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Smart Marketing: The Rise of Trust and Authenticity
May 06, 2008
By the year 2020, corporate sincerity will trump marketing's "four Ps"
By Don Peppers And Martha Rogers
It's an exciting, perhaps even scary, time to be a marketer. Times are changing, media is changing and even customers are changing. If the present is so unpredictable, what will the future look like? We just completed a new study with our 1to1 Xchange panel that may provide some interesting answers.
We asked our panel of sales and marketing executives, "What will one-to-one marketing look like in 2020?" The results show promise for a more connected and informed customer-company relationship. The future looks bright, as 84% of respondents agree that there will be moderate to high levels of positive change occurring within one-to-one marketing by 2020. This means significant improvement in the ability of organizations to capture and share information, understand customer needs, calculate customer lifetime value, improve the customer experience and provide customers with relevant messaging in their preferred channel.
Similarly, 78% agree that the future of marketing will be based on building authentic relationships moreso than the development of new products. And customers will continue to gain control of the relationship. Online chats, blogs and Internet-based social communities increasingly put control of the brand image into the hands of customers. On the customer service side, one bad experience can have an exponential impact on a company's reputation as customers share their horror stories electronically.
Companies that will break through to customers are the ones that will focus on fairness, transparency and building trust across the board. By 2020, marketers will focus less on gaining short-term advantage and more on working to win and maintain customer trust—in fact, 84% of respondents agree that building customer trust will become marketing's primary objective.
To build customer trust an organization needs to build it into the culture. But that isn't easy. The habits and patterns that build up over time into a "culture" will have far more impact on a company's overall actions than will even the most detailed written procedures. Culture is hard to define, harder to manage and even harder to change. Nonetheless, here are a few pointers:
• You get what you pay for. People do what they are rewarded to do, so give employees incentives for practicing trust-based activities.
• Actions speak louder than words. If you're a senior person at your firm, your employees will imitate what you do, not what you say. The chief privacy officer cannot build customer trust alone. Don't hire a CPO as your privacy strategy. Hire one because of your strategy.
• Find the influencers in your organization. Networks of employees form spontaneously, and the key influencers of other employees' behaviors and attitudes are probably not the most senior people in your organization. Identify those employees that other employees turn to most when asking questions or solving problems.
• Focus on a single, simple, unifying mission. You can rally people around an idea if the idea is universally appealing but specific and tangible enough to offer guidance.
• Celebrate small victories. Find examples of the right cultural values being put into practice, and socialize them within your firm.
So how do you do prepare for the future? The first step is putting one-to-one principles into the day-to-day operation of the organization to improve the customer experience and build trust.
Organizations that plan accordingly will have the early mover advantage. Those that fall behind now by not acting in customers' best interests will fall even further behind their competitors. Keeping up won't be easy, but the effort will be well worth it.
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers are founding partners of Peppers & Rogers Group, a division of Carlson Marketing, in Norwalk, Conn. Write them at edit@salesandmarketing.com.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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