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Preventing the Premature Death of Relationship Marketing
by Susan Fournier, Susan Dobscha, and David Glen Mick
http://www.harvardmanagementor.com/demo/demo/market/print.htm 05/25/2003
Harvard ManageMentor | Marketing Essentials | Printable Version Page 53 of 70
The Idea in Brief
Business is abuzz with relationship marketing. "Learn more about
your customers! Build meaningful, one-on-one relationships! Personalize!
Customize! Please every palate with infinite offerings!"
Customers response? An irate "Buzz off!"
Why? In our rush to reap the potential benefits of relationship marketing
reduced costs through customer retention and increased revenues through
customer loyalty we ve overlooked two basic truths. First, relationship
building requires willing participation from both parties. Second, it takes
reciprocity a balance of giving and getting. If customers are only giving
vital information, but not getting benefits in return, relationship marketing
deteriorates into unwelcome manipulation.
To recover, we need to:
see marketing through consumers eyes,
regain their trust, and
build true intimacy.
The Idea at Work
See Through Consumers Eyes
Blinded by relationship marketing s potential, we don t understand how
customers see marketing. The hard truth:
Companies flood consumers with too many requests for one-on-
one relationships. Yes, long-term, committed partnerships are
valuable. But people maintain just a few close relationships in their
personal lives. How can we demand more from their consumer lives?
Result: Marketing advances seem trivial, useless. Consumer interest
in relationship building evaporates.
Companies ask customers for friendship, loyalty, and respect
without giving the same in return e.g., hotels request personal
information from guests but don t give personalized service in return.
Result: Consumers see marketing as a "one-way street" benefiting
companies only.
Companies cater to their "best" customers such as dropping off
rental-car "club" members at their cars while making loyal non-club
members walk.
Result: Customers feel spurned.
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Companies offer too many options e.g., a toothpaste brand in 55
product and packaging variations.
Result: Customers feel overwhelmed, paralyzed.
Regain Customers' Trust
How to rebuild damaged consumer trust? Prove through your actions that a
relationship with your company can be useful and stress free. Rethink two
aspects of marketing:
Product design. Do your new products and extensions create need
or noise? Evaluate consumers likely reactions, then eliminate
frustrating or overwhelming features and functions. Procter &
Gamble has standardized product packaging and pruned marginal
brands. Offer frustration-control tools e.g., America Online s
software lets customers block unsolicited e-mails.
Personal-information handling. If you re not using sensitive
information about customers, stop gathering it "just in case." Be
honest, too: You want consumers money. Tell them that, and explain
why your deal s the best.
Attain True Intimacy
Successful relationships hinge on true intimacy, both parties fully knowing
one another. To hold up your end, get everyone senior and midlevel
managers, engineers out in the field, "living with the natives." Read your
target consumers magazines, watch their favorite TV shows, learn what
issues command their attention. Find out how people actually use and feel
about your offerings. Get an up-close-and-personal view of "a day in the
life of the customer" through:
videotapes and photographs of customers using products,
customer-service hot lines,
Web-based product discussion groups.
Make consumer specialists the foundation of your entire marketing
discipline, and you just might achieve a marriage or at least a relationship
made in heaven.
Preventing the Premature Death of Relationship Marketing
To save relationship marketing, managers will need to separate rhetoric from reality.
Relationship marketing is in vogue. Managers talk it up. Companies profess to do it
in new and better ways every day. Academics extol its merits. And why not? The new,
increasingly efficient ways that companies have of understanding and responding to
customers needs and preferences seemingly allow them to build more meaningful
connections with consumers than ever before. These connections promise to benefit the
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Harvard ManageMentor | Marketing Essentials | Printable Version Page 55 of 70
bottom line by reducing costs and increasing revenues.
Unfortunately, a close look suggests that relationships between companies and
consumers are troubled at best. When we talk to people about their lives as consumers,
we do not hear praise for their so-called corporate partners. Instead, we hear about the
confusing, stressful, insensitive, and manipulative marketplace in which they feel
trapped and victimized. Companies may delight in learning more about their customers
than ever before and in providing features and services to please every possible palate.
But customers delight in neither. Customers cope. They tolerate sales clerks who hound
them with questions every time they buy a battery. They muddle through the plethora of
products that line grocery store shelves. They deal with the glut of new features in their
computers and cameras. They juggle the flood of invitations to participate in frequent-
buyer rewards programs. Customer satisfaction rates in the United States are at an all-
time low, while complaints, boycotts, and other expressions of consumer discontent rise.
This mounting wave of unhappiness has yet to reach the bottom line. Sooner or later,
however, corporate performance will suffer unless relationship marketing becomes what
it is supposed to be: the epitome of customer orientation.
Ironically, the very things that marketers are doing to build relationships with customers
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