The customer relationship is more important than ever as traditional strategic advantages in economies of scale and product differentiation become more difficult to achieve, thanks to globalization and ever-shrinking product life cycles. Companies must shift their emphasis to attaining economies of scope in customer relationships—in other words, they need to do whatever is necessary to increase customer share and retention. That means services marketers need to stop trying to control customers and instead become experts in collaboration marketing—rich networks of highly specialized and diverse resources to serve customer needs, according to John Hagel, a business strategist, author, and chairman of a new Silicon Valley-based research center being set up by Deloitte & Touche USA LLP. These networks are critical to the success of a solutions-based strategy because no one vendor can solve all its customers’ problems itself; third parties are going to become indispensable.

Hagel contends that traditional marketing is focused on “Three I’s”: Intercept, Inhibit, and Isolate. But this approach lacks adequate relationship management. In fact, services marketers today rate their relationship management skills second lowest of the seven major marketing competencies. Therefore, in order to find out what the customer needs and to be as helpful as possible in finding the resources and connecting them, Hagel believes colloboration marketing is essential. It has three main goals:

• Attract: make customers want to seek you out.
• Assist: help customers with their specific problems.
• Affiliate: be willing to recommend soneone besides yourself.

Successful solutions utilize in-depth knowledge of customer needs, provide incentives for third parties, and have metrics that encompass all pieces of the sultion. Among its results, collaboration marketing can lead to improved customer tracking, better access to business decision makers, more relevance to SMBs, and increased global integration.