Seminar focus: Mix demand, technology

To prosper in the 1990s, American businesses must meet their customers’ individualistic demands while incorporating the latest in technology.

That was the message delivered to some 275 people during the Bangor Daily News Fall 1993 Marketing Symposium, held Tuesday at the Bangor Civic Center. Two keynote speakers, Wade Leftwich and Ann Hunt, discussed the implications of customer-focused marketing.

Leftwich, the publisher of American Demographics magazine, emphasized the importance of developing customer relationships. He described 1990s’ American consumers as “individualistic” people “who want more from you, and they want to pay less for it.”

Leftwich focused on using demographics to help target specific consumers. A business requires much information on demographics, geography, lifestyles and attitudes to “know more about your customer than anybody else does, including your competitors,” Leftwich said.

By amassing this information via available computer technology, businesses create “the triangle of consumer knowledge,” he said. This helps a business to develop marketing strategies and build relationship marketing, or “getting more out of the customers I (already) have.”

Ann Hunt is the president of Hunt & Co., a New York-based retail and media-marketing firm. She described how modern computer technology, “in the form of logistics and distribution systems,” assists retailers in getting merchandise to their customers, while reducing costs.

America has witnessed the advent of the “strategic shopper,” a “savvy customer who’s interested in value and is a very elusive customer and hard to track,” Hunt said. The country’s more successful retailers (she listed Wal-Mart, Kmart, and Target) have attracted such shoppers by responding “to the consumer credo, `value and convenience.”‘

While many retailers have reluctantly employed technology to help develop relationship marketing, those who have are doing well, Hunt said.