Customer World

Consumer's lust for relevant information - Tracking & Alerting - An important trend for 2010

Trendwatching has come out with interesting consumer trends for 2010. One thing that caught my attention was - Tracking & Alerting as an important trend for 2010.

I think this trend provides a huge opportunity for companies wanting to take advantage of data-led marketing for their products or services.  

"Tracking and Alerting is something that consumers actually need and want, that delights them, that they crave. They are quite literally asking for relevant information, even giving you permission to provide them with more," Trendwatching.com said.

In the era of privacy and DNC, Tracking and Alerting provides huge advantage for marketers to take advantage of permission marketing. If you were a travel company, imagine a service that let's you alert about long weekends coming well-in-advance ( say 2 months in advance). This will help consumers plan their holidays. It's a huge engagement tool.Hence, planning their travel bookings with them.

Or if I were an insurance company, imagine a service that alerts me to taking an yearly medical check-up or an application that alerts me to my fitness regimen! It's a service that I will really appreciate from my insurance company rather than quarterly renewal notices!!

In my opinion, herein lies a huge opporutnity for companies to take advantage of this trend. The ones who do it, will win the war of customer engagement for 2010.

Data-driven advertising - How do we move it beyond the web?

I came across an interesting service platform Meme Machine which has interesting customer-focused applications using data.

Calling itself reactive advertising Meme Machine defines this platform as:

"Reactive advertising is a technology for dynamic customization how display ads look and behave in real-time based on what we know about each viewer and the surrounding factors for each exposure. So instead of one campaign having three different ads, we can run three million different ads, where each is unique for the person watching it. Real-time data and dynamic content are two of the things that makes the Internet really unique. Coming up with the basic ideas for a dynamic ad is just one piece of the puzzle and you also need an engine that can mix up the data and make sure that the right stuff is actually shown to the right people."

Meme Machine has a reaction library and has some cases like Scandinavian Airlines, Swedish Post etc. 

How do we really fuse data that's online, offline and transactional?

To make this more widespread & relevant to a consumer &  marketer, the question that came to my mind really was, how do we use offline data & behaviour for such a service in addition to online information that gets tracked. Imagine a variety of devices and vehicles that consumers today either read, watch, listen, carry along with them - radio( FM), TV, Mobile, Outdoor, Magazines, Newspapers etc.which is not tagged or data rich today.

I believe we still have a long way to go  & innovate here. Here in lies interesting opportunities waiting to be tapped. There must be different applications across devices & media vehicles that must bring this to life. The control, of course, must lie with the consumers to bring all of this together. The applications must talk to each other, pull relevant content, send proactive messages as things happen in each media vehicle or device or by interest tagged by consumers, to bring this conversation & experience to life with each consumer.

Multi-channel marketing poses new data challenges

The world of database marketing has changed since the time we knew it . There were only a few options as one knew it - lists - internal/ external, direct mail and telemarketing a decade or two ago. Today, for companies, customers come from different channels - social media, mobile, website leads thro' SEM or SEO etc. There is a need to track this customer data, organize them in a manner to know where they are coming from, is becoming increasingly critical. Before they know, many customers reach-out to companies from many channels available, in no time, which are available to them. This leads to multiple responses, follow-up and absolutely wasted marketing monies & more importantly a frustrated customer! Only when they organize and track this data across channels can companies do systematic campaigns & profiling of these customers. Not many companies are ready to handle this challenge. In my view, they are sometimes blisfully unaware of the problem and how to manage them!

It starts by building clear customer paths on how customers can potentially reach out to these companies, how they need to be tagged, scoring them by their interest and value, allocating them to an appropriate channel with clearly laid-out follow-up programs by channel. 

Deb Campbell of Clario Analytics has written a nice article on this topic:

Marketers still need to gather and keep the best data they can on their customers, understand them, segment them, track them over time, do some predictive modeling to market relevant to them and target new prospects most like them....Today, marketing channels are exploding all around us, not only with e-mail, search and display ads but also with all the social networking sites.

How does all this affect database marketing?

While the multiplication of channels can make tracking harder, and as a result make it more difficult to amend a database, you still need to know your customers’ needs and wants, and market to them one-to-one. Database marketing best practices haven’t changed as much as how you implement them.

You may have customers who are Internet-savvy and want messaging sent to them digitally. You have to target them, and those like them, in this way. Perhaps another customer segment prefers sales reps to contact them.Where database marketing pays here is that all this information can be captured.....

The solution is to keep your database as up-to-date as possible, with changes of addresses and e-mails, titles and positions. Track and segment your database at both levels, and target prospects with similar preferences and behaviors.

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.

Poverty of attention

I often wonder as we have access to more or more information, why is it that it is getting more and more difficult to take decisions ? Jeffery Phillips had a very interesting perspective on the same.Jeffery writes:

"I spotted a statement on a whiteboard that's stuck with me for a few days.  On the white board, in big, messy handwriting, was the statement:

A wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention.

The point of the statement is that what we are missing - what many of us lack in today's working environment - is not enough information, but enough attention to the important things.  We've migrated from decision makers who had to "go with their guts" and could focus their attention on important things, to those who simply cannot (and will not) get enough information and who are distracted by the search and analysis of information, rather than focusing the right amount of attention and effort on any particular problem."

We just need as much minimum information as possible( or just the right information)  and enough  time for attention amongst ourselves to make the decisions.

 

Bye Bye Barcodes. Welcome Bokodes.

Bokode is expected to be the tagging technology of the future.

Barcodes may have been extremely useful to us over years but what it provides is just information to the person who uses the scanner. But in the new era of technology enviroment that we live in, customers  expect tons of information and help about the brands or products that they use. For example - from the exact place they came from, to how safe they are and their carbon footprint.

See how Bokode works:

Bokeh-code or Bokode for short is a barcode design which is has lenses over the pattern. This new development is going to be presented by its developer, MIT, next week at the Siggraph conference in New Orleans. One of its developers, Dr. Ankit Mohan, is very enthusiastic about the Bokode because of its potential to open up a new way of tagging. The Bokode can be used to set nutrition data on food packaging, and even in developing gadgets to be used in video games! The possibilities are endless. This potential alone makes it very different from the conventional barcode being used now in various products.

As mentioned previously, the Bokode is made up of a LED that is enclosed in a tiny mask and lens. The light within the mask contains the information, and this light can appear either dark or bright. And the Bokode can be read even up to a distance of 12 feet!

Looks like there can be interesting customer applications over this to me right from Auto, FMCG, Healthcare brands.

The shift index - How companies need to understand and adapt to the changing environment

The shift index is a year long research work done by the one of the greatest all time business thinkers John Hagel, who runs the Centre for Edge at Deloitte. In his conversation with Francois Gosssieaux, John talks about some significant shifts that companies need to be cognizant of  and adapt themselves for a change:

Foundation Index

1. The exponentially price-performance capability of computing, storage and bandwidth is contributing to five times the adoption rate of previous infrastructure like power and telephone networks
2. The line between internet and wireless media will continue to blur further enhancing our abilities to connect irrespective of the location

This represents potential for companies to precipitate, participate in and profit from knowledge flows and reducing interaction costs due to digital infrastructure.

Flow Index

1. Individuals are finding new ways to reach beyond the four walls of their organization to participate in  diverse knowledge flows.
2. Sources of economic value are shifting from "stocks" of knowledge to flows of new knowledge - It is no more about protecting and hoarding proprietary knowledge but building scalable offerings around it
3. Worker passion -Workers who are passionate about theri jobs are likely to particpate in knowledge flows

One of the big challenges for companies is that unlike information or data flows, knowledge does not flow easily - as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships. So the key to success in this new economic reality is to move from a transactional world to a long-term trust-based world. Examples of taking on a knowledge flow approach include letting your key customers participate in product innovation, or turning them into affiliates to allow them to help one another.

Impact Index

1. Consumers possess much more power based on availability of more information and choice
2. Brand disloyalty - Consumers are becoming more and more disloyal to brands

There is host of other impact index identified - competitive intensity, labor productivity, ROA performance gap, firm topple rate etc.

The report  provides a fantastic perspective to various changes companies need to prepare and plan for to gain leadership in the market place. Download the report here.
Download Us_tmt_ce_ShiftIndex_0620092_1344(2)

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?

Managing data across the enterprise- How semantic web is changing the game

Most often enterprises struggle with siloed data. It's no surprise that integration of data across enterprise is a nightmare. PWC technology report provides some interesting perspective on how semantic web can make it real and ensure it can be done easier than ever before.

Here are some interesting facts contained in the report:

How is semantic web a game changer for data integration?

The disparate data feed into a mashup—a Web application with highly configurable data display capabilities—that updates each time you add a new store site or remove an old one. Other data in the mashup arerefreshed whenever the original sources are updated. By combining various data, regardless of their formator source, you have a wide range of possibilities forgreater insight and context.

The challenges with traditional data integration vs semantic web:

Generally enterprises don't make the best use of their data.

Given the disparate systems and multitude of vintage of technologies( old and new), it is always very difficult for business managers to use multiple source of data for decisions.

 

Getting internal and external to handshake with each other can help trigger power decisioning within organizations

 

.....empower your business users...

with exploration tools that they could use with existing internal data and with external data of their choosing. These tools would let them find the best business cases and make immediate use of the Linked Data technologies at a low cost to IT, since most of these tools are reasonably priced.

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