Today I thought to write something about how marketing was used to be and how it is now. Because, he approaches, the strategies have been evolved alot throughout the time.
Earlier days, main focus was Transactional marketing which was aimed at individual transations (or one-off sales), rather than at creating a long standing customer relationship. But now with the evolvement of marketing, organizations are more concern about Relationship Marketing.
What is Relationship Marketing?
In simple terms, without only focus on enhancing the product it gives the same priority to enhance the customer relationship as well. Keeping customer retention, building customer loyalty and maintaining a high level of customer service are some of the key highlights of Relationship Marketing.
In marketing books you can find about even four types of relationships. They are,
Alliance Relationship
Partnering Relationship
Transactional Relationship
Co-operative Relationship
If you ever think why the orientation have been changed, it is simply because of the competitiveness of the market. Everyday a cool product appears somewhere in the world. To being ahead of the business it is must to retain the existing customers rather trying to create new ones. To accomplish that, focusing on Relationship Marketing is vital.
Relationship Marketing, from the point of view of the supplier-customer dyad, is all about the supplier improving the quality of the customer experience. Although some customers still rate low price as the key factor in determining their satisfaction level, most of others rank service level. Specially since products become more and more similar in terms of their features and benefits, the differentiating factor between them would be the level of service accompanying the product.
To get the essence of Relationship marketing you have to directly communicate with the customers and ask them to respond in a tangible way. Only then you can look forward to fulfill the response and lead a prospect to a partner.
So, to win the race,
Try to obtain the loyalty earlier
Maintain the consistency
and
Commit to continual renewal!!