Expressing how much you value your customers are worth every penny and effort to retain their loyalty. Any company who doesn’t take care of their customers is a darn fool!

Approximately 60 miles away from my office sits a small country store that strongly believes in caring for their customers. Every year the store owner brings in country cookers to brew up their favorite stew, BBQ, and other tasty treats.

A small group of ladies also bring home cooked pies and pastries for the crowd to enjoy. There’s even more home cooked goodies available, and served hot while various local bands play music for all ages. People dancing, eating, and swapping fish stories – what a Day!

It’s a special time of the year when people from around the community and abroad come together to fellowship and have fun – all because of one store owner’s compassion for great customer care. Each year is filled with something new with vibrant foods always present. And to top off the day, each event manages to gather dozens of new customers.

Showing your customers you appreciate them simply makes good business sense. It reinforces a common bond between your business and the customer. It’s a time when you must make a great impression and say, “Thanks for being such a loyal customer.”

The greatest thing about this is you can do it, too. Don’t limit yourself by saying, “this won’t work in my business.” You have viable ways to do this no matter what business you’re in. Don’t make excuses. Just think about who makes money when you make money. Care for your customers and they will care for you!

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What Makes Your Business So Unique

For those businesses with similar competitors eventually learn they must establish their own unique brand. In fact, there should be a huge difference between your business and others doing the same work. I can tell you from first hand experience that being different and more efficient at the same time will not only be more productive, but it gives your customers more purchase options.

Questions you must ask yourself are:

a) Should I offer my customers something for free?
b) Can I offer solid guarantees and still make a profit?
c) Will my years in business make a difference?
d) Should I really charge for after hours work?
e) Must I invest in new breakthrough equipment?
f) Should I offer special financing options to my customers?
g) Will my bottom line increase if open weekends and nights?

Consumers want more bang for their buck during a recession. They will not purchase from you unless they receive some kind of benefit. First time customers need to be told how they will benefit by doing business with you. Regardless if you own your market, do you know

what makes your business stand out from the rest?

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Most small businesses are more flexible organizationally than ever before. They have set aside their cultural and organizational differences to predominantly better equip their company with quick decision making, where risk taking is encouraged and failure is merely an education.

A company with conventional free advertising methods usually find it a generally unsatisfying experience. They utilize every part of their imagination and energy to be a guest on radio and television talk shows. They produce and distribute advertising circulars on all the free bulletin boards at coin operated laundries, grocery stores, and beauty or barber shops.

What they eventually find, is that increasing complexity in their company has resulted in inflexibility and slow decision making processes. The more routine free advertising methods have a tendency towards internal conflict and stratification, as well as a leadership that would tend to emphasize capital investment as a solution to all problems.

Consumers have acquired organizational habits that are not well aligned to the needs of a tough economy, therefore, they discover undesirable traits or behaviors found in many organizations. They have become smart consumers in the movement towards centralized control. This characterizes a typical consumer goods business, and will carry with it limited coordination among departments and divisions resulting in a weakened sense of market trends and increased dissatisfaction.

Free Advertising must embrace the initial contact and emphasize that your product or service would be of interest to the listeners or viewers of the program, perhaps even saving them time or money. This also must carry an increased willingness to seek appropriate alliances and partnerships that will provide convergence to the integrated business model required to overcome these mismatches in our current economic culture and outlook.

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Ask anyone what their primary sales strategy is for selling their products or services and their response might seem shocking to you. Why? They make harmonious bonds with their customers!

Simply put, these are advertisements which represent the hidden benefit to reinforce the need for a desired outcome. The consumer makes an emotional connection, whether it’s your customer service, your product, or other factors of human behavior.

Before you develop this style of ad, you must understand the five basic needs or motivating forces from a consumer’s point of view. The theory is that until a lower ranking need is satisfied there is no desire to pursue a higher ranking need.

Below are the five human motivators, beginning with the basic or lowest ranked need and continuing to the highest.

Physiological needs - Include hunger, thirst, reproduction, shelter, clothing, air, and rest.

Safety-security - The need for security, stability, dependence, protection, structure, order, law, tenure, pension, and insurance.

Love-belonging - The need for belonging, acceptance, love, affection, family, group acceptance, and friendship.

Self-esteem - The need for recognition, respect, achievement, responsibility, prestige, independence, attention, importance, and appreciation.

Self-actualization - The need for satisfaction, the desire to achieve fulfillment through reaching self-set individual goals or aspirations.

If you can become familiar with this theory, then you will understand that motivation is always an individual act. The most your advertising message can hope to do is to present an appeal strong enough to stimulate action toward satisfying one of the basic human needs.

If there is one rule that will be most helpful in preparing effective advertising, it is this: The message must put the desire of the potential customer before the advertiser’s desire. Please read that one more time! The rule may sound like a simple one to follow, but frequently advertising messages take the form of a plea to customers to respond rather than solve the advertiser’s problem.

The buying decision is seldom a purely rational one. Emotions always influence behavior. As you explore various techniques for presenting your advertising message, do not ignore psychological and harmonious appeals.

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Finding additional funds can change your financial position permanently for the better. But, without changing spending habits first you will never begin to uncover money that you can take advantage of for future investment opportunities.

Before I continue on with the insurance buried treasure, the first thing you must do is to reduce any existing debt. You may often achieve a higher return by reducing debt than by committing funds to new investments.

The interest rates are quite high on funds borrowed through charge accounts, credit cards, or consumer finance companies. It is seldom less than 15 percent and often 20 percent or more. You will want to reduce or eliminate these debts before committing to investments with lower expected yields.

The general practice is simple: Pay down or eliminate existing debt whenever the interest cost saved is above the prospective gain on the alternative. If the prospective returns are only slightly above the cost of the debt, you may still prefer to reduce the debt. The interest saved is a certain gain, the prospective return is not!

Look Deep Into Your Insurance

Whole life insurance policies and a few others allow you to build up a sizable cash value that you can put money into for efficient use. The insurance company will lend most of the cash value to you at an attractive interest rate. You can then invest that money, earning a much higher return than any interest the insurance lender charges.

Currently, the U.S. tax law states that the interest expense on a loan from your life insurance policy may be considered consumer interest and not deductible. If you can’t borrow the cash value on your life insurance policy, take another hard look at the policy. Eliminate unneeded coverage to reduce your premiums, and use the savings for other investments. But, it’s the same story as with bankers: Insurance agents will not tell you that you need less coverage. This initiative must be yours.

To do this, simply increase deductible limits for auto and home loans $250 – $1,000. The higher premiums you pay every year that has a low deductible is not worth the few extra hundred dollars you would get with your claim in the unlikely event of damage or loss of property. What’s amazing to know, people don’t even make a claim for less than a large damage loss, because they fear their premiums will increase.

You can make an even larger savings by raising the deductible on your health insurance plan. This is of course unless your employer pays for your coverage. The so called “first dollar” coverage is the most expensive health insurance you can buy, and the price tag for having the insurer pay for routine doctor visits and occasional prescriptions may be greater than it’s worth. A policy with a $250 or $1,000 deductible generally will cost hundreds of dollars a year or less.

If your vehicle is over five years old, take the maximum deductibles on comprehensive and collision coverages. You may also want to eliminate these coverages altogether if the repair/reimbursement will be relatively low due to the vehicle’s age. Some insurance companies allow you to insure against the damage to your vehicle with a few dollars premium that applies only if you don’t carry regular collision coverage and the damage is proven to be the fault of the other driver.

To go even deeper, discuss your policies with your insurance agent to be sure you are receiving all discounts to which you are entitled. Make sure any changes in status since you bought your coverage are reflected in your policies. Some of the things for which auto owners can get premium discounts include:

a) Having two or more cars on the same policy.
b) Having student drivers in the family take driver’s ed class.
c) Installing a security system.
d) Having a driving record free of accidents or violations.
e) Living in low risk – low accident area.

Homeowners can benefit on their insurance, which include:

a) Being non-smokers.
b) Having smoke detectors.
c) Living near a fire station.
d) Having a home security system
e) Living above the ground floor.
f) Often by using same insurance company for car and home.

Depending on your insurance company, these factors can make you eligible for premiums lower than those that you started with. If they don’t, then consider changing companies and find one that will listen and work with you. You may also want to compare larger reputable companies. This may allow you to save hundreds of dollars each year on auto, life, and homeowner policies. After all, you are entitled to the full value of what you pay for.

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Your marketing plan should recognize the various segments of the market for your product or service and indicate how to adjust your product to reach those distinct markets. Instead of marketing a product in one way to everyone, you must recognize that some segments are not only different, but better than others for your product.

This approach can be helpful in penetrating markets that would be too broad and undefined without segmentation. No matter what you are making or selling, take the total market and divide it up like a pie chart. The divisions can be based on various criteria.

Demographics- This is the study of the distribution, density and vital statistics of a population, and includes such characteristics as:

Sex.
Age.
Education.
Geographic location.
Home ownership versus rental.
Marital status.
Size of family unit.
Total income of family unit.
Ethnic or religious background.
Job classification, blue collar versus salaried or professional.

Psychographics- This is the study of how the human characteristics of consumers may have a bearing on their response to products, packaging, advertising and public relations efforts. Behavior may be measured as it involves an interplay among these broad sets of variables:

Predisposition- What is there about a person’s past culture, heredity or upbringing that may influence his or her ability to consider purchasing one new product or service versus another?

Influences- What are the roles of social forces such as education, peer pressure or group acceptance in dictating a person’s consumption patterns?

Product Attributes- What the product is or can be made to represent in the minds of consumers has a significant bearing on whether certain segments will accept the concept. These attributes may be suggested by the marketer or perceived by the customer.

Some typical ways of describing a product include:

1. Price/value perception- Is the item worth the price being asked?

2. Taste- Does it have the right amount of sweetness or lightness?

3. Texture- Does it have the accepted consistency or feel?

4. Quality- What can be said about the quality of the ingredients or lack of artificial ingredients?

5. Benefits- How does the consumer feel after using the product?

6. Trust- Can the consumer rely on this particular brand? What about the reputation of the manufacturer in standing behind the product?

In conclusion- Life Style. Statements consumers make about themselves through conspicuous consumption can be put to good use by research people who read the signals correctly. By studying behavioral variables, such as a person’s use of time, services and products, researchers can identify some common factors that can predict future behavior determining which marketing segment relates directly towards the products or services being sold.

The real key to successful marketing is to identify the market segments you wish to reach and then tabulate the results of your marketing efforts until you find out what works best for you, and then keep repeating your successes.

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For many years marketers were in control and advertised their products and services in order to sell as much as possible of what they produced. However, there has been a seismic shift in recent years and it is now the consumer that calls the shots. This change in the center of control has substantial implications for marketing as traditional marketing practices have been established around the marketer in the controlling role.

At the same time we have been witnessing an increase in the disenfranchised consumer in developed markets. This shows that marketers now have to take into account a consumer who is knowledgeable about marketing and, in many cases, cynical. They may de-construct marketing messages or, in more extreme cases, set up pressure groups to air their views on specific marketers or marketing practices.

The move away from mass marketing towards one-to-one and niche marketing also plays a key role. Consumers will increasingly expect marketers to deliver what they are looking for, not a product or service that is simply designed to appeal to as many potential buyers as possible. They are looking to direct a dialogue with a marketer, not receive a monologue.

The consumer in control is one of the most important Forces of change impacting on marketing today as it is changing so many of the practices and processes that are established. Through the Loop has been analyzing some of the implications of this as part of its Knowledge Development Program.

Why is there a need for more marketing control?

This need for having greater control results from a number of factors. The over riding factor is the rise in uncertainty in life. This has occurred for a number of reasons, some of which are closer to individual consumers and some of which are more micro but make a clear impression.

Major world events can impact on consumer uncertainty and lead to buying decisions being postponed or cancelled. It is too early to be sure of the long-term impact of 11 September However, research has shown that short-term uncertainty may not necessarily dampen longer-term underlying optimism.

Closer to home, there is frequently less stability in consumers’ lives. Changing working practices have meant that there is a job no longer guaranteed for life. Work may not provide the security required for consumers and their families. Furthermore, they may find that their journeys to and from the workplace are taking longer due to traffic congestion. Some have been looking to downshift, opting out of  the normal working environment for a different type of life. Others will look to change how they work within “traditional” employment. Employers and employees have to work together to find ways to bring a level of personnel control back into the workplace.

Time pressure is increasing. A reduction in working hours was supposed to lead to greater leisure time. Have working hours actually been reduced? In addition, there are an increasing number of activities that make demands on precious leisure time. Consequently, there appears to be less time to relax and take things easy. This adds to the level of stress experienced and a perceived loss of control.

Changing social patterns includes the fact that more women are working and in increasingly senior roles. This leads to a shift in how household roles and childcare are allocated between parents. This means that there is an opportunity to help consumers maintain control over their home lives.

On a more micro level, the personal information that is being collected from consumers whenever they use a credit card, visit a Web site or telephone a call center leads to a degree of uncertainty about how that information will be used by the company. Consumers will look for confirmation about what is collected, how it is stored and how it is likely to be used. They want to retain control of their own personal data.

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Shopping for gifts during the holidays can cost you a bundle of cash. Knowing what it takes to limit those impulse purchases can save you money during critical economic times.

Regular buying on impulse will skyrocket any type of money management system. If you are one of those shoppers who finds, too often, that items you don’t need have just followed you home from the store, then you’re one of many millions of people who have the “Impulse Buying Syndrome.”

Amazingly over 40 percent of all in-store purchases are completely unplanned. If you spend $50 a week in the grocery store, there’s a good chance at least $20 of that will go for impulse items. That’s $1,040 a year!

Retail merchandising techniques encourage impulse buying and certain products are sold largely on their impulse appeal; it is no accident that such items as candy, batteries chewing gum are displayed at the checkout counter.

If you carefully plan your shopping in advance (make a list and stick to it), you’re much less likely to react on impulse. Another proven way to combat impulse spending simply is to pace yourself when shopping, especially the during the holidays.

Before making a major purchase, it is essential you research the product and have an idea on what the item should cost. setting a fixed amount aside (mentally or actually) for that particular purchase.

Before making a purchase, ask yourself:

1. Do I really need this item?

2. Can I really afford it?

3. Have I done enough comparison shopping?

4. Is now the best time to make this purchase?

5. Should I pay cash or go into debt on the installment plan?

6. Should I use my credit card?

7. Is there a less expensive way to borrow the money?

A prime time to shop for many expensive consumer goods is always after Christmas. Big post season sales start in January, but February can be even better for shopping. It’s in February that consumers begin to receive their deferred-payment bills for goods that they charged at Christmas. They make a point NOT to go shopping. Most retailers anticipate the corresponding drop in sales and mark inventory down to keep it moving.

This is When You Make Your Move!

You get nothing extra for the additional money you spend. That money becomes a higher gross profit to the retailer, extra cash in their pocket, and less for you to invest or to spend on yourself or your family and friends. Put yourself in control of your purchases rather than letting merchants, other people, powerful advertising, or random impulses dictate how much or on what you should spend.

Take advantage of seasonal fluctuations in retail sales or on the internet as well. Buy a new car when dealers advertise rebates or low-interest financing or when you can get an attractive loan in terms with your bank. Buying in the late fall, when dealers offer major discounts on existing inventory to make room for next year’s models. Make Sense?

Most shoppers know it pays to buy your wardrobe out of season. you can predict shifts in demand for many goods and services and structure your spending accordingly. Most items such as electronics, furniture, heating/cooling systems and most other items move in seasonal cycles.

If you really want to control impulse buying, especially during the Christmas Holidays, think about the lost money that you will never recover. Plan ahead and you will save you a lot of money.

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