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Don't Just Relate - Advocate!: A Blueprint for Profit in the Era of Customer Power Illustrated Edition
Purchase options and add-ons
- ISBN-100131913611
- ISBN-13978-0131913615
- EditionIllustrated
- PublisherWharton School Publishing
- Publication dateMay 21, 2005
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.36 x 0.91 x 9.5 inches
- Print length234 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Congratulations to Glen Urban for moving 'best marketing practice' up a notch. Companies will gain more in the long run by helping their customers make wise choices than in pushing them into purchasing their products. Establishing a reputation for customer trust, transparency, and advice will be the new differentiator." - Phil Kotler
From the Back Cover
"Establishing a reputation for customer trust, transparency, and advice will be the new differentiator. Congratulations to Glen Urban for moving 'best marketing practice' up a notch."
--Philip Kotler, author of several books on marketing, including "Kotler on Marketing, Marketing From A to Z, Lateral Marketing, Ten Deadly Marketing Sins, Social Marketing, "and the best-selling and authoritative textbook, " Marketing Management, " now in its 12th edition.
Traditional "push/pull" marketing no longer works. Even highly-touted customer relationship initiatives are failing. Smart companies are pioneering an entirely new route to higher margins and sustainable competitive advantage: customer advocacy. This book reveals how it works, why it works, and how to make it work for your company.
In today's environment, you must build unprecedented trust among customers who have more information, options, and sophistication than ever. You must transcend "relationship marketing" to focus on maximizing customer interests and deepening customer partnerships. It's not easy. But if you do it, you gain immense opportunities your competitors simply can't touch.
Glen Urban offers a complete blueprint for getting there. You'll learn how to improve on all eight elements of customer advocacy, from transparency to partnership. Urban answers frequently asked questions about advocacy strategies, helping you identify and overcome your most significant obstacles. Then, drawing on new case studies, he shows how to align culture, metrics, incentives, and organization, driving effective advocacy throughout your entire organization.
Power shift: Why your customers now drive your relationship ...and why they no longer respond to conventional marketing
Do your customers trust you now? Assessing your company on eight dimensions of trust
Your customers are smarter than you think ...and they'll appreciate being treated that way
Tools and plans for moving to customer advocacy Changing culture, people, metrics, incentives, and organization
Straight answers on the pitfalls to avoid, and how to get results
In today's environment, you must build unprecedented
"Beyond "relationship marketing" The new route to success with today's empowered customer"
Don't fight your customers: "earn their trust!"
Craft customer advocacy strategies that work
Reduce customer acquisition costs, increase margins, accelerate growth
Deepen customer trust, one step at a time
Learn from the experiences of today's customer advocacy pioneers
For every CxO, board member, marketing leader, and strategist
Today, customers call the shots--and they know it. You can fight them, and lose. Or you can become a true customer advocate, and "win."
Customer advocacy means faithfully representing your customers' interests. It means giving them open, honest, and complete information (because they'll discover the truth no matter what you do). It means talking "with "them, not at them. And it requires a massive transformation in both your culture and your processes. Now, one of the world's leading marketing innovators shows why you "must "make that transformation-- and how to make it "work."
MIT's Glen Urban covers the entire "pyramid" of customer advocacy: the "base" (starting with TQM and customer satisfaction initiatives); the "middle" (relationship marketing); and the "pinnacle" new advocacy techniques built on trust, not coercion. Drawing on the latest customer advocacy initiatives at firms such GM, Intel, Qwest, and John Deere, he identifies crucial lessons for "earning "customer trust, "keeping "it, and "profiting "from it.
(c) Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Glen Urban is a leading educator, prize-winning researcher specializing in marketing and new product development, entrepreneur, and author. He has been a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty since 1966, was Deputy Dean at the school from 1987 to 1992, and Dean from 1993 to 1998.
Urban's research focus is on management science models that improve the productivity of new product development and marketing. For example, in a methodology he devised called Information Acceleration, he uses multi-media computer technology to simulate future sales of products such as cars, computer systems, telecommunications, and drugs.
Information Acceleration emerged from Urban's earlier ground-breaking work in premarket forecasting for frequently-purchased consumer (nondurable) goods called Assessor. Since the Assessor concept publication, it has been used to forecast the success and profitability of more than 3,000 new consumer products around the world. Dr. Urban's recent research is to develop a trust-based marketing system on the Internet. An extension of the Information Acceleration research, the system uses pickup trucks for a prototype Web site that integrates attribute screening, expert advice, collaborative filtering, and community interaction. This is being extended to understanding how the click stream from such an advisor/customer dialogue can be used to discover unmet needs. Finally research is underway to find the determinants of trust on the Internet and design a real-time adaptive experimentation system to increase the levels of trust on a Web site.
Trained initially in engineering and business--earning a BS in mechanical engineering in 1963 and an MBA in 1964, both from the University of Wisconsin--Urban went on to earn a Ph.D. in marketing at Northwestern University in 1966. He is co-author of six books, including "Digital Marketing Strategy" (2004), "Design and Marketing of New Products "(second edition, 1993), "Advanced Marketing Strategy "(1991), and "Essentials of New Product Management "(1986). He has also published more than 30 articles on premarket forecasting of new products, test marketing, product line planning, leading-edge users in new product development, and consumer budgeting. His papers have won several prestigious awards, including two O'Dells--in 1983 and 1986--for the best papers published in marketing research. In 1996 he received the American Marketing Association Paul D. Converse Award for outstanding contributions to the development of the science of marketing, and the Journal of Marketing award for best paper in that year. In 1999 he was winner of the American Marketing Association and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania Charles Coolidge Parlin Award for recognition of a body of work in marketing research. In 2000 he presented the Wroe Alderson Lecture at the Wharton School.
With two other researchers, Urban founded Management Decision Systems, Inc., a marketing consulting firm that merged with Information Resources, Inc. in 1985. He also co-founded Management Science for Health and its spin-off John Snow, Inc., both consulting firms specializing in international healthcare and family planning that have grown to several hundred employees worldwide. He co-founded Marketing Technology Interface, Inc., a company that uses multimedia computing to support strategic new product design, which merged in 1993 with Mercer Management, a consulting firm. In 1998 he co-founded InSite Marketing Technology, a software firm for trust-based marketing on the Internet (sold to Silknet in October 1999). His newest firm is called Experion Systems and was founded in December 1999.
(c) Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.
Product details
- Publisher : Wharton School Publishing; Illustrated edition (May 21, 2005)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 234 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0131913611
- ISBN-13 : 978-0131913615
- Item Weight : 15.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 6.36 x 0.91 x 9.5 inches
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Humanism of this sort has its limits, but the point is to reach as far as possible toward that point where the company becomes known as a trusted advisor, i.e., the optimum market position between its own products and the broader needs of customer. This will engender positive word-of-mouth, which should consequently help to reduce acquisition and marketing costs. For many companies, this will require quite a makeover in which not only the way of doing business becomes significantly changed but also the branding and infrastructure essential to support it. Urban, however, makes a strong case for such an investment and provides guidance in a helpful, stepwise fashion. These elements include focusing on customer success and being more open to customer knowledge, creating a sustainable brand based on customer advocacy and creating an actual brand community, and providing the appropriate incentive compensation to staff. An advocacy-based strategy for a company may sound new-fangled, but Urban really shows the necessity of coming back to what the customer wants and realizing that finding it goes beyond one's offering. Highly recommended.
The relationship between companies and customers is no exception. The old notion that producers produce and consumers consume is regarded as passé by management theorists. These days, value is more often co-created by producer and consumer.
For example, innovations are as likely to come from customers as from pointy-headed PhDs in corporate labs. In extreme cases (think Open Source software) consumers are cutting producers out of the game altogether by collaborating to build their own products. How postmodern can you get?
In his latest book, Glen Urban offers his prescription for survival in this topsy-turvy world. His answer, as the title of the book implies, is that producers need to move far beyond cultivating relationships with consumers. The future, he argues, belongs to companies prepared to act in the best interests of their customers at all times, even if it means advising them to buy elsewhere.
But "customer advocacy" involves more than simply turning away unprofitable business. Urban, a faculty member at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Business since the mid-1960s, urges companies to steer even valuable customers in the direction of competitors if they would be better off.
On first hearing this sounds not only idealistic but also unrealistic. Since when was anyone in business happy to act as a salesperson for a competitor? This is "coopetition", the phrase coined by economists Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff to describe co-operation among competitors gone mad.
But Urban argues his case from a pragmatic starting point. Today's internet- enabled customers have all the information they need to make informed choices and access a greater variety of alternatives.
Moreover, they are becoming harder to reach. As media outlets proliferate, primetime advertising no longer reaches a critical mass of consumers. The old "push-pull" approach to marketing - pull by media advertising, push by price promotion - has started to break down.
The answer: spend less on push-pull marketing and more on developing the best products available. Then aim for complete transparency, disclosing everything that a customer needs to know to make an informed choice.
"Far from being foolish, the honesty of advocacy reflects the reality that customers will learn the truth anyway. If your company is distorting the truth, your customers will detect those falsehoods and will act accordingly."
There are echoes here of Fred Reichheld's influential work on customer loyalty. Reichheld, a consultant with Bain & Co, pointed out that loyal customers are not only more profitable than new customers but also a valuable sales resource. Satisfied customers may come back again. Loyal customers will recommend your service to friends, family, colleagues or anyone else within earshot.
Shoshana Zuboff, formerly of Harvard Business School, is on a similar track. In The Support Economy, co-authored with her husband Jim Maxmin, she argued that companies that were geared up for mass production were bad at meeting the needs of today's informed but time-constrained consumers. Organisations that could be trusted to steer customers towards the best possible product or service would enjoy a powerful competitive advantage.
Yet in the wrong hands, this is dangerous stuff. A company that tried to become an advocate for its customers without first developing great products would be doomed to failure. Helping your customers figure out that your products are sub-standard is not much of a strategy.
As Urban points out, however, businesses built on solid foundations of quality, service and value might also think about competing on trust.
Thus Dell could start to help customers build the best system for their needs, not just the best product in its range. Southwest Airlines might make it easier for customers to compare its services with other carriers by giving online travel reservation services access to its schedules and fares.
The rub, of course, is that great companies such as Dell and Southwest do not need to move in this direction. They are doing very nicely already. Yet the companies that need badly to develop new sources of competitive advantage (Hewlett-Packard? Delta Airlines? General Motors?) are in no position to start steering customers away.
Then there is the tricky issue of corporate culture, dealt with by Urban in a few short pages but worthy of a whole book. Customer advocacy requires transparency, honesty and a focus on the long term. Yet most managers have been raised in environments that reward secrecy, short-termism and spin.
Yes, the world of business is topsy-turvy. But some things never change.
Instead of selling the potential customer we need to be an advocate for them. That means telling them not only the good things about your service or product but also the weaknesses. Being up front about everything builds trust and trust builds loyal customers. Throughout the book the author argues that by building trust the customer advocate gains several major benefits. Among these are reduced customer acquisition costs, higher profit margins, and a long-term competitive edge. I particularly appreciated the fact that the author followed his own advice and pointed out industries where advocacy makes the biggest difference and where advocacy is unlikely to make much difference. Don't Just Relate - Advocate is a highly recommended read and should be required reading for anyone involved in regular contact with your customers or potential customers.