The Customer is King: The Key to Great Marketing

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a million times: the customer is king.  Realistically, everything we do in business is centered around the customer.  Our strategies, culture, marketing, even our internal processes, they’re all designed fit a more customer-centric frame.

If you’re restructuring your marketing, it important that you consider realigning within this customer-centric frame if you’re not already there.  Instead of getting caught up in creating new ideas and marketing appeal, take a step back and ask yourself what the customer wants and let it guide you. This approach will not only appeal to your target customers, but help to attract new ones.

In the Forbes article Customer Experience Is The Future Of Marketing, author Daniel Newman gives us a few reasons as to why the customer experience is the key to success:

Why Customer Experience Is The Key To Success

Customers equate brands with experiences. From customer service to the digital journey to retail ambiance, our association with a brand is based on how it makes us feel. For example, Apple users stick with the brand despite the products costing three times more than other similar products. That’s because Apple values the customer experience and people respond accordingly. They are willing to pay a premium for great customer service and an excellent retail experience. Similarly, going to our favorite clothing retailer connects with us in a unique way. Just think about why when we go to Target for just one thing, we can’t seem to bring ourselves to leave the store, yet we can’t get out of Kmart fast enough.

Customers are more demanding than ever. Marketing research has discovered that it takes 12 positive experiences to repair the damage caused by a single unresolved negative one. In today’s competitive business environment, even one negative experience is enough to lose a customer forever because people now are less tolerant toward poor encounters than ever before.

Bad customer reviews spread like wildfire. People are unlikely to forget a bad customer experience. An interesting statistic that illustrates this it that Americans tend to mention a good brand experience to an average of nine people, but will talk about a bad one to 16 people. However, keep in mind another important caveat. The only thing worse than a bad customer experience is an average, lackluster one, because I can guarantee you, no one will remember those.

Angry customers can damage your brand name. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos hammered home the point when he said, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.” Today it’s commonplace for an angry customer to spew venom on the Internet after a bad experience, whether through their Facebook status, or posts on the brand’s Facebook page, a tweet, review, or forum thread. This can spell disaster for a brand’s image. Once the words are out there on the Internet, they can’t be unseen.

With customers seeking personalized interactions with their favorite brands, it’s important for companies to connect with them in a way that goes way deeper than the usual ‘brand-consumer’ relationship. To that end, brands need to serve up nothing short of stellar customer experiences throughout the purchase journey and even beyond.

Want to continue learning about marketing?   Reach out to Business House, LLC for your first FREE consultation.  With our talented team of marketing professionals, we’ll be sure to be your one stop shop where you can do it all and do it right!