Insight - Interact - Improve

Super posting from SAS on Customer Contact Strategy, especially the problem of saturating the customer with customer contact (email, mail shots, phone calls, etc. etc.) You have to have a clear understanding when to contact, in what mode, and to make what offer. That may mean you need to segment your customers on the basis of how they want to be contacted. I think the SAS post misses some key points but they do get that all your communication to the customer needs to be planned and integrated into an overall strategy. Neat idea of "the recently rule", ie. you can't call your customer twice in 60 days with an offer. Also good example of not messaging cross-offers to customers that are "churn risk". This means you have to have a pretty solid view of what the "interaction rules are" for each segment. However, completely misses the idea to create real two way value through better interaction management.

Jeff Jarvis has a very nice piece on WWGD (What Would Google Do?) in terms of the downturn in the economy.  Such as look at how relationships in themselves signal value, or ARE value; making physical products is probably a decaying strategy or just plain ole very hard to make money at (Dell?); big companies are really networks of small companies; in a network driven economy you should strive to be the platform; transparency will drive trust; the more control you hand over to users the more trust you build, and the stronger your relationships. Most of these points come from his effort to deconstruct what has made Google so successful. Could Dell execute on being your "design to build" for IT & Consumer Media products? It has most of the business and technical infrastructure to achieve this.

John  Quelch over at HBS re-posts ideas on The Middle Aged Simplifier which basically says that this category (sic) of person is looking to de-layer their product ownership-positions (sic) in that they are going to happy to not own so much non-essential stuff, and will lease cars, holiday homes etc. in a variety of non-mass-consumer modes. I think the undertone of this piece is interesting none the less because it might signal an even older marketing lesson: if everyone else has your stuff (read 4x4 "landrover") then it has no social status, and no brand communications value. Perhaps "the experience economy" is going to truly expand.

Oh, and just in case anyone is dropping in here, and doesn't know, I am http://www.twitter.com/PaulSweeney