Learn How To Build Relationships With Your Customers To Increase Sales

You want to get your brand name out there and take control of the great product or service that you have to offer. A good way of doing this is to use marketing to create a personal relationship between what you have to offer and what the customer is looking for.

According to Rick Roth of Advertising Age, "Chief marketing officers (CMO) who understand the interplay between their key retailers and their brand also fair better. How retailers advertise a shelved product also adds to or detracts from a brand's value."

"The retail trade seems to enjoy more control over the fate of a brand with each passing day. Years ago, clients knew exactly what they wanted from in-store, demanded a certain level of performance and got it. Today, there is one brand major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Costco, Best Buy, Target and Safeway care most about...their own. Marketers are squeezed by an empowered consumer, a controlling retail channel, and, on top of it all, a lack of predictability in the impact media truly delivers. No wonder they are increasingly focused on return on investment and are zeroing in on where they can best measure results: at the point of sale," claims Roth.

So how do you create this relationship between you and the customer. Roth believes you must find out how your potential customers move throughout their day to day operations, how do they interact with your competitors and their products or services, or where could it. You must be able to identify the most powerful moments to intervene with your product or service.

Roth stresses, "Retailers hold tremendous leverage in the relationships shoppers have with your brand. CMOs must investigate the relative strengths of each key retailer as well as their individual brand propositions and their category and market challenges. CMOs must also build marketing plans in such a way that considers the needs of their retail brand, and, ultimately, they must create programs that contribute to retailers' and their own businesses."

He stresses that in order to build up your product or service, you should also help build up the retailers business. By doing this, both will be successful and thrive from the lucrative partnership.

An example of such a partnership was when Levi's created a new brand exclusively for Wal-mart, and as Roth puts it, "the retailer was able to leverage the credibility of the Levi's name, and Wal-Mart provided Levi's with an unmatched volume opportunity as a means to jump-start their new brand." Of course a more recent partnership was AT & T and the Apple iPhone.

McKinsey & Company noted that approximately 70% of purchase decisions are made at the shelf-regardless of what the consumer was originally intending to buy. Roth says he conducted an in store study where the results show that 37% of consumers walked by displays without even looking at them, 32% looked but did not bother to stop, only 4% did stop, but did not buy, and 27% stopped and bought.

"The study pinpoints seven critical moments-from category visibility to checkout-that lead a shopper to purchase. Barriers are at each step and involve everything from planogram and store design to product placement, packaging, signage, pricing and shopper demographics," claims Roth.

Purchasing decisions vary by what you are selling, the region of the world you are based in and of course gender. To better market your product or service you should understand the who, what, when, where, and why questions, to narrow down what kind of consumer it is geared toward.

You must be able to create and build valuable relationships with your buyers. If these relationships created have a strong foundation, such as commitment and understanding, you are sure to see your business grow tremendously.