One of the new trends in building relationships with customers is the idea of giving something away – not like a slice of summer sausage from the Hickory Farms mall store (by the way: yech!), but some nugget of useful information. This can be really effective, especially when that information has value for the customer, and is actually part of what the company sells.

It’s really crazy where this idea manifests itself. A nice example of this landed in my mailbox not long ago in the form of the catalog from Walthers, the country’s most prominent wholesaler and retailer of model railroading products. (I don’t have a model railroad, but I borrow their scenery and detail bits for my model airplane hobby – hence, my receipt of their catalog on a routine basis.)

Walthers’ catalog has never been bad – it’s pages and pages of locomotives, scenery, buildings and people, all O gauge or smaller. I suspect if I was looking for a Santa Fe diesel electric in the Warbonnet paint scheme, or a Milwaukee Road dining car, or a big 3-8-8-3 brass locomotive, I could find it. That presupposes I knew what all that railroad jargon meant. If I was a newcomer, though, it was a pretty bewildering collection of stuff – where do you start? And how do you begin planning a realistic layout when the options are so many and varied?

The new catalog arrived and it looked more like a magazine. Sure, the listings were still there, as was the jargon that appealed to the hardcore railroaders that are the basis of Walthers’ business, but there were other short features. There was one on loading docks, and what goes on them to make them look realistic (pallets, hand trucks, boxes, barrels and where they would all go). Another one was about locomotive shops and their buildings, equipment and transfer tables (think of a parking lot for locomotives undergoing maintenance), which, not coincidentally, was the subject of a new product. A third talked about Amtrak Superliner cars and discussed ways to weather them. Essentially, these short articles are the kinds of things that would go in books for model railroaders (which Walthers sells, too). By sharing this information and not treating it as a proprietary product to be released only when the customer coughed up some cash, the company starts building a relationship – and they start with newer customers who don’t have 20 years of experience behind them, but who may have 20 years of model railroading ahead of them.

If I had a goofy-looking railroad engineer’s hat on right now, I’d doff it to Walthers for its effective use of a simple CRM concept.