The most important single distinction we must make in our target group for any brand is the one between prospects and clients. This is because these two groups play very different roles in our business building program.
There are two broad strategic activities involved in increasing our brands' market share. We have to keep acquiring more revenues. And we have to avoid losing revenues we are already acquiring.
We will ne'er grow our market share if we don't keep in-creasing our revenues. We will also ne'er grow our market share if we keep losing more revenues than we are acquiring.
Each of these two strategic activities involves two functions:
There are two broad ways to keep acquiring more revenues:
1. We have to convert more prospects into clients.
2. We have to get our existing clients to use more of our products or services.
And there are two broad ways to avoid losing revenues we are already acquiring:
3. We have to avoid disappointing clients' experience of our products or services.
4. We have to avoid disappointing clients altogether the other the experiences they might associate with our brand.
Of the four strategic functions, the first, that of converting more prospects into clients, is, by far, more difficult than the other three.
This is because this function involves overcoming two major barriers:
a) prospects have little or no interest in or any relation-ship with our brand;
b) prospects are already engaged in other activity that we will have to discontinue, typically that of exploitation our competitor's product or services.
This is the function that focuses on our prospects, the people who have the money that is not yet being transmuted into our revenues, and are therefore the most important target toward increasing the market share of our brand.
Prospects have to made to notice our brand, they have to be made to get interested in our brand, they have to be made to desire our brand, and they have to be made to prefer our brand over its competitors, and ultimately, of course, they have to be made to purchase our brand, which is when their money becomes our revenues, and when prospects become our clients.
The unexpended three strategic functions, that of increasing clients' usage, and avoiding disappointing them either with our products/services or in any other way, are, relatively, importantly easier. This is because all three of them involve dealing with people who, as existing clients, are already in a relationship with us. As such, these three strategic functions involve a degree of openness toward us from the people we are addressing. Indeed, with today's interactive media, it has become easier for us to know them one by one by name, know where they live, how to reach them, and be acquainted with their demographics of gender, age, education, lifestyle, and other habits; and their psycho-graphics of values, interests and other preferences.
Coming back to the first strategic function, that of converting prospects into clients, we have literally to transform their existing disinterest toward our brand into a relationship. This toughest business challenge involves, above all, the WHAT of branding, and the HOW of MarComm, advertising, gross sales promotions, marketing, pricing, distribution, promotional material and other merchandising and communication possibility media and activities.
Branding is the most important of these because it is the abstract essence of the entire business building effort. Branding comprises the cluster of concepts and signals that have the challenge of overcoming the superior barriers between us and the prospect - those of their disinterest and pre-existing preferences and habits. The disciplines and media of gross sales, advertising, gross sales promotions, distribution, pricing, marketing and promotional material, etc. then have to deliver this brand communication possibility essence to the prospect so that it can break through the barriers of disinterest and antecedent practice.
CRM, or client relationship direction should cover all the HOWs involved in maintaining and strengthening the relationship with the client, once branding has broken through and established the relationship.
In this, CRM must remain consistent with the brand communication possibility essence, which lives on in the client as a cluster of expectations and signals, which is the actual the brand. Just as the above mentioned gross sales, merchandising and communication possibility functions must deliver the brand through media and locations, CRM must deliver, and stay faithful the brand essence through all its human and other experiential interactions with the client.
So every element of the functioning relationship with the client, the ease of opening the package, the ease of use of the product, the performance of the product, the disposal of the promotional material, the messages received by the client, the experiences of the client with client service staff, with charge staff, with credit control staff, with collections staff, with vehicles bearing our brand's logo, all must not only avoid negative residue, but also regard themselves as brand communication possibility as well, and deliver all these activity-media in ways that are consistent with the brand.
It must be noted that CRM can also contribute indirectly to increasing revenues and market share as well. This can be accomplished by fulfilling the brand essence vis a vis the client so thoroughly via the latter's experiences, that clients are delighted enough to make the effort to recommend it to other people who also happen to be prospects.
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