Business across cultures

KNOWINGYOUR COSTOMERS
Know your customers better because only they can help you get more lead and more business. Understanding customers is the key to giving them good service which in turn results into strong customer relationships and new sales through positive word-of-mouth recommendation. However, understanding the customers’ psyche is not easy and most often requires a thoughtful analysis to identify their preferences or purchase patterns so that you can anticipate their needs and exceed their expectations.
In what holds further is a list of six easy ways to understand your customers better. Read, comprehend and imbibe them in your working approach to engage with the customers better and ultimately sell them more.
1. Track Customers’ Real-Time Behavior
Today’s customers demand nothing less than a seamless experience across both traditional and digital touch points. To do this, a business needs to be prompt and proactive in its approach. It needs to anticipate the customers needs to serve them on all platforms even before the requirement is actually placed.
And all this can only happen when you have a tool that gives you a peep into the real-time behavior of the customers. Experts suggest investing in a customer relationship management tool (CRM) that provides an in-depth analytics of the customers’ activities. One of the best instances to corroborate this is CRM’s email marketing functionality.
Most of the renowned CRMs offer robust email marketing functionality with real-time tracking.
Using the software, you can
Track the performance of your email marketing campaigns
Track each campaign result through fields such as Total Sent / Attempted; Opened / Viewed; Link clicked; Un-subscribed; Bounce / Invalid
Understand your target audience better by jotting down a list of their likes and dislikes
Presenting their preferences with highly visual, context-rich Bar, Pie, and Line charts for quick analytics.
Jane Miller comments – Majority of the Big Players in the market do ‘needs anticipation’. All thanks to the easy to use CRM technology that has given them the power to extract, blend and analyze real-time customer data to identify customer preferences and purchase patterns and predict customer needs before even customers say so.
2. Identify the different categories of your Customers
Tagging them together in the same group only leads to generic cross-selling campaigns that do not generate any fruitful results. It’s important to understand the different parameters on which you can segregate your customers. Let’s say – the type of products/services they buy, frequency of purchase, geographic location of the customers and so on.
BRANDS AND BRANDING
Taken together, the book demionstrates how leading companies are ceasing to be collections of physical capital (Adam Smith's land, labor, and capital), and becoming mental constructs that represent the characteristics of human beings: brands can be trustworthy or not, creative or stable, leading-edge or traditional, conservative or liberal, male or female, and so on. Companies and their brands become complexes of embodied characteristics, as complex as any individual. These qualities become the promise the brand makes to the consumer. As long as the brand lives up to the promise, customers are retained, and so are profits. But if the company violates its brand promises, it betrays its customers and begins to lose them. This book comes at this from many directions, and lacks a clear comprehensive approach, but it is a fascinating sampler. This volume greatly benefits from many different perspectives and authors in tightly written essays that focus on brands, brand management and the future of brands.
Part one examines the definition of what a brand is, the history of brands and the social and economic importance of brands. Many will be intrigued to see that there are now methodologies for valuing brands independently of the operations of the companies that own them. For many public companies, the operating value is relatively slight without the brand values. There are a number of mini cases involving the world's most valuable brands (such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's). This background will be especially relevant to the general reader and for students new to the subject.
Part two looks at brand development and management in detail. This section will be very valuable to those who have not had much experience with brands.
Part three looks at the future of brands. I found this section to be the most interesting as the book looked at issues like the global debate about whether brands "steal" from poor consumers and workers in developing countries, the rise of Asian brands, country branding, adding social agendas to brands and protecting brands from counterfeiters worldwide.
The essays are nicely summarized in Rita Clifton's concluding essay, "The Future of Brands."
Each essay contains many references that can allow those who wish to learn more the pathway to take such steps.
I was pleased to see that the essays did not simply espouse the traditional wisdom on brands, but chose to "push the envelope" to provide more up-to-date and aggressive thinking.
I have a hard time imagining that you could find a better introduction to the subject in such a slim volume.
This anthology, edited by Rita Clifton and John Simmons with Sameena Ahmad, contains an abundance of information about branding.