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Tag: respect

  • Affinity Programs CAN Drive Engagement And Loyalty . . . If Executed Properly

    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 . . .

  • Brand Loyalty Is More Fragile Than You Think

    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.

  • 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.

  • Just Like Rodney, Marketers Get No Respect . . .

    Just Like Rodney, Marketers Get No Respect . . .

    I’ve been reading and absorbing a lot of chatter about the level of respect marketing professionals get (or don’t get) in companies across the nation. There is some debate as to how to justify and validate the need for such positions as CMO, Marketing Director and Marketing Manager – debates that tend to ignore the elephant in the room. The bottom line in most of these discussions is that if nothing is bought or sold, then there really is no “business”, and that without the skill of folks internally in a marketing capacity, regardless of title, no one would be aware that the potential for commerce with your business exists, and therefore no transactions could occur. So based on that logic, without marketing, there is no business. Yet, there is an ongoing debate as to why such people are needed, and what their value to the organization might be.

    Why is this?

    Is it because the rank and file are jealous that the marketing people seem to have all the fun – planning and attending big events, creating collateral, going on photo shoots, speaking with media editors and television stations, creating commercials, and the like?

    Is it because other employees think they could do the marketers job, it doesn’t look too hard and they have fun, so why can’t I contribute to that?

    Is it because with so many marketers out there, there must be a reason everybody picks that, it must be easy?

    Is it because they have a larger budget to work with, and sometimes a larger staff over which to divide the work?

    I’ve heard all of these postulated in one form or another, and many others as well. I’ve sat in meetings where senior executives questioned the efficacy of the entire marketing department’s efforts in the face of 10-20% business growth directly tied to specific campaigns! When the economy slows, such complaints often rise in volume and stridency. Apparently a rising tide floats all boats, but when the waters recede, the marketers that made the boat and kept it afloat are no longer effective . . .

    As marketers, it is our job to facilitate contact and commerce from without the company by working from within the company. There needs to be a belief that an investment in marketing activity drives commerce far in excess of it’s cost, and that beyond that, criticism of the mechanisms employed and the means brought to bear are so much sturm and drang from naysayers. If a culture of marketing is formed and supported at the top of the organization, and communication of those efforts within the organization is fast, accurate and appropriate, that culture will flourish and all members of the company will prosper.

    So, how do we spread the word of such simplicity, and earn the respect we deserve as facilitators of transactional commerce?

    1) Do the job well, and get results that can be measured and proven.

    2) Stop worrying about who gets credit, or blame, and focus on results.

    3) Closely tie effort to results, and promote those results in reasonable, detached fashion – leave the ego out, and just state the facts without the superlatives.

    4) Drive the volume of effort upward – not all ideas are good ones, and not all executions are perfect. But the more you attempt, the more likely one will be a success.

    5) Innovate new ways of thinking and doing that drive success. Open your mind to input from unusual quarters, and give it it’s due diligence. You never know where the next great idea will come from.

    6) Show that the work you perform every day has value to the entire company, that everybody wins when marketing is effective.

    When sales slow down and the economy contracts, many companies go into “emergency” mode, cutting costs, laying off workers, creating an environment of fear and uncertainty, and delaying or outright removing opportunities for innovation – exactly the wrong reaction in a crisis. Many companies have been operating this way since mid-2008, and after six years the fear has turned to something else, killing creativity, halting innovation, and limiting possibilities for success.

    This presents an excellent opportunity for the marketing department to shine! Teach the others how to do more with less – we do it every day! Show others how to think and work your way out of a problem – we do it hourly! Tell others how to prime your thinking to view situations rationally with an eye toward exploitable opportunity – we do that constantly!

    Give away the benefits of your talents as a marketer, and the respect you deserve will return to you ten-fold – that’s a heck of an ROI in anyone’s book.

  • July 4th, 2014

    July 4th, 2014

    Have A Memorable, Respectful,

    Restful, and Thoughtful Holiday

    As You Wish Our Nation

    A Happy Birthday!