THE MIGHTINESS OF A CHILD IS HIS BEING UNKNOWN OF WHAT HE CAN BECOME

That day I walked along with a kid. A small ordinary boy who apparently has nothing exceptional except his constant laughing habit. He was a son of my cousin’s friend’s brother. Shian was his name, a typical of American name, though there was no any American or western country blood streaming in his vein. Then, through the following chronology I describe my short relationship with him.

It started in a hotel room, when he and his family came and prepare themselves to attend a wedding celebration. His dad was the elder brother’s bridegroom. When his parents left him for picking up their mom at a saloon, I only saw him and Bella (his sister), playing on the bed and laughing foolishly. They are sure not a typical bookworms. Subsequently, I grabbed Shian’s attention by involving myself to the interest of those age kids. I lifted him, got him feel like a bird flying. That kind of play was a beginning of his liking me.

Relationship Marketing: Dating In Business (Part2)

A lesson from “Men are from Mars, Woman from Venus”

How far have you realized that the relationship between men and women are much similar with the one between businesses and customers? How deep do you understand that the difference of men and women are as great as the one in business relationship? Once you believe and realize the difference, you can improve both your business and love relationship.

I think it’d be best firstly to quote one of the most interesting parts of the book concerning about the five common misunderstanding here:

1. When she says "You don't listen," he says "What do you mean I don't listen. I can tell you everything you said."

- When a man is in the cave he can record what she is saying with the 5 percent of mind that is listening. A man reasons that if he is listening with 5 percent, then he is listening. - However, what she is asking for is his full undivided attention.

2. When she says "I feel like you are not even here," he says "What do you mean I'm not here? Of course I am here. Don't you see my body?"

- He reasons that if his body is present then she shouldn't say he is not there. However, though his body is present, she doesn't feel his full presence, and that is what she means.

3. When she says "You don't care about me," he says "Of course I care about you. Why do you think I am trying to solve this problem?"

- He reasons that because he is preoccupied with solving a problem that will in some way benefit her, she should know he cares for her. However, she needs to feel his direct attention and caring, and that is what she is really asking for.

4. When she says "I feel like I am not important to you," he says "That's ridiculous. Of course you are important."

- He reasons that her feelings are invalid because he is solving problems to benefit her. He doesn't realize that when he focuses on one problem and ignores the problems she is bothered by that almost any woman would have the same reaction and take it personally and feel unimportant.

5. When she says "You have no feelings. You are in your head," he says "What's wrong with that? How else do you expect me to solve this problem?"

- He reasons that she is being too critical and demanding because he is doing something that is essential for him to solve problems. He feels unappreciated. In addition he doesn't recognize the validity of her feelings Men generally don't realize how extremely and quickly they may shift from being warm and feeling to being unresponsive and distant. In his cave a man is preoccupied with solving his problem and is unaware of how his indifferent attitude might feel to others.

When a man and woman first fall in love each other, they must have a very strong desire. They often think to give the best for whom they love. Surprisingly, this applies the same when a person firstly becomes a customer of a business (this customer might fall in love with its product/service).Then each of them would try to satisfy each other (the customer is willing to pay more money, the business is planning to give more utility). Nonetheless, as their each interest is so much in the opposite, what a business might think of the best, more quality product/service, its customers may wish another thing.

After successfully knowing and giving the best for customers, what should a business do? As I have mentioned earlier, the satisfaction a customer had may fade away as times goes by. To maintain the lovely relationship which has been created, communication is the main issue. Establishing a continuous communication enables customers to be reminded of how great the business loves them (the way a business does this relationship has been mentioned in my previous post).

More importantly, in any kind of relationship, what do you expect from your partner? Trust and loyalty! But how do you make your partner trust and be loyal to you? Howard Schultz, the founder of the successful Starbucks, once said, “Marketing today is the ability to build this emotional connection.” This is true as though relying merely on feelings may be dangerous; the only way to maintain a long-term relationship is to build a great emotional bound for each partner. Through this emotional bond, trust and loyalty are born!

There are absolutely numerous ways that a business can use to create the emotional bond. Traditional communication such as direct mail, e-mail, or telephoning might work. A side from communication, a business may create a personal log such as customer card that records every transaction and points reward given. Another program may include a ‘comeback reward’ that gives a discount or special gift for another upcoming transaction.

Thus, choose the one that suits best for your business! A customer is your partner in a loving relationship!

Relationship Marketing: Beyond the Happiness (Part 1)

What is happiness? How can we make people happy? Does money bring happiness? These questions are important since at all senses people live seeking for this big thing. There is no absolute answer to define happiness as it differs for each and every person. Thus the way to make people happy would also be  different. Nevertheless, there is one powerful thing that people might consider be able to bring happiness. Yes, that is money. But why are there some rich people who are not happy and meanwhile yet the other poor people seem to be happy enough?

In Economics, one of three basic concepts is utility. The law of diminishing return shows that to consume a same product/service will bring increasing utility to a certain point and then decreasing afterwards. (Eating ice cream brings a person more utility until, for example, three ice creams, then the utility decreases). Utility is a very essential thing because that is the ultimate goal of all economic activities. To bring more happiness to people is for sure the final objective for all businesses on earth.

Loyalty, What's Inside?

A study for years to thousands workers by Public Agenda Foundation, recommended by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene in their book, "Re-Inventing the Corporation") lists 13 things that workers want. These are the result:
1. Working with people who respect them
2. Interesting Job
3. Compliment for a good work done.
4. An Opportunity to develop skills
5, Working with people who listen to them when they have a good idea.
6. An opportunity to think themselves rather than being instructed about how to do the work.
7. Watch for the their final result.
8. Work for efficient managers.
9. Having not a very easy work.
10. Feel being informed of what is happening.
11. Work safety.
12. High salary.
13. Big profit.
The book "A Class with Drucker" by William Cohen is questioning how you sort them.
Give it a shot.

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Have you done with sorting?
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If you sort them as they are listed above in order, then you have the same result!

So, it says Money is no.12, far behind Respect, Interesting Job, and Compliment at the top three. What makes me always wonder is still, even people having those three never guarantee a loyalty for d employers. what's up? is loyalty born rather than created? Being loyal and being institutionalized, are they the same?

One Product, Two Customer Segments, TWO Marketing Strategies

As I was reading Steve Jobs’ biography by Walter Isaacson, I found an interesting story about how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates differ so much. The story tells that After NeXT (where Jobs worked after being fired from Apple) received a 100-plus-page contract from IBM, Jobs slammed it on the table and said, “Come back with a two-to-three-page contract … you don’t get it.” At the same time, a contract was offered to Microsoft, concerning the possibility to cooperate on building windows. It was 220 pages long. Bill Gates did the same thing, but he asked IBM to re-send him a more detailed contract. The result was 336 pages long contract.

In the previous article, I have written about whether marketers should differentiate their marketing program for both student and employees – two different market segments. In this section, now I think it is important to show why and how marketers set a different successful marketing program for both segments on one particular product.

"Involvement refers to how much time, thought, energy and other resources people devote to the purchase process" (Brian-AdCracker)

Consumers are willing to spend much time on them when the product or service is important to some extent on a particular are of their life. There are some products that seem to be equally important to all people. House, car, and major electronics are examples in which people generally need to know the details about those products before making a purchase decision.

However, the importance level is different for many products. Some products have high involvement to some customers; the others have low for another. Perfume, for example, has high involvement for actors/ actress but low one for students. Ideally, when a company launches its perfume, one should be differentiated for only one targeted customers. That is, perfume for students and actors should not be the same. Unfortunately, for many products, a business would have to offer the same product for different segments.

The idea to have a different marketing program for different segment is related to the story of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs at the beginning. Are you willing to spend great effort preparing for long detailed contract for Steve Jobs? It is such a waste! It is the same why marketers should not spend a lot of money allocated to provide more information about a product to customers who just do not care about it very much.

Now since we know “Successful brand such as Nike, Starbucks, and Sony command a price premium and elicit much loyalty” (Kotler 274) and “Marketers and researchers use various perspectives to study brand equity. The premise of customer-based brand equity models is that the power of a brand lies in what customers have seen, read, heard, learned, thought, and felt about the brand over time.” (276), how can we set the successful marketing strategies to build strong brand equity? Once we understand that a customer segment is highly involved, we should spend extra time and effort to design a creatively much informing advertising and promotion. Advertising generally is important for high involvement customers since it provides information both rationally and emotionally. High involvement customers would rather like details more. They want to get the product knowledge so that it can make them sure in their pre-purchasing process.

Here is the illustration. My company is running a laptop business. I, as a marketer, use some outdoor advertising since I know that Jakarta is considered as a busy city. I know that I should design my advertising differently, but how? Assume I know the fact that college students are highly involved in computers product, and employees, on the other hand, are relatively low involved in the same product. Then in some areas in universities, I would design my advertisement with much information about the details of new processor, memory, entertainment features and much more; perhaps it is also best to add clear explanation and visual details in the advertising content. Yet in other places, for examples near large offices, I would use much simpler one, probably with emphasized only on a beautiful picture of the laptop and avoiding to put more details.

Less Details

More Details

There are some other ways however, to have a marketing program which is intended to low involvement customers. Direct selling, couponing, sponsorships are examples of a way to directly persuade customers in purchase decision rather informing them the superiority of the product over others. Last to say, although high customer involvement may lead to high brand equity, it is equally essential to think and plan on how to build equivalent brand equity for the low customer involvement.

never too late to be all you can possibly be

At the first place, I'd like to apologize that I have been unable to search the original source of this story. When I tried to google it, I just found http://ibc.ac.th/faqing/node/13, which seemingly even failed to cite the source. I'll much appreciate whoever knows the original one and put it into the comment box below.

Then.. This is it: The story :)

The first day of school our professor introduced himself and challenged us to get to know someone we didn't already know. I stood up to look around when a gentle hand touched my shoulder.
I turned around to find a wrinkled, little old lady beaming up at me with a smile that lit up her entire being.
She said, 'Hi handsome. My name is Rose. I'm eighty-seven years old. Can I give you a hug?'
I laughed and enthusiastically responded, 'Of course you may!' and she gave me a giant squeeze.

'Why are you in college at such a young, innocent age?' I asked.
She jokingly replied, 'I'm here to meet a rich husband, get married, and have a couple of kids...'

'No seriously,' I asked. I was curious what may have motivated her to be taking on this challenge at her age.

Should marketers have different approach in their efforts to increase its brand awareness and brand equity for students and employees?

 Hi! it's already new year! :) got some resolutions? I think they are handy in the first days of the year.
One of my resolutions is to finish my writings 8) well it's been so long that I wanted my first post about Economics published here. Yet I was to carefully spending my time to prepare my writings with a hope that they can be published in sequence. After all, here is the first post (and the others will definitely, precisely, be published randomly :D)

If am about to ask you “How much time and effort do you usually spend to search for a complete information of a product that you intend to purchase?” You might answer “it depends!” Yes, we are unlikely to spend some minutes just to find out whether a particular product suits us well or has a higher quality over the others for products such as salt, biscuit, mineral water, lamps, or tooth brush. On the other hand, we usually spend some amount of time to read or hear some testimonies of users of a particular brand of shampoo, to find out what its main benefits offered, or to ask our friends whether they use that particular brand; we do the same for laptop, car, or watch. What makes it different? At a glance, we can say that the first category of products to some extent is not expensive, and the second is much more expensive. Yet what best differs the two is whether a product is important for a particular customer segment. Products which are more important for customers will have higher level of consumer involvement and vice versa. People with high consumer involvement spend more time and effort to find out everything about a product and therefore will be likely to know not just the brand's name, but also all the information inside.