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Don't Just Relate –
Advocate By Glen Urban  Relationship building is based on understanding customers and meeting their needs, but advocacy is based on maximizing the customers' interests and partnering with customers. This goes beyond customer focus to actively representing the customers' interests like a good friend. This philosophy is based on the realization that customers are in control, so the path to success is to help them make the best decisions possible in the complex world of buying. The philosophy is based on mutuality of interest. If the firm helps the customer, it will learn what products and services customers really want and then can provide the products that honest advice would recommend. The customer advocates for the manufacturer by telling others about the firm and developing a long-term trust and loyalty for the firm.
Building an advocacy-based strategy Improving trust and moving toward advocacy is likely to be a good strategy (a) if your company sells products that are complex and require customer education, (b) if the products represent a risk to customers who make a wrong choice (for example, a high-priced item like a computer or a physical risk as in health care), and (c) if your company's products/services are personally involving (e.g., choice of a vacation destination). A program to increase trust could involve a range of components. Here are some examples:
You might decide that your current push/pull or intermediate strategy on trust is appropriate. Advocacy is not for everyone. If you are in the fashion industry, for example, leading customer tastes and aggressive advertising may be best. If your product involvement is rather low, such as in some frequently purchased consumer packaged goods, you may not want to be an advocate – you might prefer to stay with the kind of aggressive promotion that characterizes this industry. It is not uncommon to spend more than one-third of sales dollars on promotion in this industry. If your customer base is deal-prone and trained to be disloyal through ongoing promotions for switching, you may not find it profitable to build trust – wireless phone services would be an example. If your product is an image product, traditional marketing may be effective, because you need to use aggressive advertising to establish a psychological positioning when physical differences are small. The use of celebrity endorsements for running shoes is one example. But it is up to you. For example, Proctor and Gamble, a leading consumer packaged goods manufacturer, uses promotion heavily, but it has created an advisory site for mothers called Pampers.com, which provides education and services and does not directly sell products. P&G uses image-heavy advertising, but it also demands that its products have superior performance advantage. Reebok spends heavily on advertising with celebrities, but it allocates a large effort to build superior performance into its products. Although some current market situations may seem to make trust an inappropriate choice, in the end it is up to the senior management to examine the space and see if trust is for them. I predict that, in most cases, innovative managers will see that responding to the rise of customer power with advocacy-based strategies is the way to maximize long-run profits in industries where one might not initially expect it. |
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