Steve Yastrow

Customer Relationships Create Competitive Advantage

I was eating lunch with an executive of a hotel company, in a restaurant located at one of his company’s hotels. He was talking about competitive threats, describing how companies in his category are constantly copying each other’s innovations. I said, “If I were your competitor, I could walk into this hotel and easily copy your physical product. I could study your service standards, and copy them too. What I could not copy are the personal relationships you have with your customers. Those relationships would be impenetrable to me.”

In an age of interchangeable products and easily duplicated services, customer relationships have become one of the most powerful competitive advantages available to a business. Do you agree?

What about your business? What is it that your customers “can’t get anywhere else?” Your products? Your services? Their unique relationship with you?

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What is a Customer Relationship?

In my last post, I talked about the difference between a customer who thinks “Them” when thinking of you and a customer who thinks “We” when thinking of you. This shows us how you can know if you are in a relationship with a customer:In a customer relationship, your customer never thinks of you without thinking of both of you

This is powerful stuff. Your customer thinks about you and your business 1% of 1% of the time. She thinks of herself 100% of the time. So once she invites you into the 1^st person with her, and thinks “We,” you are have now earned the right to share mindspace with what she cares most about: herself.

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What are You to Your Customers: “Them” or “We”?

In the age of brute force marketing, the goal was attention.  “Capture eyeballs.”  “Cut through the clutter.”  The idea was that if you captured someone’s attention enough times with your clever advertising message, you would automatically earn their business.

As marketers got more sophisticated, they began to realize that simple attention was not enough.  We heard about things like mindshare, purchase intent and loyalty.

These are all fine, but they can be fleeting.  Purchase intent one week doesn’t automatically lead to purchase intent the next week, if a competitor offers a better sale price or promotion.  And loyalty can evaporate quickly, if the next company offers better incentives.

Far more sturdy, far more lasting, is when a customer stops thinking of your or your company as “Them,” and begins to think of her and you together as “We.”   When a customer invites you into the 1^st person with her, as “We,” you have entered a realm that attention, 2-for-1 promotions and “Your 10^th pizza free” programs can’t match.

This is what it means to be in a relationship with a customer:  When you stop being “Them,” and you start being “We.”

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New Book, New Blog

Over the past few years, I’ve been writing my new book, We: The Ideal Customer Relationship, and blogging as a contributor on tompeters.com. We arrives in retail stores this week, and to coincide with the book launch I’m starting this blog. My work on customer relationships, combined with new ideas on marketing, branding and unleashing the latent profit in businesses, has produced ideas to share.I will still contribute to tompeters.com, where the community is always full of interesting comments and debate.

Also, I will bring my newsletter out of its dormant state, and it will begin a semi-monthly publication in mid-February. The newsletter articles will be a bit more in-depth than the blog posts, and not as frequent, focusing on different topics at a given time.

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