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European Forum Underlines Need for Client Intimacy in Solutions Marketing 9 July 2003—Deeper client knowledge and more targeted strategies and tactics are the top marketing challenges in the emerging world of IT solutions, according to leading European services marketers from 32 companies and nine countries gathered at ITSMA’s Annual European Forum in Heathrow last month. Adrian Payne, professor of services and relationship marketing and director of the Centre for Customer Relationship Management at Cranfield School of Management, stressed the importance of information-enabled relationship marketing. Making the point that most customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives fail (even within IT suppliers!) because they rely on technology alone rather than broader marketing processes, Payne advocated the concept of “the Cornershop Corporation.” While most of us can remember how it feels to deal with the local cornershop—where everybody knows both your name and your deepest, darkest secrets!—the challenge of creating a similar customer experience through a large solutions operation is daunting. For Payne, the answer is to have the same or a better memory as our clients and use technology to “replicate the mind of the customer” as far as possible. No matter how clients touch our complex, multichannel environments, they should receive the tailored, personalised service they have come to expect from other service industries. Marketers thus need to focus on creating the ideal customer experience for target clients. Philip Oliver, vice president at ITSMA and former vice president of worldwide strategy for IBM Global Services, complemented Payne’s presentation by discussing marketing’s role in driving business strategy. Oliver illustrated his view of strategy in terms of the art of war—choosing when and where to fight such that the conditions favour you over your competitors. When we apply this logic to business, the most important tasks are gaining a deep understanding of market opportunities and target clients and achieving clear differentiation from competitors through effective business design and consistent operations. Similarly, Dr. Paul Fifield championed differentiation as the key source of price premiums in a maturing industry. Citing a PA Consulting study that shows differentiation to be three times more successful than any other competitive strategy in creating value for shareholders, Fifield returned to the Forum’s main point by reiterating that effective differentiation is born of marketing segmentation and client intimacy. To achieve the latter, Fifield argued that we should downplay the “what, where, how, and when” of understanding clients and focus instead on the “why.” Understanding the “why” lies at the heart of creative solutions marketing, as noted by several presentations from leading European solutions providers. For example, Unisys’s Value Added Solutions Provider programme has had notable success by digging deeply into the business issues of its top target buyers. By getting close to the critical business drivers, Unisys is able create compelling value propositions for individual buyers and back them up with evidence in the form of video references from senior business executives in the same industry, dealing with the same business issues. Hewlett-Packard’s eight-step marketing value chain takes a similar approach in getting to the “why” of potential clients’ buying priorities. Client knowledge is far from the only challenge faced by solutions marketers in Europe today. Solutions development, pricing, and delivery are also important, to say the least. Yet an intimate understanding of potential and existing clients’ business issues, buying priorities, and relationship dynamics is absolutely essential if we are to move ahead with effective and sellable solutions. —Bev Burgess, info@itsma.com |
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