An excellent model of Customer Relationships

There is a white paper (titled True Romance) on Research International’s (part of WPP) web site that is worth reading.

It describes a simple model for understanding the hierarchy of factors that lead to creating a successful customer relationship. At the base of the hierarchy are the things required to satisfy a customer’s basic product and service requirements – at the top are the emotional factors that we seek a brand to generate.

One of the most interesting (and worrying) results of the research was that approx 50% of people were neither functionally nor emotionally satisfied with the products or services they purchased. Only 21% of people were in the category of being satisfied that the product/service met their functional and emotional requirements.

It would have been fascinating to have overlaid an age analysis on top of this research.

The bottom line message is that if companies are throwing their promotional spend at engaging the young customer so as to retain lifetime loyalty they are making a bad job of things!

There is a lot more detail to this article – worth a read.

Dick Stroud: www.20plus30.com