Editoral

Marketing and CVM in Practice

What's new in Marketing
and CVM ?

Know your customer; ECN Article

Key Account Management

MarketAbility News

MarketAbility Wisdom

MarketAbility featured Practitioners

MarketAbility Polls:
Key marketing challenges

• MarketAbility Polls

In this issue we would like to know what your key marketing challenges are
Visit the Poll-Section...

Visit the Poll-Section...

Marketers have to challenge the sacred cows in their companies and extend the boundaries

I’d like to lay down a challenge to marketers in all companies. It is simply to be more creative to challenge the more traditional marketing thinking and to advance beyond conventional dogma to create more value for their customers and to capture more profits for their employers. As shipping magnate, Aristotle Onassis once said, ’The secret of business...is to know something nobody else knows’.

We are all aware of products, but the secret of successful marketing lies beyond the products. Marketing is not about products, it is about customers. Marketing is about understanding the needs of customers and the benefits they seek and the value they attach to receiving those benefits. The customer is willing to pay a certain price for the benefit received.

What Market are you in?
The starting point for being a better marketer is to figure out what market you are in. If you are able to define your market according to the needs of your customers, rather than according to the products you produce and try to sell, you are on the road to becoming a value-based marketer.

Integrating the Customer Perspective
Value-based marketers need to integrate the customer’s perspective in their analyses and decisions.

The customers will choose the offering they prefer, based on their
perception of the strengths and weaknesses of the respective offerings
available.

There is no such thing as a commodity
If we think our product is a commodity, and if we think the customer
perceives no difference between offerings, then neither we nor they will see the differences.

Link Actions to Customer Value
Even the best strategies can still fail, if there is not an effective and
efficient implementation.

Conclusion:
Challenge the Sacred Cows and Change the Way You Market
Traditional marketing models and conventional use of them does not serve the needs of the modern marketer or the modern business. To survive in the competitive and fast-changing world of the 21st
century, marketers must challenge the old school and change the way they go to market.

Click here to read full text article

• Marketing and CVM in Practice

For many, Customer Value Management is something of a black art, with little or no scientific substance and unclear processes and concepts - and that's just what the marketers themselves think about it!!

MCE Faculty Member Phil Allen sheds light on the true substance and value
of Customer Value Management as a marketing concept.

Click here to access the full article

• Key Account Management

Key Account Management is a hot topic for many companies. MarketAbility runs Key Account Management training workshops and coaches Key Account Managers at several clients.
MarketAbility CEO warns: "Whilst key accounts are important, many companies fall into the trap of focusing so much on key accounts that they actually neglect their other customers. We would urge you to consider ALL customers as important. Losing a customer can cost a company dear. Not only do they gain a negative image, but the cost of replacing a lost customer with a new customer has been estimated to run as high as five to twenty TIMES the cost of continuing to serve an existing customer.
We recommend that all customers be looked after by some for m f account manager - someone who fells responsbile for that account and to whom the customer can turn when they need to.

• MarketAbility News

MarketAbility extends reach of Customer Value Management and Value-Based
Marketing workshops to cover broader industrial and B2B markets. MarketAbility is known in the chemicals and plastics industry for its popular and down-to-earth marketing and customer valaue management workshops.
Responding to popular demand these workshops have now been re-designed to
address the needs of a broader base of industrial and B2B marketers.
THERE IS STILL TIME to book a place on the next workshops which will run 12-14 November at The Marketing Centre in Zürich, Switzerland.
For more details please use this link or call Phil Allen
directly on +41 1 783 8777

Book your place on a workshop