ABSTRACT
We have now reached the end of our journey through the planning, development, and application of a customer-brand value relationship program. When we started, some 300 pages earlier, we offered the premise that a new method of developing relationships with customers and prospects through various forms of marketing communication was needed. We have provided evidence throughout this text that (1) the marketplace has changed, (2) customers and prospects have changed, (3) media and delivery forms and systems have changed, (4) competitors have changed . . . in short, marketers and marketing communicators now find themselves in a radically different space everywhere in the world than was present a scant half dozen years ago. Those changes are not going to reverse themselves. Marketers will never be able to get back to what was once considered “normal,” nor return to the old days when they knew fairly well what was likely to happen next. The marketplace of the late twentieth century, which they thought they understood, is gone, probably forever. Trying to hang onto the past is not a viable option for marketing organizations. The marketing and communication arena is only going to get more complex, more difficult, more changeable, and more perplexing in the future. On the positive side, the world of marketing communication is likely to be more interesting, more exciting, and more global, providing many more opportunities for growth and development than we have ever seen before. What is scary to some, others see as a golden opportunity. It simply depends on the view they take.
