Annual reports, spread sheets, customer satisfaction reports, mystery shopping and keeping the competitor in the rear view mirror are all activities that marketers pour over in an effort to help their businesses or organisations grow and prosper. Marketing automation, the new holy grail of this quest, provides us all with the tiniest details of the behaviours of our audiences. We tweak here. We tweak there. We tweak everywhere.
But what does one of the world’s most successful companies do to keep on being so successful?
They don’t focus, as you might expect, on competitors or technology shifts and many critics say that don’t focus enough on financials and profitability either.
No, what they do is to continue to look at their customer and ask themselves, what are the small things we can do to improve their customer experience? They grind out incremental improvements in delivery speed and product offerings with a healthy chipping away at prices. There’s an unrelenting focus on reinvesting to make it better for their buyers.
It wasn’t always an easy ride. In 2000, fund managers were openly laughing at the CEO saying that ‘this guy is nuts and the company is going to go bankrupt” but he didn’t give up. His style and approach to work hasn’t always been appreciated. Some have said he’s aggressive and treatment of employees has sometimes drawn fire.
But I want to focus on a single thought – for all our marketing tools, maybe we forget that it’s the small things that matter. Maybe we need to take a leaf from Jeff Bezos book at Amazon and take the customer experience apart, bit by bit and start the process of fixing the very smallest things to see the very biggest of differences with our customers.
For more information contact Melvin Day mday@marketingmoves.com or follow us on Twitter @marketingMMoves.
