Rethinking Marketing Essay

Companies today have technology that enables them to interact directly with customers. Firms must make use of this technology to focus on customer needs and develop into customer-oriented companies rather than product oriented ones. In order to facilitate this change a change in the company’s strategies as well as structure becomes necessary. This change includes reinventing the organizations marketing department entirely. One such change in strategy involves customer cultivation. Companies must move from being traditional companies to customer cultivating companies. A customer cultivating company is one that focuses on individual or small groups of customers as opposed to a traditional company that focuses on the mass. Many firms today are trying to make this strategy work. For example IBM, Tesco and American express. Next we come to change in structure, which involves reorganizing the marketing department. * Firstly CMOs must be replaced by CCOs (chief customer officer). The CCO’s job is to plan and implement the firms customer relationship strategy and supervise all customer-facing functions. * Secondly under the CCO will work the customer managers who identify the customer’s needs and direct brand mangers to fulfill those needs. * Customer- facing functions: some functions such as the customer relationship management that forms a part of the IT department must be made a part of the customer department. CRM (a tool for gauging customer needs and behavior) contains the data needed to implement customer cultivation strategy and hence essentially forms a part of the customer department. * Market research: market research changes to become more customer focused as well. * Research and Development: marketing and R&D must be integrated so that the customer itself can be brought into the process of designing products. * Customer service: the customer department must handle this service to ensure both quality and building long-term relationships with customers. With change in strategy there comes a need to change the measures that gauge the effectiveness of the strategy as well. These changes in measures are as follows: * Product profitability to customer profitability * Current sales to customer lifetime value * Brand equity to customer equity * And lastly market share to customer equity share. All in all the article considers reinventing the strategies and structure of companies to make them focus on building lasting customer relations rather that building brands.