We had a good meeting at vistage yesterday, @Robert_Craven came in and gave a talk on disruptive marketing. I made some good notes (first time taking notes on the ipad!)

Here’s some of the things that really resonated with me, I like to do a summary like this so I remember things better, hope it’s useful to you too.

‘Delighted customers are 5 times more likely to buy again than satisfied customers’

’67% of customers leave because they think you don’t care’   - I believe this stat and it’s often quoted, would love to know where it’s from though. See more here.

Financial performance is the average of Marketing performance and Operational Performance, you can’t have good financials without good Marketing and Ops. < Ok, very basic, but I found it useful, as we (and most of the businesses there) tend to focus on Ops, not marketing.

‘If marketing doesn’t generate sales, it’s just spending money’ 

76% of people don’t believe adverts « Mind you, that means 24% do believe, which isn’t too shabby!

“I don’t know who you are, 
I don’t know your company, 
I don’t know you company’s product, 
I don’t know what your company stands for, 
I don’t know your company’s customers, 
I don’t know your company’s record, 
I don’t know your company’s reputation, 
Now, what was it you wanted to sell me?”

 (David Ogilvy copy) .  This one is getting printed out today!

Robert really pushed being ‘disruptive’ his favourite model being charge customers whatever they see fit to pay, a la radiohead. One surprise example of this was Agency Nil (http://www.agencynil.com/) What a cool model, mind you it looks like they are going to be pretty selective about who they take on. 

I’ll not spoil the workshop, but a few quick wins he suggested included raise prices, reduce costs, and my favourite, ‘be remarkable’

On raising prices  - If you raise prices by 10%, and lose 25% of your customers you would make the same profit. This is an interesting concept to think through, the converse being that if you drop prices by 10% you need to sell 50% more to make the same profit.  

During this process, I realised that while we really care what our customers think, and want the service to work amazingly well, often the only communication they get from us is a monthly bill. This isn’t exactly remarkable, so I’m going to look at how to communicate more regularly, without interrupting people too much. I figure a once a month phone call wouldn’t upset anyone, and would help us.

What do you do to be remarkable to your customers?