Archive for November, 2010

With the Thanksgiving holiday behind us (if you are in the USA) and more holidays ahead, my mind is on the travel industry this morning. Even with all of the TSA debacles, I am sure that many companies in the travel industry are doing their best to stay focused on the customer.

More often, I am seeing “customer-centric” and “outside-in” as becoming interchangeable buzz words for social media and customer service. Please, don’t mistake the two. Customer-centric and outside-in clearly have their beginnings in integrated marketing communications, which demand that data be the core driver in all marketing and customer-based activities.

To be clear, customer-centric doesn’t always mean customer service. But that doesn’t mean that having customer-centric data can’t lead to experiences that include customer service activities. When it comes to customer service, even customer-centric companies will trip up and falter. Why? Because it’s a human-to-human touch point that even the most detailed and modeled data can’t always predict the outcome of. So the next time you claim that a company isn’t customer-centric because you had a bad customer service experience, think about that and also think about how your behavior affected the situation as well.

Today I am sharing some examples of companies in the travel industry that are leading their customer-centric efforts with data that is leading the way to changing their business culture.

SAS.Com Events: Carnival Cruises Along with the Power of Customer Analytics

Enablers of customer centricity:

• Data Foundation
• Targeting and Marketing
• Measurement
• Marketing Performance Management

Keep Reading…

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

• Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
• What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
• Do Your Stakeholders Find You Enchanting?
• Designing An Organization from the Outside-In

Obviously gaming has been a round for a long time. And social gaming isn’t really that new either. But for those marketers that are still not convinced that social media is really relevant to their organization, gaming might be a little tough pill to swallow. And just like social media, whether we like it or not, gaming is a very important element in consumer behavior.

So, is gamification the next word to be added to the marketer’s lexicon? Or is it destined for Buzz Word Bingo? I can hear it now… “We need gamification!” or “Our site has been gamified!”

Okay, I’ll stop…like I said this is serious business. As serious as an Angry Bird flying into FarmVille only to get whacked by a mobster, right?

I’ll be honest with you, I am not a gamer (if you couldn’t gather that already). I have however played Angry Birds on my iPhone and iPad. I am not sure I’ll ever understand the lure of gaming as a consumer (as a marketer, heck yeah!). Is it stress relief to blow up little pigs? Well, sure! Is it social to get a pig from a friend? Of, course! But will I be playing FarmVille or Mafia Wars just to understand that community aspect that exists with gaming? I am not so sure. And yet, I feel like I’d be a failed marketer if I didn’t deeply understanding the draw, the community, the vernacular and the gaming levels in order to best serve clients. Is understanding social media enough to understand gaming? From an ethnography and technology standpoint, I don’t think so. Just like anything social, not understanding these important elements can backfire on a brand. Only understanding social media is how organizations will best understand why the same thing applies to the gaming community.

Keep Reading…

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

• Saturday Morning Reads: MADD Reading
• Dear CEO: Your Customers Really Want You To Know Them
• Is Personal Social Media Experience A Negative For Job Seekers?
• Saturday Morning Reads: Do Marketers Need to Become Social Psychologists?

When Aaron Strout tapped into a bunch of us to do a haiku regarding a brand experience we’ve had, I just couldn’t say no to the opportunity to be creative (reminds me of my 8th grade English class!) and to share a great brand experience that I recently had.

If you don’t remember, Haiku is written as 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables.

Enjoy!

Damn! Bluescreen of death.
Went MacBook Pro and iPad,
Couldn’t be happier.

For your next brand haiku, head on over to the super smart and savvy blog of the one and only Valeria Maltoni.

P.S. This goes on record as one of the shortest posts I’ve ever written!

P.P.S. Be sure to check Twitter for the hashtag #brandhaiku.

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

• Are You Leading Your Industry As A Wikibrand?
• The Marketing & PR Conundrum: Lying to Customers
• Saturday Morning Reads: Does Your Brand Resonate?
• Saturday Morning Reads: Who is Protecting Your Brand?

Let the seller beware. Quite the opposite of what gets flinged around when customers have a bad buying experience, isn’t it? While this context is not the normal definition of caveat venditor, the point is that at any time customers (or potential customers) can—and will—walk away from a sale if the product or service doesn’t meet not only their needs and wants, but their ethics as well. And, often, technology is helping them to do just that.

It’s a fine line that needs to be balanced between being profitable, being customer-focused (or, better yet, customer-centric) and being good enough at every given moment to not provide an experience that turns a customer away from the brand faster than your Wile E Coyote tactical mindset can grasp.

MIT Sloan Management Review: The Change Leadership  Sustainability Demands

“Three teenage girls are at a shopping mall looking for sunscreen. It’s an impulse purchase, and it has to be an all-natural choice. They think they’ve found what they’re looking for at one store, but on the way to the register one of the girls takes out her phone and swipes it by the barcode of the product they’ve selected. Moments later, as she’s pulling out a credit card at the register, her iPhone announces an incoming e-mail. It’s a short message informing her that the item she is about to purchase contains compounds that are linked to the decimation of coral reefs. Moreover, the plastic container is difficult to recycle. Because her phone has pinpointed her location via GPS, she also learns that another store in the mall carries a “greener” sunscreen that has neither of those two problems. The girls leave the register and make a beeline for the other store.”

Keep Reading…

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

• Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
• Saturday Morning Reads: What’s the Return on Investment (ROI) of Content Marketing?
• What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
• Outside-In Thinking

If you aren’t considering customer experience from a marketing and communications perspective yet, you have a long road ahead of you. Research has shown that corporations lose half their customers every five years. What causes this lack of loyalty? And is there anything marketers can do about it? As Joseph Pine explains in his TED Talk, products and services have been commoditized. So, what’s left? Experience.

Smart marketers will lead their organizations on the journey to understand what experiences their customers are currently having and how to improve them across the organization. The challenge is to avoid lip service (fake) and to truly view the experience from a customer viewpoint. There is much work to be done to turn around an organization’s customer experience, but it’s the only recourse available to providing an authentic customer experience.

TED Talks: Joseph Pine on What Consumers Want

“…with the experience economy, it’s about rendering authenticity. Rendering authenticity — and the keyword is “rendering.” Right? Rendering, because you have to get your consumers – as business people — to perceive your offerings as authentic.”

“There are two dimensions to authenticity: one, being true to yourself, which is very self-directed. Two, is other-directed: being what you say you are to others. And the other dimension is: are they what they say they are to others? If not, you have, “is not true to itself,” and “is not what it says it is,” yielding a two-by-two matrix. And of course, if you are both true to yourself, and are what you say you are, then you’re real real! The opposite, of course, is — fake fake. All right, now, there is value for fake. There will always be companies around to supply the fake, because there will always be desire for the fake. Fact is, there’s a general rule: if you don’t like it, it’s fake; if you do like it, it’s faux.”

Keep Reading…

Even More Goodness! Related Posts:

• Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
• What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
• Do Your Stakeholders Find You Enchanting?
• Designing An Organization from the Outside-In