Need for a separate “customer marketing” function

Prospects' and customers' expectations and behavior are very different.

• Prospects are influenced by perceptions and promises; customers are influenced by experiences

• Prospects have expectations; customers have demands

• Prospects seek assurance; customers seek reassurance

• Prospects gather information; customers disseminate information

• Prospects consume WOM; customers spread WOM

Marketing to these two should be and is obviously different. In some organizations, marketing is responsible only for advertising. Advertising, though many practitioners might disagree, has more impact on prospects than on customers. Customers require much more than advertising.

Customer marketing is not just about increasing product usage, cross-selling and up-selling. It is also about delivering the promised value, enhancing experiences and nurturing lasting relationships. Organizations do have customer management programs like CRM, CEP, etc. Are these sufficient? Do they provide the answer to an important question, "who is responsible for the customer?" Most would spontaneously claim, or believe, that the CMO and the marketing function are responsible for the customer. Even where they are, is there adequate marketing balance between prospects and customers?

In practice, responsibility for the customer is shared by many functions in an organization while responsibility for the prospect is not. Letting different functions, led by conflicting functional KPIs, to manage customers is a sure way to frustrate them. Customers are normally required to interface with different functions for different needs and are at times made to run from "pillar-to-post" to find resolutions.

A customer is possibly the biggest under-leveraged asset in an organization.

Its likely that in many categories, there are fewer prospects than customers, making customer marketing much more important than marketing to prospects. Organizations should consider a separate "customer marketing" function different from the advertising and product marketing functions. Not only will this bring the required balance between prospects and customers, more importantly, it will integrate the entire customer facing functions to manage and deliver a consistently better experience.

After all, isn't marketing also about creating and maintaining satisfying relationships with customers that result in value for both the customer and the marketer?