Archive for the ‘Marketing Analysis’ Category
Saturday Morning Reads (Late Edition): Is Social CRM Bringing Companies & Customers Together Yet?
“No company will tell you, ‘I don’t want to be customer centric,’ but do you know the difference between taking an inside-out versus an outside-in approach?” - Ranjay Gulati
An organization’s goal for being social with customers is, presumably, to gain a better understand of what customers want and need. Typically used to warehouse customer data, marketing campaigns, and customer service endeavors, CRM systems now must also capture the social interactions of customers and prospects as well. It is those social interactions— in a natural setting—that will provide organizations with untarnished insights.
More importantly, by drawing the customer closer, the organization will find a refreshing ‘outside-in’ view that leads to budget, resource, and time savings when it comes to new product or service development, customer service and marketing communications.
Keep Reading…
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Marketers, It’s Time To Rethink Target Market Segmentation
Market segmentation as you know it has become more complicated today than ever before. Capturing data in CRM systems, doing primary research, etc. all help, but the ways of segmenting we’ve learned don’t allow you to see your customers in their natural space. Sure, sales, marketing and customer service teams capture a lot of information, but is it insightful? Is it useful in understanding the segment? Or is it just what ‘they heard’ and made a note of?
There is a lot of hype around social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., but the fact remains that social media (as a concept) is the first time that organizations have ever been able to see, listen to and get to know their customers in public spaces (again, in a ‘natural’ setting). Social interactions tend to be natural and not forced or coerced, which often leads to deeper insights.
Let’s look at all of the “-graphics” to get a better understanding of segmentation and how segmentation has changed.
Demographics & Firmographics
Ah, demographics and firmographics…the marketers tried and true methods of slicing and dicing their markets. We know them well, don’t we? They were drilled into our heads as marketing majors and have stuck with us through the years as the best practice for market segmentation.
But the days of mass marketing have come to an end and it doesn’t make sense to segment markets only to treat them as if they all live, think and buy the same way.
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Tags: Data, Data-Driven, Demographics, Ethnographics, Firnographics, Market Research, Marketing, Marketing Analysis, Marketing Communications, Marketing Management, Psychographics, Segmentation, Social Marketing, Sociographics, Target Marketing | 
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How Audience Research Can Help You with Your Traditional Marketing Efforts
As traditional marketers, we have years of experience understanding our markets, what products and services they need/want, how to communicate best with them, and how they regard our brands, right?
Well, maybe not…
We have often relied on marketing research (primary or secondary), sales team feedback, customer satisfaction surveys, etc. to provide insights into those areas. The issue with most of those forms of feedback is that they tend to provide the answers we want to hear or find necessary to meet our internal business goals (either as an organization or a professional).
Audience research, on the other hand, uncovers specifically how markets use products and services, speak about them, form communities, etc. It’s like watching a pride of lions in their natural habitat. Regardless if it’s a B2B or B2C market, when we take the time to watch people in their natural – or comfortable – habitat, we will see their true behavior and opinions surface. If you haven’t done audience research, it can be quite eye-opening. But more importantly, it can’t be fabricated. As an organization it’s your choice to ignore it (at your peril, potentially) or to embrace what’s really going on in the market.
So how can audience research help traditional marketing efforts?
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Tags: Analysis, Audience Research, Branding, communications, Customer-Centric, Data, Ethnography, Marketing, Product Development, Psychographics, Serengeti Communications, Service Development, Sociographics |
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Brand vs. Brand Relationship: Let’s Not Confuse Them
Last night on our weekly PR 2.0 chat on Twitter (anyone can join this weekly chat Wednesdays at 8pm EST. Search on hashtag #pr20cat and join in!), we discussed branding and PR 2.0 and why PR folks (and marketers, that’s a topic on integration for another day!) need to understand branding and how it affects their interactions with constituents (or publics).
If you’ve hung out in social media circles long enough, I am sure you’ve heard “you don’t own your brand, your customers do.” Nothing can be further from the truth and why we need to be very careful with how we phrase this as marketers, consultants, agencies, etc.
FACT: You do own your brand and brand messaging
FACT: You don’t own relationships customers have with your brand
I kicked off by asking people’s definitions of branding and a lot of people responded with a brand relationship definition, which is great but I think it also leads us to, as marketers implementing social media, to want to easily hand over the keys to the castle a little too easily.
For some people it’s a chicken and egg situation. Do you love the logo or the company that produces the product/service first? Vanessa French asked me (paraphrased) “what if your mom gave you Pepsi as a kid, you’d have a relationship with Pepsi (based on emotion).” My response was “what if your mom served you Pepsi in a plastic cup and you never saw the bottle?”
People tend to identify with a brand (i.e. logo, message, etc.) first and then they relate to it. I think it explains why there are so many fake bags (Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, Hermes, etc.) not to mention other products on the market. It’s not that people relate to the company that owns the brand it’s that the brand (in this case a logo) gives them a perception of inclusion without the sting of the price tag. If they truly had a relationship with the brand they would never by fakes. Unfortunately, the perception of others is what spurs on the fakes market.
From “Driving Brand Value” by Tom Duncan & Sandra Moriarty (what I shared during the PR 2.0 chat):
Brand relationship is driven by:
- Trust
- Consistency
- Accessibility
- Responsiveness
- Commitment
- Affinity
- Liking
(Sounds a lot like what we talk about with social media, huh?)
Five Levels of Bonding:
- Awareness
- Identity
- Relationship
- Community
- Advocacy
I think we also tend to mixed up brand perception with branding and brand relationship. My perception of a brand comes after my relationship with the brand. For example:
I bought a Jaguar and it was a piece of junk that could never be fixed. The Jaguar dealer and Jaguar wouldn’t do anything about it. I bought based on the brand (awareness/identity), my relationship was affected by lack of trust, consistency, accessibility, etc. My perception is that Jaguars are bad cars. I am sharing my story (WOM) on my blog (social media).
So, if you are Jaguar’s PR folks and I had consistent blog about this and chatted on forums, you might want to pay attention. I would hope.
The tenets of branding are still viable, but just like everything else with social media they are more visible today and brand relationships and perceptions are out in the open.
But we DO have control over our brand and messaging! You might want to reconsider using “trust” in your brand (logo) or messaging if the case is that the brand relationships and perceptions indicate that you are not an organization to be trusted.
By the way, Driving Brand Value was written in 1997, and yet offers lessons that we still have not learned. It’s available on Amazon starting at $0.38 USD. I suggest you snap up a copy.
Also, grab Integrated Branding by LePla and Parker while you’re at it…
What do you think?
[Image: David Armano]
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New, Old, Simple, Easy… Shifting from words to experience
Over the last few weeks I have noticed an interesting trend. Or maybe it’s been around and I just didn’t notice it until I was confronted by it.
So, what’s the trend you may be wondering? Well it goes something like this…
You aren’t talking about anything new…
That’s old-school…
PR isn’t simple…
It’s easy for anyone to be a marketer…
Why do we describe the areas of our profession and each other in this manner? I am as guilty (really guilty sometimes!) as the next marketer for throwing around a few of these words/phrases and I’ve decided to stop. Why? Because I think it’s a missed opportunity to learn and gain a new or different perspective. [And you know, hindsight is always 20/20!]
NEW: The act of being social isn’t new (on- or off-line), but for some people it is. As social media practitioners, we should provide everyone the space and, more importantly, opportunity to figure social media out for themselves whether it’s through blogging or Tweeting, etc. We tell people/companies that the best way to “learn” social media and the online culture is to engage. It’s not quite fair then to tell people (or over analyze what they have implemented), based on their new and unique experiences, that what they are doing/saying is nothing new. Perhaps if we listen to these first time experiences something new just might be learned.
OLD: Integrated marketing communications is coming back to the forefront and I made a comment that it was, well, old school. That’s a limiting perspective because as social media (the tools and the concept) disintegrates marketing silos, there’s an opportunity to learn or implement something new…even all these years later.
SIMPLE: We all work at different speeds and levels of understanding. We are at a point where early adopters are looking for more advanced conversations and information and those lagging a bit behind are scrambling to find all the information they can. We need to be aware of the different levels within our social networks and respect them.
EASY: There is a notion in marketing that “anyone can be a marketer.” I think that’s a disservice to our profession. Just like with any other profession, years of experience leads to knowledge, instinct, intuition and confidence…and sometimes those traits often lead others to a false sense of marketing being easy. Great marketers know that they need to continually learn, listen, test, ask questions, build relationships and push limits. [And when I say marketers, I mean all aspects of marketing from research to product to communications (PR, advertising, direct marketing, etc.).]
We are in a tremendously exciting & turbulent time in marketing…can we just put these words (well, adjectives) aside and focus more on the experience? What do you think? Am I looking at this the right way?
[Image: iStock]
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The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
