Don Peppers interviewed
I recently met the InHouse team and they told me that they’d secured an interview with my old boss, Don Peppers for their InHouse Village site.
Well, Don is a key man in my life for having jumped onto cluetrain very early and added the dimension that explained the future of direct marketing was integrated…. and that it needed to be supported by a new principle treat different customers differently.
His methodology for CRM was 4-steps: Identify your customers, Differentiate them by value and need; Interact with them and learn; and Customise your offering to their needs.
in his interview (published in short chapters…. two are up right now), he has developed his theme somewhat.
Key quotes
You can’t un-Google yourself
If your dialogues with customers don’t result in spontaneous replies from the customers - they are not authentic [he fails to add that this is PR not dialogue and that you might examine whether your offering is hitting the ’spot’ with customer needs
The key brand trait today is TRUST. A company should always act in the interest of its customers and not just in pursuit of profit. [nicely put - and a key part of WOM online]
When considering which brands your agency wants to work with, think carefully how many brands actually do hire an agency to work on their marketing. Most don’t. Target your approach.
When he was doing biz dev - Don kept a ring binder with one page of notes for each target brand he wanted to work with. [A great low-tech means of keeping data to hand, up to date and focused.]
So far in the interview, it seems Don is just saying the same stuff about 1to1 marketing but realising that today’s digital world actually enables a lot of his past-10-years-theorising. That’s fine. What I want to know is what are leading companies actually DOING? Now?