Sample Solution-Community #6

Community Economic Development

Vendor-Client Communities in a Multi-Client Firm (An Advertising, Consulting, PR, Law or Accounting Firm, for example)

Challenge:
Strengthen bonds with current customer companies while building relationships with potential customer companies.

Corporate Community Solution:
Use multiple causes to create corporate communities among your customers and among your customers' customers that generate increased revenues at all levels of this hierarchy of corporate communities.

Results:
As indicated in the diagram below, it is possible to select causes that are suited to groupings of a firm's clients so that multiple corporate communities are created. Partnerships in a noble cause tend to bond companies and the individuals of those companies together. This is an effective Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) strategy.

The communities may be completed by adding companies who are not currently customers but who may want the benefits of the cause marketing and cause branding they can get from being a sponsor of the cause. This gives the multi-cliented company the opportunity to begin to build relationships with companies which could potentially become clients in the future.

Often the customer base of the client company can also be catalyzed to create multiple corporate communities around various causes supportive of the customers cause branding. This gives the customer the opportunity to increase its relationship with its own customers, build relationships with potential customers, and strengthen its brand.

Recommendation:
This model for creating a hierarchy of vendor-customer corporate communities around humanitarian or community causes will work with any company with a large base of corporate clients. However, it works best when the services of the company can be utilized in the support of the cause.

For example, if an advertising company designs a cause that is suited to the creation of a corporate community from a number of its clients, those clients will be paying the advertising company for the advertising required for the cause marketing project. Advertising will be required for the cause itself and cause marketing may also be required for each of the companies participating in the cause-based corporate community. This means the advertising company will have generated a substantial need for its services from multiple fronts.

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