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For most of us, marketing has been a rather mysterious subject. Many equate it to advertising and to promotion. Marketing is a very broad subject that is defined as follows:

Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves.

Well, it appears that we have a new vision on marketing that has developed since the early 2000s. Academia is all-abuzz about a subject called Services Dominant marketing, a position recognizing that operant resources (humans with knowledge and skill) are of equal importance as operand resources (products and services). That should be something all of us knew intuitively and now appears as if the academics are finally on board with us.

You might be wondering why I am making such a fuss about this. Well it is really very simple. As you know, I am completely supportive of frontline employees. These are the people who service the customers: The mechanics and the clerks, the telephone sales people and the warehouse employees – in other words, the people who make the difference for your customers. I have spent my most of my career in the parts and service business with a brief foray in the systems world, and I have seen some wonderful people perform heroically for your customers. Not a lot of fuss about them and very little recognition of their heroic works, but you know what they do for you.

Consider some of the basics of the service-centered marketing theory, and you will surely see the value of your people shining through:

• Skills and knowledge make up the fundamental unit of exchange.
• Indirect exchange (wholesale activity) masks the fundamental unit of exchange.
• Goods are distribution mechanisms for service provision.
• Knowledge is the fundamental source of competitive advantage.
• All economies are service economies.
• The customer is always the co-producer.
• The enterprise can only make value propositions.
• A service-centered view is inherently customer oriented and relational.

That is a pretty powerful list of elements describing the theory to me. It's a change from the positions of dominant theorists from the 1990s and is causing serious creative tension in the academic world. But we have an opportunity to get out in front of a change that is coming to the world of suppliers and customers, the world of customer relationships driving the decision making process. This is the logical next step in the process that we began in the 1980s with the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) movement and has morphed into several iterations from Six Sigma to Lean Management. And this is wonderful news to me.

We need to recognize now that the relationships we enjoy with our customer are a product of many aspects of the services and products that you offer in your business, all of which you should take pride in. We must further recognize that now is the time to go further. We need to engage our customers and ask them what they want us to do more of and what it is that they want us to improve on. In my experience, the customer will be more than willing to help us. It is in their own best interest.

One of the many things that I suggest to dealers is to start a "listening post" program. Create a question and ask the question to everyone who engages in communications with one of your employees. Get everyone on board to take note of all answers and comments that customers provide. Do this one week every month. At the end of every day consolidate the comments and then at the end of the week create a master list. There should be a lot of repeats or comments that can be put together into one thought – now create a "Top 10" list. Finally, call a random set of customers who contributed to the exercise and ask them to pick the top three from your top 10. You should know what you need to do at that point, shouldn't you?

You will be hearing a lot more about service-centered marketing in the future. I will be talking about it at Summit in January. This is a very positive thing for most of us. Good luck with it.