Customer World

Crowdsourcing - When customers get together on unfair credit card interchange fees!

There has been a lot of talk and buzz around crowdsourcing. Social media too is shifting the control from marketers to a "network of customers" who influence product/brand preferences and purchase decisions. Many marketers have been using this power effectively. Here's an example of how customers have got together against what they believe is an unfair practice. The interesting point to note here is that 7-Eleven stores have provided the platform for consumers to get together and voice their concern. It's an example of a great platform owned by a marketer to get together with their customers'  for a cause. It drives authencity and trust between the marketer and their customers. Take a look:

" 7-Eleven has announced that its franchisees and store operators have collected more than 1.6 million signatures in the “Stop Unfair Credit Card Fees” petition drive. 7-Eleven says it believes this marks the largest number of signatures collected for a public policy issue on record.

The signature drive ran from June 22 through Aug. 10 at store counters coast to coast.

“Consumer response to this grassroots petition drive exceeded expectations,” said Joe DePinto, 7-Eleven president and CEO. “Customers share our frustration over the hidden fees that American retailers and, ultimately, consumers are forced to pay. They, too, want Congress to take action to regulate these unfair fees, which are the highest in the industrialized world.”

Interchange fees aren’t transparent to the consumer and assessed to store owners every time a consumer uses a credit card. These charges result in higher prices which are borne by all consumers, whether or not they use a card or cash. In 2008 alone, these fees cost American businesses and their customers $48 billion. According to the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) 2008 State of the Industry data, on average, an American convenience store owner paid 63 percent more in transaction fees than they earned in profits."

If you as a marketer genuinely believe there is a cause you can take-up for your customers, do that with conviction. Get them together, become a platform for their conversations and they will surprise you with their response overwhelmingly.

Michelin's famously anonymous intrigue misses a trick or two!

Michelin has come-up with lovely idea to connect with their customers - famouslyanonymous.com. This is a great case for open-source marketing! This is perhaps how marketing will be done in the future for many brands.

The Michelin guide was first published in France in 1900 as a free directory that offered listings of hotels to promote road travel which would in turn help sales of Michelin brand tires. By 1926, they started charging for the guide and also started rating the restaurants. Michelin has its secret reviewers going into restaurants and giving them a 3 star rating to them based on their experience. Now, they seem to be making the identity of these reviewers public and therefore giving it a lot of credibility.

Here's my experience of the customer engagement and the gaps that I saw

I had visited the website as it generated a lot of interest in me due to  high decibel PR. While the campaign seems to be at a teaser  stage just now, the website had some interesting content around the history of the guide etc. I wanted to see the interview with the inspectors section and it asked me to comeback on Oct 5th. This is where they I felt they got it all wrong and dropped the ball!

Take a look at some great opportunities to build  the depth of this engagement further with consumers:

1. Interview Alert:  They could have asked me to register for the interview alert with inspectors as and when it happens on the site. A simple and easy trail that I could have left behind - build a prospect database for the guide. I would have gladly agreed to do so. Oct 5th is quite a long way off and I might just forget to revisit the website amongst my other commitments. Hence, the engagement needs to be at the behest of the brand and not leave it to chance of my coming back.
2. E-book Track: Having come-up with a great story on the heritage of the guide, there was an interesting opportunity that seemed to be available - to capture my identity to build a dialog further. Brands need to understand conversations like this happen over multiple touches with  consumers. The heritage story has interesting levers to "extend the conversation"!
3. Leveraging the power of multi-channel for trial:  There is a huge opportunity for this campaign to use a multi-stage, multi-channel campaign approach which seems to have been missed. There is a great case for using mobile marketing by registering the vistors' mobile numbers and texting them on "interesting happenings on this website or restaurants" when they are not on the net. Also, if  consumers don't pre-book, there can be a trigger for the 'trial' of the guide. Consumers could use mobile texting(SMS) or email alerts to know more about a particular restaurant of their interest and their rating. This could act as a "sampling" for the new guide and encourage more purchase interest in the guide. This will open-up new opportunities for dialog and a continous one too.

In the world of open-source marketing and web conversations, there is a need to look at building the dialog thro' bits and bytes all the time. One must be able to link every "customer interaction chain" into a next step that can fulfil a behavioural objective - reinforce, reopen the dialog, inform, reiterate etc. and this is critical if the campaign objectives have to be met.

Passive to Active customer engagement

I have been writing about this shift for sometime now and the need for marketers to take note of this change to take action. Marketers need to evolve to what I call as "inclusive marketing" methods by involving, empowering customers & building an open channel for a conversation with them.

Davide Raab has provided a very interesting perspective on this change. He writes about the power of social media getting more importance when it comes to active customer engagement as compared to search marketing as these are an 'explicit group' of customers wanting to be involved and engaged in a particular topic, issue or cause. He has provided a brilliant summary of how the marketing focus needs to change. Take a look at the table on various dimensions:

medium	consumer engagement	authority	post-sale relationship	marketing focus
mass media (broadcasting)	passively exposed	conferred	service / support	brand message
database marketing (narrowcasting)	targeted	relevance-based	cross sell / upsell / retention	segmentation
search marketing	activity-triggered	implicit group	Web self-service	content
social marketing	consumer-controlled	explicit group	public engagement	empowerment

Going beyond transactional data to predict sales in retail - Tesco shows the way

I have often found a lot of interesting case studies and  lots of content around using a variety of internal sales & transactional data in retail stores to manage category, assortments, inventory planning and customer cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. What these data always many a time miss or don't factor is the external variables that account for customers to make decisions to buy or not buy. This could play a critical role in driving sales.These in fact play an important role in customer shopping behavior.

Some customer or environmental behavioral drivers like  whether it is a cold or a warm or a rainy day( and hence a decision to want to go to shopping or not), or sudden change in prices/promotions of specific products across categories in nearby shopping areas or stores, new choices of shopping destinations around the store, sports season etc. affect footfalls and purchases.

UK based Tesco has decided to use weather as an input to predict demand and therefore sales.After over 3 years of research, they have a software that identifies how shopping patterns change with every degree increase in temperature or every hour of sunshine! More here

My View: If information based decisions have to be made by marketers, the 'surrounding factors' around customers needs to be taken into consideration. It might well include traffic patterns, weather, attitudinal factors like health and welleness, enviromental concerns like green agriculture/organic farming etc. Marketers need to find methods to factor all these data into their analysis to forecast customer shopping behaviour.