Relationship Marketing

A practical guide to best practices in the revolutionary new marketing strategy that's sweeping the business world

Marketing Is Dead!
Long Live Marketing!

Marketing is dead because the old rules of identifying and satisfying customer demand no longer apply. But relationship marketing offers a new alternative, and new opportunities.

Traditional marketing dealt with market segments. Relationship marketing gives managment more "bank for the marketing buck" by focusing on the ultimate market segment— the individual customer — effectively and efficiently. Marketing attempted to generate as many sales transactions as possible, across all groups of customers. Relationship marketing enables your company to improve profitability customer by customer, by focusing on those who receive, and return, the best value.

Relationship Marketing: New Strategies, Techniques and Technologies to Win the Customers You Want and Keep Them Forever goes far beyond the basic idea that customers' needs and desires can be addressed uniquely. It is a practical guide to helping marketers and others to integrate relationship marketing into the business and use it to create value for the company and for its customers:

• Shows how to plan a relationship marketing initiative and provides sound, proven techniques for implementing it successfully.
• Gives you the tools to determine: the current mix of customers; the current and potential profitability of each one; and when to reward, discipline, and even fire customers.
• Explains how business-to-business relationships differ fundamentally from those with consumers, and presents a process for the planning of these different customer relationships.
• Explores the impact of technology on marketing, and how advances in technology can help companies bond more tightly with their customers.
• Expands the concept of a company's relationships beyond those with customers to include employees, suppliers, investors, and other important links in the "chain of relationships."
• Features numerous examples of best practices from leading-edge relationship marketing companies.

Relationship marketing is not just a "fad of the month." Rather, it affects the entire enterprise and all its stakeholders. This book describes how to link and align various groups and initiatives within the company — technology, people, business processes, and customer knowledge — in order to bond more intensely with your customers and create new value with them.