I didn’t understand what it meant to have a loving customer until I met her

The following article is an excerpt from my book The Art of Lifelong Customers: The Field Guide to Growing Profitable and Fulfilling Customer Relationships

I didn’t understand what it meant to have a loving customer until I met Mrs. Queen. Her actual name wasn’t Mrs. Queen, but she will always be a queen to me. She taught me more about marketing than all the textbooks I read and all the experiments I ran throughout my career. Mrs. Queen was a remarkable woman, a highly successful business owner, and a wise person. She was also a loyal and highly valuable customer to the company I was working with at the time.

I was a young marketing professional at a global, multi-billion-dollar company when I met her. Most days, I had my head buried in customer data and Excel charts, but that week I traveled to a foreign country where I accompanied several customers to a variety of exciting experiences, including museum visits, factory tours, dinners, and much more. These experiences were part of a VIP Customer Love Program that our team had carefully crafted for our best customers. (I will share with you how to create a program like this later in the book.)

One evening, Mrs. Queen and I were the first to arrive at a dinner event. I was nervous to be alone with her, but her warmth quickly made me feel at ease. Her presence was airy, relaxed, and at peace. I mentioned the rough thunderstorms that had just started striking outside, but Mrs. Queen didn’t seem to be affected one bit by them. Instead, she looked me straight in the eyes, leaned over, and whispered something that I remember clearly to this day: “It’s unbelievable how much work and preparation goes into each of your products. To me, each product is a unique work of art.”

As she said these words, she pointed to what she was wearing, moving her hand softly in the air from her shoulders down to her hip, as if she was gesturing “all of me is now a unique work of art.” I noticed she was dressed head to toe in our products. The bag, the flowery jacket, the shoes, everything on her was made by our company.

I know you’re probably thinking that Mrs. Queen had a little too much to drink when she said those words to me, but I assure you she was quite sober. In fact, the honesty, firmness, and urgency with which she spoke made me pause and pay attention to this great secret she was revealing. It was the last part, “a unique work of art,” that has stuck with me ever since that evening. It was true that a lot of preparation and care went into the making of each of our products, but I had never thought of them as unique works of art. To me, up until that moment, they were products, nothing more and nothing less.

But Mrs. Queen’s perception was different. When she looked at the products she bought, she didn’t see something you use or consume, even though she certainly used what she bought. She saw something you hold and cherish, something unique, that gives you as much fulfillment as a work of art would.

I realized in that moment that she wasn’t buying a product. She wasn’t buying a brand name or a logo, either. Instead, she was buying a feeling that deeply resonated with her, a feeling that added more meaning to her life. When she bought our products, she felt differently. She felt at peace with herself, as if she had sloughed off a fake, heavy overcoat and finally became the free woman she always knew she wanted to become. When she connected with us, when she attended our events, when she read our content, she felt differently. She felt like a better version of herself.

In her eyes, our products were more than just products. They were avenues that allowed her to feel more fulfilled and more connected to herself. She wasn’t seeking the product; she was seeking the fulfillment that came with buying the product from us. She could have bought our product from many other places, sometimes even at a lower price, but she chose to buy it directly from us because that’s what felt the most satisfying to her.

When I had that heart-to-heart conversation with Mrs. Queen, I finally understood the real impact that our relationship-marketing work had on customers. We didn’t just drive sales, we also helped others feel more fulfilled.

In this book, I’ll share with you what I’ve discovered about growing highly profitable and deeply fulfilling relationships with customers. You can apply the ideas in this book whether you sell a product or a service, whether you’ve been in business for a long time, or whether you’ve just started recently.

The lessons I share are based on my fourteen years of relationship-marketing experience working with Gucci, Ralph Lauren, La Redoute, KingSize Direct, MedicAlert Foundation, and other companies, on the hundreds of marketing experiments I’ve run in my career, on the extensive research I’ve done, as well as on my entrepreneurial journey since I left my fulltime role of Director of Customer Intelligence and Experience Management at Ralph Lauren.

I like to think of this book as a field guide that I wrote for you. I hold nothing back and I share all my stories with you (well, almost all of them). I’m not a big name on any chart, but the gift that I can offer you is my real-world experience, inside real companies. I want to share it all with you because I want you to have customers who adore you, who love having a relationship with you, and who buy galore from you. I want you to enjoy the deep fulfillment that comes from working with wonderful, respectful, and appreciative customers and from growing your business in ways that feel authentic to you. I hope you’ll find the book useful through your journey in business, and I hope it will serve as a reference you keep coming back to, as your needs in business evolve.

This article is an excerpt from the book The Art of Lifelong Customers: The Field Guide to Growing Profitable and Fulfilling Customer Relationships by Mihaela Akers.