Marketing employees may work hard for their U.S. companies, but many are not working smart, according to a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill expert. Surprisingly, too often such professionals focus on the entire range of customers rather than on those who can contribute most to the bottom line. To make money, what they really need to do is to segment their customers figure out which customers are most profitable for them. They then need to reallocate their marketing and marketing communications resources to concentrate on those people who can maximize profit.
Some customers are just too expensive to attract and maintain.
Beyond critical mass, they should concentrate less on boosting market share, because the last few percentage points are the hardest and most expensive to acquire and keep. Knowing consumer desires is the key. You can t maintain a technological advantage or a marketing advantage because it s too easy for somebody to copy what you re doing. The most critical thing a company can know is why customers value their goods and services. Too many U.S. firms do not know why their customers do business with them, Lauterborn said.