Market Your Way to Growth: 8 Ways to Win

2 Grow through Developing Committed Customers and Stakeholders

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us—we are dependent on him. He is not an outsider in our business—he is a part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him . . . he is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.

—L. L. Bean Store in Maine

We said at the end of the last chapter that it is more important to obsess about your customers than to obsess about your competitors. After all, it is customers, not competitors, who determine who wins the war.

We live in a world characterized by an abundance of goods and services. In fact, almost every good is available in oversupply. A car buyer has countless car types and brands to choose from; a mobile handset buyer has a plethora of handset brands to choose from; even a builder of a new factory has so many steel and cement companies to choose from. We are not in a goods shortage economy; rather, we are in a surplus economy. There is only one thing in short supply here: customers. Therefore, the customer is the center of our struggle. So how do we compete for, win, and keep customers?

Because the cost of losing customers and replacing them is much too high, we must learn first and foremost how to keep them. When studying General Motors, John Goodman of TARP—one of the leading specialists on factors in customer satisfaction—found that General Motors had to spend five times as much to attract a new customer as to ...