We are a marketing consulting firm that focuses on helping our clients do a better job engaging customers, which we believe is the key to business success.

We believe sound marketing principles must be followed and are essential to successfully engaging customers. It is critical to create a dialogue over time with customers. Too many companies have a “check the box” approach to gaining customer insight, with the rapid pace of change; that is not sufficient.

We believe in developing an in-depth understanding of customers; mining different dimensions of understanding the customer. Building a fact base is important; but so is learning insights and motivations for decision making, and putting this into action to differentiate the company.

It is also essential to choose which groups of customers you will focus on. Strategy is all about making choices; companies that don’t choose specific segments of customers to put a higher level of focus on cannot have a sound strategy. With the greatest resource constraints in decades, this kind of focus is an essential business strategy.

Dialogue, understanding, and targeting the right customers also require defining and implementing precisely the right customer touch points. Emotional, intellectual, and behavioral goals must be set and measured to ensure touch points are having the desired effect.

New social platforms are changing the way customers and business interact, communicate, and influence each other. Advertising to a target audience is defunct, replaced by engaging and sharing value with them.

Ten years ago, many new internet business models streaked to glory, but since they didn’t adhere to sound business strategy principles they went down in flames. The same is true for social marketing. Embracing new social platforms now is essential to successful marketing and customer engagement, but will fail without being integrated with proven sound strategic marketing principles.