If you have been following my blog, you will notice that my consulting work on Product Design is grounded with a single focus on creating Relevance for the people who will be introduced to the product.
A good positioning strategy, brand and marketing campaign are ALL part of a good product, and indeed almost all banking products are marketing packages alone. Thus successful marketing consultants the world over encourage and emphasize relevance in marketing campaigns as opposed to mass mailing campaigns.
The possible easiest description I can give you about Relevance and what I try to achieve for my clients’ products is this:
A Product is Relevant to a customer, if after looking at or reading about your product once, the customer’s world becomes permanently bent — he stops sleeping or eating or otherwise doesn’t feel satisfied with his life until he actually goes back and buys your product with an almost obsessive desire for it.
That over simplistic definition aside, it is good to finally see actual data to support this focus.
“Despite additional campaign costs, relevant
campaigns increase net profits by an average of 18 times more than do
broadcast mailings, according to Jupiter Research report “ROI of
Relevance”.
I found this data at The Perfect Customer Experience, which is a blog with incredible posts on new-age marketing.



March 3rd, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Thanks for the compliment about http://www.perfectCEM.com … we’re trying real hard to deliver good Cx content, but as you know this is more a passion than a vocation. I just put up a post that offers a download of a little research I just completed. I got tired of colleagues who prefer to stay with a product-centric approach instead of making the jump to Cx … the basic challenge was whether this Cx stuff is real or a fad. So I put together a dowloadable document on 25 Business Leaders Who are Committed to Customer Experience. It is accessable at http://contextrules.typepad.com/transformer/2007/03/is_customer_exp.html.
Best wishes to “the other osama” — Dale Wolf