Sunday, September 16, 2012

Customer for life?

Take care of your clients and there’s a good chance they won't leave you. - M. VEDHAN

A smart marketer will not alienate existing customers in the quest for newer ones.

As I have often said, I spent six years of my life counting other people’s cash and writing other people’s fixed deposit receipts. Even after leaving the banking industry, I still talk about it as I am still a customer of one bank or the other.

Today, I am not merely a customer but someone who perhaps knows a little more about customers than when I was a callow youth in the banking counter hoping for a typhoon or a flood on Saturday morning so that I could leave in time to catch a movie rather than be flooded by customers! One of the first things I have since realised is something called “lifetime value of the customer”, which I knew nothing about or cared even less for in 1973 when I first started working with Grindlays Bank.

Monday, September 10, 2012

Picnic with the Tiger

Wooing the press is an exercise roughly akin to picnicking with the tiger. You might enjoy the meal but the tiger always eats last.