1. It is supplier-centric. The only goal is product sales at any cost.
2. It is manipulative. It attempts to lure customers into stores with a bait-and-switch scheme.
3. It has no recognition of whether the customers receiving the so-called bargains have every shopped at their stores before or intend to shop there in the future.
4. It presents a deceptive view of value. Lowering costs on a small number of items does not deliver real value.
5. It says, “Attack our store, we don’t have to answer questions, and when you want to pay us, we will take your money at the cash register.”
6. It is copy-cat. Companies participate primarily because others are involved. It is a desperate attempt not to outperform, but simply to stay even with the competition.

The term Black Friday is now accepted as the day in which retailers turn a profit on the year or “go into the black.” However, the origins of the term range from descriptions of the shopping rush and resulting traffic jams to a reference to worker absenteeism on this day from as early as the 1950’s. There is almost nothing appealing about the process. It has no regard for the welfare of company employees who are forced to work ridiculous hours and, of course, if some cases, it results in violence of shoppers against one another. This day represents the lowest point of the year for companies in forgetting their customers and resorting to gimmicks based on selling more products.

Black Friday techniques are built on short-term tactics that primarily benefit the seller. A customer-centered mindset thinks differently. It focuses on long-term connections that are grounded in making customers more successful and more committed to maintaining a strong relationship with their suppliers.

The concept of “engagement” is clearly winning the race for the hottest idea in customer consulting circles these days. It is overshadowing customer “experience” and customer “delight” in the pantheon of business improvement words. Be cautious, however, and don’t believe that a single word can change your operation.

Bob Gilbreath, in The Next Evolution of Marketing, shares the definitions of engagement put forward by the Advertising Research Foundation, Forrester Research and his own company, Bridge Worldwide. These and other consultants’ descriptions all use words such as involvement and interaction and turning on a prospect and they explain the advantages for the supplier in terms of customer retention and recommendation. I have yet to see any of these manifestos explain the benefits that the customer receives.

These consultants and suppliers mean well. They are trying to invoke participation by customers in a community, which they, as a supplier, are willing to host. However, the advocates frame all of their literature around the belief that “active” customers are more loyal and will buy more and the cost of switching to a competitor increases over time. Isn’t that about the seller, rather than the customer?

Engagement, as commonly deployed, is too programmatic. It is transactional, not strategic. The problem is that when most organizations implement their version of engagement, it turns out to be one-way. It is from them to their customers, particularly in the realm of social media. How many companies are following the customers who are following them? Wouldn’t an engaged organization want to truly know about the customer they are trying to engage? It has become so diluted that the subliminal definition of collaboration or engagement is that the other party is buying from your company.

Over ten years ago, Seth Godin in Permission Marketing and Unleashing the Ideavirus, told us to “stop marketing AT people.” Rather than creating interruptions for customers, it is better to provide value that will grow your relationship with them. It’s a feeling of interdependence, not one-way. Value becomes the mortar to hold together the connection. The touchstone is that it must be on the customers’ terms, not yours, at a level that is both emotional and fun for them.

It is presumptive to believe that all customers want their supplier to be involved with them. I propose that Apple evangelists would still love the company because of its products and innovative thinking. Apple does not have to “manage” engagement because they build customer advocacy into everything they do.

Too often we become enmeshed with buzzwords to the point that we lose our objectivity. Engagement is a marketing term, an attempt to soften the words “selling” and “advertisement.” Do not undertake an engagement program unless you can define how it will benefit the customer. There is a false belief that markets and customers will shift behavior in large groups if engagement is available. What lasts are the fundamental values in your organization to take care of customers as individuals. Are you customer-motivated, or are you focused only on a new way to sell? Is your engagement one-way, or, are you truly trying to interact with your customers?

Be very reluctant to toss the word “engagement” out casually. Eventually, the word will lose its impact. The better metaphor for connecting with customers is dance—cooperation with a partner for a single purpose. In this customer-centered view, you would not “win” and “keep” customers and they would not be opponents, but rather, partners, moving in the same direction, enjoying the moment together, interested in each other. The actions taken include anticipation of customer needs and performing together to achieve success. Carried out properly, customers will never want to leave you.

The legendary architect, Christopher Alexander, revolutionized the approach to building with his concepts in The Timeless Way of Building. His belief was that we had lost our “fire” by creating structures and communities that no longer touched the humanitarian elements of our nature. We had forgotten the fundamental patterns that are universal, which give us “those moments and situations when we are most alive.”

Because these qualities had “broken down and were no longer shared” or even understood, the architectural industry was producing results that lacked “wholeness.” Alexander, therefore, developed a pattern language which was adaptable, but which made sense of “the endless play of the repetition and variety” in our cities and towns. This language of proper space and geometry “gives people who use it the power to create an infinite variety of new and unique buildings.” His synthesis has been called “the architecture of humanism” and it shepherded in techniques which resulted in a feeling of amplitude or fullness. It unfolded a process which was deep-seated and grounded in integrity. His book is a seminal work and you will gain a profound understanding of the world and the business in which you work by reading it.

There is an essential property to any system which accounts for its wholeness. In architecture, think of the awareness that you have when you see just the right use of space in a building. It is a very satisfying, abundant feeling that delights us as “customers” when we experience it.

In parallel with Alexander’s work, there is a fundamental quality of great customer relations that many organizations have lost. Let me be clear. This is not some nostalgia for “old-fashioned” customer service, which is often invoked. Most of us would be appalled if we could travel back in time to be dealt with in the way customers used to be treated.

The timeless system for customers is not going back, but beyond what exists today. The new paradigm represents congruence with your customers. It is authentic. It is the basis of a coherent approach within your business. It is satisfying to customers—not in that they simply liked the product or service that you provided, but that they felt deeply satisfied with their decision. It’s the difference between the feeling that you just did enough to satisfy your customers and awakening the feeling that you completely connected with them. It is the feeling of freedom that arrives when you know that your customers know they have absolutely made the right decision.

It is a system that can and must be built, but it is not found by reading a book and implementing a list of prescribed steps in your organization. It is complex and must be developed. However, it engrains in businesses Alexander’s “infinite power” to design unique products and services In the speeches that I deliver, I talk about the criteria for identifying the genuine qualities that make up this “customer system” with its unifying structure. It is fundamental, but when implemented properly, it will take your business to the next level.

The future will belong to those organizations that can grasp these universal concepts and find their fire. There is a paradigm in customer success that is timeless. Our role should be to constantly move our organizations closer to that system that is more natural and whole. The necessary first step is to understand it and to design ways to pursue it. It will dramatically change the way that you relate to your customers.

Consider one restaurant chain’s loyal following, which Stacy Perman describes in her recent book, In-N-Out Burger. This restaurant has ardent fans who are beyond loyal and it has established a market position that is hard to ignore. It offers a secret menu that regular members know about and its T-shirts are the epitome of cool. Words that Perman uses to describe the restaurant chain: phenomenon; mystique; allure; and packed with customers “making pilgrimages to what was considered the quintessential Southern California attraction.” It all translates into a brand that means originality.

One of the key traits of hyper-loyal customers is their passion for converting others to become members of their “club” so that they can have the same great experiences. “Its loyal fan base…often did the heavy lifting, frequently boasting about their zealous affection for the chain to everybody else,” Perman writes. “The chain’s regulars assumed the responsibility of bringing in a constant stream of new devotees, an act generally referred to as ‘the conversion.’ It had the feel of bestowing membership into a club that seemed at once exclusive and egalitarian.” One In-N-Out Burger customer said, “I feel it’s akin to my civic duty.”

Traditional companies are grounded in a quid pro quo mentality. Whatever they sell they get paid in return. Customer-centered companies, however, know there is much more that they can do for their customers. If they are passionate about thinking like a customer, that’s where conversion comes in.

I ask companies in my workshops: Can you expect customer loyalty if you are the same as your competition? The answer is obvious, but it creates discussion about the practices of companies that almost never lose a customer. The “secrets” go much deeper than customer satisfaction and willingness for customers to repurchase from their companies.

Success means winning the hearts and minds of the market. If truly done right, it creates contagion. People will have an unconditional love for your services because they trust that you are always designing new solutions for them. Hyper-loyalty is the perfect destination for reframing the customer-centered efforts in your organization.

Customer-centricity creates originality for your company. It means being loyal to your customers. In turn, they will be loyal to you. It’s very much a symbiotic relationship, based on persuasion–that your company is a great fit with your customers.

So, are customers less loyal or have you lost your edge? What have you done lately to convert customers to higher levels of loyalty?

Customers are only less loyal if you have lost touch with them–if you have focused on aspects that don’t matter to them. The antidote, of course, is that you must establish your connection in their belief systems even more deeply. Being customer-centered means moving your culture to a whole new level–where people not only buy from you, but love you and want you to continue to get better. They want to be around you because they know you are the best and will keep getting better. They’re hyper-loyal.

Last week, I attended the Loyalty Expo, a showcase of the prominent suppliers using incentive rewards programs to drive their business growth. The good news is that some of the companies that are using these points programs are looking at new ways to drive loyalty by becoming more relevant and customer-centered.

The old models are programmatic and have settled into complacency. Many of them have lost their freshness and the system protects underperformers who basically choose to “me-too” other programs. Differentiation is done at the edges, rather than the heart and soul of customer recognition. Barry Kirk from Maritz Loyalty Marketing referred to the traditional incentive programs as “a little tired” and he is absolutely accurate. Today, success depends on the constant gathering of new information about your customers. But this is difficult when your view of the world is narrowly focused on point redemption.

In order to overcome this malaise, the industry is waking up to new opportunities. Obvious at the conference was a direction toward the use of social media. Teresa Caro of Razorfish, among others, talked about how social media has redefined how to measure customer value. In addition to scrambling to identify a social strategy for using Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, suppliers realize that they must have two-way conversations with their customers.

Kudos are also in order for Maritz for challenging the rewards programs to be fun rather than boring. Maritz also did a great job in defining “high-definition” loyalty, a term to bring clarity to future efforts to move vendors away from a push strategy to a fuller understanding of the subtle factors that can influence customer advocacy.

I believe that the key to the future will be recognition of the customer as an individual. This involves instilling into your organization the ability to think about the needs of your elite customers and to engage them at a personal level. Not only does this eliminate the one-size-fits-all technique, it goes beyond to customizing the personal contact that your workforce has with these best customers. As one speaker said, “engagement of customers will shorten their buying cycle,” and this is even more true for your top 5-10% customers, who have already proven their loyalty to you.

Strategic thinkers are also realizing that these rewards programs can no longer prosper by operating as a silo within their corporate structure. If the goal is to increase spend and to switch customers to higher-end loyalty, this must be done at an organizational, not programmatic level. It must use the fantastic data that the programs currently have available to take customer loyalty to the next level.

Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC show Hardball, referred to this as a “journey of rediscovery” in his book American. This is what occurs when you commit to looking at your organization through the eyes of your customers. You still have the same products and services, but framed around the customer instead of the internalized way of looking at them. Matthews gives us a great example, using the American Revolution pamphlet “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine. He makes an important point–that this treatise not only called for independence from England, but, more fundamentally, for separation from the past. This is what thinking like a customer also represents–a new direction in decision-making. The future is not programmatic, but rather, is centered on your customers and their status in your elite group.

The traditional approach of the incentive rewards industry is shifting by separating itself from the past. It is beginning to focus on changing behaviors (rather than reinforcing them through points) by adding value at every touch-point of the customer experience. The new model uses every employee by adopting what Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City, termed “getting every brain in the game.” Loyalty programs are changing, but there is a lot more to do in order for them to reach their goal of becoming more customer-centered.

Great thanks to Kim Cameron and Marc Lavine in Making the Impossible Possible: Leading Extraordinary Performance: The Rocky Flats Story, for this insight about what is known as a heliotropic effect, from “heliotropism” which is Greek for “turning toward the sun.” This phenomenon manifests itself in one side of the stem growing rapidly to shift the direction of the flower to face the sun. If you have ever passed a field of sunflowers at different times of the day, it is fun to notice the flowers follow the position of the sun across the sky.

Let me remind you how the science works. A plant’s side opposite to the sun grows more quickly while the side facing the sun grows very little. The technical answer is that the flower’s orientation to the sun is due to differential growth of the stem. A plant-growth regulator builds up on the shaded side of the plant when unequal light conditions exist. Because of this, the darker side of the plant grows faster than the sunlit side, causing the stem to bend towards the sun.”

Phototropism is the plant’s tendency to “know” which way the source of light is. Using its photosynthetic properties, in other words, a plant improves its survival rate. Does this sound like strong brand identity and how your customers behave in following companies that outperform their competitors?

Cameron and Lavine cite a number of organizational studies that prove that generous, abundant behavior creates “an upward spiral of improvement”. The resulting actions attract customers who observe a corporate behavior designed to improve their lives (not the suppliers’ internal costs). It creates a sense of attachment and this attraction strengthens customer loyalty, in other words. Leadership in extraordinary companies believes in always giving more than they expect to receive. In fact, that is the secret-to give unselfishly. If you do it well, you will get your reward sometime later-a pattern that Cameron and Lavine call an ‘upward spiral of improvement.’

This is grounded in the belief that eliminating customer problems is ordinary behavior. Problems cannot be ignored, of course. But customers expect organizations to take care of these. Extraordinary performance derives from enabling customers to succeed and from visualizing a service to those customers that never stands still. As a leader, educate your culture to believe that you will attract more and more loyal customers by doing and being what they want.

Don’t approach your role as just a supplier; be a positive energy source. Most organizations give lip service to being solutions-providers to their customers. But, when they proactively think like their customers, this pattern creates an energy source that attracts these customers, just as the sun attracts plants. Instead of simply being a one-dimensional provider of goods or services, these organizations are the center of an ecosystem that delivers what customers need to be successful.

Customers relate to organizations that embody this generative, idea-developing energy toward their customers. Consequently, these suppliers are perceived as much higher performers. They are legendary, rather than ordinary.

The phrase Year of the Customer has been proclaimed by individual companies and consultants for over 20 years now. In 1987, for example, then IBM Chairman, John Akers, declared the year of the customer. Although it was a noble purpose to try to improve systems for the benefit of the customer, it failed miserably. I have recently mentioned one episode from this initiative in my post dated November 26, 2008.

Any search of the Internet will uncover many other examples of years, particularly since 2000, that have been designated the Year of the Customer. The most recent one, noted by VisionEdge Marketing, was the declaration, in the third annual New York Stock Exchange CEO Report, of 2008 as the year of the customer. I guess you saw how that turned out?

In 2000, Ander Gronstedt went even further by declaring the 21st century the Customer Century The Customer Century : Lessons from World Class Companies in Integrated Communications . I suppose that should stop any further escalation of slogans. How do you get any better-the Customer Millennium, perhaps? But the point, of course, is that a naming only means something if the customer notices a change and that does not happen very readily.

It is really tough to break away from being internally focused and transition to being customer focused. It does not simply happen by announcing a slogan such as the Year of the Customer. In order to transition to truly being customer-directed, companies must break free from decades of old habits. They must shed the inward culture in which internal processes are more important than what the customer values. Metrics, of course, are important to this transition. But leadership is essential in order to change the culture to one in which your customers’ success drives every decision.

Here is my recommendation. Instead of declaring another customer slogan, identify what your organization needs to deal with the future-as viewed from what your customers value. Instead of simply thinking about your customers, switch to thinking like your customers and putting in place ideas which will enable your organization to do just that.

Globally, 2008 was very disappointing economically for most organizations and the beginning of 2009 will be equally challenging for everyone. Your customers will be even more important to you and now is a great time to transform your company to one in which every process, every policy, and every customer touch-point is thought about in the way the customer thinks.

As you make your resolutions for 2009, it is my hope that you value the people and companies who buy from you enough to begin the change. Resolve to have your company continually question how it can improve its product or service by thinking like its customers-not just for one year, but looking forward years into the future. I wish you great success in transforming your organization into one that creates customers who are so loyal that they dare not dream of replacing your company as their supplier. Good luck in the New Year!

True or faithful (to duty, love or obligation); steadfast in allegiance, devoted to the legitimate sovereign or government of one’s country.

On that basis, why should anybody be loyal to any business organization? What legitimacy does the enterprise possess? Why do its customers have any duty to show allegiance to it? Of course they don’t, and the more the education, confidence and power of consumers have grown, the more they realize it. In fact, in the twenty-first century it is the other way round. It is the customer who is king and the supplier that needs to be loyal to its customers!

Since it is now widely recognized that it is much less costly and much more profitable to keep existing customers than to win new ones, customer retention has become a major goal for most organizations. Numerous companies have adopted the idea of customer loyalty to spearhead their retention strategies, but it is very doubtful whether the loyalty concept is fully understood or effectively implemented by many who embrace it. These organizations will not be successful in retaining their existing customers without first developing customer commitment and an attitude of devoted attachment.

In a 21st century context, the translation of the Chinese version of the word for loyalty may lead us to an interpretation that is more appropriate for product and service providers than the European version.

During the 12th century, the Song Dynasty of China was under constant invasion by the Jinn Dynasty, the ancestors of the Manchus. When Jinn troops captured the Song emperor and his father, the Song people were humiliated and mobilized to fight off the Jinns. The general who led them was Yue Fei. He was a great leader who was never tempted by an extravagant lifestyle. He led an extremely disciplined army that would do anything for him. He had the Chinese character representing loyalty, shown above, tattooed on him. As he went into battle, he remembered his mother’s words about being loyal to his country, which drove him to fight for his king and to sacrifice himself for his country in the end.

The character literally means, “from the center of the heart.” That accentuates a more emotional side of loyalty and it is a more fitting way to describe the relationship with your leaders and which embodies a sense of purpose. The character for loyalty is a very important concept that influences Chinese people deeply. And the word, Zhong, has gradually become a more widely used word, meaning to be loyal not only to your country, but also to a person, a community, a company, or an organization.

In today’s competitive markets, organizations must deliver a meaning that captures the heart and soul of their customers. Loyalty has to be driven by a deep connection between customers and their suppliers-not some feudalistic allegiance or obligation that is founded on inequality between organizations and their buyers. It is the serious misunderstanding of the loyalty concept among managers and senior executives, which has been responsible for the many misguided strategies that have been devised in the name of securing customer loyalty. Whether you are the leader of a country or a company, loyalty has to be earned.

How will organizations continue to attract increasingly educated and confident customers and keep them committed? The answer is simple-thinking like a customer. When organizations embrace the need to connect with their customers and to lock in their hearts and emotions to their brand, then they understand the true meaning of loyalty.

These ads, which ran from 1963 through 1981, were indicative of the catchy gimmicks that were popular in that simpler time in the world. As cute and silly as they were, however, the tagline exemplifies the concept that all sellers want their customers to embody.

Customer loyalty may seem like a lost concept to many suppliers in recent years. Now, the sellers have to fight to keep their customers from switching. Yes, the times have changed. I was told a story of a prominent retailer who had one of its executives deliver a supplier of the year award to a manufacturer that had obviously served them well. During a side conversation after the ceremony, the executive, however, described his idea of loyalty to that supplier as “lack of a better offer.” Brutal.

A loyal customer should be defined as one who has invested time and effort into building a relationship with your organization and positively chooses to conduct a major part of his or her relevant business with you. However, the supplier must be committed to its customers, as well, and make an aggressive investment in strengthening the relationship. In other words, the ‘build-it-and-they-will-come’ approach won’t work anymore. Suppliers must be loyal to their customers and think the way their customers do in order to be successful.

Every organization wants customers that are so loyal that they would fight to keep buying from it. Harley Davidson customers come to mind, of course, because the employees of that motorcycle manufacturer have worked hard to create an ultra-loyal following that is committed to its brand. The biggest success stories in the next five years will be the organizations that proactively implement a strategy to build and sustain a relationship that delivers high value to their customers.

What organization are you so loyal to that you would rather fight than switch?