By Glen Urban
Rating – 5 stars
Rating - July 5, 2005
In this Internet Age, consumers know everything about your
company and its products.
Glen Urban, a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management
faculty since 1966, Deputy Dean at the school from 1987 to 1992, and Dean from
1993 to 1998 posits that the only way to earn their trust is to provide them
with open, honest and complete information – even if that means finding the
right competitor’s product to meet their needs.
In the face of this increasing consumer power, your company
has three options:
Respond with the traditional
marketing push and pull. In other words, increase pull by upping your
advertising budget. Increase your push by employing price and promotional
policies. These have been the mainstay of marketing for more than 50 years.
Strengthen your customer
relationships. In recent years companies have refocused on their customers
by emphasizing customer satisfaction metrics, staying on message, building
better products using TQM and emphasizing more personal service.
The final option is to advocate
for your customer. This means you give your customers and prospects
complete, open and honest information so they can find the product which
best serves their needs. This is a dialogue. The goal with this option is
to have customers reciprocate with their trust, purchases and loyalty.
Although it may require a complete cultural marketing
make-over, Urban says the benefits of advocacy are worth the investment:
Reduced customer acquisition
costs. Trust lowers the number of new customers company must acquire to
maintain its growth projection.
Higher Profit margins. Customers
are willing to pay more for quality products from vendors they trust.
Growth. When a company becomes a
trust vendor, customers look to that firm for more products and services in
more categories.
Advocacy lays the foundation for
long-term customer advantage.
Not only is Urban’s thesis persuasive, he also shows how to
determine whether an advocacy-based strategy is right for your firm. He ten
takes the strategy the next step and shows how to build the trust required. The
MIT professor provides you with new tools and identifies the leadership skills
and cross-functional requirements needed to develop a successful response to
this rise of consumer power.
