From first touch to lifelong loyalty: Know your customers
Five of the world’s greatest marketing thought leaders stress the importance of customers, customer brand experience and understanding a brand’s customer journey.
Hail, hail, customers, customers, customers, say thought leaders Drucker, Levitt, Ries, Kotler and Keller.
Peter Drucker is known as the father of modern management.
He gained fame with his seminal book that became the basis for many modern business practices including management by objectives, decentralization and the rise of knowledge workers.
Drucker espouses the management thinking that a business’ primary objective is to create value and experience around the customer.
Thus his famous quote, “the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.”
Unfortunately, not many organizations subscribe to this management thinking.
Some board members, key executive committee and management committee members lobby for their own profit interests and strategic discipline.
Drucker maintains that putting the customer first integrates all the functions of business and leads to profitability.
Theodore Levitt, another esteemed Harvard Business School professor like Drucker and credited with the strategic discipline of globalization, likewise said that a business’ corporate purpose is not merely to make money.
He said, “Rather than merely making money, it is to create and keep a customer. The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing or operations expertise can keep a company going.”
Levitt, like Drucker, believes that business survival is highly dependent on keeping the customer happy with the brand.
Legendary marketing thought leader Al Ries, credited with the marketing strategic discipline called Positioning, steps up the role of consumers or customers in business survival.
Ries maintains that “a brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer.”
Ries posits that marketers must strive to find a unique, distinctive, simple but compelling message that resonates well with the customer.
He adds that customer loyalty can be built on a convergence of brilliantly executed customer experiences aimed at credibly building and sustaining ownership of that one word in the customer’s mind throughout the customer journey.
Philip Kotler, known as the Father of Modern Marketing and credited with the strategic marketing concepts known as the 4Ps of marketing i.e. product, price, place and promotion; STP known as segmentation, targeting and positioning, societal marketing, among others, espouses a customer-centric focus, saying that the role of business is to “create genuine value and long-term value for the customer.”
Kevin Lane Keller, another prominent thought leader and professor of Strategic Brand Management at Tuck School of Business, also called the Father of Strategic Brand Management, builds on Kotler’s thinking with his landmark Customer Based Brand Equity Model (CBBE).
The framework shows that successful businesses rely on strong valuable brands built on what customers, think, feel and experience.
Keller maintains that “Customer-based brand equity occurs when the consumer has a high level of awareness and familiarity with the brand and holds strong, favorable and unique brand associations in memory.”
Five legendary thought leaders of different times and generations: Peter Drucker (1909 to 2005), Theodore Levitt (1925-2006), Al Ries (1926-2022), Philip Kotler (born 1931) and Kevin Lane Keller (born 1956), all recognize that the key to business survival remains the customers.
The secret to business survival is to understand and resonate well with customers, keep them happy with strong, favorable and unique associations throughout the customers’ life journey.
Building customers
Here’s how to build customers and own the customer experience:
1. Know your customers all the time. This means identifying the evolving preferences and interests of the “target market.” A brand cannot serve all publics and markets.
Sir Winston Churchill, former prime minister of Great Britain that led his country to victory during the World War II, once said, “I cannot give you the formula for success but I can give you the formula for failure which is: Try to please everybody all the time.”
Ries shared the same thought, saying that “The essence of positioning is sacrifice. You must be willing to give up something in order to establish that unique position.”
2. Remove sacred cows while understanding your customer journey.
A sacred cow refers to an outmoded belief, an assumption, practice, system or strategy that generally inhibits change and prevents responsiveness to new opportunities.
Old thinking is a distraction to recognizing blue ocean opportunities.
An example is the emergence of Uber, responsive to new millennial generational customer beliefs, habits and preferences where convenience aided by modern day digital apps has become a compelling benefit.
Same with Airbnb, rising to become a new competitor segment in the hospitality industry.
3. Design a unique multi-dimensional customer experience
Experiential theorists as far back as 1955, among them Abbot (1955) and
Alderson (1957), have said that “what customers desire are not products but satisfying experiences.”
Much of the scholarly articles on customer experience espouse the concept that any customer experience must come across as multidimensional involving cognitive, emotional, behavioral, sensorial and social touchpoints.
Brands that deliver this type of exceptional customer service and memorable experiences include some of the top 10 luxury brands by value, like Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Hermes, Dior, Cartier, Porsche, Ferrari and Gucci.
Many businesses today are challenged by online and offline environments when it comes to customer service.
The success of a brand and business is dependent on how nuances in online and offline omnichannels are merged to convey to the customer a distinctively unique, compelling, favorable brand association that will lead to a business and brand survival for a very long time.
Moreover, brand and business owners must be committed to ensure that any additional investments made in delivering an exceptional customer service must enable the organization to deliver a strong and positive return in terms of market metrics ie. sales performance and market share as well as financial metrics in the areas of shareholder returns, net profits and return on assets. —contributed INQ
The writer is Chief Brand Strategist of MKS Marketing Consulting and is an alumna of Oxford University’s SAID Graduate School of Business Strategic Leadership and Strategic Marketing Executive Education Program and Stanford Graduate School of Business Strategic Marketing Executive Education. De Asis is also the 2025 ASEAN Women Entrepreneur awardee representing the Philippines for her advocacy in helping family business brands become category dominant market leaders or challenger. She is also an Agora Awardee for marketing education. Reach the author who is also a member of the Global Strategic Consulting Network at karenvdeasis@gmail.com.
