Making Customer-Centric Marketing Real
Making Customer-Centric Marketing Real - click on the hyperlink to watch the video on YouTube
Forrester Research’s Peter Kim talks about the importance of Customer Advocacy, a term he says was coined by Forrester Research, for business success. In a nutshell, by convincing your customers and prospects that your company is truly committed to their interests, you will win more customers, more customer loyalty and more business from each of your customers.
While the video is entitled Making Customer-Centric Marketing Real, Kim doesn’t focus much on the role of Marketing in Customer Advocacy, except perhaps to say that Marketers tend to understand the value of the concept, but in order sell it to others in the company, they need good hard metrics to prove to the others that Customer Advocacy, which is a big investment for a company, has real ROI.
What I would like to focus on is that Marketing owns the PERCEPTION that a company adopts the value of Customer-Centricity. In the world of “Marketng 2.0″ and “Web 2.0″ the marketers’ job is to consistently feed examples of how the company loves, values and aids Joe Customer at all different levels of the Customer Experience, and clearly in today’s world of transparency to use Real “Joe Customers” to speak on company’s behalf… Good marketers can create a strong perception of Customer Advocacy and make it a differentiator for their company even if the company isn’t the top Customer Advocate on the block… But in the long run, to keep this message consistent, the marketer needs to mobilize support for customer advocacy across the organization and have some substance to support the marketing content… 
The bottom line is that in today’s market, the marketers have a new and more important role than ever to convince management that what makes companies succeed today is not having the best product or fastest time to market, but, in the long run, the most loyal customer advocates. Marketers can create buzz, podcasts featuring testimonials, YouTube infomercials by happy customers and on-line customer forums (fora?) but the key point is that by doing this they are convincing management to invest in customer experience Far Outside the realm of influence of the Marketers so that there will be more Loyal Customer Advocates to support the next campaign… Doesn’t that make you feel a little bit better about being a Marketer?
