The post title is a quote from this blog post by Gerry McGovern. In it, he says:
‘Marketing has become everything you do. Everyone in your organization is a marketer.
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The Web reflects an empowered, engaged consumer who sees past many of the traditional marketing tricks. “At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company,” Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill write in a July 2011 article for McKinsey Quarterly.
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Many of these customers judge your brand first and foremost based on your service, not your product or fancy advertising. Part of this service is the self service simplicity of your website. How easy is it to use? Does it give real answers to specific questions?
At Zappos they state that, “Customer service isn’t just a department. We’ve been asked by a lot of people how we’ve grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple… We’ve aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible.”
The heart of new marketing is customer service
This fits with a lot of the thinking around user service in libraries, especially that based on K G Scheneider’s great manifesto, The User is Not Broken.
How does this chime with the marketing that you do? Is excellent customer service at the heart of your marketing strategy? If not, should it be? Leave a comment and let us know how these ideas and principles are changing the way you market!