davidpoulos.com

Category: Data

The Advantage of Primary Source Data With Respect To Aggregated, Accumulated or Transactional Data

By Dave Poulos, Chief Consultant, Granite Partners, LLC

Big Data – There, I said it, now the bots can find this article and show it to the millions of eyeballs watching the internet for articles on big data and Big Brother. We are all contributing daily to this giant cache of data, every move we make, from buying groceries, to pumping gas, to using a toll road, to making a phone call or sending a text, to posting on social media, we’re adding to the huge pool of information called big data. But here’s the problem – data isn’t knowledge, and knowledge isn’t wisdom. Just because we collect facts, aggregate them, sift them, analyze them, order and rank them, connect the dots between them – doesn’t mean we really KNOW those individuals who originated the data. We can only make educated guesses, informed by history, not intent.

It has been said that trying to harness that massive stream of data and use it to make decisions is like trying to drink from a fully-charged municipal fire hose – the power can literally blow your head off! The real trick to using data to make, or at least inform decisions, is to select the bits that get you closer to the truth of the motivation you’re trying to trigger. From a marketing standpoint, finding what to measure is at least as big a challenge as how tomeasure it, and how you use the answers to guide marketing outreach activity. Once you’ve made some determination as to what data you need, you can nearly always find a way to extract and aggregate it to use to your advantage. But how do you decide what you’re looking for?

One of the best sources of solid, reliable, workable data we’ve discovered in actual practice is primary research with a split pool of the target audience. We use both digital survey and long-form, In-Depth Interview (IDI) methodology to glean primary customer insight data from a split pool of logical likely customers and actual purchasers. The phone interviews are structured like a conversation, the questions asked in a seemingly logical order, although not always in the same order from call to call. Each call is recorded, and transcripts made of each. This is what assures the research staff that they have “covered all the bases” and that each call is consistent with the goal of the study. The responses are analyzed to glean insights as to satisfaction or awareness, or preference, or attitude toward, or dislike of a product, service or brand. There are many uses for this methodology, but the results are almost always enlightening and revealing. Unfortunately for the enterprise IT specialist, this is one methodology you can’t throw more hardware and software at to scale up or solve a problem – the only compatible hard drive available is in each person’s head, and the software is custom made and varies by individual’s emotional and intellectual make-up.

Once the IDI data has been analyzed, some consistent issues will invariably present themselves among the target audience – they will all or almost all mention one or two specific likes, dislikes, preferences, or peeves, about the product or service. Now the challenge is to see how wide and how deep the problem with these elements runs, and if it affects the buying decision to a significant degree. Survey research is now employed to drill down and discover the depth of the problem. The ins and outs of survey marketing are myriad, and best practices are easily found elsewhere. Suffice to say here that by overlaying the survey data upon the IDI inputs, a very accurate, true picture of the customer’s viewpoint can be created.

This data, when analyzed, can give you invaluable insights in to all sorts of different emotional triggers, life-stage triggers, off-label uses, alternative audiences, and a host of intelligence regarding the product with respect to the intended target audience. For companies wishing to be or become customer-centric in their approach, these insights are vital to the effort, as they form the platform from which you build an engaging customer experience. If you know what the audience wants, you can deliver it, preferably in a way that resonates with that audience, is economically feasible to produce and buy, at the time when it is most advantageous to both.

The best part of using primary insights to guide your creation of marketing outreach is that not only do you know you’re correct – the customer said so – but that it will hold up over time. Customer insights are not dependent on past activity, on a transaction that has been made at some point in the past. If you study how consumers make buying decisions, you’ll discover that there are a host of factors involved in making that decision, many of which are situational. In other words, if that same products were presented to the consumer under different circumstances, it may not be as preferable as it was when the transaction occurred. The time of day, the financial situation of the purchaser, the proximity to other destinations or products, the lighting in the aisle, the breath or cologne of the sales person, a huge number of variables you have no access to have to align in order to drive that transaction forward.

Transactional data will never really reveal those variables, and while some can be controlled for using predictive software algorithms, the technology is imperfect and incomplete – humans are regrettably inconsistent. When you’re betting tens of millions of dollars on a marketing campaign, it may not be a good idea to rely solely on past purchase history and algorithms, and ground your decisions in data that considers the present, the future, and the emotional triggers of the purchase, not just the variables you can’t control.

Removal of those variables, or at least controlling for them, can provide you with insights far beyond the current strategy or campaign plan, and lead you down roads to revenue you never even considered. An ongoing program of gathering and analyzing customer insights only strengthens and broadens the value of the insight data, and the richer that data, the more on-target you can be. Those additional streams of revenue from off-label usages, new markets, affinity and co-branded products, follow-on services and upsell strategies that actually work can add up to millions of dollars in the positive column for an enterprise-scale firm. The upfront investment in a customer insight program may appear steep at the outset, but when balanced against the potential upside and the lack of waste or loss due to misinterpretation or contaminated data, it looks like a bargain in the long run, one most enterprises would be smart to leverage.

September 19, 2016
If Your Brand Was A Person, Would You Date Them?
Brand gets defined in many different ways depending on the source, the context and the scope and depth of the investigation and the purpose of the definition. We’ve found a great way to help simplify this definition process and allow marketers to cut to the heart of the brand and incorporate that insight into all of their marketing efforts more seamlessly and easily.

Brands function as an identity for companies, just like a name does for people. Brands have a reputation, just like people. Brands have a personality, just like people (brandinality?). So why not examine your brand as if it were a person? Brand personalization is a great way to help your company’s employees and associates think of your firm in a consistent, easily-relatable fashion, one they can tell others about quickly and easily.

It’s also a way to get to know your brand better, because people are hard wired to humanize inanimate objects in order to better understand and relate to them, a fact that is a founding principle of the Disney company, and the basis for their movies and animated features. Think talking tea kettles with a British accent, and you get the picture.

[pullquote align=”left or right”]Brand personification is “a Projective Technique that asks people to think about brands as if they were people and to describe how the brands would think and feel,” according to mktresearch.org.[/pullquote]

The process is fairly straightforward, and we use it to help define customer’s perceptions of brands for client companies. Start off by asking a few basic questions:
- Is the brand male or female?
- Is the brand smart like school, or smart like a poker player?
- Is your brand a slob or a neat freak?
- Is your brand a jock or a nerd? Cheerleader or Goth?
- Is your brand trustworthy?
Now that you have some basics, flesh them out by asking yourself or your subjects “Why do you think that?” Those “why” responses are critical to keying on central core attributes or characteristics about the brand, be they experiential, visual or verbal. From those why responses, you can tease out various aspects of the brand that reappear across responses as more central to the identity. Those are the pillars of the brand and should be adhered to in all brand-relevant activities.

Now that you know it’s personality, it’s time to think about appearance. What does your brand look like – not the logo or visual identity, although that will come along a bit later. This relates to if this brand was a person, how would those key personality traits be revealed at a cocktail party or in their dating website profile photos. Visualize how they might represent themselves, as a person. Start with a name, (is it a Gary or a Lawrence, a Wendy or a Sahara) then flesh out the appearance of the person – are the clothes clean and do they fit well, are they age appropriate? Is this person kinetic and high-energy, or more laid back and laconic? Are they credible in speech, manner and appearance, or are they overblown or timid? Are they solidly in a category, like a surfer dude, or a Wall St. guy, or a coal miner, or a tire store manager? This can go on for quite a while, until a fully-realized person presents themselves to your vision. Now ask yourself “is this person a good representative to relate to our target audience?” If you’re selling amps and road cases, the laid-back rocker might be perfect. If you’re selling securities and annuities and other financial services and products, maybe not so much.

Now the big question: Now that you have created the brand personality, fully formed in front of you, would you spend time with this person? Would your target audience find him attractive and credible? Would they take him/her home to meet Mom?

Creating a brand personality does more than provide a short hand way for you as a marketer to think about your brand – it’s also a great way for you to explain your brand to colleagues and to get to know it more intimately, and allows you to improve the effectiveness of your brand marketing across all channels and media, company-wide.

Would you date your brand? If not, it might be time to make some adjustments . . .
August 25, 2016
Market Research Is the Answer to ‘Uberization’ and the Customer Challenges of the 21st Century
Jessica delivers this message better than I could, so I thought I’d pass this along . . . we’ve been explaining this to clients for years, and she nails it!

by Jessica DeVlieger |

April 4, 2016

Customer behaviors around the world are changing. Fast. For businesses, the risk in not keeping up is all too real.

The companies that really “get” their customers, like Apple and Amazon, are setting the standards, raising the bar high.

Because of “Uberization“—in broad terms, displacement and marginalization by nontraditional competitors—customers across all industries now have higher expectations.

As a result, staying relevant to customers is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve in a time when doing so couldn’t be more critical to success.

Gradually, leaders are recognizing that relevancy demands empathy—to know customers as the real, complex, creative people they are—then instilling that empathy across the entire organization. It’s why, according to a recent IBM C-suite global study, 66% of C-level execs say they plan to focus on customers as individuals rather than segments (up from 54% who said so in 2013).

But cultivating a shared understanding of customers as individuals is easier said than done, especially for multinationals with millions of customers and dozens of offices scattered across continents. It requires departments to align and pay closer attention to the people they serve. To embrace new perspectives and fresh ways of seeing the world and the business. To then internalize that knowledge and use it to act with intuition and urgency. And, it needs to happen on an ongoing basis—not on a need-to-know basis—to meet customers’ needs as they change, therefore making the business more agile and adaptable.

The way most businesses are structured today, it’s the market research and insights teams that are positioned to champion the customer-as-individual. Those departments are the official caretakers of consumer truths, and they are the people in the organization closest to customers.

The question is whether market research departments are empowered enough, and have the right resources for, inspiring leaders and the company culture to change.

The answer, usually, is no. Most market research departments operate as 20th century customer feedback engines, focused primarily on collecting and disseminating customer information through a well-intentioned series of disparate messages and reports. That approach rarely creates the desired impact. The empathy generated is fleeting, at best; and the drive to action stalls.

Businesses can’t afford to continue to operate that way. Not when they’re faced with new challenges like “Uberization”; 21st century challenges require 21st century market research.

The market research department must play a dual role: consultant and marketer, expert in both uncovering opportunities from customer stories and motivating colleagues, with clarity and simplicity, to take action. It will function with as much vigor on engaging stakeholders within the business as it does in collecting customer information from outside of it.

That change will give Market Research a permanent seat at the C-level table. It’ll be held accountable by leaders to create broad customer empathy that drives growth, complete with defined goals, measurable KPIs, smart strategies, and creative tactics.

Researchers will need to update their LinkedIn profiles and resumes to match the following four business objectives of the 21st century market research department.
1. Connect the dots to bring customers to life
Ask any market researcher today, and she or he will tell you: I don’t need more information, I need help synthesizing what it all means for the business. Finding value in a sea of data from various sources is difficult. And once found, it’s how it’s socialized that actually matters. It needs to be such a powerful and memorable narrative that it inspires decision-makers.

For example, a retail bank launched an initiative to help their employees understand different types of banking customers more intimately. After collecting data on household income, average number of credit cards, retailers frequented, and other spending and saving behaviors, the insights team brought those customers to life in a fun and creative way. It assembled individual customers’ wallets (based on the bank’s key customer personas), each filled with common items, like a driver’s license, receipts, credit cards, loyalty rewards cards, cash, and family photos. Though the wallets weren’t “real,” they were tangible replicas, just about the realest window one can get into how a customer spends and saves. The wallets were shared among employees so that they could see, feel, and experience exactly who their customers are and how they manage their money.
1. Create buy-in to help others see and act on the opportunity
All the insight in the world doesn’t matter if it doesn’t somehow create urgency and willingness to make a meaningful change. And making that change means that everyone feels what the customer feels and understands the opportunity for the business.

For example, a major retailer had lots of data showing customers’ frustrations with advertised products that were often sold out—or simply not there—by the time customers got to the store. But the data alone wasn’t persuasive enough to initiate action to fix the problems. So the insights team created a documentary-style film about one woman’s daily routine, highlighting the gaps in her experience and why the store’s failures made her life harder. It humanized the customer’s problems, leaders felt her pain immediately, and the company responded with greater urgency to fix them as a result.
1. Align priorities and departments with a clear and collective agenda
Facilitating alignment across departments can be complicated when teams are siloed and have their own priorities and perspectives based on their role and department. To create a collective agenda, you must make customers the central rallying point.

In fact, 63% of CEOs say rallying their organization around the customer is one of their top three investment priorities.

It makes sense: Customers create focus; centering work on their needs ends debate and swiftly moves solutions into action.

A great example of this comes from a major pet food and supply retailer. The company realized that pet owners were answering questions about their pets from their pet’s perspective, not the owners’: “Prudence loves her new grain-free wet food!” for instance, or “Rufus is such a calm pup when he’s in the hands of the grooming staff.” That realization led to a game-changing insight: Owners consider their pets as the customer. In-person collaboration between executives at the most senior levels and shoppers helped the company land on a guiding principle that put pets at the center of business, like stocking foods at “pet-level” or pinning the names of employee’s pets to their lapels. Today, it’s a pet-centric lens through which every decision by every employee—from cashiers to the marketing team to the C-level—is made.
1. Infuse a constant flow of customer empathy that affects company culture
People become fluent in a new language by immersing themselves in the culture of native speakers—not just by listening to Rosetta Stone on their commute to work. The same is true when trying to build genuine customer empathy among employees. It can’t be a one-off engagement. It needs to be an immersive and ongoing experience that evolves over time, ultimately altering the company culture.

Take, for example, a well-known consumer electronics company that had enjoyed years of success when led by its product-focused engineers. But, as competition heated up, the company’s growth stagnated. It wasn’t until company leaders made a long-term investment in embedding customers’ voices, experiences, and stories to drive strategy across divisions that the culture truly began to change. Executives and customers now regularly solve problems together in face-to-face sessions. Engineers innovate outside the box thanks to pictures and videos of the creative and unexpected ways customers use the company’s products. The culture has shifted, fueled by one thing: the customer. The business is growing enormously today as a result.

* * *

The ability to learn from customers and evolve with them is inextricably linked to a company’s potential for growth. After consultant and marketer, there might be a third hat that the 21st century market researcher wears: teacher.

It’s the researcher’s job to shape the minds of the business so that everyone knows the rich and diverse perspectives of the customer. It’s the best defense against “Uberization,” and the only sustainable way companies will grow in the 21st century.
August 11, 2016
How To Think Like Designers

This is What We Do – Thought this was interesting . . .

IBM hires hundreds of these workers to shake up clients — including Vodafone — and figure out what customers want

JUSTIN TALLIS/GETTY-AFP

What do your customers want? That’s not a skill that comes naturally to the engineers who build software for big corporations. But in a world filled with user-friendly smartphone apps, clunky enterprise software is no longer tenable.

So to shake up the status quo, IBM, Cognizant, Infosys and others have been racing to hire thousands of designers who once would have taken more specialized jobs-at an ad agency, say, or an industrial-design shop.

At IBM, they team up with engineers and consultants and embed with a multiplicity of clients. Besides providing customer i nsights, t he t eams encourage constant feedback and tweak products as they’re built — a process aimed at getting them out faster. It’s how successful Silicon Valley startups operate but radical for the IT services industry.

IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty has bet the future of the services division on design thinking. She badly needs the strategy to work if her company is to reverse 17 consecutive quarters of falling revenue and adapt to a cloud-based world. In the past few years, the company has recruited about 1,250 designers, built a global network of design studios and is training employees to incorporate design thinking into almost everything they do.

By the end of this year, the company says, about a third of the 377,000-strong workforce will have been retrained. The goal is to build a customer-centric, startup-esque culture — and then persuade clients to do the same.

Brian Corish never planned on joining a big corporation like Vodafone; the serial entrepreneur was used to working at startups where knowing what the customer wanted was baked into the DNA. But when the head of Vodafone’s Irish operations came calling for help enhancing the company’s online pres- ence, Corish saw an opportunity to teach the startup ethos to a company with lots of unused information about its customers.

His new bosses didn’t say precisely what they meant by the digital transformation, but Corish soon concluded he needed to reorganize the entire culture around its customers.

As a big, established company, he says, Vodafone hadn’t bothered providing the best consumer experience because it already had a massive customer base and was making money building and selling products the way it always had.

Corish decided to bring in outside help but was underwhelmed when all the consulting firms talked up previous projects rather than focusing on the challenge at hand. IBM sent its team back for a second try. This time they ran design thinking exercises with 30 or so attendees.

A lot of the discussions centered on actual customers, what they didn’t want and what they wanted more of. Darren Gerry, an IBM designer, says Vodafone attendees were shocked at the revelations, having never thought about customer needs and desires in those ways.

To start, IBM was asked to build a self-service portal that would let employees working for Vodafone’s enterprise clients order phones and other workrelated gadgets themselves.

Gerry says his team developed a close relationship with the client, keeping the project transparent and demonstrating to Vodafone how design thinking works. Corish, keen to teach as many people as possible about design thinking, helped facilitate the indoctrination, starting at the top; that’s when senior management met the Snapchatobsessed teenager.

Traditional enterprise software projects can drag on for years before bearing fruit. IBM delivered the first version of Vodafone’s self-service portal in six weeks. Corish says his colleagues were astounded how quickly the job got done. “The rest of the organization went, ‘ Oh, you really can do this,’ ” he says. “It doesn’t have to take five years.”

Before the self-service portal was built, enterprise clients had to call Vodafone to order a new device, often spending days getting it configured. Now they can use their own logins to order a phone or tablet, which arrives in a couple of days and works right out of the box. “If we don’t focus on the customer,” Corish says, “we’ll be irrelevant.” Much the same could be said about IBM.

August 2, 2016
How To Become Customer-Centric . . .

Whether its B2B, B2C, global enterprise or local start-up, commercial or non-for-profit, all types of business can benefit from becoming more customer-centric. But what does that mean, what does that look like, and how can you achieve it without recreating your business from the ground up?

True customer centrism is as much an attitude, an approach, as it is a model or structure, which means if companies want to take advantage of all the positives derived from knowing and treating your customers better, it all starts at the top, it’s built into your corporate or organizational culture, deeply interwoven into your corporate DNA. It’s one of several facets of business where you can’t just “talk the talk,” you HAVE to “walk the walk” every day, day after day, from all employees, customer-facing or not.

OK, so now that you have the attitude adjusted, it’s time to check the altitude. That requires some real, trusted, correctly executed research data. But where do you start? One aspect of research data is that it’s like lettuce, it needs to be fresh to be at it’s best. Which means you need to develop a way of gathering data from your customers that you can rely on to be accurate, to pull from a high-confidence sample size, and can be put in place relatively quickly and can be relaunched on a regular basis, once a baseline is established. Surveys can be used in some instances, depending upon what you’re trying to accomplish. Our preferred methodology is the IDI, or In-Depth Interview. It’s a semi-scripted conversation, 30-60 minutes in length, guided by a pre-written discussion guide, executed by trained researchers, NOT telemarketers, who can hold an intelligent conversation with a wide range of professionals and consumers. That conversation is geared toward gathering not only facts about your customers buying habits and purchase patterns, but about their attitudes, feelings, preferences, and moods regarding your products, services or brand. Many of those will be driven by their most recent experience with your company, usually an interaction with either billing or customer service representatives. Keep this in mind when doing the data analysis later, its one of the reasons why research data needs to be fresh.

Each IDI is recorded, transcripts made, each question response is then tabulated, and the responses segmented into positive and negative piles, or into a range of “buckets” based on type of response, severity of feeling, and prevalence among respondents. Those data points are given to three analysists (in our practice, anyway), and three independent analyses are written up based on the same data, to mitigate bias and skew. That’s the basic methodology, but the key to using these successfully comes in the performance of the questions themselves – if you don’t ask the “right” questions, you can’t act appropriately on the answers and achieve the desired result. That’s where the magic happens.

Now that you have your data, and have done the analysis, now what? Data is just dumb numbers and words unless it leads to, or can be converted into, some positive action with respect to your customers. Some of the data will be most useful in making adjustments operationally to customer-facing processes. Is your fulfillment process causing problems, is the return policy too restrictive or difficult, is your phone tree routing system too complex or directing people insufficiently or are the menu options wrong – those are things that can be adjusted and shifted based on the data in a very direct way. They make a big difference in the customer experience, and can certainly affect their attitudes and emotions toward the company in the short term. It gets a bit more complex when you start examining some of the deeper attitudes and preferences about the company and its brand, what the company and it’s products mean to them emotionally, what feelings does the brand bring out in them, and why. Those are brand-linked attitudes and emotions, formed after repeated interactions and touch points with the company, its outreach materials and products. It’s much tougher to pin down the cause of these aggregate attitudes, but worth the time if you can make a correction that rights the brand’s direction going forward.

At this point, many of the smaller B2B companies and service firms are thinking, ”isn’t that up to our sales people to assess those things and listen to their customers and shape their offer and interaction accordingly?” Even if your transaction volume is very low and your client number correspondingly low, there is still much to learn about your customers by doing research, and to be able to adjust your marketing to find more of them as a result. In fact, smaller, lower volume firms can make a bigger impact by paying attention to brand influence and making customer-centric adjustments than a larger firm can – small changes make a bigger difference in their bottom line, and a small increase in customer volume makes a bigger difference financially as a percentage of overall revenue.

It’s said in the psychiatric profession that admitting you need help puts you half way to a cure. Becoming customer centric as a business is a similar situation – by discovering that you can improve your growth, meet objectives, increase revenue and profit by knowing your customer better and serving their needs more directly, you’ve already planted the seeds of that first attitude adjustment step, a big move forward in the process. Communicating that attitude down through the rank and file so that it becomes pervasive throughout the firm is the next step. Strong belief, direct simple communication, and a solid, positive example shown in every corporate action is the key to building a more customer-centric organization. No time like the present to get started. If you don’t know where to start, we’d be happy to help.

July 28, 2016
Affinity Programs CAN Drive Engagement And Loyalty . . . If Executed Properly

Business owners who sell to consumers are constantly striving to grow their customer base, and to retain the one they have already established. Organic growth, whether driven by effective marketing and promotion or by product quality, or customer service that leads to word-of-mouth referral, is the first priority for most consumer-centric businesses. But most sales pros will tell you that it’s much less expensive to keep your existing customers happy and have them buy more, than it is to acquire new ones. So why are most businesses taking the expensive route, rather than increase retention and engagement of the existing customer base? Most likely, it’s because loyalty programs, or affinity programs that encourage repeat business and customer loyalty, are difficult to execute effectively. There are lots of moving parts, lots of detail to keep track of and account for, and they attempt to codify human behavior and account for each variation to counter potential abuse. This creates other obstacles, which will be addressed shortly.

Most businesses are good promoters of product, so crafting offers around product, centered on price or volume, is routine and straightforward. Put together a few “Buy one get one free” promotions, or “Early-Bird Specials” to add urgency, and they become your go-to strategy for driving foot traffic (or clicks). It takes little in the way of creativity or customer insight to knock off 10% or split 50-50 for volume purchase, and they do the job to a certain degree. But are you creating real brand loyalty, or just offering casual customers a reason to save a little money?

Loyalty programs have been around for many years, but the availability of inexpensive computer technology, databases in particular, have spawned a new era of growth for these types of customer engagement set-ups. Sometimes these programs are created in conjunction with other partner businesses – witness the partnership between Giant Food and Shell Oil – grocery purchases are logged and items assigned a point total, and that total yields a discount on gasoline purchases at Shell stations. By linking two basic expenses, groceries and gas, the program allows customers to be rewarded for purchasing things they would normally buy anyway. Credit card “cash-back” programs fill this same need. But, they do engender loyalty.

But a true loyalty program no only allows for more repeat business from your best customers, it give them a reason to tell others about what a great deal they get from you, thereby expanding your customer base organically without spending a dime. By rewarding the behavior you want -repeat purchase on a consistent and regular basis – you build transaction volume over time and increase profitability. But is this organic growth, or just incentivized interaction? The best loyalty programs no only facilitate repeat purchase, they also encourage referral, and some even provide disincentives for disloyal behavior.

The very best programs not only engender loyalty, provide an incentive for not only loyalty but referral, and provide a mechanism for it. But they are also very customer centric, which means they are elegantly simple for the customer to enroll in and use regularly. Keytags with bar codes are convenient, but if it takes you half an hour and twenty pieces of personal information to enroll, the abandonment rate will be huge and usage will never meet expectation as a result. Simple for the consumer includes simplicity in enrollment, usage, and in accruing benefits. Credit card points programs are notoriously complex when it comes time to actually reap the benefits of your buying behavior, with many rules, complex formulas, and exceptions to the promised rewards that can make cashing in more difficult than it’s worth. To avoid fraud and abuse, those companies have put the onus on the consumer to do their back-end work for them, and find their own way through the maze of regulations and guidelines. Simpler is better.

All the loyalty programs in the world won’t overcome product quality issues, poor customer service, bad product design, lack of distribution channels, low awareness or other inherent consumer business issues, but if you have the others conquered, a well thought out loyalty program can be a big help in tipping the scales toward brand loyalty, reducing churn, increasing engagement and retention. As usual in marketing, the secret to success is in the execution . . .

June 16, 2016
Marketing Automation Can Go Too Far

With as many digital marketing programs, apps, platforms and dashboards as are currently available to the modern marketer, clearly marketing automation is an idea whose time has come. But at what point does all that automation start to mask, hide, obfuscate and cloak the real goal of the marketer – to persuade, influence, elicit emotion and garner a specific reaction by connecting in some emotional way with the individuals who make up the target market. If the machines are deciding the timing, tone, quality, frequency, subject matter and even copy point priority, is there really a relationship being created there?

While I’m still emotionally a bit of a luddite when it comes to technology, I understand it’s uses and marvel at its potential to make our lives easier, and more productive, alleviating the drudgery of some of the more mundane daily tasks and delegating the type of “step, repeat” activities that make up our daily existence to simple machines. However, there are limits to the level and type of task I’m willing to relinquish to the machines. The little voice in the back of my head that warns “If it can do this, what else could it do if I don’t keep control over it” is running that script more frequently when I take a few moments to fill the que of my social media automation platform. It speeds up knowing that the machine will be totally in charge of what people see, when they see it, how often they see it. Relin quishing that level of control is a little scary.

Now, take that a step further. The next generation of software is likely to have wider permissions within your physical and online universe. It’s possible, given the necessary set up structure, for a similar platform to deliver a message to a given recipient, with the ability to search their hard drive and cloud account, dredge up bits of information gauge their reactions to online posts by others, collect viewing habits for photos and videos, and be able to piece these disparate pieces of data together into a coherent letter rife with personal references that only make sense to them. Its invasive, it’s creepy, it gives the recipient a sense of exposure, but if crafted correctly and reigned in appropriately, it would be so personal and so relevant, it would out-pull almost any generic control letter by a factor of 10. Are you scared of the machines yet?

Currently, the overuse of personalization typically takes the form of using the person’s name or address or other key piece of publicly available information too many times. The only damage there is to the sender, as it pulls back the curtain and exposes the use of data in the letter, destroying the illusion of personal relations and destroying trust. This depresses response, but doesn’t hurt anything. But taken a notch further, say that same letter is riddled with personal information, including images of your home and kids, banking and financial “hints”, information about your mortgage or car loan, the kids’ school names or addresses, extracurricular activities. Looks and sounds personal, right? Now imagine that letter is stolen out of the mailbox, or picked up out of the delivery bin before it even gets to you. The person with ill intent now knows more about you than they could ever discover any other way, and can use that data to do anything they want, unfettered by regulations, legislation, professional ethics or legal restriction.

Used correctly, personalization and data “injection” can make messages feel relevant, feel familiar, feel comfortable, and lead to a positive response. Used incorrectly, personalization can open the door to abuse, cause damage to both the sender and the recipient, and lead to a range of problems from minor headache to legal action. When employing automation for driving or disseminating marketing messages, best to err on the side of caution and keep your human fingers in the pie at critical points – just to be sure everyone stays on good terms – be careful out there . . .

June 9, 2016
Brand Loyalty Is More Fragile Than You Think

Marketing and sales pros know that people don’t really buy features and benefits, they buy feelings and stories. Your brand (hopefully) tells your buying audience a compelling story, one that gets retold each time they interact with your brand, which makes them feel a certain way, under a variety of circumstances. For retailers this means that each time customers shop your store, whether brick and mortar or online, they have certain expectations of that experience, and if you don’t live up to them, you may be doing damage to your brand. This makes customer service a key component to brand loyalty.

I was speaking with a friend of ours the other day and we were comparing the stores where we buy wine. I buy at a small, boutique, one-off adult beverage emporium, one that specializes in having a large selection of micro-brews, and a strong selection of more esoteric Bourbons and Scotches, and a terrific selection of wines from around the world. She shops at a chain store, owned by a major grocery retailer, with a huge inventory of all the top brands, great pricing due to volume buys, and a no-frills approach to store design and displays.

The reason she was asking me where I buy is because she had recently experienced three separate instances of poor customer service by store sales staff. She swore that after three strikes, she would never patronize that store again. Her brand loyalty to that brand, which had been off-the-charts strong before, based on it’s affiliation with the larger grocery chain, had been eroded to zero in just three perceived poor incidences of inattentive, rude, or unpleasant behavior. The selection, pricing, hours, decor and layout hadn’t changed one bit, but her perception of the store and its contents changed dramatically, for the worse.

Now I’m pretty sure the large chain won’t really miss her business, and will likely never make positive changes to the sales staff’s training or behavior guidelines, probably because they will never know they have a problem, and she has no reason to tell them about it. But if you multiply her experience by a hundred, or several hundred, or several thousand chain-wide, you start to see some negative effects on the balance sheet. If you disappoint your target audience badly enough, or often enough, then your brand is no longer what it was.

Ongoing feedback from customers, becoming more customer-centric in your operations as well as your marketing, can help stem this downward spiral and if caught early enough can give you a start on reversing it. Some companies are acutely aware of this, and take great pains to listen carefully to their customers. This customer brand monitoring takes several forms – feedback cards, social media monitoring, ongoing survey research, continual customer service call monitoring and review, and a host of technological solutions that track and measure customer attitude and preferences.

One of the more diligent brands in this regard is Hilton. They religiously guard their premium brand, listening carefully to all customer feedback, and taking swift, effective steps to satisfy customer complaints. They do it so well that most complainers are turned into brand evangelists! They have an overwhelmingly positive customer rating in a variety of categories by organizations like J.D. Power, Zogby Analytics, and media outlet lists like MSN, List25, and Wall St. 24/7. They have realized that their customer interactions are a driving force in their brand loyalty, and take iron-clad, positive steps to protect it and bolster it with each customer experience they deliver.

The real message is that while a single customer may not contribute much to your bottom line on their own, the symptoms and actions that lead to that customer losing their loyalty to the brand need to be addressed before they “go viral” among your customers and degrade the brand. As Barney Fife once said, “we can’t have that kind of behavior, we gotta nip it in the bud” when you fail to deliver the highest level customer experience each and every time.

May 21, 2016
Are You Selling To The Right People?

We’re big advocates of using research, especially primary customer research, to drive marketing and sales efforts. It’s much more difficult to miss the target when the target is telling you how to hit it, how far away it is, and where your arrow is in relation to itself.

Sales benefits as much from research as Marketing does, but in different ways, and by using different pieces of data. Primarily, Sales will be ale to use data to determine who is, and how well-qualified is, the audience of one (company) in front of them. With a list of several hundred prospects in their satchel, Sales people have to determine if this company is even realistically a prospect at this time, who inside that company they should approach, who the actual decision-maker is, and how best to reach out to them to get the warmest reception.

New research has shown that trying to pinpoint a single individual decision-maker may be a futile and even damaging effort. Corporations are so integrated, so closely cooperative, in an effort to move forward more effectively, to make purchasing of goods and services more streamlined, and maximize cost-effective use of resources, that an average of 3.4 departments get “in on the purchasing decision”.

That number differs depending on the industry, with manufacturing scoring a surprising 4.6 departments needed to make a purchasing decision, and some smaller non-profits scoring a 2.1 or less. Reasons for this are less clear, but the prevailing theory is that the classic manufacturing firm has fewer distributed costs, centralized purchasing for raw materials, and the purchase affects more departments’ budgets and ability to function as a result. Fewer “silos” leads to more people involved in making decisions.

Which departments are involved makes the picture for Sales even murkier, with variables including cost of the purchase made, length of the sales process, number of touchpoints that selling company has with the target firm, and the nature or structure of the product or service being bought. Things like consulting services, legal assistance, accounting services, tend to have more folks weigh in on the decision, based on the number of departments such an engagement will touch within the company. Things like maintenance and physical plant services typically fall so squarely within Operations, with a touch on accounting and finance, that usually there is only one true decision-maker. The decision to spend the money has more involvement, but the actual vendor is pretty straightforward and stays “local” most of the time.

The bottom line is that sales people need to do a certain amount of probing and due diligence when qualifying prospects to make sure they are not only aware of all the various inputs in the buying decision, but that key stakeholder are not “left out” of the communication chain, to avoid making them feel ignored or worse, disenfranchised. That kind of innocent mistake can torpedo even the most potent sales effort, and it may be happening and you don’t even know it.

The time spent doing this type of research is almost always time well invested, if for no other reason than to allow the sales person to speak with confidence about the target company. Additionally, it avoids the type of error described above, and allows you to streamline the process and avoid real time-wasters, like selling for months to the wrong person(s).

This type of information should be prominently noted in your CRM entries as well for each prospect, not only as a reminder to you, but as a signal to others viewing the reports, who may be able to suggest a new approach, or use a contact in a department you have yet to approach. Share the wealth.

Do your homework, include and approach the “right” people, and be aware that it will likely take a unanimous decision among up to four full departments to close the sale. Knowledge is power in this instance – go forth and be powerful!

May 12, 2016
Make Your Marketing Dollars Work As Hard As You Do

Marketers are typically asked to justify their expenditures, to craft a nearly inviolate budget often as much as two years ahead of time, and to stick to it to control spending. Rarely are they asked if those expenditures are the most cost-efficient solutions, or if allocating more resources to a particular item might improve its resulting gains over above the spend, by scale or efficiency. Corporations with a culture of control focus more on the outflow than the value of the resulting inflow when discussing marketing expenditure. Based on years of experience with both winners and losers in the corporate and non-profit world, I can honestly say that this might be a losing approach to marketing.

Corporate leaders often assume that marketing is ALWAYS doing the most cost-effective thing to achieve results, based on a cost-conscious culture and the nature of marketing as an accountable function. Spend “X”, and you can usually count on “Y” coming back. But what if you doubled “X” and “Y” quadrupled or quintupled? Would they have approved the additional expense at the beginning of the year, prior to the effort? Probably not. In some cases, more time is spent trying to justify expenditure than on creating the method and message of the expense. To me, that’s crazy!

Fortunately, in today’s expanded culture of innovation, a business climate rife with entrepreneur-ism and start-up fever, fast-cycle test-fail-repeat operations are becoming more prominent, and with that comes an easing of the penny-pinching, along with a realization that “if we try ten things and six work, we’re ahead of the game” for marketing departments lead by enlightened senior executives.

Finding such an enlightened marketing leader requires some work, but the effort is almost universally worth it based upon the game-changing results that can be had as a result of their efforts when supported by senior leadership. They are often cloaked in other experiences, other disciplines, and usually don’t fit the linear career paths that the HR Department is trained to look for. Such outliers can really move the needle, and are worth the effort to find. But that’s not the whole story.

A quick analysis of your marketing expenditure will show you where the money is going, and each item should provide some indication as to what it’s returning for that spend, either in dollars, or results of some kind. If it doesn’t, some sort of metric needs to be “baked in” to that activity so that you can make it accountable. Once that’s in place in the budget, sort and rank the items by results, not by cost, and see if the order changes from the cost-based ranking. Comparing those two lists seems simple, but it can be an eye-opener when seeking an edge, by finding inefficiencies and reallocating resources to drive growth and revenue generation. Like the stock market or Las Vegas, you double down on the winners and bag the losers quickly, to mitigate risk and drive growth of return.

The other advantage to this type of approach is that you avoid the “cheap trap” of not thinking large enough, based on a lack of faith in the results. Thinking bigger has a really strong track record of success, doing everything as cheap as possible doesn’t, because many great ideas, initiatives, campaigns and other activities die from capitol starvation before they ever get a chance to come to fruition. If the initial tests are even reasonably favorable, feeding that idea has a 2000% chance of succeeding over the one that breaks even and stays small. Good testing programs and solid research mitigate that risk even further, and will highlight even greater opportunities as results come in and new ideas surface based on their successes. It’s a good day when the winners spawn more winners.

Good ideas, good research, patience and faith combine to drive success in marketing. As a famous marketer for a large consumer products company once was rumored to utter, “every dime I spend on events and marketing comes back to our company dressed up like a quarter.” When you scale up, double-down on winners, and feed the best ideas, that quarter quickly becomes a dollar.

April 28, 2016