José Ignacio Gafo Gómez-Zamalloa

When we speak about customer development and retention, building customer loyalty and long-term relationships with our clients, most of us show an skeptical attitude. We all know that acquiring a new customer is 10 to 20 times more expensive than developing and mantaining an existing one, but place most of our efforts in the former and not in the latter.
The reasons for doing this are several. First of all, we have not been educated in doing so. Just take a look at Marketing books It is amazing how many of them you can find about product life- cycle and product development. Even in Marketing Foundamental ones you can find info about them! However, when you look for customer lifecyckle and their development, you will have severe problems in finding them.
Secondly, many of us feel comfortable launching simple recipes used by everybody. Loyalty card or point programs based on usage are the most common ones. We think that by doing this we have done our part and feel no more effort is required.
And last but not least, I am sure we have many SMEs directed by smart people that are aware of the importance of this topic, but simply do not know how to articulate and implement it.
Lastng and successful companies are effective on this, so we defitively have to give it a thought and give some guidance on how to do it. I will write a little bit about it here, but I encourage you to go to the Forum created on this issue and share your experiences and concerns. Sharing them with the rest of the community wil surely help all of us to deepen in this issue.
So, "Science fiction or reality?" No science fiction for sure. I would say a reality hard to achieve but essential if your company wants to survive!

Best.

Ignacio Gafo

Posted on 11 February 2007 in Customer development and retention

Comments

Post a comment