Customer World

The new Sovereign Consumer and their impact on marketers

Keith of KRG Marketing responded to my last post on Marketing in a world when the door is already shut.

He pointed me to his presentation on Sovereign Consumer which is brilliant. I have embedded this presentation here. I liked a couple of points from this presentation which I think are game changing for marketers:

1. The need for marketers to tune-in to meta factors that affect consumer behaviour
2. Only those marketers grounded in the reality of consumer's lives will understand their priorities
3. The sovereign consumer defines value in his/her own terms. They need community and also anti-community as the situation may warrant. Expects responsible pursuit of profit!
4. Digital Connectivity does not mean engagement!
5. The increasing power of printed value in an ever increasing digital world - Tangibleness will gain value.
6. Consumers will decide how much of an ad-unit will they allow themselves to become - Not everything can be monetized
7. Marketing "within the context of the customer's world" is increasingly becoming critical
8. Don't think media planning. Think Connection Planning
9. Simon Clift's( CMO of Unilever) comment is interesting - One needs get ready to do marketing in a world of low  or near zero budgets! Coming with ideas then, can make a huge difference
10. Co-ownership of data - between marketers and consumers is an interesting thought that needs to be practiced by marketers

The Sovereign Consumer

View more presentations from Keith Gerr.

Marketing in a world when the door is already shut!

I am bombarded in a day with hundreds of emails and SMSs- many of them are promotional emails and SMSs. I simply ignore them.

I sit in front of the TV to watch my favorite program and I see a ticker running with messages.Just fails to grab my attention.

I am out to watch a movie and suddenly I realize there are "product placements" intelligently( supposed to be) weaved with the script. My mind shuts immediately as I realize I am being marketed at.

Many consumers like me are getting a lot a savvier than ever before and in one of my conversations with my clients, she was telling me how the hell do I market in a world where most of my best prospects and customers are in Do-No-Call or Do-Not-Disturb lists! 

How does one do marketing in a world when the door is already shut?!

Welcome to the world of relevance marketing. This is increasingly becoming important as many marketing messages are just being ignored or it's money wasted as the consumer is just indifferent. How does one practice the art of relevance marketing.

1. It starts with being genuine and authentic. Facebook fan club/Apps has become a fad. Soon it will lose its relevance after the initial hysteria is over. May be start a help desk page in Facebook for your brand to answer any queries or may be even have a click-to-call service as an app in your Facebook page,twitter or mobile which connects the customer with your already existing call centre.
2. Follow the customer learning journey   - It is important to understand at what stage is your customer or prospect at. It is important not lose the communication script & trigger at each stage. As the customer or prospect knows more about your brand, the intensity of her queries or help is different. It pays to focus your attention to this detail. 
3. Bring the data together for the dialog - Many a times the availability of multi-channel options creates fragmented knowledge across the company among customer facing executives. How can we identify repeat customers or  visitors and make them know enterprise wide, how can you fuse the data available at the call centre with web, how can your link service data with customer billing/purchase data? Start the data journey with small experiments and accelerate them with quick wins. Knowing this can help relevance marketing greatly.

My friend Sandra Zoratti has written an interesting article on this topic:

Step 1.Consumers want precision marketing. On the brand side, this process must begin by first deciding what problem, or pain point, you are seeking to address.

Step 2. Next, marketers need to evaluate and then leverage the data and campaigns currently in place.

Step 3. The next step is to synchronize your campaigns and determine the best message for the channel.

Step 4. Once a test campaign has been launched, the next step is to measure the results based on a wide range of criteria and, most importantly, bottom-line measures.

Step 5. After the initial test, it's time to refine and repeat the above steps to produce the same or different results.

Read more here

Making Analytics actionable - Add the power performance management to it as a catalyst

With  zillions of data points becoming available in organizations today, there has been a lot of buzz around the following:

1. Using analytics in marketing campaigns driving relevance, immediacy, reducing wastage and optimizing spends
2. Making marketing more accountable using the power of data that's becoming available like never before
3. Getting analytics closer to business - Making it simpler and business manager friendly for action to be taken
4. Getting organizations more customer-centric as customers leave a lot of trail about their behaviour - likes and dislikes

I have been always of the belief that analytics is not worth its weight in gold, if you don't make it actionable. The key to this has always been taking this power to the ultimate decision maker where ever he or she is in the organization - it could be the tele-sales rep on the phone, the customer service executive on the field, the marketing manager at customer's office etc. To make that happen, this has to be linked with performance management of employees who ultimately play a role in making this happen on the ground. Peppers & Rogers too seem to make this point in their recent  Expert Opinion( Mark Selcow)article: 

Organizations are beginning to recognize that these massive volumes of data are valuable for more than the immediate insights they reveal: By leveraging metrics, dashboards, and other PM components, data can also be harnessed to change behavior and processes.

The connection between the growing interest in analytics and PM is not coincidental. Analytics is about mining data for patterns and insights – making big discoveries that help advance big ideas. PM is about turning operational data into metrics that show performance versus a goal on a task or process that matters. Simply put: Analysis, Action.

Here are a few quick thoughts on how analytics and PM can fit together in a single project initiative:

1. Select the best projects to execute against that will help advance a critical goal, such as customer churn reduction (analytics)
2. Determine what the metrics and goals should be in each project (analytics)
3. Uncover patterns that can be addressed with process reengineering or team/individual intervention (both analytics and PM)
4. Plan out the financial impacts of making operational change, such as modifying compensation, or tightening/relaxing SLAs (PM)
5. Operationalize the insights and plans by introducing to the organization, for example, in dashboards or in incentive systems (PM)
6. Measure and control performance (PM)

This will continue to be an area of growing interest in organizations as the results then get tangible, metrics then become a measure for evaluation of employees who are responsible for making this happen.