After 12 years doing customer analytics the phone keeps ringing.

More and more business people are seeking us out because of the growth of behavior based marketing. But even in the face of the good results we’ve gotten for our customers, some are skeptical.

“I don’t know if you can help us,” they’ll say, “because our business is different.”

This drives us crazy!

Of course their business is different.  But for marketing purposes who cares? What matters is that their CUSTOMERS are different. And we’re not talking just about differences in demographics.

The single fact that matters most in marketing is customer behavior – knowing what customers do and when they do it is pure marketing gold – the secret to building revenue and customer loyalty.

We started Loyalty Builders in 1999 on the premise that no two customers behave in quite the same way.  They buy different individual products. They buy different combinations of products.  They buy at their own intervals: weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever.  Some are ripe for up-sell or cross-sell offers.  Some have growing loyalty while others’ loyalty is at risk.  We figured if we could crack that code and learned what made customers tick we could treat them as individuals instead of a single great mass that marketers refer to as “the consumer.”

Most companies insist they’re different because they’re what we call ‘product-centric’.  Their world-view is built around what’s in the warehouse and how to get it into customers’ hands.  We prefer a ‘customer-centric’ view that focuses on customer behavior and customer purchase propensities, and how they change over time.

From a customer-centric point of view, the fact that your business is different doesn’t matter. Until you as a marketer can tune what’s unique about your business to your customers’ behavior you’re behind the curve — still marketing in the 20th century.