Building Customer-Brand Relationships

I've added reading notes to my site on a book entitled Building Customer-Brand Relationships, which is less about customer-brand relationships and more about the changing nature of consumer marketing in an increasingly competitive environment in which the seat of power has been ceded to the customer rather than the marketer.

To be frank, there's much I don't like about this book: it attempts to present ideas as "new" that are merely paraphrases of the old, it dismisses established theories on a whim without substituting a rational alternative, it is often based on thin evidence and specious reasoning, it has a pubescent fascination with fads that had already worn thin by the publication date, and it often expounds upon the obvious.

Even so, it's grist for the mill and, in spite of its flaws, addresses a notion that has been slowly regaining popularity: that by virtue of choice in a competitive marketplace, the customer is in full control - and companies that mistake them for gullible creatures that are easily herded will invariably find themselves without a customer base when a competitor offers them a better deal.

My sense is that this is not new or revolutionary: focusing on the specific needs and behaviors of the individual customer, as opposed to consolidating them into masses and presuming them to be uniform, should be familiar to the front-line staff who interact with the customer in a direct manner, especially in retail and businesses-to-business. There is much knowledge from those specialized disciplines that can and should be applied to marketing in general .... but this book doesn't do so.

Also, the individual needs of the customer have been forgotten, overlooked, or pointedly ignored by those who market to the masses - and perhaps justly so, as the channels through which "the masses" can be reached do not have an affordance for personalization. In the rare instances in which they might have, it was simply inefficient to attempt to gather intelligence and tailor tactics to the individual customer or prospect. It's primarily the emergence of new media and new tools of data collection and processing that make it possible to approach the masses .... but the authors give this notion a passing mention without detailed consideration.

So in the end, the book is a (just) repudiation of mass marketing techniques as an outdated practice, and a strategy that will fail when challenged by a competitor whose efforts are better tailored to the individual customer - but in a dismissive and superficial manner that doesn't provide much guidance or instill much confidence.