Dead or Dying

摘要

For several decades, if not longer, marketing managers have hypothesized, aggrandized and generally sung the praises of customer loyalty-loyalty to products, brands, manufacturers, retailers, etc., or all of the forms and functions that seemed to promise ongoing sales, profits, market share and the like. The premise was that once the customer buys, we can simply put our focus on more acquisitions since we will have these customers. We can then cross-sell and up-sell existing customers through various customer relationship management systems. Let's face it: That is what traditional marketing has been about-acquisitions, growth, more acquisitions and more growth-a never-ending cycle driven by 90-day updates and yearly fiscal reports. If your company isn't growing, at least to the expectations of the market analysts and the "Street," you must be dying.