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 The Customer Loyalty Quotient: From Goodwill to Better Profits
By John Kane, Senior Vice President, Account
Management, and Jonathan Honiball, Associate Vice
President, Research
Even if your brand is as innovative as any market entry
in its class, the competitive landscape is sparse and
all the stars are aligned properly, your brand can't be a
true success without a loyal customer base.
In this article we will examine the customer loyalty
quotient, its implications for profitability and how it
should be measured.
One timely and compelling reason for understanding
the impact of customer loyalty on your brand is the
state of the current economy that demands marketers
be more competitive than ever before. With the
decrease in product differentiation and limited number
of new products entering the market, customer loyalty
is a key battleground among those in the health care
industry, in particular. Any method of differentiation that
could positively impact sales must be fully explored.
To that end, the customer's relationship with your
brand is critical. Enough dissatisfied customers can
turn your power brand into an also ran in the
marketplace, thus diminishing your bottom line. In
essence, goodwill does ultimately lead to more total
spend and greater profitability.
So what is customer loyalty?
 Reality Check, Please!
As things move more rapidly in the health care space,
health care marketing researchers need to ask the
right questions of the right people so we can make the
optimal business decisions that such research is
designed to guide.
As one example, in this month's Orange
Pages, we
examine the results of a recent issues-based
research study, conducted among 1,000 medical
students by Epocrates, in order to examine the use of
smart phones, such as iPhone, BlackBerry and other
PDAs, in a professional setting among physicians-in-
training.
The discussion includes thoughts on what the
penetration of smart phones in the practice of
medicine might mean for the future of health care and,
specific to the role of health care marketing research,
the kind of projects researchers may be involved in to
help shape both the devices and their myriad
of "apps" - all with the aim to increase the
effectiveness and efficiency in their use in the
practice of medicine.
A Beginner's Guide to Marketing Research in the Emerging BRIC Nations: Where Pharmaceutical Marketing is Going and How You Can Get There
Free Educational Webcast
September 9, 2:00 - 3:15 p.m. EST
Save the Date! What if you could map out a way to leverage your
brand, not just domestically but beyond borders in
emerging nations? The new evolving world of
marketing demands you rethink and reinvent
opportunities for your brand. And global presence is a
particularly significant option.
To enrich your understanding of the health care
landscape within the emerging markets of Brazil,
Russia, India and China (BRIC) and help identify
opportunities where you can leverage your brand's
potential in other corners of the globe, GfK Healthcare
is hosting this webcast.
Did You Miss the August Issue of Topline?
Click
here to read the issue, which
includes:
Topline
archive is available. Skim the
directory and select
articles you missed. Access subscriber
opt-in/comment form.
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September 2009
 A Renewed Search for Understanding For what feels like a long time now, pharmaceutical companies have seemed to demonstrate little interest in understanding how things work in marketing and marketing research. Surely, the conduct of marketing research projects has continued apace, albeit at a pace estimated at some 35 percent slower than in recent years. What virtually disappeared, however, was the emphasis on getting a basic orientation in pharmaceutical marketing research. Customers have increasingly been reduced to being viewed as market share, which was never really acceptable but is now even less so in an increasingly complicated marketplace. Interviews with numerous clients have revealed several manifestations and causes for this reality. First, clients consistently over the years have failed to keep up with the business literature, both health care specific and more generally. As we keep trying to persuade clients, much of the knowledge they seek through the conduct of expensive marketing research is already available in books and on Internet sites. One of the major roles that I attempt to serve in my job at GfK Healthcare is to guide clients in this direction. But the good news is that clients are starting to reawaken to the need not just for specific marketing research results, but also for a basic understanding of how things work now, and how they will work in the future. Increasingly, clients are calling on me to visit with their marketing research departments and lecture them on the basics of marketing research, but also on future trends that will reconstitute the organization and work flow of their departments. Reminder courses in basics need to be offered since, over recent years, the types of fundamental marketing research training seminars that used to be offered regularly by my organization and others have dried up as new members of the department are thrown right into the conduct of projects, with their managers unwilling to "waste" time on initial training and believing that the new researchers will learn what they need to learn through on-the-job training. Conversely, my presentations on the future of marketing research are increasingly in demand since most pharmaceutical companies...  Richard B. Vanderveer, Ph.D. CEO, GfK Healthcare   |
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