Rabu, 05 Maret 2008

Integrating Customer Management and Marketing Communications for Customized Selling

Have you ever imagined how customized selling efforts can really make a change in your sales? I am sure you have heard about segmentation concepts. How about precision selling? Segmented selling? Personal selling? They are all very interesting and useful concepts in marketing. But, one insight I got from my personal selling experience was how a customized communication message through personal channels can make or break a deal. Of course there is always the trade off between coverage and customization of a communication message. Just like between advertising and personal selling. Since that is not the current focus, we can sum up the strength and weaknesses some other time.

Some people can send the same message through various personal hand phone numbers and emails but receive disappointing results. I found out myself, that by crafting a customized message for each person, products sell faster than ever. Remember that in order to make this possible you must have some enablers. You have to manage your customers effectively before you can create a customized marketing communication effort. Most of the time, you must have a customer database and the ability to capitalize on it. Afterwards you can create a customized selling effort. Here, technology does indeed hold a significant role. Just take a look at what someone can do with their hand phones and laptops.

A couple of days ago I received a quite interesting tip off from a friend saying that you could make a lot of money from creating ring back tones. You could be a famous artist and earn billions, just like Ahmad Dani whose song “Munajat Cinta” earned him billions of rupiahs in just three months! You could also be anybody creative enough to record a rare, expressive, interesting audio material. My friend told the story of how someone was just sitting and doing nothing when a famous recording music group passed by. Suddenly he got an idea to ask the artists to record their voices and he then sold the content as a ring back tone. Surprisingly, it was a quite success. Maybe he didn’t earn a fortune, but he earned more than many recording artists. Here, creativity plays the breakthrough role.

These days, the expressive individuals combined with the borderless world technology, so many interesting marketing dynamics are happening. We have al heard a lot of community marketing and word of mouth. Both are becoming more powerful tools due to the social-cultural change in the business landscape. With technology ordinary people can become celebrities, at least to their specified audience. Blogs and social network sites are becoming hot items over and over again. But I see that in 2008, this trend will increase rapidly.

Indonesia has the largest population of internet users at around 20 million users, but only an 8.5% penetration rate. Singapore and Malaysia have a penetration rate of over 55%, Brunei nearly reaching 48%, Vietnam 22%, while more moderate countries such as Thailand and Phillipines at 13% and 15% respectively. Asia in general is highlighted as the fastest growing region in the world in internet penetration rates. ASEAN itself has recognized the importance of information and communications technologies (ICT) in November 2000 through the e-ASEAN Framework Agreement. It is intended to facilitate the establishment of the ASEAN Information Infrastructure - the hardware and software systems needed to access, process and share information - and promote the growth of electronic commerce in the region.

If we can summarize the discussion, we can see that technology and creativity plays important roles in the customized selling process. The customized selling effort will thus result in higher sales. What can we learn from all this? As ASEAN marketers, we must be able to capitalize on the technology. Not just on our customer database, but also on the dynamics of our customers’ social-cultural lifestyle. This point means more on understanding how technology changes them. Remember, conquering your local market and going regional requires a lot of technology and customer understanding. But again, that is not enough. After that, creativity is what can create breakthroughs, edging threats and identifying opportunities. When viewing technology and customers, thinking out of the box is becoming the differentiator in many businesses. And in this case, integrating customer management and marketing communications for customized selling is the big idea. ASEAN marketers should adopt this idea in order to achieve high performance selling.

Source: The Point, Wednesday 13, 2008

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