معکوس کردن منطق : مسیر سود دهی از طریق بازاریابی رابطه مند‌ (بازاریابی رابطه ای)

Many firms have experienced greater success through implementing relationship marketing strategies. This is achieved by gaining knowledge about their own customers through database marketing and about the general marketplace through marketing research. Over time, this has led firms to adopt a general framework which we call the conventional path to profitability. This conventional framework suggests that new product innovation leads to acquisition, acquisition combined with a rich experience leads to satisfaction, satisfaction leads to loyalty and customer retention, and loyalty/retention leads to profitability. However, we show that some of the links in the framework are weak based on both academic research and marketplace realities. Consequently, we reverse the logic of the conventional path to profitability. We introduce a new approach that starts the customer relationship management strategy with customer profitability and the notion that different customers should be rewarded and satisfied differently. In addition, we outline a strategy that relationship marketing firms can implement, leading to higher levels of customer profitability and offer directions for future research.

It is widely recognized that many successful firms have gained a competitive advantage in the marketplace by implementing a relationship marketing strategy. The success of this strategy has been built upon the constant advances in information and communication technology that allows firms to gather large amounts of information about their own customers (database marketing) and about customers in the general marketplace (marketing research). As a result, this has led to what marketers believe is the conventional path to profitability through relationship marketing (see Fig. 1). The conventional path to profitability starts with innovation being the foundation to acquire customers — where the better the products and services, the better the rate and quality of acquisition. Then, it is expected that when the newly acquired customers are given a richer experience, those customers will achieve a higher level of satisfaction. As a result, these highly satisfied customers will show stronger signs of loyalty, both through their behavioral loyalty (retention) and through their attitudinal loyalty (e.g., positive word of mouth). The improved level of retention gives the firm opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell to these customers, providing enhanced revenues and subsequently higher profits. Finally, the profits are then reinvested in new innovations of product and services, strengthening loyalty programs, and increasing the satisfaction of the firm's customers.Intuitively, this conventional path to profitability might make sense. For example, consider a loyalty program from a firm where $1 gives the customer 1 reward point. Say, there are two customers who both enter the store on the same day and purchase $100 worth of products and services. Should both of these customers receive 100 reward points? The conventional path to profitability would suggest that by giving every customer 1 reward point for every $1 spent the firm builds loyalty — and in turn profitability. However, there is a significant amount of evidence in both the marketing literature and in the marketplace today that suggests that this conventional path to profitability needs to be questioned and a new path to profitability needs to be developed. Consequently, there are many firms that are beginning to deviate from this conventional path to profitability. They are doing this by first looking at each customer's profitability and then later thinking about customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. Take Sprint Nextel for example. Recently, they decided to ‘fire’ around 1000 of their 53 million customers for calling the call center too frequently. Sprint Nextel's justification for firing these customers was purely based on the lack of profitability from these customers.1 A typical Sprint Nextel wireless customer spends about $55 per month, of which about $24 is profit for the firm. In addition, it costs about $2–$3 dollars per minute for Sprint Nextel to have a customer talk with a customer service representative. So, if a customer talks with a customer service representative for more than 8–12 min per month, then Sprint Nextel is going to lose money on that customer. These customers made similar calls multiple times within a month for several months. This generates a very interesting set of questions for marketers. First, is the conventional path to profitability in Fig. 1 still the proper framework for firms to use for achieving maximum profitability through relationship marketing? Second, if it is not ideal to follow the conventional path of profitability, when firms like Sprint Nextel fire customers based on a measure of customer profitability, are they taking the right approach in building the foundation of their marketing strategy around customer profitability? To answer these questions in this paper, we proceed with the following three specific topics: 1.Questioning the strength of the links between each part of the conventional path to profitability. 2.Reversing the logic of the conventional path to profitability and proposing a new path to profitability. 3.Outlining how managers can implement a successful relationship marketing strategy using the new path to profitability proposed in this paper.

The conventional path to profitability has dominated the corporate landscape for several years. However, the conventional path comprises links that are weak or questionable. Recent research has introduced a powerful metric to the marketing world — CLV. This metric has proved its superiority at selecting and managing customers for maximizing firm's profits. Our reverse logic framework is firmly grounded on the philosophy and principles of the CLV metric (Kumar, 2008b). In the new framework, the CLV is the starting point for all subsequent customer relationship management decisions. Consequently, our proposed new path to profitability reverses the direction orientation of the conventional path to profitability. Does this make sense? Would such a framework really work in the real world? For example, IBM implemented the CLV metric and deployed CRM strategies based on the CLV metric. The outcome was an incremental profit of about $20 Million (Kumar et al., 2008). Moving forward, we expect the RLF based on the CLV metric to prevail as the most effective framework to manage customer profitability in the twenty-first century.