Chapter 11: Selling in a Branded World: Linking Your Brand Proposition to Your Sales Messages

1 The beginning of relationship marketing was explained by H. Hakansson and C. Ostberg, "Industrial Marketing: An Organisational Problem," Industrial Marketing Management (1975): 113–123. The idea was explained in relationship to services by L. L. Berry, Relationship Marketing in Emerging Perspectives on Service Marketing (Chicago: American Marketing Association, 1983), 25–28, and then applied to consumer sales by R. Oliver Christy and J. Penn, "Relationship Marketing in Consumer Markets," Journal of Marketing Management 12 (1996): 175–187.

2 See J. N. Sheth and A. Parvatiyan, "The Evolution of Relationship Marketing," International Business Review 4 (1995): 397–418.

3 Peter Drucker, in his customary precise and direct style, expressed it this way: "Marketing ... is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view. Concern and responsibility for marketing must, therefore, permeate all areas of the enterprise." Peter F. Drucker, People and Performance (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

4 This idea has been expressed by numerous business leaders, including Andrew S. Grove (CEO, Intel Corporation), One-on-One with Andy Grove (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987).

5 Adrian Payne, Martin Christopher, and D. Ballantyre, Relationship Marketing for Competitive Advantage: Winning and Keeping Customers (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, Ltd., 1991).

6 Peter Jordan, "The High Tech Way to Hold the Anchovies," VarBusiness (January 1, 1996)

7 Panayiotis Kyzirdis et al., "Sales Management: Re-engineering the Sales Force for Relationship Marketing" (Symposium, European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research, Amsterdam, 1996).

8 Brand expert Daniel Finkelman reports that 20 percent of satisfaction in the industrial paper industry comes from the selling process, while 52 percent comes from customer service; in the automotive industry it is 16.8 percent from sales and 33.6 percent from customer service; and in telecommunications, less than 20 percent of satisfaction comes during the buying process, while 40 percent comes from customer service. Daniel P. Finkelman, "Crossing the Zone of Indifference," Marketing Management 2 (1993): 22–31.

9 Peter Jordan mentions this point in several of his articles. For example, see "How to Make the Computer Telephony Sales," VarBusiness (January 1, 1996).

10 Kyzirdis et al., "Sales Management."

11 As quoted in Fast Company (September 1988): 54.