Relationship marketing? Forget it. The face to face, with a little entertainment, lunch or dinner, occasionaly thrown in approach, is about to be usurped by performance marketing.
That at least is the view of Mark Larson, president and chief executive officer of Digi-Key. What's performance marketing? Well simply put, its doing what you say you are going to do - delivering on the customer's expectations.
In Larson's view, the younger engineers now populating the community are web savvy. They can pick up 90 per cent of the information they need by jumping online. They don't necessarily need a field sales engineer or field applications engineer to hold their hand.
To this new breed, the important attributes of a supplier are that the product ordered is delivered on time and that the price is right. They want to be sure if there is a screw up, the supplier will get it fixed pronto. In other words, just get me the damned product. Now Larson's view is that he is sitting on every component under the sun at Digi-Key's Thief River Falls headquarters, and that he is in a unique position to be able to meet engineers' demands.
He reckons this shift is a threat to the traidtional frahcnised distributors strategy. He cites customers who now place production run orders on the web. The highest order so far is a 5000 plus volume.
Is there a limit to how many pieces a customer will order on the web? Larson agrees there is and then adds, "It's the customer who will decide that limit." Which suggests it will get higher.
Comments