Addicted Customers: How to Get Them Hooked on Your Company
Excerpted with permission from "Addicted Customers: How to Get Them Hooked on Your Company," authored by John Todor, Copyright 2007. Published by Silverado Press. ISBN 1934198323. For more information about this book and other similar titles, please visit www.addictedcustomers.com.
What are Addicted Customers?
For most people, fulfilling basic needs is easy to accomplish. Increasingly,
customers value opportunities to reduce stress in their lives;
moreover, they want to become engaged in meaningful experiences
and to become immersed in authentic relationships. When a business
offers an emotionally and psychologically fulfilling experience,
customers will scrimp elsewhere to enable them to splurge on the
desired offering. They do so because of the total experience, not just
the product.
Yet, most businesses are focused on selling "things." They have a
focus on sales and market share and compete by exceeding competitors'
offers. The upshot is that this "competitiveness" encourages
customers to shop on price and to shop around. This works against
loyalty. Loyalty comes from delivering what customers value, something
they find meaningful, not just utilitarian.
This is a challenging situation that requires new strategies to deliver
the experiential value customers seek. The foundation of these strategies
must be based on the psychology underlying the behavior of
today's customers. It is important to understand how they arrive at
decisions, and how their decisions are tempered by current marketplace
dynamics and the demands of contemporary lifestyles. Creating
addicted customers is a metaphor for the process of delivering
what today's customers value and engaging them in customer experiences
that are emotionally and psychologically gratifying. These are
the types of experiences that stimulate desire and as a consequence,
lead to committed customer relationships. This is "how to get them
hooked on your company."
The Two Distinct Buying Personalities
Customers have two distinct buying personalities: indifferent and
engaged. The personality that surfaces during particular buying decisions
depends on the type of value customers seek. Most businesses
are optimized to sell to the indifferent personality. In this buying
mindset, customers are focused on practical features such as price and
convenience. As a consequence, customers' relationships with sellers
are often adversarial. Customers are interested in acquiring products
to fulfill well-defined, basic needs. They want means-to-an-end and
they want them at the best combination of low price and convenience.
They have tasks to complete and there are minimal standards
of functionality, but beyond that, it is price and convenience. In this
mindset, customers are emotionally indifferent to the products or
the tasks those products serve. Batteries are bought so flashlights
work. In these situations customers become indifferent to the purchase
process as well as indifferent to the products. Or they become
adversarial -- they try to get as much as they can for the lowest price.
They want the purchase process to be a non-experience. They want to
extract the greatest tangible value at the lowest possible price. There
is no inherent basis for loyalty.
The engaged personality emerges when customers are emotionally
and psychologically engaged in the buying experience, and when this
engagement is motivated by desire. Certainly, "engaged" customers
may buy tangible goods or services that serve utilitarian purposes.
However, customers increasingly value the shopping experience for
its own sake, and want to be immersed in the emotional and psychological
consequences of the experience surrounding a product.
Companies that support them in this quest strengthen the relationships
and this ultimately translates to customers with high lifetime
value -- in short, those companies accrue customer equity.
The following "tale of two purchases" illustrates the distinction
between the two primary buying personalities and their impact on the
ability of businesses to create addicted customers.
Read more in the rest of sample chapter 1: What are Addicted Customers?
Read other excerpts and download more sample chapters from our CRM and call center bookshelf
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