Category: Small Business

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The Importance of Content Marketing for Manufacturing Companies

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, businesses must adapt their marketing strategies to remain competitive. Manufacturing companies, in particular, face increased competition and changes in the industry that require them to stand out from the crowd. One effective way to do so is through Content Marketing for Manufacturing Companies. Content marketing allows manufacturers to build brand recognition, attract and retain customers, and establish thought leadership. In this blog post, we will explore the importance of content marketing for manufacturing companies, the benefits it can provide, best practices for implementation, common challenges, and strategies to overcome them.

What Is Content Marketing and Why Is It Vital for Manufacturing Companies

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. The content can take many forms, such as blog posts, videos, social media posts, whitepapers, and more.

For manufacturing companies, content marketing is highly relevant as it enables them to showcase their expertise, demonstrate their thought leadership, and build brand recognition. It also allows them to educate potential customers on their products, services, and industry trends, ultimately helping them to attract and retain customers. Additionally, content marketing can provide a competitive advantage for manufacturing companies, enabling them to differentiate themselves from their competitors and position themselves as industry leaders. In short, content marketing can be an effective tool for manufacturing companies to achieve their marketing goals and succeed in today’s digital age. Mantec writes:

“Content marketing for manufacturing companies is becoming increasingly competitive every year. The percentage of organizations with mature or sophisticated content marketing strategies grew from 29% to 39% in 2020. Investing in content marketing allows you to keep up with industry leaders and gain a competitive advantage over manufacturing firms that are stuck in the past. Unlike traditional platforms that are cluttered with advertisements vying for attention, content-based channels provide a clear pathway to reach your target market.”

What Manufacturing Companies Need to Know About Content Marketing

Content marketing has become increasingly crucial for manufacturing companies due to several factors, including changes in the manufacturing industry, increased competition, and the importance of brand recognition.

Firstly, the manufacturing industry has undergone significant changes in recent years, with advancements in technology and increased globalization. As a result, it has become increasingly challenging for manufacturing companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors and maintain a competitive edge. Content marketing for manufacturing companies can help them to showcase their unique value proposition, thought leadership, and expertise, thereby distinguishing them from their competitors.

Secondly, the manufacturing industry has become increasingly competitive, with new players entering the market, and existing companies constantly seeking to expand their market share. Content marketing can be an effective tool for manufacturing companies to attract and retain customers by providing them with valuable information, insights, and solutions to their pain points. IndustryWeek writes: 

“Manufacturers are going through a fundamental rethink of their supply chain structures and long-term talent development plans as they look toward a post-COVID future. There is also a structural shift in priorities, attitudes and investments related to environmental consciousness. While ongoing inflation pains will hopefully stabilize as supply-chain capacity issues ease and the federal interest rate hikes work their way through the system, these structural shifts in the manufacturing sector, accelerated by the pandemic, may contribute to inflation in the mid- to longer term.”

Finally, brand recognition has become crucial for manufacturing companies as it can help them to establish trust and credibility with potential customers. Content marketing can help manufacturing companies to build their brand recognition by providing relevant and valuable content that resonates with their target audience. This can ultimately lead to increased brand loyalty, customer retention, and a competitive advantage.

The Benefits of Content Marketing for Manufacturing Companies

Content marketing can provide several benefits for manufacturing companies. By creating and distributing valuable content, manufacturing companies can achieve their marketing goals and succeed in today’s digital age. Here are some examples:

Attracting and Retaining Customers: Content marketing for manufacturing companies can help to attract and retain customers. By providing relevant and informative content, manufacturing companies can showcase their expertise, build trust, and establish a strong relationship with potential and existing customers. This can ultimately lead to increased customer loyalty, higher conversion rates, and revenue growth.

Thought Leadership: Content marketing can help manufacturing companies establish thought leadership. By sharing their expertise and insights through various content formats such as blog posts, videos, and webinars, manufacturing companies can position themselves as industry leaders, thereby increasing their credibility and reputation.

Build Trust: Content marketing can help manufacturing companies build trust with potential customers. By providing valuable and relevant content, manufacturing companies can address the pain points of their target audience and demonstrate their commitment to solving their customers’ problems.

Provide Competitive Advantages: Content marketing can provide a competitive advantage for manufacturing companies. By creating high-quality content that resonates with their target audience, manufacturing companies can differentiate themselves from their competitors and establish themselves as the go-to source for information and solutions.

Best Practices for Content Marketing in the Manufacturing Industry

Content marketing for manufacturing companies can be effective if certain best practices are followed. These include:

Identifying the target audience: Knowing your target audience is critical for manufacturing companies because it helps to ensure that the content they create is relevant, valuable, and resonates with their potential and existing customers. In today’s highly competitive manufacturing industry, understanding the needs and interests of your target audience is essential to building trust and establishing a competitive advantage.

Manufacturing companies must first identify their target audience, which may include engineers, procurement officers, or other professionals who are involved in the purchasing and decision-making process for manufacturing products. Once they have identified their target audience, they can begin to understand their pain points, interests, and needs. This information can then be used to create content that addresses their specific challenges and interests.

For example, if a manufacturing company’s target audience is engineers, they may create content that focuses on the latest technological advancements or best practices for designing and building products. By addressing these topics, the manufacturing company can establish themselves as a thought leader and build trust with their target audience, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will do business with them in the future.

Creating content that resonates with the target audience: Creating content that addresses the specific pain points and interests of your target audience is crucial for manufacturing companies for several reasons.

Manufacturing companies operate in a complex and technical industry, and their products and services can often be difficult to understand for those outside of the industry. By creating content that addresses the specific pain points and interests of their target audience, manufacturing companies can simplify complex topics and provide relevant and valuable information to potential and existing customers. Creating content that addresses your target audience’s specific pain points and interests can help to differentiate your company from your competitors. By providing unique insights and information that is tailored to your audience’s needs, you can establish yourself as a thought leader and create a competitive advantage in the market.

Leveraging different content formats: Leveraging various content formats is crucial for manufacturing companies because it allows them to engage with a diverse range of audiences who consume content in different ways. For example, some people may prefer to read blog posts, while others may prefer to watch videos or view infographics.

Manufacturing companies should take advantage of different content formats to appeal to different types of people and cater to their preferences. This approach increases the chances of engaging with their target audience and providing them with valuable information in a format they find appealing.

For example, a manufacturing company may create blog posts to provide in-depth insights into industry trends, videos to showcase their products and services, infographics to simplify complex topics, and social media posts to engage with their audience and promote their content.

Distributing content through various channels: Distributing content through various channels is crucial for manufacturing companies to ensure that their target audience sees their content. Manufacturing companies operate in a complex industry, and their target audience may not be actively searching for information related to their products and services. Therefore, it’s essential to distribute content through multiple channels to reach their target audience where they are most active and engaged.

Social Media Channels: The Importance of Content Marketing for Manufacturing Companies
Hubspot

Social media is one of the most effective channels for distributing content for manufacturing companies. Manufacturing companies can create social media accounts on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, and post their content regularly to reach their target audience. Social media allows manufacturing companies to engage with their audience and promote their content, which can lead to increased visibility and engagement. According to Engineering.com:

“Far and away, the most effective social media platform for manufacturing marketers is LinkedIn, with 79% of respondents selecting this as a top producer of results in 2021. The next-highest answer was YouTube with 35% – a steep drop-off.”

Email marketing is another effective channel for distributing content for manufacturing companies. By sending regular newsletters and updates to their email subscribers, manufacturing companies can keep their audience informed about their latest products, services, and industry news. Email marketing is an excellent way to establish a direct line of communication with potential and existing customers and keep them engaged with your brand.

Crucial Role of a Blog in Content Marketing for Manufacturing Companies

Having a blog is an essential aspect of content marketing for manufacturing companies. A blog provides a platform for manufacturing companies to create and share valuable content with their target audience. By creating blog content that addresses their audience’s pain points, interests, and needs, manufacturing companies can establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry.

Blogs also provide an opportunity for manufacturing companies to showcase their expertise, knowledge and services. By creating in-depth, informative blog posts, manufacturing companies can demonstrate their expertise and build trust with potential customers. This trust can translate into increased brand recognition, leads, and sales.

Moreover, blogs can help manufacturing companies to drive traffic to their website. Search engines love fresh, relevant content, and blogs provide an opportunity for manufacturing companies to create and publish new content regularly. By optimizing blog content for search engines, manufacturing companies can improve their website’s search engine rankings and attract more organic traffic to their website.

In addition to attracting and retaining customers, a blog can also create a competitive advantage for manufacturing companies. A blog can differentiate manufacturing companies from their competitors by providing valuable information that sets them apart. By consistently producing high-quality blog content, manufacturing companies can build a strong online presence and attract more leads and customers than their competitors.

Strategies for Overcoming Content Marketing Challenges in the Manufacturing Industry

Content marketing can be a challenging task for manufacturing companies, but with the right strategies, it is possible to overcome these challenges. Here are some effective strategies for overcoming content marketing challenges in the manufacturing industry:

Outsourcing content creation: Outsourcing content creation can be an effective way for manufacturing companies to overcome the challenge of creating high-quality content consistently. Partnering with a content marketing agency or freelance writers can help manufacturing companies to produce high-quality content at a reasonable cost. 

Nevertheless, outsourcing content creation can sometimes result in poor results if the content creator does not have a deep understanding of the manufacturing industry. Outsourcing to a general content creator who lacks this knowledge can result in generic or irrelevant content that does not resonate with the target audience. For manufacturing companies, this is especially important as their audience is typically highly technical and requires specific knowledge to be engaged. It’s important for manufacturing companies to work with content creators who have a solid understanding of the industry and can create content that speaks directly to their target audience. According to Search Engine Land:


“Anyone can call themselves a freelancer and present a fluffed-up resume to impress. That doesn’t mean they can deliver. You’ll often end up with bad content, missed deadlines, or someone who ghosts you after you hire them.

Roughly half of companies outsource content writing, but one in ten stopped outsourcing because the results didn’t measure up.”

Focusing on quality over quantity: Manufacturing is often focused on producing large quantities of products. The manufacturing industry should, however, emphasize quality over quantity when it comes to content marketing. This is because manufacturing companies typically have a highly technical audience who require specific information and insights. In the age of information overload, quality content is more likely to stand out and capture the attention of a target audience. 

Utilizing analytics to track performance: Analytics are a powerful tool for manufacturing companies to measure the success of their content marketing efforts. By tracking metrics such as website traffic, engagement rates, and conversions, manufacturing companies can gain valuable insights into how their target audience is interacting with their content. These insights can be used to adjust content marketing strategies and create more effective campaigns. In addition, analytics can help manufacturing companies to identify which types of content are most popular with their target audience, allowing them to create more of the content that resonates with their audience. By continually analyzing metrics and adjusting strategies accordingly, manufacturing companies can stay ahead of the curve and ensure that their content marketing efforts are delivering the desired results.

The Impact of Content Marketing on Manufacturing Companies

In conclusion, content marketing has become a crucial tool for manufacturing companies to attract and retain customers, establish thought leadership, build trust with potential customers, and create a competitive advantage. To be successful, manufacturing companies should identify their target audience, create high-quality content that resonates with them, leverage different content formats, and distribute content through various channels. While outsourcing content creation can sometimes provide poor results, focusing on quality over quantity and utilizing analytics to track performance can help manufacturing companies overcome content marketing challenges. With the right approach, content marketing can have a significant impact on manufacturing companies, helping them stay competitive in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

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A Terrible Idea that is Great: Kill All Meetings

A few years ago, I was called into a meeting with my supervisor and two of my management colleagues to discuss a lack of productivity on our teams; deadlines were being missed, work was not being checked and was shoddy, and projects were off track and disorganized.

She suggested that everybody come prepared with a few items that we could implement to help get this production issue under control.  My first colleague came up with the idea of a “committee” that would hold weekly reviews of all the work going on, to ensure that work was up to standard.  Excellent!

My other colleague came up with a series of forms that would have to “signed off” by both the person doing the work, the supervisor and the client, to ensure that the work was being done and on time, and that it was up to our standards.  A paper trail! Greatness!

I came with one suggestion: Stop having meetings.

Gasp.  They looked at me as if I had lost my mind.  Stop having meetings?  How will we ever know what is going on?  How will we ever communicate to our teams what we want!  Terrible idea!

When the collective panic subsided, I stated my case:

The reason that work was being done late, missed or turned in under-standard wasn’t because our employees were incompetent or did not understand their jobs, it was because they weren’t spending enough time at their desks doing actual work.  I laid out some of the calendars of some of the members on my team and showed them that on the average, each member was spending at the minimum, two hours a day in meetings; 10 hours of prime productivity every week.  I was spending 4-6 hours a day in meetings; even though myself and my team members came in early, stayed late and spent time in the office on weekends, there still wasn’t enough time in the day to concentrate on the work at hand with all the meetings on our calendar (the meetings were often scattered throughout the day). Any communication could be handled by email, or if urgent, a phone call. I concluded: If you want production, timeliness and quality to go up, cancel these meetings unless it is an emergency; a very last resort.

We went with the committee option. Things didn’t get much better.

When I began with my current employer, they were faced with many of the same problems: shoddy work, missed deadlines, etc.  I suggested cancelling meetings and to my delight and surprise, they agreed to try it out for a month. Also to my delight, something started to happen with the members of my team:

They stopped missing deadlines and started getting shit done.

As a result of this, we have perhaps 1-2 meetings a month, and the results continue to speak for themselves.

Meetings, in a word, suck. They are like the office dress code: a business dinosaur of another era. They are the killers of innovation and creativity.   In this day of enhanced communication, there is really no reason to have a meeting unless you absolutely must.  Meetings should be the absolute last resort.

As Peter Drucker points out in his book The Effective Executive, “one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”

Nobody wants to go to them anyway

Cancelling meetings, while seemingly a radical idea, is in reality what all workers secretly hope for; everybody hates going to meetings.  A recent survey by Microsoft of roughly 38,000 people worldwide found that U.S. workers spent 5.5 hours in meetings each week—and 71 percent said those meetings weren’t productive.  This non-productive time ain’t cheap either: some estimates put the national cost in lost time and wasted talent as high as $200 billion every year.

For management it is even worse; according to the same Microsoft study, some CEO’s and upper-management spend about 60% of their time in meetings. Because of this, they are unavailable most of the time during business hours to make key decisions, or monitor the work their employees are producing.

So, we have established that meetings are a waste of time, nobody wants to have them and nobody is getting any work done, yet it begs the question:  Why are we still having so many meetings?

The answer seems to be for the same reason your company has a pointless holiday party every year: Because that’s the way it’s always been done.

Culture changes, especially with an old rock like meetings, are hard to change. Some methodologies, like the darling of development Agile, are based upon having (gawd) daily meetings (even if they disguise it with terms like “Standup”, it’s still a meeting). People will resist this approach, but in order to show that killing meetings is a good idea you will have to produce:

– Hand in that report early

– Be on time with every assignment

– Have your work be flawless and beyond expectations

– Add some extra items to your task list

-Get your emails to inbox zero.

An increase in productivity at your job and not on Facebook is the goal here: the chance for showing that your time is being better spent at your desk instead of in a conference room is in your hands.  Change is hard for people to accept,  but you can’t argue with results.

Oh sure, you’re thinking: “This sounds great, but how do I keep from being dragged into the countless meetings that bombard my inbox on a daily basis?”

For starters, you could use this powerful word: No.

“No” is tough for most people to swallow, but it goes down a lot easier if you follow it up with options: Let everybody know you are not having meetings, even project status meetings,  but let everybody know that you are available for them to come see you, call or email.  Communication through email means you are going to get tons more and you might actually have to answer it in a timely manner,  but it is still a more efficient option.  For your projects, send out a status report with action items to get done.  If anybody has questions, they can reply back.  For your direct reports, have them make a brief status report or fill out a status on the items they are working on in some online tool like Asana (free), Basecamp or AtTask.

Or you could negotiate, as Leo Babauta demonstrates in his great book The Power of Less: always ask people if they really need you for a meeting. If they say yes, ask if you couldn’t give your input via email, via telephone, or in a 1:1 talk. Or maybe they only need you for 10 minutes during that 4-hour meeting, so how about you only show up to give input during that slot?

Whatever works for you, make sure it ends with the same goal: no meetings unless it is an absolute, unavoidable crisis.  And even then, keep it short (I’m not going to waste bandwidth on tips for holding meetings; Google is saturated with suggestions).

So there you have it: hold less meetings and get shit done.  Seems simple right; well, it is.  After all, I was able to find time to write this article because…I have no meetings.

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A corporate benefit all companies can afford: Get rid of the dress code

I have a confession to make: sometimes when I have lots of work to do and I am going to be at my desk all day, I take off my shoes.  It’s just more comfortable for me and allows me to think more clearly then when I have dress shoes on.

Can you guess how many people in my office know this?  Zero.  Unless I walk around my office, or have somebody stop by my desk, nobody sees me for the entire day.  Many people I know are in the same sort of position as myself: they do not have many face-to face contacts with other workers or clients and yet they are still being forced to adhere to a dress code that is simply out of touch with today’s workforce.

When I began in the workforce in the late 1980’s, the code of dress was even stricter: Men had to wear jackets and ties and the women had to wear skirts and hose.  “Casual Friday” meant we got to ditch the jacket and tie for what we commonly wear to work now.  We could wear jeans to work a few days out the year but they were usually centered around some corporate event.

I remember there being a shift in the dress code around the middle 1990’s, but it wasn’t without a great deal of apprehension from the senior management of the company: What if somebody dresses inappropriately?  What if the employee’s start acting less professional?   What will our clients think?  After much hand-wringing they decided to change the dress code from suits/tie/skirt/hose to the casual Friday wear and jeans on Friday.  You can probably guess what happened next:

Nothing.

Business went on as usual: people wore the appropriate attire (the people who crossed the line on their choice of clothes turned out to be people the company didn’t want anyway), productivity continued and eventually the clients (and almost everybody else) changed their dress codes too.  The world did not end.  With this in mind, I say to the business leaders of the world: time to take the next step and get rid of the dress code completely.

I loved the show Mad Men.  It was like watching a live time capsule: set in 1961, the men wore suits and smoked and drank in their offices, demeaned their employees and delegated women to minor roles such as secretaries and hostesses (until of course, they got married and quit their jobs).  I asked my father if that was accurate and he confirmed it for the most part: he had never seen someone with a bar in their office where he worked, but he knew of others that had, yet otherwise it was spot on.  It was, he explained, the way it had always been.

As modern-day office worker, how many of the things from the Mad Men era survived?  Practically none (women still are not equal to men in business, but that’s another column).  Smoking is banned, nobody drinks in the office or at lunch any more, management is trained on how to get the best out of their employees without belittling them and there are much more opportunities for women.

Did the American economy collapse?  Of course not, the times simply changed and business changed with it; this is what I am suggesting should happen now.  With easy access to the internet, email and wifi you don’t even have to be in an office anymore, much less dress up, and the relationship between corporate workers is more virtual (the majority of people I interact with every day aren’t even located in my state).  So we are we holding up this pretense of wearing slacks equals productivity/professionalism?

According to an article on the Inc. website, the trend against work dress codes is coming and there is little anybody can do about it.

“Formality is breaking down–just think of Mark Zuckerberg in his hoodies and the explosion in flat organizations. Is this all for the better?  Formality is like a virus that infects the productive tissue of an organization.  When did you last hear a programmer or designer clamor to wear a suit to work? The order always come from the executives (followed shortly by a request for those TPS reports!).  In other words, it’s all about posture, not productivity.”

Case studies on successful organizations such as Google, Facebook, Apple and top creative agencies that have eliminated their dress code show they have not missed a beat with their productivity.  In a profile on Google by Fast Company, it noted “The search giant’s lack of a formal dress code means employees’ clothing choices run the gamut of buttoned-up button-downs accessorized with pearl earrings to jeans and T-shirts. But that hasn’t hurt productivity. In fact, while some staff liken its Garage innovation space to a cross between kindergarten and a classy law firm, Google is consistently ranked as one of the top best companies to work for.”

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban takes it a step further by stating that a casual dress code policy could be a benefit that their employees will love and does not cost them a cent.

“If you are a CEO, are there not better things your employees could spend money on than multiple suits, ties, dress shirts, dress shoes, dress socks, dry cleaning, and all the other associated costs ? Gee, no suits would be the same as giving your employees a tax free raise. Think that might make them happy ? Or do employees consider having to spend money on suits a perk?”

Gary Vaynerchuk, CEO of Vayner Media, believes the issue of a office dress code and professionalism comes down to context:

“To say that professionalism is one way or the other is complete insanity. To a twenty-five year old startup guy or gal, professionalism is a hoodie and jeans. To a fifty-three year old Madison Avenue executive, professionally dressed is, at the bare minimum, a dress shirt and jacket. Context. And as these two worlds collide, you start getting a mix. Some people are wearing hoodies on Wall Street, and we do Formal Friday at VaynerMedia.

Over the next decade as these worlds come together, they will become all one and the same. Professionalism will be agnostic.”

There is no real reason for us to keep this up: if Steve Jobs could transform society by wearing jeans, a black turtleneck and Nikes everyday, why can’t people at other companies?  Is the wrapper on the gift more important than the gift inside?

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Where’s the Love? Why companies need to invest more in loyal customers

Last night I cancelled my DirecTV service.  I had been a customer for 7 years; I had bought special services and packages from them. The decision to cancel them was based upon several factors: spending too much time watching TV, other cost-effective entertainment options, not enjoying the channels that were available to me, but the largest factor came down to my experience with DirecTV themselves: They never did anything for me; they just didn’t seem to care.

I never seemed to get any incentives from them for being a good, loyal customer.  I got fliers in the mail all the time for them advertising specials like low cost packages or free HBO, but when I called to ask them, it was always the same answer: incentives were for new customers only.

I can understand the need to gain new customers, but why was there no incentives for customers who kept the lights on?  Customers who paid their bills in full on time?  Why once you are in the door, are you forgotten?

The problem of customer loyalty isn’t just with the cable entertainment industry: Airlines, Grocery Stores, Retail Stores, Hotels are all suffering the loss of customers through either poor, non-realistic programs or no customer loyalty at all.

According to consumer advocate and journalist Christopher Elliott, loyalty programs “are not in touch with reality because their judgment is clouded by money. Pay attention to the affiliate links on their sites and you’ll see that their rewards don’t come from the programs they promote, but from the generous bonuses they receive when someone signs up for an affinity credit card they hawk.

The cheerleaders will continue pushing these programs until the bottom falls out of them. A vast majority of them don’t care about you. They are the emperors fiddling while Rome burns. They are like the last men standing at the top of the pyramid scheme, insisting that everything is fine. But everything is not fine.”

Loyalty just isn’t what it used to be

One theory about why there is decline in the incentives for customer loyalty is there is lack of loyalty not just with the companies, but also with the consumers.  According to Forbes, 46% of consumers believe they are more likely to switch compared to 10 years ago. Accenture conducted a study entitled “The $6 trillion opportunity: How digital improves customer experience” which noted “Consumers continuously evaluate providers and have become nonstop customers. The tangible result is a growing “switching economy” that accounts for an estimated $6.2 trillion in revenue opportunity for providers across 17 key markets today—up 26 percent, from $4.9 trillion, in 2010.”

Another reason some loyalty programs are being shunned by consumers is the rewards being offered are not really rewards at all.  Elliott notes that many rewards programs do not offer rewards as much as they give you a currency you must spend;  and even that isn’t really worth it to the loyal customer.  Speaking specifically on the travel industry: “For most travelers, loyalty programs are not worth the effort anymore. That’s because, as I’ve previously explained, they have a negative value. Put differently, by the time you’ve collected the points, and gone through the effort of redeeming them, you will have spent more money than if you’d just bought the product without any consideration for loyalty.”

Spending on the 20%

So what’s the solution?  It maybe simply to change the mindset of the company from to how to milk more money from their current customer base to offering real incentives.  According to Pareto’s principle, 80% of your sales come from only 20% of your customers; so why not spend more on the 20 %?  An infographic from the B2B community website shows that the benefits for spending on the 20% are literally endless.

Or how about the radical idea of eliminating the loyalty program altogether and give the savings to all customers – old and new?  Time magazine writes about the supermarket company that runs the Albertsons, Shaw’s, Acme Markets, and Jewel-Osco brands announcing the elimination of all loyalty programs.

“Shaw’s, for instance, has been pushing the change as “Card Free Savings,” in which “Everybody gets a low price,” regardless of whether the shopper is a loyalty program member or can produce a card to get zapped at the register. “The card isn’t so special anymore,” the grocery company announced via its website. “Everyone has one. So we want to take the special step of not requiring one anymore.”

DirecTV lost a loyal, good customer in me.  It was never about the money I was spending as much as it was about the company not really caring about me and the investment I had made.  Even a little incentive might have kept me there.  As they are learning, as well other companies, in the digital age when there are hundreds of more options to choose from, consumers may start voicing their dissatisfaction and letting their large companies know they are there by hurting them in the place they will notice: the bottom line.