No matter what you call it, it's based on the principle that a customer is singularly the most valuable asset of any business. It's good old-fashioned friendliness and knowledge of your customers' tastes (i.e., buying habits) kept track with the brains of a computer. Don't confuse a database with a customer mailing list. A database is a collective memory that allows you to market to individuals based entirely on what you know about them. In a retail situation the database can tell you how many customers have purchased blue socks so a new shipment can trigger a personal message sent to blue sock lovers. In a professional service business, a database can tell you which clients use which services, match up those characteristics with other names to help identify people who are most likely to want additional services (cross-selling). A good marketing database allows any business to act as friendly and knowledgeable as the old neighborhood grocer who knows what kind of bread you buy and tells you when that bread arrives. Some people find it more than a little scary that traditional mass forms of communication aren't necessarily effective, much less measurable. When clients tell us they need ads and brochures, we're likely to ask them why. More often than not the answer is, "Because our competitors have them," instead of, "Because they work." When we ask them what they've done to bond with, cross-sell and up-sell their existing base of customers, they generally admit they haven't done anything. This wake-up call is around the idea that in the near future we may not have to create non-personal pieces of paper or prospect with mass market ads. We can develop business from the inside out while strengthening the bonds with our customers. We can learn from our current customers who our most likely new customers will be and speak to them directly. We can learn everything we want to know about improving our products or services from the people who use them. We can talk to them like friends and benefit from listening to them. We can track it all with technology that allows us to be better friends. Radical idea.
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