Nowadays, a new marketing strategy is making marketing managers and business owners sit up and listen. This is known as customer intimacy.
It is a marketing strategy where the seller or supplier gets close to their clients. The benefits of greater customer intimacy for a business might include improved highly tailored problem-solving capabilities and greater adaption of products to customer goods, as well as higher customer loyalty levels.
According to socialmediaexplorer.com, customer intimacy closely mirrors person-to-person relationships where the mature stage of true intimacy is achieved through shared knowledge, understanding, commonly held beliefs and mutual compassion. This happens when a company moves from a transaction-based mindset to one with more long-term goals. Relationships where one party connects deeply with the other but the reciprocal emotional tie is weak, make for shallow short-lived relationships. When it happens in our personal lives we experience heartbreak. When it happens in statistically relevant number in business, the broken and bloody pieces left behind are loyalty, referrals, satisfaction, and reputation.
Dr. Ned Roberto of PDI Marketing RX relates customer intimacy with high customer involvement in a product.
When there is low involvement, he says, customers buy a product because it happens to be around or because it’s lower priced. “That’s why when its out-of-stock customers are quick to buy another competing product.”
According to www.dummies.com, a company implementing the customer intimacy strategy competes on scope, providing superior value by tailoring its products or services to match exactly the needs of targeted customers. It serves customers who are willing to pay a premium to get precisely what they want and specializes in satisfying unique customer needs through an intimate knowledge of the customers.
A customer intimacy value proposition sounds something like this: “We provide the best total solution to our customers because we make a practice of knowing exactly what they need.” Try to fashion your goals around the following examples:
- To ensure that our customers feel like we understand them by continually engaging in market research and responding to it
- To provide customized products and services to meet their needs
- To stress exceptional customer service
- To install and effectively use a customer relationship management system
- To offer and sell a complete solution (selling multiple and bundled products and services)
Develop a customer-focused culture to attain these marks. These procedures include offering as many products and services that your customers are looking to you to provide — meaning that you completely solve the problem or need that your customers have.
Photo: from www.haikudeck.com