Recent Articles

• Customer Experience: How you deal with the unexpected can have the most impact
  Brand perception and value, particularly in service industries, is determined primarily not by advertising, public relations or other traditional marketing vehicles but by how good your customer feels during and after the time they do business with your company. And the key to a truly delightful experience can often be how well your company handles a situation when something goes wrong.
  
  Read more
  
  
  
• Marketing Matters: Q&A with Naras Eechambadi
  Originally published in Marketing Matters newsletter, October 17, 2006.

  Naras Eechambadi is CEO of Quaero Corporation, a marketing and technology services firm based in Charlotte, NC. He is also the author of High Performance Marketing, a book that discusses how marketing executives can maximize information resources, organizational structures, technology, and communication to enhance their overall marketing.

  Read more
  
  
  
• Customer Loyalty is Not Always What it Seems
  By Naras V. Eechambadi, Ph.D., Quaero

  ”Forced” customer loyalty, that is when customers seem loyal because they really do not have reasonable, competitive choices, proves ephemeral when market conditions change, says former McKinsey consultant Naras V. Eechambadi, CEO, Quaero Corporation.

  Read more
  
  
  
• Customer Retention is a Multi-dimensional Issue
  By Naras V. Eechambadi, Ph.D., Quaero

  Customer retention may not be sexy, but it certainly can be profitable, says former McKinsey consultant Naras Eechambadi*, PhD, CEO, Quaero Corporation. Customer management is not rocket science. It is pretty basic business common sense. There are three primary elements to it. Acquire, grow and retain customers. Of these three elements, the first two capture most of the attention and mind share of the majority of
  marketers as well as senior executives in many companies. This month I want to focus on the third, often neglected, area of customer retention.

  Read more
  
  
  
• Getting what you paid for: Winning customers through an acquisition
  By Naras V. Eechambadi, Ph.D., Quaero

  Financial markets typically react to news of a corporate acquisition by driving down the stock of the acquirer and bidding up the price of the target company. Why, if the acquisition is a smart move, should the markets drive down the stock of the acquirer?

  Read more
  
  
  
• Analytics Can Make Your Numbers Really Add Up
  By Naras V. Eechambadi, Ph.D., Quaero

  At Quaero, we run into a number of clients who have large marketing budgets and staff but don't have a commensurate strength in marketing analytics. When I dig deeper, I often find out that analytics has historically not been proven to be a significant driver of performance, value or differentiation. In these companies, analytics is often an outsourced activity, performed by contractors who are asked to deliver on specific end products, such as a predictive model for a particular campaign or a marketing mix allocation model. The organizations don't view it as strategic but, rather, as something to be plugged in when needed.

  Read more
  
  
  
• Marketing Shouldn’t Always Drive Customer Strategy
  
  Customer strategy lies—or should lie—at the heart of customer relationship management. It defines a company’s objective with regard to its customers: acquiring them, serving them and retaining them. It involves understanding the nature of customers, the relationships and the different flavors customers and relationships come in, as well as the factors driving those differences. So what is, or should be, marketing’s role in defining and driving customer strategy?
  
  Download PDF
  
  
  
• Marketing Executives Sought—But Didn't Quite Find—More Accountability in 2005
  
  Over the past few years, analytic CRM and marketing applications have been among the most active and fast growing areas within CRM. We saw that trend continuing in 2005.
  
  Download PDF
  
  
  
• Big Ideas
  
  A profile of Quaero CEO Naras Eechambadi from the Charlotte Business Journal, November 25, 2005.
  
  Download PDF
  
  
  
• In Marketing Analytics, Business Needs Drive Technology Adoption
  By Naras Eechambadi, Quaero
  
  You might think that when a technology is trendy, you would have questions of business ownership. Organizations would buy the technology before knowing what to do with it. But in the case of marketing analytics, a fairly hot area within the broader realm on CRM, my experience with a range of clients, small and large, in financial services, automotive, pharma and high tech, is that business needs truly drive technology use, and the questions of ownership fall by the wayside.
  
  Download PDF
  
  
  
• Marketing Increasingly Under the Microscope
  › › ›   ClickZ News
  By Kevin Newcomb | November 10, 2005
  
  If your organization has not yet started looking at marketing as a manageable business process, chances are it will begin to do so soon.
  
  Download PDF
  
  
  
• Unraveling the Marketing Mystique
  From Strategic Finance Magazine, July 2005
  
  Perhaps no other major area of corporate spending and investment is as hard to measure and to hold accountable as marketing (although sales and IT can provide some stiff competition!). The reason? Marketing can have so many different objectives that sometimes seem to be contradictory or irreconcilable, and the impact of marketing can also vary a great deal from the ephemeral to the very real.
  
  Download PDF
  
  
  
• Marketing Can Be Accountable and Creative:
  An Interview With Naras Eechambadi
  The old days when businesses took marketing spending on faith are over. But marketing doesn't have to give up its finer side for the sake of accountability, argues Naras Eechambadi, author of High Performance Marketing: Bringing Method to the Madness of Marketing. CRMGuru.com founder Bob Thompson interviewed Eechambadi on Oct. 20, 2005, on the best ways to improve marketing performance.

  Download PDF ››