Given the wealth of information available online, the need to learn the Pepsi relationship building is becoming ever more important. Why? Because today’s consumers are more informed than you can imagine.

This has resulted in a drastic shift in consumer power and has altered the selling process by placing a greater emphasis on both customer relationships and customer experience.

Most businesses do not have a clear understanding of what relationship building is and how to successfully put it into practice. Pepsi is not one of them. Let’s debunk one misconception right from the start:

Relationship building isn’t the opposite of traditional marketing, and it doesn’t exclude older channels (like email marketing and content marketing) in favor of solely using social media.

To clarify this important practice, today we’ll look at the most important recommendations in relationship building campaigns.

We’ll even give you the inside scoop from notable entrepreneurs and Pepsi on how relationships helped build the audiences that built their businesses.

Let’s get started.

What is the business relationship building?

With a focus on loyalty, retention and long-term relationships, the aptly named practice of “relationship marketing” is designed around developing strong connections with customers by directly providing them with information that is tailored to their needs, wants and interests.

As opposed to transactional marketing’s focus on direct sales, relationship marketing emphasizes increased word-of-mouth activity, repeat business and a willingness on the customer’s part to provide information to the organization.

And unlike “interruption” marketing, this process is started willingly via an opt-in by the customer.

Pepsi relationship building … the value add

But is this focus on creating a Pepsi relationship with customers worthwhile? As we previously discussed, the shocking truth of brand loyalty is that most customers do not want to be engaged with a business or brand; their priority is shared

The secret here is that the relationship marketing process has nothing to do with engagement and everything to do with being practically useful for both your business and customers.

According to a management study by Robin Buchanan and Crawford Gillies, the increased profitability associated with relationship building is the result of several factors:

Less “dating around”

Satisfied, long-term customers in your marketing funnel are statistically less likely to switch.

As a bonus, they tend to be less price-sensitive; experts say that customers who feel taken care of are less concerned about what they are paying.

Pepsi relationship building … avoid the cost of acquisition

The famous Bain & Company analysis that it is 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one is something that keeps marketers up at night.

But businesses with high rates of customer satisfaction needn’t worry about high churn rates.

It’s the foundation of the word of mouth

Strong relationships are essential to a high net promoter score.

In other words, the chance that a customer will happily refer your business to a friend.

Pepsi relationship building … your advocates are your rock

Regular customers tend to buy more often.

They are less expensive to maintain because of their familiarity with your business and the processes behind it.

Business Information: How to Completely Change Your Success Priorities

Expansion becomes easier

Longstanding customers are much more likely to purchase your ancillary products and embrace your new ventures (think of those folks you know who buy each new Apple gadget).

Pepsi relationship building builds customer trust

Most businesses today consider themselves to be trustworthy, and by yesterday’s standards, they are.

They post their prices and rates honestly, they try their best to maintain the quality and reliability of their service, they protect the security of their customers’ funds, and they do what they promise.

But even though they don’t lie or steal, the fact is that the vast majority of financial services companies still generate substantial profits by fooling customers, or by capitalizing on their mistakes, or by taking advantage of them when they simply aren’t paying attention.

That approach in today’s environment is a direct route to customer attrition. Retention and growth now entail acting in customers’ best interest.

Acting in the customer’s interest requires companies to balance the benefit of an immediate profit against the cost of earning respect and confidence of a customer—an asset that is, in the long term, far more valuable.

Financial services companies must become more trustable because as the rising power of customers exposes untrustable behavior the question of a company’s trustability will go to the heart of its value proposition.

Trustability will become an essential element of any bank’s customer service in the future in much the same way that having a website has become an essential element of customer service today.

For survival

To survive in this new, hyper-transparent world in which extreme trust is a prerequisite for business success, Pepsi has shown must pursue these basic courses of action:

Building Repeat Customers: 11 Easy Fixes for Customer Growth

Pepsi relationship building … good intentions

Having empathy for customers, and treating each one the way you would want to be treated if you were that customer, is the single most important element of trustability. Pepsi has this down pat.

To be trustable, you have to adopt a customer-centric philosophy, and then re-engineer your value proposition and customer experience from the standpoint of the customer.

This will have consequences for your operating policies, of course, but the eventual implications for your firm’s culture will be even more profound.

If your call center reps, sales, marketing, don’t believe you are a trustable company, then your customers won’t either.

Rethinking control

In the transparent future, Pepsi won’t be able to retain control over communications about their brand. The only thing you will control is how well your business processes protect your customers’ interests.

To make your command-and-control, hierarchical firm more trustable, you will have to give more authority to individual employees, empowering them to “sense and respond” in real time to customer issues.

And don’t be too afraid to allow your workers to show your company’s human side, including its vulnerability.

A little vulnerability will encourage customers to be empathetic to you, and empathy generates trust.

Pepsi relationship building … ask good questions

Many people think good listening means always letting someone finish every thought and nodding along.

Instead, active listening requires that you ask questions while you are listening. Sometimes this means interrupting – but this isn’t something to be afraid of.

Often the interruptions will lead to tangents that create more intersections for both of the people in a conversation.

Build community

One of the secrets of the e-social revolution is that people have an irresistible urge to share with others. They make their opinions known, they contribute ideas, they collaborate on things such as Wikipedia and open-source software.

Pepsi even finds that customers provide the best kind of customer service for other customers.

If you want to become more trustable, you have to tap this sharing instinct, first by sharing your honest counsel with customers.

Talk to them not just regarding how they can get more value from their financial products, but how they can better manage their resources, and how they can save and spend responsibly.

Pepsi facilitates customers collaborating with other customers, through online community platforms, social sharing sites, product reviews, and problem-solving customer forums. Wow, does that work well.

**Pepsi relationship building s*hows competence***

To be trustable not only must you intend to act in the customer’s best interest, but you also have to have the competence to act on that intention.

On a basic level, this means paying close attention to the quality of your product and service.

But as important, you should upgrade your data, analytics, and systems. Quantifying the financial benefits of long-term customer trust and confidence requires good analytics.

Customer lifetime values are not easy to compute, but in the financial services industry, more than in most other categories, the statistical data is available.

There is no shortage of analytical tools to make these calculations.

If you want your company to become more trustable, you’ll have to begin paying attention to the data and pushing the envelope on analysis.

Stimulate stories

Some questions lead to answers, and then there are questions that lead to stories. Here’s one way you might start a story seeking question, “What inspired you to …”

When people share stories, they go beyond feeling like they are being interrogated. They open up, and they connect.

The more stories you can hear, the more connection you’ll feel to everyone you speak to.

Make observations and draw assumptions

Consider starting questions with this phrase: “I noticed that you …” What happens when you are forced to think about this is that you start to consider what you know about someone before you meet them based on where you are, what they look like or what you know about them already.

One of the best conversations I had at an event recently was because I noticed that someone was using two different phones at the same time.

Asking why led to an amazing conversation about time optimization and technology.

The bottom line

For customers who do want a relationship with your brand, their concerns are primarily about how useful you prove yourself to be (outside of your product).

In a world of extreme trust, you always have to take a step back from whatever business policy you’re considering, whatever new idea you’re thinking about, and ask yourself:

“If this became public, would it be an embarrassment to us? Would we be proud of it?

Would any of our customers hold it against us?”

Because in the highly interactive, extremely transparent future everything you do, every policy you have, will become public.

Hidden fees won’t remain hidden, and bad intentions will be quickly exposed. If you want your financial services company to be genuinely trustable, then you have to have clean hands, not just a good alibi.

BUSINESS COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION — Business collaborative innovation.

Need some help in building better customer trust from your customer engagement? Creative ideas to help grow your customer relationships?

Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job and pay for results.

Call Mike at 607-725-8240.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.

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Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

Given the wealth of information available online, the need to learn the Pepsi relationship building is becoming ever more important. Why? Because today’s consumers are more informed than you can imagine.

This has resulted in a drastic shift in consumer power and has altered the selling process by placing a greater emphasis on both customer relationships and customer experience.

Most businesses do not have a clear understanding of what relationship building is and how to successfully put it into practice. Pepsi is not one of them. Let’s debunk one misconception right from the start:

Relationship building isn’t the opposite of traditional marketing, and it doesn’t exclude older channels (like email marketing and content marketing) in favor of solely using social media.

To clarify this important practice, today we’ll look at the most important recommendations in relationship building campaigns.

We’ll even give you the inside scoop from notable entrepreneurs and Pepsi on how relationships helped build the audiences that built their businesses.

Let’s get started.

What is the business relationship building?

With a focus on loyalty, retention and long-term relationships, the aptly named practice of “relationship marketing” is designed around developing strong connections with customers by directly providing them with information that is tailored to their needs, wants and interests.

As opposed to transactional marketing’s focus on direct sales, relationship marketing emphasizes increased word-of-mouth activity, repeat business and a willingness on the customer’s part to provide information to the organization.

And unlike “interruption” marketing, this process is started willingly via an opt-in by the customer.

Pepsi relationship building … the value add

But is this focus on creating a Pepsi relationship with customers worthwhile? As we previously discussed, the shocking truth of brand loyalty is that most customers do not want to be engaged with a business or brand; their priority is shared

The secret here is that the relationship marketing process has nothing to do with engagement and everything to do with being practically useful for both your business and customers.

According to a management study by Robin Buchanan and Crawford Gillies, the increased profitability associated with relationship building is the result of several factors:

Less “dating around”

Satisfied, long-term customers in your marketing funnel are statistically less likely to switch.

As a bonus, they tend to be less price-sensitive; experts say that customers who feel taken care of are less concerned about what they are paying.

Pepsi relationship building … avoid the cost of acquisition

The famous Bain & Company analysis that it is 6 to 7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep a current one is something that keeps marketers up at night.

But businesses with high rates of customer satisfaction needn’t worry about high churn rates.

It’s the foundation of the word of mouth

Strong relationships are essential to a high net promoter score.

In other words, the chance that a customer will happily refer your business to a friend.

Pepsi relationship building … your advocates are your rock

Regular customers tend to buy more often.

They are less expensive to maintain because of their familiarity with your business and the processes behind it.

Expansion becomes easier

Longstanding customers are much more likely to purchase your ancillary products and embrace your new ventures (think of those folks you know who buy each new Apple gadget).

Pepsi relationship building builds customer trust

Most businesses today consider themselves to be trustworthy, and by yesterday’s standards, they are.

They post their prices and rates honestly, they try their best to maintain the quality and reliability of their service, they protect the security of their customers’ funds, and they do what they promise.

But even though they don’t lie or steal, the fact is that the vast majority of financial services companies still generate substantial profits by fooling customers, or by capitalizing on their mistakes, or by taking advantage of them when they simply aren’t paying attention.

That approach in today’s environment is a direct route to customer attrition. Retention and growth now entail acting in customers’ best interest.

Acting in the customer’s interest requires companies to balance the benefit of an immediate profit against the cost of earning respect and confidence of a customer—an asset that is, in the long term, far more valuable.

Financial services companies must become more trustable because as the rising power of customers exposes untrustable behavior the question of a company’s trustability will go to the heart of its value proposition.

Trustability will become an essential element of any bank’s customer service in the future in much the same way that having a website has become an essential element of customer service today.

For survival

To survive in this new, hyper-transparent world in which extreme trust is a prerequisite for business success, Pepsi has shown must pursue these basic courses of action:

Pepsi relationship building … good intentions

Having empathy for customers, and treating each one the way you would want to be treated if you were that customer, is the single most important element of trustability. Pepsi has this down pat.

To be trustable, you have to adopt a customer-centric philosophy, and then re-engineer your value proposition and customer experience from the standpoint of the customer.

This will have consequences for your operating policies, of course, but the eventual implications for your firm’s culture will be even more profound.

If your call center reps, sales, marketing, don’t believe you are a trustable company, then your customers won’t either.

Rethinking control

In the transparent future, Pepsi won’t be able to retain control over communications about their brand. The only thing you will control is how well your business processes protect your customers’ interests.

To make your command-and-control, hierarchical firm more trustable, you will have to give more authority to individual employees, empowering them to “sense and respond” in real time to customer issues.

And don’t be too afraid to allow your workers to show your company’s human side, including its vulnerability.

A little vulnerability will encourage customers to be empathetic to you, and empathy generates trust.

Pepsi relationship building … ask good questions

Many people think good listening means always letting someone finish every thought and nodding along.

Instead, active listening requires that you ask questions while you are listening. Sometimes this means interrupting – but this isn’t something to be afraid of.

Often the interruptions will lead to tangents that create more intersections for both of the people in a conversation.

Build community

One of the secrets of the e-social revolution is that people have an irresistible urge to share with others. They make their opinions known, they contribute ideas, they collaborate on things such as Wikipedia and open-source software.

Pepsi even finds that customers provide the best kind of customer service for other customers.

If you want to become more trustable, you have to tap this sharing instinct, first by sharing your honest counsel with customers.

Talk to them not just regarding how they can get more value from their financial products, but how they can better manage their resources, and how they can save and spend responsibly.

Pepsi facilitates customers collaborating with other customers, through online community platforms, social sharing sites, product reviews, and problem-solving customer forums. Wow, does that work well.

Pepsi relationship building shows competence

To be trustable not only must you intend to act in the customer’s best interest, but you also have to have the competence to act on that intention.

On a basic level, this means paying close attention to the quality of your product and service.

But as important, you should upgrade your data, analytics, and systems. Quantifying the financial benefits of long-term customer trust and confidence requires good analytics.

Customer lifetime values are not easy to compute, but in the financial services industry, more than in most other categories, the statistical data is available.

There is no shortage of analytical tools to make these calculations.

If you want your company to become more trustable, you’ll have to begin paying attention to the data and pushing the envelope on analysis.

Stimulate stories

Some questions lead to answers, and then there are questions that lead to stories. Here’s one way you might start a story seeking question, “What inspired you to …”

When people share stories, they go beyond feeling like they are being interrogated. They open up, and they connect.

The more stories you can hear, the more connection you’ll feel to everyone you speak to.

Make observations and draw assumptions

Consider starting questions with this phrase: “I noticed that you …” What happens when you are forced to think about this is that you start to consider what you know about someone before you meet them based on where you are, what they look like or what you know about them already.

One of the best conversations I had at an event recently was because I noticed that someone was using two different phones at the same time.

Asking why led to an amazing conversation about time optimization and technology.

The bottom line

For customers who do want a relationship with your brand, their concerns are primarily about how useful you prove yourself to be (outside of your product).

In a world of extreme trust, you always have to take a step back from whatever business policy you’re considering, whatever new idea you’re thinking about, and ask yourself:

“If this became public, would it be an embarrassment to us? Would we be proud of it?

Would any of our customers hold it against us?”

Because in the highly interactive, extremely transparent future everything you do, every policy you have, will become public.

**Pepsi relationship building s*hows competence***