When Fortune 500 companies need help developing a strategic communication plan, many turn to marketing and communications guru Harry Beckwith. As founder and director of Beckwith Partners based in Minneapolis, he has helped clients like Microsoft and General Motors forge the kind of lasting customer relationships every company craves. He is also a best-selling and critically acclaimed author, whose books include Selling the Invisible, The Invisible Touch, and What Clients Love. Beckwith shared his thoughts with FuelNet on a number of topics, such as why best practices aren’t so great and why customer relationship marketing is more important than ever.

FuelNet: In your book What Clients Love, you write that competence, even superior competence, isn’t the essential element of a customer retention strategy. The relationship a business establishes with its customers, you argue, is most important. Why?

Beckwith: Because in most cases, a prospective client assumes that you are sufficiently competent. If someone refers you to a law firm, for example, you assume the lawyers are skilled, not least of all because they’ve completed law school and run the gauntlet of the bar exam. They’re smart and knowledgeable; they’re skilled enough. What you do not know, and what will make or break the decision, is whether you like and trust them and feel comfortable with them. If you do, you choose them, and if they maintain that trust and comfort, you keep them. If [the answer] is no in either case, you move on to someone else.

FuelNet: What role does a company’s strategic marketing communication program play in building customer loyalty for a brand?

Beckwith: As significant a role as your skill and imagination allow. Ordinary programs do not produce ordinary results; they produce poor results. Exceptional programs — communications that define your point of difference, corroborate it with credible evidence, and deliver the message succinctly, clearly, vividly, and persuasively — produce exceptional results, not least of all because they are so uncommon.

FuelNet: In your view, what should companies try to accomplish with their customer communication efforts? Is it realistic to believe that you can build customer relationships through a strategic communication program?

Beckwith: It’s not only realistic, it’s necessary. Part of the requirement is that you involve more of your people in communicating — you recognize that everyone in the company is the marketing department. If you genuinely care about making a difference in your clients’ lives, that can, and usually will, come through if you have reasonable communication skills. If your people and company don’t have that belief, that will come through too. It gets back, then, to having a genuine desire to improve people’s lives, and there are companies that utterly and absolutely live to do that.

FuelNet: In your opinion, what are the key elements for creating a strategic communications plan that can help forge a bond between a company and its customers? Are they consistent across various media? Or are they individualized?

Beckwith: The key element is a company that truly cares about its customers — and that tells that truth well. But yes, it must be consistent; like a person, a company that lacks identity — that is, a company that is not identical across all its media — will lack appeal. If you don’t know what the company represents, you won’t feel any bond or loyalty to it. And you can only achieve that identity, by definition, by “communicating identically.” Those words are cognate.

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