davidpoulos.com

Category: Vision

  • So, I’ve Got All This Data . . . Now What?

    So, I’ve Got All This Data . . . Now What?

    Marketing industry media, and more recently mainstream media have latched on to the term “Big Data” as the next big thing due to the huge impact all the computer communications and digital signal data can have via tracking internet traffic. It has reached the point that you can’t open a blog, a magazine or newspaper without seeing it mentioned in a headline, often in conjunction with subject only thinly related to marketing. Some are related to privacy and identity data, which is a legitimate concern when all your personal information is digital and flying around through the air every time you take a phone call or text your friends. But the use of transactional and biographical and search data to custom craft messages and actively serve digital ads online has been around for the last five years, or more depending on how you qualify the description, (remember AOL, and their MyAOL product that showed you ads from places you’d visited in the last week? 1998!)

    But unfortunately, big data is here to stay, not just the next big, shiny thing on the marketers tactical menu. Our personal, transactional, and biographical data, (medical, too, if you dig nefariously) is available for the taking, asking, renting, or hacking, and can and will be used against you in a court of law . . . Everything you text, tweet, post, share, like, friend, check-in and play is held on a server somewhere, virtually forever, and if mankind invented a way to store and secure it, man can find a way to get at it for other purposes. Certainly adds food for thought as you’re browsing those facebook posts that lead who-knows-where, killing time on the phone waiting to pick up your kids or in the doctor’s waiting room.

    Used properly, ethically, and strategically, the use of big data to mine and prospect for customers should be nearly invisible, and indeed will create welcome and well-timed information that is relevant to you and that you will actually use and enjoy. It’s when corporate marketers use these sophisticated tools with less-than-complete understanding, and don’t want to put the safeguards in place, to put in the effort and human intelligence to remove the obvious mismatches any such algorithm will inevitably create. That’s when the problems start and people get in trouble.

    If your company has a a sizable database, a well-trafficked website, and a social media and web presence of any size, you have or can gather a vast treasure trove of data on your visitors, casual and otherwise. The question then becomes not “How do I get this data,” but “Now what do I do with it.” The real task here is to use groups, sets, trends and responses in that data to build an outreach or nurturing program that will provide your customers and prospects with a positive, relevant, valued experience. Such a program will allow you to engage them in a positive way that puts your brand in the best light and make them feel comfortable and engendered to your products and services, to the point where they buy them over and over again.

    Call it trust, call it security, call it safe harbor, to whatever degree your customers feel they need to feel comfortable buying from you, you need to show them that you will provide it, including how you use their data – mistrust of data use leads to mistrust of transactional security, which leads to avoidance, in a strange death-spiral of aversion that makes it hard to retrieve a customer who’s been caught in this web of misappropriation of your personal information. You play that card 100,000 times a month, and see how many customers you have left . . .

    One of the best safeguards against this, for the marketer, is to start slowly, put the relevant safeguards in place, play them up, in fact, compared to your competitors – you want to own it, especially in the beginning of your big data journey. You want to highlight your security in a way that shows you care about and for your customers. People will endure unimaginable, tedious routines and log-in scripts to avoid having their data end up somewhere unintended – anyone who’s flown on an airplane in the last decade instinctively knows this.

    Build up your data use slowly, carefully, cautiously, so that it makes sense to achieve the outcome you want – happy, engaged customers in growing numbers, recommending your products and services to their “friends” and families, because they are secure in the knowledge that buying from you won’t lead to any surprises later. Trust is a fragile thing, handle it with care . . .

    If you like this train of thought and want to jump on board, or if you think I’m full of it, let me know, I’d like to hear from you in the comment box below.

  • Free Product Development Assistance – Just Ask Your Customers

    Free Product Development Assistance – Just Ask Your Customers

    We’ve long been a proponent of the use of primary customer research to guide and inform marketing activity, because it makes so much sense to simply ask your customers or members how they would like to receive communications from you, in what form that communication should be, and what the focus of those communications should be. “Give the people what they want” is something of a mantra around here, and it has been very effective for our clients, driving solid member growth, higher retention rates for non-profits, and smarter customer interaction, higher engagement levels and higher customer loyalty levels for commercial businesses.

    Taking that a step further should yield even better results – don’t just ask customers how to market to them, ask them how they want the product or service to look, feel, be delivered and how it should function! Bringing your customer input into the business stream at the product development level can offer stellar results, and not doing it can deliver disastrous consequences.

    Imagine pouring your blood, sweat, and tears, not to mention scads of time and money, into developing a product based solely on secondary market research – other products on the market, SWOT analysis, competitive scan, staff intelligence gathering and R&D imagination, then getting all the way to the sales pipeline and discovering that no one really likes or wants the product as it is. Heartbreaking, sure, but also damaging to the brand, the company, the bottom line, and the credibility of the company for potentially years to come.

    But, ask some key questions ahead of time, toss in a focus group or two, build some inexpensive prototypes (for products of a certain size and price point) by 3D printing or other inexpensive method, and see how actual users react, how they interact, how they approach using the product, and you can build a fully-viable product, well-suited to it’s intended target market. You get it right the first time, spend less on marketing costs, and can scale up with confidence, knowing that the product has a viable, receptive market.

    Yes, we know this doesn’t work for every product or service. We can’t very well have experimental pharmaceuticals out there floating around in a focus group and having the participants dropping like flies because they determined their own dose, and having the astronauts test the rocket on their own prior to building it can be expensive, and a little dangerous. But for many products, and a significant number of service businesses, a little primary research and customer input before the launch will save a huge number of missteps and headaches, and make the launch a bolder, more confident, less anxiety-racked event.

    Based on some of the products I’ve seen out in the marketplace recently, the phrase “There’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it over” seems to resonate with inventors and product originators more often than ever, and in the rush to market, many seem to have ignored the mistakes of others in the past regarding assessing the needs, wants and preferences of the marketplace. With broad-spectrum consumer research an inexpensive option due to newly developed technology, there’s no excuse not to do it right the first time, and have nailed down your customer’s needs before the product ever hits the shelves.

    Do you agree? Let me know in a comment if you’ve discovered any new products or services you’ve seen where you thought “Who were they thinking would buy this?”

  • Innovation – Does Your Management Style and Culture Foster or Hinder It?

    Innovation – Does Your Management Style and Culture Foster or Hinder It?

    Organizational culture is getting a lot of attention recently, as economic growth is tougher to come by and company profits even harder to generate. Where efficiency, productivity, and process used to get the attention of management gurus, the general impression is that those things aren’t sexy anymore, and that if you can create the “right culture” at your organization, it will be able to grow by leaps and bounds, leap tall buildings and take the market by storm, etc.

    Culture’s definition is often a bit diffuse, but for the sake of argument we’ll use this: The atmospheric environment within an organization created by the Senior executive and mirrored down the ladder to the rank and file, reflective of a set of values and preferences, and a vision conferred onto individual staff interactions that bleeds into their products and services and suffuses the brand. True, that still leaves much room for interpretation, but it gives you an idea of what the majority of workers are going for.

    But culture goes deeper in some cases than others. In almost all cases, it really starts at the top, with a communicated vision for what that senior executive wants that company to be, day in and day out. That vision is reflected in many aspects of daily life within the organization, from the physical plant layout, furnishings and decor, down to the paint on the walls in some cases, to the tone of the Employee Manual (or if there even IS one), memos and e-mails, the recording on the voice mail at the front desk, to how customer services treats customers,  and in nearly every other aspect of life in that hive every day. What holidays they celebrate and how many, how vacation time is viewed, how the management structure is coached, trained and their performance assessed are key to defining that corporation’s culture.

    But how does that culture affect the organization’s ability to innovate?

    I think it has the most to do with a sense of freedom borne of respect for the employees’ ability to work together for a common goal. That ability is derived through common and communal trust and a sense of obligation to the mission and to their co-workers. If you are trusted by your peers, and managers, and you trust your subordinates and direct reports to do the best they can all the time, to strive for continual improvement, and to work as hard as necessary to adhere to the goals and needs of the company as a whole, the table has been properly set to drive innovation around the current product or service offering, as part of that constant curiosity and need to improve the status quo.

    On the flip side, if management is constantly looking over the shoulder of direct reports, codifying each action and driving their efforts down a narrowly defined group of managed behaviors, that trust in and growth of their abilities doesn’t have much “elbow room” alongside the rest of the required actions, and innovation rarely occurs – they’re having too much trouble just getting through the day.

    Innovation comes from many quarters and from many unexpected directions, but somewhere down the line, it really stems from the freedom to be curious, to be able to find answers to the question “What if . . .?” If the answers to that question are never sought because there’s no value to exposing the answer, innovation will have a hard time taking hold and the organization won’t be able to nurture that spark into a meaningful flame of business brilliance.

    Don’t let your need for profitability smother creativity and innovation – five hours “wasted” finding out about a certain idea could be the best investment you ever make.

  • NEW STUDY RELEASED: SHOWS NON-PROFIT BRANDS HAVE MORE POWER THAN THEY THINK

    NEW STUDY RELEASED: SHOWS NON-PROFIT BRANDS HAVE MORE POWER THAN THEY THINK

    Granite Partners’ Study Shows Brand Power Underestimated, Suggests that Relevance Key to Engagement

    Sparks, MD – Non-profit member-driven organizations may have more brand power than they are aware of, and can potentially use that power to leverage the launch of new products and benefits to members, according to a new study released today in a white paper by Granite Partners, LLC, a Maryland-based marketing consulting firm.

    In a small study conducted among over 60 non-profit membership organizations, professional trade associations and professional societies, brand awareness, brand value and power among their constituencies was studied with respect to member engagement, with some surprising results. Such organizations have been struggling in recent years on the whole with finding and keeping members, and having a difficult time opening new member sectors or keeping them alive.

    This study, while too small to paint the industry with a broad brush, suggests that when these organizations fully engage their members, their brand has the viability and trust needed to successfully offer new products or benefits to their current members, and enough relevance to recruit and keep new members as well.

    “Based on our work with these groups over thirty years, we found that we had consistently asked them the same questions over time, and in looking at the answers, we noticed some significant differences between how these non-profits gauged their own brand awareness and power, and how their constituents and members gauged that same power. These organizations have been underestimating their own importance to members, and the level of trust they’ve built up over the years in their brand. Many of them can be leveraging that difference to recruit and retain new members, open new segments, “ notes David Poulos, principal of the firm and author of the study.

    The White Paper outlining the study results, “Customer Engagement: The Science of Getting From “I See it” to “I Want It”” was released today, and is available digitally upon request. To receive a copy of this informative paper, send a request to:  dpoulos@granite-part.com .

    David Poulos, has over thirty years of marketing experience, ranging from private enterprise, state and federal government, non-profit and charitable organizations. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Marketing Communications from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, and has effectively served as Director of Membership Marketing for the National Grain and Feed Association, as Director of Marketing Communication for the National Printing Equipment Manufacturers Association (NPES), Director of Marketing for the National Court Reporters Association, and as a consultant to a host of other non-profit clients including: American Institute of Aeronautics and Aviation, Community Associations Institute, Electronic Retailing Association, Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association, National Assn. Retail Pharmacists, National Association of Wholesale Druggists, National Geographic Society, National Grain and Feed Association, National Information Corp., and the National Society of Professional Engineers.

    Mr. Poulos has published over 20 articles on a variety of marketing topics in nationally published magazines and websites, is the author of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes,” has published over four year’s worth of weekly blog articles on non-profit and commercial marketing, management and customer service best practice, has been quoted as an expert in articles appearing on Fox News Small Business and MSN Main Street Business websites, was featured in the Global Edition of Who’s Who of Marketing Executives, and is a former board member and President of the Sales and Marketing Executives international, and is a member of ASAE, DMAW.

    For more information on Granite Partners, visit www.granite-part.com , or

  • You’ve Worked Hard To Sign Up Those New Members . . . Now, Keep Them Around

    You’ve Worked Hard To Sign Up Those New Members . . . Now, Keep Them Around

    With the realities of the “new” economy intruding into everyone’s business and personal lives, and the recent political theater further adding to the uncertainty about the future, it’s more important than ever for non-profit organizations to focus on member retention, on devising and living up to that key value proposition that keeps members coming back year after year.

    Based on nearly 100 executive interviews over the last 10 years, we’ve compiled five core activities that seem to keep association members renewing their memberships time and again. Not all five are necessary, or even reasonable together, but by selecting elements that are true to their organization, non-profits can make all that member recruiting work pay off beyond the initial year.

    5) Remind them what they’ve received this year. Renewal notices that list the benefits which that particular member have partaken of during the year is a quick, but effective, way to show the value each has received when it comes time to write the dues check. For those with no transactions on record during the year, defaults could include participation by their voice in aggregate on industry-centric political or regulatory issues, or mention receipt of key information through their magazine or newsletter articles that helped them advance their knowledge or career.

    4) Communicate the message in the media and format they prefer. Hopefully in your member database there’s a field for “preferred communication method” that can be selected. If members have chosen to receive ALL communication from you electronically, make sure they receive at least one renewal notice electronically. As a matter of strategy, you should hit them from several different angles using several media, but make sure the preferred method is first and most prevalent.

    3) Make sure they are actively engaged as soon after enrollment as possible. Studies over the years have backed this assertion that the likelihood of a member renewing beyond the first year directly correlates to their speed and level of active engagement. Invite them to be on a committee, put them on an editorial review board, ask them to attend a seminar for free as an introduction to the organization, have a staffer  phone them and ask what they feel are the most important reasons to join – something to show you know they exist, and that they are welcome at the organization.

    2) Repeatedly restate and reinforce the strong, unique, value proposition your organization represents to them. Show each member how the benefits you offer directly affect their personal or professional life in a positive way. Make it easy for them to walk that renewal notice up the hall to the CFO’s office and show how the value received is worth the dues money you’re asking. Be specific, attach a dollar amount to each benefit if possible – just like when you were in school and were asked to “show your work,” you have to do the math for them, and it has to make sense.

    1) Have recent, solid, professionally-performed research on your particular members, to really know what benefits will resonate with them, and show how those were delivered over the past year. Telling members about benefits they don’t use or care about can actually work against you, making it appear that you are wasting funds on things that don’t matter to the members. This knowledge is critical to creating and implementing that unique value proposition as well as formulating a benefits package that will attract and keep good, loyal members.

    There are many different tactical schemes for boosting retention, at least temporarily, including rate discounts, waivers, hardship grants, and a host of other discounts or special deals, but the most powerful of all is delivering the desired value in a timely, engaging, and directed fashion, year after year. Find out what they want, and give it to them in spades – you members will be as loyal as can be.

    If you found this valuable, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog, above. Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Consultant Saves 25% over In-House Cost for Member Research

     

    Cost Comparison between In-house and hiring a consultant for a typical member research project. Assumes In-Depth Interview method, with 20 Interviews, and recommendations report.
    consultant      inhouse

    Costs calculated based on 6-month project, utilizing 15% of three salaried employees’ time and costs. Consultant saves 25% overall.

    There are lots of reasons to hire a consultant: to drive additional revenue programs, add to your creative firepower, review your efforts with an outside, impartial perspective, add to your staff’s existing skill-set, and now there’s one more – saving money! Many executives have a perception that hiring a consultant is an additional expense, is very expensive, and a waste of money since they are already paying in-house staff.

    Not the case, as proven by the above graphics. By the time you add up all the expenses of using staff to do a given task, it turns out to be less expensive to outsource to a consultant in many cases. This doesn’t even account for the added expertise, and years of experience, which not only makes projects run more smoothly, but also gets them completed faster with fewer errors.

    Faster, better, cheaper, more in-depth – the right consultant can be a real asset to your organization’s growth!

    Would love to hear your opinion . . .

  • And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor . . .

    And Now, A Word From Our Sponsor . . .

    Are you really getting as much value from your sponsorship activity as you were lead to believe when you entered into the agreement? Have you ever tried to measure the gains, results, or revenue generated from a sponsorship opportunity?

    It’s tough, isn’t it? It’s difficult because there were no metrics or measurement tools built into the sponsorship, and likely no real activation point with which to leverage the value of that sponsorship into more sales opportunities. Sounds like gobbledegook, but there’s a fundamental truth buried in all that jargon: You can’t elicit or assess value if you don’t have a way to measure the return, and you can’t take advantage of visibility unless you find a way to make it turn into action by the viewer.

    Let’s take the activation portion first.

    Creating activation for a sponsorship, be it a meeting, a sporting event, a team, a radio program or other media opportunity is not easy, and it’s often not just a one-step process. Companies who’ve had success with sponsorship have found ways to really turn that awareness generated by this type of activity into action on the part of the viewer.

    Modern technology can help. The QR code is one way, the photo submission contest is another, with cell phone cameras being nearly ubiquitous in the US. The idea is to give event attendees or viewers a reason not only to interact with your brand, but to extend that interaction beyond the context within which it started to outside the venue, to incorporate it into their daily activities. Technology helps you give viewers a channel through which to interact with the brand that is new and fun and engaging, and if you do it correctly, they will become evangelists for your brand and pass their experience along to the others in their personal network, extending your reach even further.

    Now with modern technology, viewers have a method to engage, but you still have to provide a motive. They’ve got to WANT to interact with your brand, hopefully in a positive way. Motivating emotions for sponsorships tend to be the need for individuality (only people who attended in person get this shirt), aspiration to be an early adopter (be the first on your block to have one), greed (something for nothing), and the need for attention (winner gets his picture on our product box) these can take many forms in terms of the offer and the audience.

    Clearly, the brand/venue/activity/audience match-up is critical to making the most of your sponsorship, always has been, and technology hasn’t changed that much. Making smart selections based on your brand character, and your goals for the sponsorship are still critical exercises. But the need to engage, not just raise visibility for a short time, is higher than ever as message clutter has risen and attention spans have shortened.

    Now, on to measurement. Not coincidentally, engagement and measurement go hand in hand. The more actively engaged your audience is with your sponsorship activity, the more easily measured it is. Engagement involves action, and actions can be recorded, measured and assessed. If you put up a banner in a sporting arena as part of a sponsorship, that doesn’t inspire much engagement. But if you put that banner at eye-level in front of the entrance to a famous venue gate, and ask people to take a picture in front of the gate and send them in to your website for a prize, now you have engagement. The more photos you receive, and the wackier they are, the higher the engagement and the more value you get from the sponsorship.

    More sophisticated measurements can be taken if you have the need and the use for the data. There is tracking technology, built into ticket stubs, bracelets, and the like that can track attendee movement and dwell within a venue passively, over time. The readouts in aggregate can show you roughly how much exposure your physical representations got that day or that week, and give you a target number to benchmark against for future events in that venue. Connect the two methods, and you set up a sort of Where’s Waldo scenario that can lead to an avalanche of engagement, at least within the venue, for more bang for your buck.

    However you choose to do it, the basics are the same: Give them a reason and a way to interact with your brand in a positive way, and then measure the activity and benchmark it against the cost and the value of the sponsorship to assess ROI and renewal decisions. With a little extra effort, you can reap huge benefits from your sponsorship opportunity.

  • Is Advertising Dead?

    Is Advertising Dead?

    Marketers, retailers and their agencies have been relying on advertising and it’s relatively high cost and low return to drive revenue for 75 years or more. Is the time of the ad behind us? Will banner ads and social media posts fill the void? Somehow, I think not . . .

    When we approach small businesses about increasing or even originating their marketing budget, their first thing they tend to think of is “Are we doing new ads, they didn’t work too well the last time” and the ears turn off and the eyes glaze over and the rest of the conversation is spent educating them on the value of other forms of marketing. Marketing and advertising have become so irretrievably intertwined in the minds of small business executives, that any conversation about one inevitably drives toward the other. While frustrating to our consultants, it tells us something about the perception that “only big companies can afford advertising,” which seems to pervade the landscape. With 500 cable TV channels, unending YouTube channels, and enough niche and general interest blogs and print publications to choose from, anyone can advertise. But can they afford to advertise in enough places enough times to break through the clutter and actually reach a select audience often enough and well enough to effect sales? That’s the real question.

    One element that will forever dog traditional advertising is accountability. No agency exec actually went into a meeting with a client and honestly said, “These ads that ran 60 times last week on all three networks and the Superstations, gave you directly a 5% uptick in product sales” – doesn’t happen, no matter how much they try. They talk around the results, talk about branding support, about number of impressions, audience reach and Q score of the spokesmen in the ad, but direct, 1-to-1 sales accountability ascribed to specific ads is the white Rhino of the advertising establishment – it’s been bandied about, but no validated sightings can be found in the literature.

    So with no direct accountability, why is something you can’t accurately measure, that costs a fortune, that can’t be tied back to the top or bottom lines, so hard to let go of? Perhaps because nothing else has come along that gives retail products the visibility, the bragging rights – “did you see our new spot on American Idol last night?” – and the complicit permission from the media outlets and media industries to charge based on demand, like a bushel of corn, driving both media and agency revenue ever skyward, that can replace TV ads. Social Media doesn’t do that, Search Engines don’t do that, E-mail campaigns don’t do that. Nobody ever turned to their neighbor at a barbeque and said “Hey, Bill, did you see that great e-mail from Purel yesterday?”

    Until something highly visible, ubiquitous to each household, device agnostic, easily monetized and publicly recognized comes along to replace it, advertising is here to stay. It’s utility may shift, it’s usage wax and wane with budgetary support and be temporarily dampened by the next shiny new thing that comes along, but I dont’ think it will disappear altogether any time soon, no matter what the digital pundits say . . .

  • Customer Service is Still Your Best Marketing Weapon

    Customer Service is Still Your Best Marketing Weapon

    I’ve traveled all over the country for years for business and personal reasons, and have a Louis-Vuitton sized trunk full of travel nightmare stories as a result, most involving air travel, but not all. I have also had some wonderful experiences, largely due to the people I’ve met or interacted with along the way.

    Recently I was traveling for business and collected a huge, whale of a tale to add to my collection. I was going to Chicago for a meeting, landing in our favorite Midwestern hub airport, for just a few hours, and then intended to return home that afternoon, both on, notably enough, United airlines.

    Now, as a matter of full disclosure, I have traveled to Chicago on United for years, and have had only a handful of bad experiences, most were minor in nature. I’ve recently had friends and relatives traveling for pleasure take United and experienced horrific treatment, unconscionable delays, poor service and extended travails and battles with management. I can’t count those as part of my story-luggage, but I should have kept them in mind when booking this particular trip.

    I boarded at BWI, on time, with no significant incident (beyond being treated like a criminal by TSA, but that’s another story for another day). Flight arrived at O’Hare without incident, but promptly upon hitting the ground, the ordeal began. Apparently, FAA regulations (and I haven’t looked this up), prohibit planes from entering the ramp area if there is any lightning within five miles of the airport. This was news to me, having taxied and deplaned in some horrific storms in the past without incident or mishap, and having been on planes that were struck by lightning. Their feeling was that sitting on the pavement fifty feet away from the building was safe, but not fifty feet closer to the building. Is the pavement different?

    After 40 minutes of delay waiting for the lightning to move a little further away, we deplaned and I went on my way to my meeting.

    My return flight was scheduled to board at 7:48 PM that same day. At 1:46 PM I get an e-mail from United saying my flight was cancelled, and that I had been re-booked on a flight at 11:48. . . AM the following morning, that connected through Newark airport and would have me arriving at home at approximately 6:30 PM, nearly 20 hours after my initial arrival time! I had no room, no luggage, no anything for an overnight stay, including a charging cable for my phone. No one bothered to call and ask if this booking was satisfactory to me, or even possible!

    Rather than try to negotiate this issue through a swiftly expiring mobile device, I called my office and had someone book me on another, available, direct, one-way flight leaving at 9 PM that evening, but landing at DCA, 90 minutes away from my destination airport where my car was parked, at my own expense. I figured I could grab a light-rail train and get to the other airport and pick up my car, and drive home from there – total delay time roughly 5 hours – not a tragedy by any stretch, especially compared to waiting until the next day.

    I received a total of 8 e-mail messages from United, alerting me to delays, cancellations and re-bookings as the fluid situation changed, all caused by a little rain in the center of the country. In the end, my original flight had been cancelled and re-booked three times, and my arrival time had extended until 6 PM on Friday, for what was intended to be a quick two hour meeting and return the same afternoon. My one-way flight, when it eventually took off, left at 10:30 PM, got me to DCA at 2AM local time, and left me with an additional 90 minutes of driving to get home, arriving at roughly 4 AM, 23 hours after I had set off on my journey.

    The following day, I drove back to BWI to pick up my car, and stopped in to the terminal to try and untangle the thicket of cancellations, re-bookings and ticket changes. The ticket agent I spoke with had no power to take any action to refund or cancel my still existing flight, despite the obvious fact that I clearly wasn’t going to be on the flight from Chicago if I was standing in front of her in Baltimore! She called a supervisor of some sort, who after no less than 6 re-tellings, however inaccurate, of my story, agreed to refund my expense for the half of the original flight I wasn’t going to use. They refused to acknowledge any responsibility for the delay, the need to purchase an additional ticket, or to refund the price of the newly purchased ticket, any meals, or the two hotel rooms I had booked, based on their poor track record of flights actually leaving the airport that day, one of which got used by a colleague trying to do the same thing I was – get out of Chicago! No one seemed the least bit remorseful, apologetic or even willing to recognize that there had been a problem.

    Now the marketing moral of the story. If they had treated me like a person, disclosed information about the nature and duration of the problem, asked how I would have liked it handled, admitted that they had not fulfilled their end of the contract, or wanted in any way to treat me like a valued customer, I wouldn’t have written this, and then sent the link around the world, spreading the negative story globally for all potential flyers to see and read. Not only will my experience preclude me from flying on their airline again the foreseeable future, but I will tell this story to anyone who will listen and try and persuade them to do the same. I’m now a REVERSE EVANGELIST for their company, the exact opposite of what their corporate branding and marketing department has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve. All it would have taken was one person from the company to send me a message saying, “we’re sorry you were inconvenienced, call this number and we’ll see what we can do to help you out.” For the lack of that sentiment, a customer, and possibly many others, was lost. For lack of customers, an airline was lost.

    Good luck, United.

  • How Marketers Can Use Customer Advisory Boards to Engage Customers, Engender Brand Loyalty, and Much More

    How Marketers Can Use Customer Advisory Boards to Engage Customers, Engender Brand Loyalty, and Much More

    Guest Blogger Rob Jensen provides some great insights about how you can get reliable customer insights to improve your engagement and profitability.

    Marketers are giving a lot of attention of late to the topic of customer experience. Indeed, ensuring that companies optimize interactions with their top clients, obtain the highest level of value and maximize ROI from their precious customers seems to be a universal desire the significance of which is of little debate. The more challenging aspect of achieving these outcomes seems to be HOW marketers are supposed to do so. It is our experience that customer advisory boards (CABs) are the most effective and impactful way to engage with key customer executives and achieving these desired results.

    For those who are unaware, customer advisory boards (also known as a customer advisory councils) are forums to review industry trends, address mutual challenges or opportunities, and offer unvarnished insights and guidance. For vendors, these councils are ideal for validating corporate strategies, gathering input on product development, and deepening relationships with key customers. In turn, there is just as much to be gained by the participating customers.
    Indeed, while engaging customers, gathering their feedback and input to your strategic plans and product roadmap helps engender brand loyalty, the benefits of CABs go much deeper than that. Here then are the top 5 benefits your company can get from a well-run customer advisory board program.

    1. Insight into Business Strategy: Your customers—the consumers of your products or services – are the best (and surprisingly most often overlooked) resource to provide input to your company’s overall direction and business strategies. Such customers should be able to advise you on the products and services they desire, what they would pay for them and how they want them delivered. After all, everything you do is designed to appeal to their needs, so there really is no one more qualified to counsel you on how to best target, approach and serve your client base. Your council can provide invaluable direction regarding which markets to pursue, how to capitalize on market trends, what customer pain points to address, which companies to partner with or acquire, how to best exploit competitors’ weak points, and how to position your company for optimal advantage.

    2. Feedback to the Product Roadmap: A customer advisory board is ideal for providing feedback and desired direction on the host company’s offerings. Your advisory council can offer an insider’s view of what your target buyer needs and wants from your products and/or services. A council also serves as a great platform for securing beta testers of your new offerings, helping you introduce your solutions and providing immediate validation before you go to market.

    3. Increased Revenue: The often unspoken (yet highly desired) benefit from your council is the positive impact you will see in incremental sales revenue. Your members’ organizations will likely increase their overall spend with your business over time. This is due in large part to the fact that they are privy to your growth strategy, are early testers of your solutions and feel closer and more faithful and dedicated to you and your offerings. In fact, Ignite’s experience shows that B2B companies that have active and successful customer advisory boards enjoy a 9% increase in new business among advisory members starting after year one of advisory programs above non-advisory council customers.

    4. Customer Approval and Brand Champions: An additional benefit to running an advisory council is that you are building a close-knit group of company advisors and brand champions. By bringing members into your company’s “inner circle” as trusted advisors, you are also transforming them into even bigger raving fans of your company. In our experience, this almost always happens with council members. As they take on the responsibility of helping to guide your business, they inherently become professionally and emotionally invested in your success, and their enthusiasm and passion tends to permeate their immediate team and sometimes beyond. The result is a group of highly loyal customers who have a vested interest in your success – and not defecting to your competition. Furthermore, your members will likely refer other prospects to you as they talk about you with peers at conferences, events, and throughout their day-to-day operations.

    5. Marketing Campaigns and Messaging: Another often less-recognized area of value a client advisory council delivers is feedback to how your company markets itself. You will gain the rich insight necessary to understand how to position (or re-position) the company against the competition. Your advisory board will advise you as to what makes your business unique and what differentiators you should highlight. Just as important, the council can guide you on which mediums are the most viable in terms of reaching your desired audience. Members can also serve as wonderful client references for testimonials and case studies. Likewise they may also be willing to develop and publish joint articles or white papers with you. This lends industry validation and credibility to your advisory board program, your own organization, and serves as a means of promoting the member and bolstering his/her own company and career.

    While engaging with customers and engendering brand loyalty may be all the rage with marketers these days, in our experience, customer advisory boards are the best method to deliver this – and much more. A well-run customer advisory council will undoubtedly provide your organization with significant input that will put your company on a better, more targeted and profitable course for years to come.

    Rob Jensen is VP of Marketing for Ignite Advisory Group (www.igniteag.com), a consultancy that helps B2B companies manage their customer and partner advisory board programs.  http://www.igniteag.com

     

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