Customer World

Marketing is getting rewired- How do marketing specialists rewire themselves?

I was reading Bill Lee's  HBR blog article on Marketing is dead. Quite an evocative headline, I must say. We have either heard or seen such headlines for example - CRM is dead, Long live CRM!

So, I wanted to get away from the hyperbole to the real message or take-out there from his article. There is nothing extraordinary in the article that one has not read or seen in the blogs, conferences or discussion forums over the last couple of years. The key questions to me is how is it being practiced on the ground?

I agree with Bill Lee that there is a tectonic shift in how traditional marketing will be done in the future but the chasm within the marketing specialists still remain which is the biggest challenge and pain for marketers. 

Lee talks about about four key points that is needed to rewire marketing as against the traditional marketing model that is broken:

1. Restore Community Marketing
2. Find your customer influencers
3. Help customer influencers with social capital
4. Get your customer influencers involved in the solution you provide

The interesting aspect of making this change happen is how will marketing specialists - advertising, public relations, digital marketing, CRM & analytics have to adapt themselves to these new rules. What I observe today is that the advertising folks have a poor understanding of community marketing or content marketing or database marketing while digital marketers have a relatively poor understanding of brand keys and architecture and public relations folks talk only about online reputation management(ORM). This is where marketers get frustrated with their marketing partners. 

Here's what I believe can make it happen on the ground:

1. Hire outside their disciplines- Many of these specialists need a higher appreciation & respect of the techniques of the other and a seamless fusion of each of the strategies into their marketing plans is increasingly important if this model has to be fixed. 
2. Identify leaders as orchestrators - There is a need for what I call as orchestrators in each of the specialist disciplines who have the ability, skills and competency to tie-up the loose threads that emerge of out their team's plans into the other discpline or play a seeding role of embedding an idea of the other discipline within their marketing plans. Therefore, they lead the customers across their decision journey for their client's brands. 
3. Clients need to identify conductors within their teams - I believe time has come for CMOs to look for conductors within their teams who demand and define the "tight connections" between the outcomes of each of these specialist disciplines & orchestrators within these specialist teams to make this happen.

 

Do you value customer complaints enough?

I was reading a very interesting article by Don Peppers on the Untapped Value of Customer Complaints. I thought it was a lovely piece which brought out some very important points on this topic in a brilliant manner.

• If you feel a company has wronged you in some way, then you’ll be examining every new interaction with it for evidence to confirm this personal belief. (This is your confirmation bias at work. Don’t even bother trying to deny its existence.) 
• Even a single complainer’s dissatisfaction and distrust can soon infect a large number of others. So complainers, if left to their own devices, can do immense damage to the value of your overall franchise.
• The more a business contradicts the customer’s own pessimistic expectations, the more noticeable and memorable its initiative will be. When done right, like the boiling pot of water that freezes faster, a boiling complainer will often become a highly convinced brand advocate even faster than someone who never had a complaint to begin with. 

In fact, Don Peppers gives some lovely tips on how to handle customer complaints:

1. Acknowledge
2. Apologize
3. Amplify
4. Ask
5. Act

 

Most often, companies and individuals who work for these companies are always in denial mode when complaints happen. Also, many of them I find are not honest to ackowledge it. Customers love individuals who acknowledge the complaint and sincerely try to solve them. The fact that they first listen to the problem is critical. Then, trying to solve the most important aspect or even part of the problem or even giving it their best shot to ensure it is heard or addressed is the next step.

Many companies have processes,software, tracking dept for complaints but customers look for the 'soul' when they raise a complaint. Many a times employees become 'numb' to complaints and that does not help. 

I always find the best doctors are the ones who understand the problem of the patients and their relatives even though they handle thousands of cases. The best ones spend a lot of time hearing and empathizing with the near and dear.

Customer complaints are also similar. They are invaluable assets and companies need to treat them not just as business as usual. 

In Don Peppers own words "When done right, like the boiling pot of water that freezes faster, a boiling complainer will often become a highly convinced brand advocate even faster than someone who never had a complaint to begin with."

Is your business ready to pick-up intentcast from customers?

The word "intentcast" has been used by Doc Searls, one of the proponents of customera taking control of their own data vs companies take control of the data.  He has written a brilliant piece in Wall Street Journal - Customer as God basis his new book intent economy.

 He makes a very strong point by mentioning that businesses treat customers like a cattle herd and they have to get ready for personal empowerment.

I personally believe this is true and agree with Doc totally. Here's why there's a silent revolution that's happening in the customers' own world:

1. Businesses are increasingly finding a large majority of their customers really don't want them to be reached out to. The digital mediums of mobile, web make this "shut-out" very easy. I have heard customers say that You Tube Ads are annoying - be it the banners or the ads before the videos. They just are blind spots. The best customers don't want to be bugged with messages and worst customers  businesses don't care any way!  They need to find a new model to appeal to both.
2. It is sometimes extremely painful to provide information to businesses and many a times the same information is sought again and again across different parts of the same businesses  and across the internet. Information is not seamlessly transported across the pockets of businesses or across different sites they are present on the web.
3. Customer's personal information is treated with very little respect as tracking by cookies, content is widespread. Search for information is treated as " intent to buy" which may not be the real case in the offline world.  Walking in the high street or mall does not mean we are opening the wallet to buy.
4. Rather "intent to buy" must be treated as information and bussinesses must find flexible ways to build conversations with customers. Not all conversations are purchase conversations.
5. If businesses  own the platform along with customers who intend to know, understand, compare, evaluate and purchase, then at least customers will give them a chance.
6. In my opinion, Intentcast is the end of the sales funnel but bussinesses that lead  customers to the end of this funnel will be the ones that will gain trustshare and then marketshare. 

 

How brands need to adopt & leverage technology marketing?

This week there was an interesting debate around P&G CEO - Bob McDonald's comment. He had mentioned that:

“In the digital space, with things like Facebook and Google and others, we find that the return on investment of the advertising, when properly designed, when the big idea is there, can be much more efficient. One example is our Old Spice campaign, where we had 1.8 billion free impressions.”

The word  "free" had raised a lot of eyebrows and threatened many on the future of advertising & marketing services business models. He was almost  saying that digital is the new mass market and that P&G does not have to pay big bucks to catch the attention  & mindspace of  such consumers, which they normally end-up spending for their brands offline. 

While I agree with him - some platforms will have to be leveraged where millions of consumers are already there in the digital market place, other marketing technologies need to be identified, invested and nurtured very carefully as most of these will increasingly become fragmented as more disruptive marketing technologies emerge in the years to come.

In fact I hold a contrarian view  that everything will not be free but I see technology marketing creating a new model of marketing spending - micro investing & budgeting - A lot of small budgets will have to apportioned intelligently across mutiple-technologies which can help marketing meet its brand objectives! Instead of a bazooka approach, it will be a stealth-gun method.

As I see the future, many new technologies will keep coming-up and world of technology marketing is going to see many disruptive innovations - by way of customer engagment technologies, customer experience platforms, payment technologies, BIG data & Analytics etc.. Today, it might be the facebook, google+ , twitter etc. and tomorrow it might be Pintrest, Instagram, some kind of a 3D software game etc.

The question really is how should brands decide which of these technologies do they need to invest and grow their marketing spends on? When we interact with many companies & their marketing departments, we do find them adopting marketing technology basis "flavour-of-the-season" approach.

1. Many a times, there is a need to adopt more depth to their thinking on how these technologies can leverage their current marketing strategies
2. Also, they need to evaluate and prioritize them from a host of options available to them but need to see which ones amongst them has a best-fit match to their marketing objectives.
3. They must refrain from having a herd mentality basis the buzz some of these technology marketing platforms create and start to adopt them without any framework or approach
4. Given they have limited resources and time to invest, it is important to debate & agree with all their marketing partners - both internal & external on how it will help achieve brand KPIs
5. Also, CIO & CMO will have to start working very closely as many of these technologies will link many of the company's internal departments like never before.

It was interesting to read Brian Solis  blog about the same topic and he had an interesting infographic which many of the CMOs can adopt as they evaluate and adopt many of these disruptive technologies for marketing:

It is important for CMOs to invest and back the right marketing technologies. They must carefully evaluate & measure the brand-fit & marketing objectives against each of them.

Personal data is the new oil!

The world economic forum and many futurists believe personal data is the new asset class that will emerge as a competitive advantage for many marketers. It is important that marketers start using this data  intelligently, judiciously and in a manner that benefits and engages the customer. Else, this is one area that can have a severe backlash from customers just like the occupy the wall street episode.

Personal data may be the new oil but refining and using it sparingly with relevance is becoming a very important issue for marketers to focus and address.

Who is the owner of our personal data?

However,  there is an emerging debate around the ownership of personal data as digital outposts & sites are gathering data about customers like never before. Google recently released a new privacy policy last week which  redefines how this data will be used across all Google properties that we as their customers have an account. The new Google privacy policy reads " We may use the name you provide for your Google Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Google Account.....We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads...."

Clearly, the challenge that is becoming a key part of the debate is who is the owner of this personal data  and what of it can be used and by whom.

My View

I personally believe customers should be given control of their data. Customers must give permission about which of this data can be used basis their interests and lifestyle needs to companies, advertisers and marketers. And thereby brands can deliver value to these customers.

Imagine personal data lockers being available which customers can own for a fee(much like the demat of company shares that have happened over years across different countries & markets). There will be several central agencies that hold this data and provide access to customers  - with a front-end which provides flexibility to give permissions to customers to release this data for commercial purposes. If the past few decades were the era of credit bureaus, the coming decades are the era of data bureaus.

Imagine a customer wanting to buy a car ticks the check-box on the need or expresses the need to be a part of a community of interest.Many marketers and companies then vie to build a dialog and a conversation with the customer - not spam her with emails, irrelevant ads and messages on mobiles. All the searches that customer does then become available for relevant ads to be shown to her online. Then, the sales & marketing teams of different marketers & products unlock a new engagement platform to woo this customer.

The customer experience is therefore refined, relevant and customized like never before using the data that is in control in the hands of the customer. 

Imagine the power of this data. Imagine its efficiency. Imagine its effectivness. If personal data has to remain as the new oil, the control & flexibility must be in the hands of the customer.

How do you define success for data-driven marketing programs?

I often have been wondering off-late how does one define success for data-driven marketing programs - the reason being tons of hours are spent in understanding data, organizing data, cleansing the data make it ready for analysis and then time taken for building insights by analysts, getting organization-wide buy-in into the insights and developing a roll-out plan, measuring them etc.

The opportunity I see with all this, is a need to clearly define how is a company benefitting with all of this is increasingly becoming critical. No amount of insights & discovery is worth its weight in gold till it becomes actionable and value is returned in dollars for them. Also, another important question is how do such programs get more investments to provide more value year after year? I also don't see this being driven from one corner or department while participation from senior management teams and other departments is critical for its success, adoption and growing investments.

Interestingly as I got thinking about it, I got something from my archives which had an interesting reference to how to define success by Pat LaPointe.

He has got a lovely definition of defining success. Here's the forumula according to him which may be worth looking at:

It is a simple summation of all experiences of transforming insights into action and the value it created divided by the number of resources consumed to get this value and this is raised to the power of perception!

From my experience, I agree with him that the hard part is transforming the insights into action in any company. Also, perception of quality plays a critical role as enterprise-wide buy-in is critical for such programs as they need collaboration from other departments like sales, customer service, IT, channels etc. So, continued success of such programs must be exponentially raised to the perception and alignment of metrics & hence the value each of them get from such initiatives.

Would love to hear any other method of measuring sucess of data-driven marketing programs.

It's time for companies to think of a Chief Marketing Technology officer!

When I talk and work with people and clients on many assignments, the challenge I find for enterprises to be customer-centric is, how to bring marketing & technology together. Increasingly, technology is getting adopted in many customer-centric channels like never before and marketing is getting more & more real time & thefore technology is becoming a nerve-centre for marketing. The future , I have always thought is the changing( or can I call it merging) role of marketing & technology folks and the need for them to work together.

I read an interesting article today, if there is a need for a CMTO ( Chief Marketing Technology Officer)! I thought this was quite interesting. Who  is a CMTO and what does he or she do?

" A chief marketing technology officer (CTMO) — use whatever label you prefer — is simply the lead marketing technologist, organizing and managing that team. He or she reports to the CMO, not the CIO. Again, this is ultimately a marketing responsibility. There should be collaboration with IT, of course, assuring that marketing fully leverages its infrastructure and complies with technical governance standards. But collaborating is better than being solely dependent."

I find this very thought provoking and I do feel this is doable. The role of the CMTO is to ensure the right technology - either already invested is leveraged across the enterprise or if to be invested is partnered and led by this role - to collaboratively ensure this is adopted enterprise-wide.

Finally, customers must see the benefit of technology in their interaction experience with any company. The role of the CMTO is to make this happen.

Empowering customers in India - Indian privacy law set to change landscape

India is gearing up for enhanced privacy laws that protects customers. This can be a landmark legislation that can have lasting impact on consumers, data protection, data sharing and use of personal data & information. 

India has a not been privacy friendly state. Data sharing and exchange is done freely and hence it is not suprising to find personal information being freely available for a few cents. The proposed act or legislation seems to be all encompassing and can have a lasting impact. Take a look at some of the recommendations:

1. Currently, in India there is no legislation for protecting the privacy of individuals for all information that may be available with private entities. The legislation proposes to bring this to force.
2. Choice and consent of the indvidual before his/her personal information is collected
3. Information should be used only for the purpose it was collected
4. The individual should have access to his/her information at any time. He/she must be enabled to update or correct the information
5. Data controller would be transparent in his working as regards to the collection of personal data
6. Data controller is primarily responsible for its safety and use

The framework proposes:

• All forms of identifiable data be protected against under the right to privacy.
• It goes on to define what is personal data -..."to be able to identify a person, information need not necessarily be objective identification such as a person's name, but can be subjective information such as the opinion that a person is a "reliable" borrower or that a person is "expected to die of a terminal disease". It is also important to bring all personal information within this definition regardless ofthe format in which the information is stored."
• It also extensively takes into consideration Indian context - Aadhar program that uses biometric information
• Explicit consent or even approval from a regulatory authority may be required to be obtained to collect sensitive personal data.
• Processing of data in an automated manner must be avoided when it affects the vital interests of the data subject.
• The data once collected must be deleted after achieving the purpose for which it was
  collected.
• Privacy impact assessments to be conducted by independent authorities in the form of
  transparent audits, for the protection of personal data.
• Appropriate measures to protect the data of Indian citizens that are processed outside the country.

I believe this is going to have far reaching implications on how private entities hold data and process data. Also, information available on the web and information shared in social media will have to undergo scrutiny, as this personal data today is being used for commercial interests by many of the entities like google, facebook etc.

I have attached the approach note paper Download Aproach_paper.

I would love to hear comments, feedback and implications on this proposed law. And how marketing in India needs to adapt to this new environment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The emerging era of customer unions!

I was reading an interesting article by Umair Haque on the threat of open customer rebellion and how industrial age businesses are completely unprepared to change the ways they  engage, treat and manage customers.He writes:

"Yesterday's massive, sprawling organizations could pacify "consumers" by buying them off with a discount or three, an overblown celebrity promising the moon, an entirely new "brand" designed as camouflage, or adding an extra blade or five, patty or three, or cylinder or four, and calling it "innovation." But that probably won't pacify people concerned not merely with what they "get," but with what, if anything, you're really contributing to society".

He goes to quote an interesting example:

"ING customers mobilised on Twitter and other social networks to protest at bonuses paid to bosses at the bank, one of the biggest in the country. The threat of direct action raised the spectre of a partial run on ING, terrifying the Dutch establishment. Fred Polhout, union organiser at the bank, says: "People were outraged. We heard about the bloated sums being paid again in the City and in New York; but suddenly the issue exploded on our own front door."

To me this is a lovely articulation of  how unprepared many companies are. It made me think of some interesting analogy of how new information age thinking has to drive changes in industrial age-mindset companies:

1. In the industrial age, there were labor unions who acted as interest groups for community who produced goods. The customer had no power as they were fragmented across markets. The information age is creating customer unions where customers come together to rally against companies which do injustice to them, their enviroment, their community, unfair business relationship & services etc. 
2. The labor unions could take the cause of only one company, theortically speaking. But, customer unions can have members across different products/brands across geographies and pose a larger threat.
3. The customer unions are self-engaging members who pose a potential threat to companies who undermine their power.
4. The customer unions can come together within a few hours and disrupt the brand reputation built over years by companies.
5. The customer unions have the power of internet, social media to engage & collaborate for this cause and will disengage once the cause is achieved.
6. If there were union leaders who drove the labor unions, here there are customer leaders who drive the opinions and issues. Companies need to identify them as they emerge from time to time for different reasons. But address them with agility.
7. Authencity and honesty will be the hallmark of successfully handling these customer unions and companies need to find new innovative methods of handling them openly & with transparency.

It's time companies and marketing departments realize this and find new ways of truly engaging with customers and their opinions.

 

 

 

Data is mine but we as consumers undermined it first!

There is a great article in Time Magazine which talks about "How companies know everything about you?".

There are many relevant points that are being made there but I really don't concur with all the blame &  privacy issues that are being made in the article. I agree with the need for privacy of my data and of course, am against littering of my personal information. But, before we jump of the hook and start  blaming the internet, industry leaders like google, facebook, twitter &  other data marketing companies, we as consumers need to think about the following points:

1. Free email : There is nothing called a free lunch right? When you have a free email id which you have  opted to take and use extensively, the companies need to find a business model to make money. Hence, they decided to build a business model around targeted advertising using the content and information that you access. The money they earn is being used to store our email data, provide uninterrupted access to your email, maintain the infrastructure etc. So, are we as consumers ready to pay for such services and also therefore define or give information access, rights to these companies on our terms? 
2. Customer aggregation platforms have done it for decades, so what's the stress?:  Television, radio station, newspapers did it for decades. The content that consumers watched on TV was subsidized by advertisers, broadcasters & electronic appliance companies to name a few - They paid to reach consumers and group of consumers like you. Every interruption of ' your valuable time' when you watch your favourite movies and soap operas is 'invasion of our privacy'. We chose to live with it, till new digital media like internet, mobile came-in. There were no laws to stop this invasion of privacy. The new media companies have now found a new method to hawk this information. Are we as consumers ready to pay subscription charges for such content and define access rights for this information on our terms?
3. Intermediation leads to social litter, disintermediation protects it: Any intermediator, we know, controls the information, prices and margins. This has happened time and again to us as consumers. The farmer faced this many decades ago as he could not get the right prices for his produce as the intermediators held them to ransom till disintermediators intervened and build an efficient supply chain. The banks are the age-old intermediators who have made pots of profits( and they make it still) by making money on our money!  I see many social media platforms as intermediators - I never was able to connect with my friends who I had lost for ever till they came-in and made it easy. I see it as a huge a benefit. But, the information they hold is a goldmine and they have to find ways to monetize it to remain in business. Are we as consumers willing to pay for being members of these social platforms - even a couple of cents, if we really find them valuable and beneficial? Therefore, we can define access rights to these platforms on our information on our terms? 

To conclude, what I see around me emerging is businesses like information vaults, personal information utlities (PIUs) firms like allow, Personal which talk the right language of consumer control but as a consumer I would like to know what are their terms of agreement with my preferred platforms - social media, TV, email service provider, communities on the Net am a member of, financial services provider, govt.( they trade social security nos. for a price too!) etc.. There needs to be terms of transparency, terms of portability, terms of usage, terms of enagement   etc. before we as consumers jump-in and start embracing these platforms.

Else, this will be a case of one more of the many fads that  we will fall into and we will undermine our data once again!