The power of marketing...One-to-One

Mention "marketing" and most people would say they know a thing or two about it. Probing further though, you would find that very often, people are confused as to what it really is and mistake it for selling. Marketing is a two-way street that involves communicating with the customer, whereas selling is more of a one-directional, targeted effort.

Philip Kotler, one of the gurus of marketing defines it as "the art of identifying and understanding customer needs and coming up with solutions that meet those needs." But what good is it if you have the solutions but your customers don't know about them? It is no accident therefore that communicating effectively with customers is an integral part of marketing.

Marketers the world over, search relentlessly for ways to get higher response rates and achieve higher returns on investment for their communication pieces. The introduction of one-to-one marketing by Peppers and Rogers, brought about a fundamental change in the communications arena, compelling marketers to change their mindset - visualising in terms of share of customer rather than share of market.

Essentially, one-to-one marketing concentrates on providing services or products to one customer at a time by identifying and then meeting their individual needs. It then aims to repeat this many times with each customer, such that powerful lifelong relationships are forged. As such it differentiates customers rather than just products.

One-to-One marketing recognises that lifetime values of loyal customers who make repeat purchases far exceed that of fickle customers who constantly switch suppliers in search of a bargain. This is particularly true when customer acquisition costs are high.

The rationale was that since each customer is an individual then tailoring marketing messages to each of them would deliver the highest possible ROI! It was the perfect plan except that the technology back then could not support this new way of thinking.

Whilst at first the concept appeared to be only suitable for a niche market of rich clients, modern information technology, particularly the new interactive mediums, provide an opportunity to bring personalised and customised products to the mass market yet at a mass produced price. This is called Mass Customisation..

Today, companies are able to miniaturise marketing, to re-gear to the level of the individual customer. At Fuji Xerox our goal is simply to make one-to-one marketing a reality today. Our new technologies and solutions, allow companies to creatively and cost-effectively personalise anything from mail, postcards, brochures to email, sms and websites. Using variable data that is relevant to the individual customer, companies can create unique websites for them according to their relationship with the customers. The possibilities are unlimited but it does require new thinking that breaks away from the traditional concepts of mass marketing and mass production

Can you imagine the response rates and ROI on such communication pieces? That, is the power of marketing…one-to-one.