Customer World

Getting serious about digital privacy

As a consumer, I have often always wondered every time I had cleared by cache on the laptop, who is accountable or responsible for dropping all the cookies that sit there without my knowledge or even with my "soft" implicit permission - a few of the websites or brands were tracking my behavior using 'app and codes' that sit on my PC. I just hate such intrusions on my privacy for the monetization benefits of somebody else. 

Finally, there seems to be first steps being taken in this direction. The key trade groups - IAB, AAAA, DMA, BBB, ANA announced self-regulation principles. How will they come into effect is critical, what measures are being taken to punish offenders will make a big difference for consumers like me trusting any information that I provide online. Here are some principles that they have adopted:

• The Education Principle calls for organizations to participate in efforts to educate individuals and businesses about online behavioral advertising. To this end, the digital media industry intends, in a major campaign that is expected to exceed 500 million online advertising impressions, to educate consumers about online behavioral advertising, the benefits of these practices and the means to exercise choice, over the next 18 months.
• The Transparency Principle calls for clearer and easily accessible disclosures to consumers about data collection and use practices associated with online behavioral advertising. It will result in new, enhanced notice on the page where data is collected through links embedded in or around advertisements, or on the Web page itself.
• The Consumer Control Principle provides consumers with an expanded ability to choose whether data is collected and used for online behavioral advertising purposes. This choice will be available through a link from the notice provided on the Web page where data is collected.
• The Consumer Control Principle requires “service providers”, a term that includes Internet access service providers and providers of desktop applications software such as Web browser “tool bars” to obtain the consent of users beforeengaging in online behavioral advertising, and take steps to de-identify the data used for such purposes.
• The Data Security Principle calls for organizations to provide reasonable security for, and limited retention of data, collected and used for online behavioral advertising purposes.
• The Material Changes Principle calls on organizations to obtain consent for any material change to their online behavioral advertising data collection and use policies and practices to data collected prior to such change.
• The Sensitive Data Principle recognizes that data collected from children and used for online behavioral advertising merits heightened protection, and requires parental consent for behavioral advertising to consumers known to be under 13 on child-directed Web sites. This Principle also provides heightened protections to certain health and financial data when attributable to a specific individual.
• The Accountability Principle calls for development of programs to further advance these Principles, including programs to monitor and report instances of uncorrected non-compliance with these Principles to appropriate government agencies. The CBBB and DMA have been asked and agreed to work cooperatively to establish accountability mechanisms under the Principles.

 

Download Ven-principles-07-01-09

Augmented reality - the fusing of data, search and advertisers

Here's an interesting cool mobile app released by layar, a company based out of Netherlands.

Basically the app figures out exactly where you are and in which direction you're looking, and then it presents additional data overlaid on top of the camera's image. Be it a bank's ATM that you may want to reach or imagine you reach a locality in your city and would love to find some houses to live here, just use layar and it will find you some houses, real estate agent too and you can call him right away!

Watch it live here:

I do believe it has limitations. It's not all pervasive at it looks:

a. You need an android phone
b. The service needs to be available in your country.This to me is a serious limitation. In a country like
    India, which has a huge penetration of mobile phones, it will serve a real need. In a world of connected
    information that's almost seamless, one cannot be selective in making such a service available. To
    me it must be simple enough to be downloaded and used anywhere in the world. The data on the web
    must be leveraged. This is really where most services fail. You can't have a product on the net and
    expect it to be available only in Europe, US and Netherlands.
c. It still needs the consumer to do something to throw this data thro' this browser. The novelty factor
    may die after some time. It needs to be embedded with what the mobile phone consumer does. I am
    sure this will improve over time.

I do think  applications like these will redefine the way consumers, data providers and advertisers will collaborate in the future.

What's your company's listening quotient?

Best Buy recently launched Idea X - a platform for customers to comment, express and share their ideas to help Best Buy get more customer-centric.

I quite love the transparency and openness of Best Buy folks to admit that this is a learning phase which will evolve, for the better, over a period of time. Here's what they say about this initiative:

"We're new at this. Its probably going to be messy for awhile. We'll probably miss stuff. We'll probably screw up. But we'll learn and get better as fast as we can. We'll blog every two weeks with updates at first. Then we'll build in new and better ways to talk to you about your ideas - when we're reviewing them, or implementing them or when we decide we just can't do anything with them. We'll always be honest. We can promise we're all going to do our best. That means listening closely, talking openly about the ideas that you've shared. And trying our hardest to make it happen."

The most interesting comment regarding this, is of Barry Judge, CMO, Best Buy - " Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, once told me “the easier you make it for customers to complain, the better your product will become...These days, it’s easy to be more accessible. Truly, the only limitations are cultural. We are doing a lot of experiments in being more accessible. Our latest test, Best Buy IdeaXchange, is a web site that is intended to enable consumers (and employees) to give us feedback on what they would like to see us do to make Best Buy a better place to shop."

Results: Over the last 2 weeks, Best Buy seems to have received over 200 ideas!

My view

Engagement is the new branding. The more companies become accessible to customers, the more customers will trust them. Opening-up newer and newer channels is critical. It is important to behave openly and be able to let your customers know that as a company you are trying your best and there will be mistakes but you will definitely improve as you go along.

Remember, customers only punish indifference but they forgive mistakes.

Some questions you may want to ask yourselves to increase your Listening Quotient:

1. Are you as a company accessible to millions of your customers and do you have channel to start a dialog and hear them?
2. Do you as a company and management team have the maturity to listen to customer problems, new ideas and learn from them?
3. What's your company management team's Listening Quotient? Do you measure them?
4. How do you convert the Listening Quotient into top priority for action across the company? 
5. Is there one member of your company's various departments in charge of taking action on these priority areas?

Change Marketing - How the world of marketing has to adapt

Here's a great presentation by Alain Thys on how the world of marketing is changing and there is a very little time left to change or adapt or  just get extinct.

Change Marketing v01

View more presentations from Alain Thys.

From product conversation to passion conversation

It's always interesting to see how marketers struggle to gain the attention of customers. Even after spending big bucks on marketing/promotions, some products catch the attention and some don't . This led me to think what makes customers lap-up certain product concepts even if they don't buy it the first time but how does one create a buzz that goes around it which enables others to make their decision faster. Here's an interesting perspective on the same topic:

If you want people to talk about your product or service, you need to ratchet up one of these three traits. Consider a 360-year-old Finnish company named Fiskars, which makes orange-handled scissors. If ever there was a viral-marketing challenge, it's scissors -- a product with all the sizzle of a RAM upgrade. Brains on Fire, a brand-identity firm based in South Carolina, helped Fiskars find the emotion. "We knew we had to move from a product conversation to a passion conversation," said Spike Jones, the firm's "firestarter." Jones and his colleagues realized there was one community that was indeed passionate about scissors: arts and crafters. They found four arts-and-crafts zealots and christened them "Fiskateers." Then Brains on Fire asked the Fiskateers to select additional compadres who would support other people in their crafting hobby. (Notice the added public-service element.) Since the project launched, there has been a 600% increase in online mentions of the Fiskars brand. (I had covered this in my previous blog post)

Start thinking about emotion, public service, and triggers.

Step # 1: People are emotional. If you can get them to either agree/disagree, love/hate, join/oppose your messages they tend to get involved. Your marketing efforts need to appeal to them to do that. Also, you need a method to know your believers and disbelievers by name and contact - a database. Then, build a one-to-one dialog with them.

Step # 2: People want to contribute Remember, people always want to give back something to the community. When you let them know you are the catalyst for the same, they tend to align with your products or brands. Include that in your marketing efforts, they tend to feel good and talk about their contribution to others and hence about your product or brand.

Step # 3 People want the right triggers  Not always, everybody wants to do the talking. But they definitely do so when there is a trigger. For example, green and energy efficiency, acts as triggers to get people to talk to each other about their contribution to this environment by buying products that are energy efficient. Or getting somebody to use or try your product before others( a preview) or a test your product before the launch encourages chatter as a trigger.

If you don't treat customers as " transactional" elements of your marketing efforts but as "emotional" absorbers of your messages, it can work a long way in gaining a passionate dialog about your products/brands leading to higher conversion and market share.

Learning when not use mobile for marketing!

According 1-to-1 media, the mobile industry has a lot of learning to do from email marketing industry - esp. how not use it! Take a look:

Taking into account email's bad customer experiences with spam and email address sales, the mobile marketing industry developed its channel strategy around the concept that consumers control the relationship.

"When we hear that beep, everybody looks right away," says Steve Leonard, general manager at mobile firm Motricity, speaking about responsiveness to text messages.Consumers are now more willing to respond to offers via SMS because they know that no one will sell their mobile number and they can easily get out if the relationship doesn't meet their expectations.....consumer-controlled relationship will only increase as technology advances to allow mobile banking, purchases, and other applications. And while high-tech devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry are important to drive mobile's evolution....

The key to mobile marketing's future success lies in its metrics capabilities.... Calls-to-action like mobile coupon redemption or in-venue sweepstakes allow companies to track consumer actions to specific marketing initiatives.....

My View:  In India especially, this medium already has the effect of email marketeers' misuse. The amount of junk SMSs we receive is quite high. Also, many companies have started using it for mobile alerts, mobile marketing initiatives etc. Sometimes, it is quite a pain or does not get the attention of customers as it would earlier. It needs to be used judiciously and it must move away from regular transactional messages to relationship messages too.

Ideas are welcome. Any ideas to kick-start this thinking?

When consumer information belongs to consumers!

There's a whole business out there on the web and offline world( direct mail databases, telemarketers etc.) where companies trade your information and make money by way of advertising. They place cookies( without your permission) on the web, track all the information you read, buy and click, use your registration information, get your subscription & transactional data and then bombard you with offers that you may not necessarily want or interested in. Finally, you get fed-up, the companies too get fed-up as there's a diminishing ROI in their marketing efforts and they start searching else where. Then comes a new Google and there's excitement again all round only to wither away after a couple of years! What happens if you as a consumer start trading your information.You as a consumer decide what information would you like to give out and get some returns out of it. That could be the future that's sustainable and  more importantly of value to you.

There are three parties who make money - first YOU, then a central customer information exchange(CCIE) that enables this and an advertiser who seeks to pay for people that they would like to build a dialog with ( remember, I am not using the word - sell, advertise or market!) 

Here's an interesting perspective Jerome brought my attention to:

Each of us is a file of personal data—our age, our sex, our address, the places we go, the things we buy. Imagine bundling thousands of these files.

Bill Densmore has been thinking about this for 14 years. A career journalist who’s shifted to journalism research, Densmore is a fellow at the futurist Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. Each of us has equity in the lives we live, he believes, and it’s time to cash in. His solution is the “information valet project,” a reordered media universe in which dozens of companies compete for the business of brokering our lives for the online news and commentary we covet.

He envisions it working something like this: You choose an InfoValet. It asks you what level of personal information you want to share with the Web sites you visit. At the low end that could basically be your name, rank, and serial number, and at the high end a laundry list of your needs and pleasures. Your InfoValet finds out what sites you want premium—i.e., nonfree—content from, and then it names a price. Its profit will come from charging you a little more than those sites charge it, and what they charge will hinge on the desirability of your “persona” to their advertisers. Densmore can imagine someone wealthy, acquisitive, and candid who’s so desirable he gets to travel the Web for pretty much nothing.
Read more.

My view:  Densmore has a  view of  how information from media can be monetized. It's a great idea & brilliant. But, we don't necessarily live to consume advertising information alone in everything that we do everyday, as we search for information. That sounds quite ridiculous and  ominous to me. Sometimes, I just seek information but necessarily don't need advertising tags next to it. Sometimes, I consume information to buy products, want to know more about some products that I read about or I saw in my friend's place and in this context & time, some advertising information necessarily will help me make better decisions. The context of consumer searching the information to me is important. Sometimes, many of these solutions are too web-centric. It needs have a fine balance between on-the-web and off-the-web linkage.

To me, consumers need to have the flexibility to join an information exchange where their membership entitles them to open or close their privacy information as they need it for that context. It must be their prerogative to build a world of links ( what ever they do - on the web and off-the-web) that is available, to the information exchange, as this will enable consumers to reach out to advertisers rather than the other way around. These are consumer info-banks that are owned and managed by consumers themselves.

The death of registration page

This has been happening to me for the last couple of years.Whenever I found interesting articles or information on the web and click the link, I am always led to a registration page to access this information which is really frustrating to fill - almost most of the time. I  never fill it up. I close the link and move on or I look at the star( information critical to complete registration) fields, fill some junk to get the info.

This has led me to wonder on the following questions:

1. Do companies believe every information seeker is a prospect?
2. When and how do such information seekers turn into prospects for these companies?
3. How does genuine information get converted as hot/warm follow-ups by companies?

I believe that as web becomes all pervasive, the registration page will become extinct. In fact, if you are an aggressive web user, you almost hate registration pages. Alternatively, you will connect with people of similar interest and get this information anyway. It's time for companies to redefine their registration page strategy. 

Here's an interesting perspective on this point by Jeremiah Owyang:

Most marketers don’t know why they want prospects to fill out registration pages, they’ve been doing it for so long, they’ve forgotten why. I’ll remind you, there’s only two reasons: 1) To get their contact information so they can bug them. 2) To get demographic and other data so they can bug them more effectively (target marketing). That’s it.

A technology will emerge that will allow users to pass only as much of their social networking profile information as they want over to a CRM system, how much? It’s up to the user. A new social contract will appear that will encourage users to give as much information as they want, and in return the brand will reciprocate. The more information the user gets, the more the brand will give back in return, I call this a “Social web contract”. Since the data will come from the profile information within a social network, there won’t be a need to have a collection web form, instead information will be passed through connective tissues. Obviously this flips a marketers world upside down as they are ultimately measured in most cases on generating leads and conversions, there’s a pretty radical mental shift that will need to take place...

Next generation marketing services companies

In an era of disruptive technologies, changing landscape in the relationship between brands and consumers, a multi-channel environment where customers tend to get information and build trust about the brands or products that they own or want to buy in more new ways than one, most marketing services firms have been left behind in the past. What does it take to build the next generation marketing services companies? Here's a very interesting perspective by Adam Needles and something that I have been writing about in this blog for a couple of years now. Take a look:

What are the key pillars of a next-generation marketing-services agency?

There are five key characteristics that will mark successful marketing agencies in the near future:

Integrated, multi-channel suite of marketing communication capabilities: Marketers must understand the combination of mediums that are most effective for reaching their target customers and brand communities; marketers must also realize this will change over time.  This means that marketers need agencies that can execute campaigns across an ever-changing combination of mediums and do so in a coordinated fashion; moreover, it means that recommendations for the ‘marketing mix’ need to be driven by real client/brand needs, not agency agenda.

Balance of strategic capabilities with strong tactical execution: Agencies are often asked to manage scale campaigns while ensuring that they are executed at every point and via every channel with perfect, ‘ground-level’ tactical execution.  This means that successful next-generation agencies must have a blend of talent — both communication medium experts and business/marketing/brand strategy experts — that can make sure the complete spectrum of a client’s business needs, from the highest level down to the lowest, are fully covered.

End-to-end results measurement and closed-loop client analytics integration: Next generation agencies must be fully integrated with their clients’ information systems and be able to supply real-time marketing performance measurement data, across mediums, directly into their clients’ closed-loop analytics platforms. Measurement and analytics also need to be focused.

Sophisticated, underlying technology platform:  Whether it is for driving execution management for integrated campaigns or it is for improving measurement and integration with closed-loop analytics platforms, a sophisticated, underlying technology platform is a critical component of next-generation marketing services agencies.  In fact, technology infrastructure must be as much a priority as hiring smart people at agencies. 

Holistic focus on both brands and brand community: Agencies are in a unique position to help bridge what is often a highly inwardly-looking perspective of marketers and brand managers with the outside world – helping to better connect brands with their brand communities.The core objective of any agency’s set of services is to support the marketing of brands.  This means that agencies need to be hyper-focused, as never before, on the impact of their programs on both brand equity and on brand revenue.

Look like the current marketing services firms have a lot to do and rejig, if they want to remain relevant to marketers in the near future. The faster they do it, the more successful they would be.

Turning customer pain into customer gain

The CMO Council just released a report on how companies are losing opportunities to turn customer pain areas into new business opportunities. The report highlights the following facts:

There are critical deficiencies in the way companies measure, optimize and leverage customer experience to drive loyalty, improve brand value and increase business performance and growth, including:

• Insufficient availability and aggregation of real-time customer experience data across touch points that should be shared across the organization
• Poor use of customer interactions to collect insights and intelligence or maximize up-sell and advocacy opportunities
• Lack of Internet processes and systems to track online word of mouth and drive customer advocacy
• Intermittent or deficient monitoring of customer experience that fails to provide true and timely insights into problems and opportunities
• Too few compensation programs tied to customer experience, loyalty and satisfaction gains

CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May says "CMOs must assume ownership for the customer experience and establish enterprise-wide measures and disciplines to ensure continuous improvement. We are missing a major opportunity to turn customer pain into competitive gain at every touch point through better use of web and contact center technologies and processes."

My view: This has been an area of intense focus amongst the marketing community for the last couple of years. I am always surprised to see that there is always insufficient customer experience data across enterprises. This is one piece of data that does not seem to have changed for quite some time now. For example, the report highlights that only 38% of companies gather insight from customer engagement situations! It always makes me wonder where is the gap between intent and execution. I believe the best way to do this is to start small. Don't start with a big bang approach. Pick-up areas for quick win, show to key stakeholders that it works and there is business impact. Expand as you get a lot of stakeholders buy-in, as this is very critical in making customer-centric programs successful in enterprises.