Using Print Advertising to Build and Expand Client Relationships

It is important for technology vendors and solutions providers to remember that every single customer touch point presents a valuable opportunity to create affinity. And, print advertising is no exception. By structuring your campaigns and strategies with the customer in mind, your organization can leverage your investment in print advertising to build affinity. This, in turn, will lead to the kind of strong, long-lasting relationships that result in optimum client satisfaction and retention, as well as sustained profitability and growth. Download the complete UBM white paper "Print: Building The Bridge To Customer Affinity.

Using Trade Shows, Conferences, and Other Meetings to Create Profitable and Long-Lasting Client Relationships

It is important for technology vendors and solutions providers to remember that every single customer touch point presents a valuable opportunity to create affinity. And, events are no exception. By organizing your presence at trade shows, conferences, and other types of face-to-face gatherings with the customer in mind, your organization can leverage your investment in events to build affinity. This, in turn, will lead to the kind of strong, long-lasting relationships that result in optimumclient satisfaction and retention, as well as sustained profitability and growth. Download the complete UBM white paper "Events: Building The Bridge To Customer Affinity.

Chief Marketing Officer Council Encourages Adding Customer Affinity Index To The Mix

Customer centric metrics are taking center stage this year as b-to-b marketers pursue new ways to measure customer engagement, satisfaction and, ultimately, loyalty to a brand.

Measuring customer satisfaction is not a new idea, but as technology puts more control in the hands of users, marketers are seeking out the optimal ways to measure how successful they are with their marketing messages, products and services.

Marketers are divided on how best to achieve this. Some are using an array of metrics and other processes to come up with a view of how they're doing with customers, while others are trying to simplify the process by using a single metric, such as the Net Promoter Score.

The NPS, developed by loyalty expert Fred Reichheld, is a score of customer loyalty based on a single question: "How likely are you to recommend our company to colleagues?"

Marketing organizations are also coming up with new metrics to gauge the customer experience.

Last month [December 2007], the Chief Marketing Officer Council released a study on customer measurement... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

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.]

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.]

How do companies innovate successfully?

They can spend the most money, hire the best engineers, develop the best technology, and conduct the best market research. But unless their research and development efforts are driven by a thorough understanding of what their customers want, their performance may well fall short — at least compared to that of their more customer- driven competitors. John Schiech, president of the DeWalt division of Black & Decker (the division that makes power tools used by professional contractors), put it simply. When asked what made his com - pany so successful, he responded, “It’s engineers and marketing product managers spending hours and hours on job sites talking to the guys who are trying to make their living with these tools.”

This insight represents a further amplification of our ongoing research into the costs and value of corporate innovation. In 2006, as in the two previous years of our annual study of the Booz Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000 — the 1,000 publicly held companies around the world that spent the most on research and development — overall corporate revenues among these companies increased 10 percent. Once again, their overall spending on research and development also rose, to US$447 billion this year. And as in years past, we found no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance. This document presents only a summary of the available research. Download this Booz Allan Hamilton report...