The customer is very much on the minds of leading marketing executives these days. Across numerous research initiatives undertaken by the CMO Council, marketers collectively indicate they are spending more time and resources than ever before on understanding and engaging with their customers, including increased investments in customer communities, CRM systems and processes, and customer intelligence and analytics. The CMO Council has been a champion of these efforts, advocating a more disciplined, measurable and integrated approach to marketing, anchored by greater knowledge and more meaningful interaction with customers and customer markets. Now we believe it is time for a new measure of marketing performance – called customer affinity – that looks beyond old brand metrics to support marketing in its critical role of building customer-centric businesses. Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.

[Note: CMP was an underwriter for this CMO Council study.]

Profitability from Customer Affinity is the first major step in a sustained journey to determine what drives customer affinity, advocacy and attachment in today’s B2B marketplace. We expect this important groundwork to lead to new, more effective measurements for marketing analytics and more profitable and productive relationships with customers. The study represents the most important thought leadership initiative undertaken by the CMO Council since the Global Measures+Metrics Audit, a milestone study that demonstrated the importance of performance measurement in growing the stature, relevance and value of marketing and the CMO.

Profitability from Customer Affinity is a cooperative effort developed with input, advice and support from respected business schools, leading marketing and customer relationship professionals and channel executives. It provides compelling data and insight into practices and principals that can help marketing assume a new role in managing and driving the customer experience.

The study explores in depth customer viewpoints and opinions about the quality and value of the customer experience with solution providers, vendors, consultants and integrators. It also compares and contrasts these perspectives with the views of B2B technology industry marketing, customer relationship and channel executives. Our goal is to establish clearer measures and metrics based on a variety of determinants of customer attachment and affinity, including frequency of contact, caliber and consistency of touch points, value-added services, responsiveness, business policies and practices, problem resolution, cooperative planning and innovation, and other factors. Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.