The old adage, “It’s just business, don’t take it personally,” is not true. In order for companies, brands, service providers and organisations to conduct business with clients, customers or consumers, there needs to be a relationship.
Relationships are the difference between buying a meal and smoothie next door, or driving 5km away because they make the smoothie that accompanies your meal “just right”.
As Flow strategist Kevin Collins points out: “Marketing is not about you, your product, and all the other awesome things that you are and have; it’s still about them – the customer, the consumer.”
The personal touch in businesses’ relationships with customers, or the lack thereof, can mean the survival of a business. Coined by Professor Leonard L Berry in 1983, the term “relationship marketing” has revolutionised how organisations engage with their customers. Pull the beast called social media into the mix, and suddenly business is up close and personal.
“Social media is the most exciting thing to happen to relationship marketing since the invention of the postage stamp,” says Flow’s head of PR, Caroline Smith.
The challenge social media poses is that, daily, customers are talking about service providers, brands and organisations that they love or hate, whether those organisations are engaging with them or not.
If the organisations don’t engage, they lose out and their reputation can be damaged. If they engage and do so badly, they also damage their reputation. However, if they invest in a social media relationship with customers, they can influence the conversation and engage meaningfully.
Organisations need to understand what they are offering; who they are offering it to; what those people need from the organisation and how they feel about it; and how those feelings affect the purchase intentions of customers. Says Kevin: “With technology increasingly in the hands of more and more consumers, it’s correspondingly becoming increasingly about them.”
The more personal the engagement, the more grateful customers feel. The more grateful they feel, the more they feel the need to reciprocate. Reciprocity = profitability. Because business is personal.