Marketing and Business 101

Relationship Marketing

Relationship Marketing is not selling to your relations, but rather developing meaningful relationships within your community and supporting those relationships in any way you can.

Once, I had the pleasure of talking with Darrell Maynard, President of Eastern Telephone Company, and his Director of Marketing, Bambi Phillips

Darrell is a big believer in helping people reach their goals, and they in turn will help you reach yours. 100% of his marketing effort is relationship based.

Serving over 63 Counties in Eastern and Central Kentucky Eastern Telephone Company markets by supporting community efforts and by supporting the interests of the Agents who sell his services. For example, when Extreme Makeover Home Edition came into the area to help a local family the employees of Eastern Telephone Company were there for seven days preparing food for the 2nd shift of volunteer construction workers. Not only did they donate their time, but also their grill, (it's the extra large kind that has to be towed behind a vehicle), and the food.

For the entire week there was no signage saying who they were, nor did they wear any logo'ed clothing. They were simply there to support the community. In the following weeks people found out who had supported this project and sales increased dramatically.

During the school year they give bottles of water, (with their logo on each bottle), to schools to sell at sporting events. This allows the teams to raise money and gets their name out at the same time.  Personally, I think this is an excellent way to put your name in front of people.

Their agents throughout the state also have special community interests, such as Habitat for Humanity. By donating time or water or whatever, in the agents name they increase the agents visibility in the community and strengthen the relationship between the agent and themselves.

Types of things they do include:  cooking for various civic and community events, providing water for schools to re-sell, giving logo'ed apparel to their agents (with the agents logo not Eastern Telephone's logo), providing other promotional products with the agent's logo on it.

By supporting the agents and the community in this manner Eastern Telephone Company has experienced a very healthy growth rate. In fact, the company grew so fast that they have found it difficult to keep up with the demand. They have outgrown their spacious offices and had to buy another building to house some of their staff.

There is one downside to this type of marketing: measure-ability. It is impossible to traditionally measure the effect of any single community effort. But Bambi's attitude is: "If it works sales will go up."

And sales have definitely gone up . . . and up.