Blog: customer retention

Showing blogs: 1–3 of 3

Engagement is the New Loyalty

Oct 26 2009

Loyalty is often simplistically defined as an emotional connection with a brand; a continued preference for something that meets a person's needs in a given category. 

In that same vein, attrition is viewed as a point in time "defection" by a customer that consciously and visibly switches to another brand.  In my experience, companies that adopt this crude definition often miss the fact that customers rarely (expect perhaps in membership or subscription oriented business models) think of themselves as having a "relationship" with a company.  Instead they tend to think in a much more pragmatic and transactional way about how your company meets their needs and whether your products deliver value for money.  Viewed from that perspective, attrition is a much more complex and subtle issue and the right measure is "engagement," which is a composite measure of the many individual actions a customer takes on an ongoing basis that touch your brands in ways that lead to purchase. 

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Do you Down Sell?

Sep 4 2009

Recently, during a company presentation at CSG's Quaero, a senior director talked briefly about down selling. We often hear about cross-selling and up-selling but very seldom do organizations talk about down selling. So, what is it and why is it relevant to marketing professionals?

There are two ways to think about it.  Downselling could mean that you:

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Will hard times spur innovation?

Jul 13 2009

Based on what I observe with many of our clients these days, particularly the ones that are hurting the most, I wonder if "hard times bring forth innovation".   Clients in multiple industries seem more open to considering new ways of doing things, perhaps because the same old same old is simply not working anymore  Or is it perhaps because they are so desperate, they will try anything?   Actually, having spent some time with senior marketing executives as well as general managers, I think the smart ones see an opportunity to actually use these hard times to execute on ideas they have had for some time - so it may be a case of not letting a crisis go to waste.  

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