The more things change the more they stay the same

My MBA project was on service marketing, specifically how art theaters in the UK could market their films. I wrote about customer experience, building a community by teaching the customer about the experience, what it had to offer, and that it was good. I wrote about the ins and outs of marketing art, and how important the experience was for art marketing.

I reread it the other day (mind you I wrote it in 1997) and it was interesting how the verbiage may have changed but the concepts haven't. We may do a lot of business over our websites, but we spend as much time considering how people navigate them as we spend analyzing how the customer experiences them. We talk about change agents, and influencers and empowering, all using social media tools. These are the new teachers; the people that help us understand the process and understand the experience so we can enjoy it. A large part of enjoying art is experiencing art.

This last bit is interesting to me, as it seems we are moving towards the idea that, whatever the product might be, a major part of purchasing or deciding to purchase is the experience. At one time this was strictly a “marketing the arts” concept. But now we are becoming an "experiencing" society, where the experience is just as important as the product itself. This can be tricky and exciting all at the same time, as experience is very subjective.  But it is fascinating to discover all the ways a person can experience something. Forums/chat rooms/blogs are wonderful examples of this. And I quite enjoy it.

Welcome and how the heck do you involve sales channel partners?

Hiya, welcome to my blog on anything customer. Currently this tends to lean towards anything social media, but not always.

Quick background, I have been customer focused since I can remember, and you can blame my mother for that (believe it or not). Even when I look back at my MBA project it was all about customer experience and community building (back in 1997!). Currently I am working on anything customer. This can include anything from voice of customer projects, social media, Web 2.0,  to looking at ways to improve our internal business processes using various software offerings. If we improve on the inside it will usually show in our interactions on the outside.

What is currently fascinating me is channel partners. The way this current partnership functions seems very archaic to me. This is mine, that is yours and no sharing allowed. So I am wondering how we can potentially move that partnership to the more sharing world we are now working in.

I believe it needs to start internally, the sharing that is. Those collaboration tools need to easily extend to our partners. It still may be a "slow boat" process, but if we start to open up, I believe that, like with most humans, our partners will start to do the same.

It's worth a go at least.