As a specialist in customer rapport merchandising, I can tell you that it is much more complicated than most people think. Customer marketing, in most people's evaluations, is a pretty straightforward matter. As a customer, you assume that a company sends out either a flyer, postcard, or a broadsheet almost indiscriminately. They might use radio marketing, TV marketing, or anything else. From the customer's point of view, it might be all the exact same, but from a business viewpoint, all of these are extremely different approaches. Customer merchandising must be carefully targeted toward the niche and image that the company wants to portray and the clients that it wishes to attract.
For example, there is a compelling reason why Automobile service centers, physicians offices, and even small niche clothes stores often send out postcards for client marketing. When you send out a business postcard, you play off of the perception of an intimate relationship between you and the customer. This form of customer merchandising is extremely effective because it encourages brand loyalty. Although the customers, of course, know that it is not a custom-made postcard, it still seems thoughtful. Some companies take customer marketing so far that they send out glad holiday cards to many of their loyal customers around Christmas. The effectiveness of this truly depends on the niche, however.
One of my absolute favorite customer service marketing strategies is to send out targeted advertisements to customers. This is such an effective form of customer merchandising because consumers always appreciate it when you are in tune with their own interests. You can even make an effort to educate about the products while you advertise them, speaking about the relative positives and negatives of each. Usually, people assume that you do not wish to ever speak badly of your own products, but every once in a while it has its advantages. A few negative details thrown into a client merchandising report can give the consumer the perception that you are unusually honest and concerned with the welfare of the consumer.
Of course, this isn't the only form of custom marketing that businesses routinely engage in. As a matter of fact, the job of a marketing consultants is to come up with new and more innovative techniques to market products. Strategies such as guerrilla marketing and word-of-mouth have revolutionized the marketing industry in the last decade, and consumer merchandising continues to evolve because of that sort of bright thinking. Not only does it help businesses to make more money, but it also helps consumers to receive a product more carefully altered to their own interests.