In becoming more market-facing, these railroads have had to become customer savvy--a significant evolution for companies that did no marketing for most of their history. This has required
substantial organizational shifts: Companies that thought of their basic business as one-size-fits-all utility offerings have to learn to build product and service offerings to meet specific customer
needs.
If railroads embrace marketing as a science for helping them understand what customers want and then giving them what they need, they can escape low margins and low growth rates, achieve much higher performance, and build a more sustainable and loyal customer base than anyone might have imagined previously.
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