Customer World

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.

Read more

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.

Typealyzer analysis of my blog - It's quite cool - Is this the future of customer profiling?

Imagine a time when you were busy taking the help of somebody to do mind reading, handwriting analysis etc. which would tell you more about the kind of person you are or the person who you are going to meet, - to know what your or their strengths and weaknesses! Or doing a detailed profiling research to know more about your customers' demographics and psychographics.

Here, it's happening to the online world too but with a difference. With typeanalyzer,  you can know the person a lot better( - What personality is your blog?)! Here's an analysis of my blog!

INTJ - The Scientists

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

Looks like this is will be one of the many ways by which customers on the web will be profiled!  Hence, this could become one of the ways to target or pull them to products or services basis their interests and personality!

 
 

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.

When cash becomes a way of life

I was reading an interesting article in MSNBC, on how American consumers are preferring Cash over Credit Cards. This is a trend seen very recently by retailers in the US where Americans want to be a lot more "prudent" than ever before. It's  moving back to pretty much the days similar to what their grandparents used to do - buy only what's needed.

It made me wonder how should marketers re-orient their marketing efforts and messages given this trend. This I believe will be something most countries will witness as customer buying behaviour, over the coming year. Here's my take on what could they do:

1. Marketers who  embrace value & savings theme will get the attention of consumers. But, this can't be just lip service or mere messages. They need to identify products within their portfolio that can really deliver this benefit. Since consumers tend to be more " rational" now, fluffy propositions and benefits will never fly with them. Imagine how "fuel-efficient" Japanese cars caught the fancy of American consumers several years back. They genuinely delivered cars that were easier to maintain and run. Similarly marketers need to identify such benefit in their products. In my opinion, this could lead to packaging innovation. Moving to smaller packs unlike giant sized packs which drove "unwanted consumption" some years back could be an option. Consumers might not stock and consume but they might buy more often as need arises.
2. Payments could move prepaid - Imagine as a retailer, if there was budget cards for customers. Pre-paid loaded value cards that offer more value  for the  same amount of money. It could have  pre-loaded offers,  savings coupons etc. as a part of the pre-paid cards on offer.This can help track cash payments which often become difficult to track during these times. This also ensures there's a lock-in for repeat visits from the same consumers.
3. Service Innovation could trigger and extend existing customer relationships - Imagine an existing environment where customers want to extend the life of their existing products. This can lead to service innovation for white good manufacturers. Imagine an extended warranty offer for next 12 months for say just few tens of dollars more. This could be offered to existing customers as an option. Or an  AMC contract that protects any additional spends due to breakdowns during the next 12 months. Companies will have to start thinking service innovation in these difficult times. But, surely they are bound to resonate with consumers as they would be totally genuine and thoughtful.
4. Converting assets into cash - If the world earlier was "Buy now and Pay later", this is an environment for financial innovation, when liquid & priced assets bought in the past can be valued and turned into cash for their customers. It's needs prudent financial re-engineering like never seen before by financial services companies.
   

The key answers if you see is turning the traditional marketing thinking on its head. That's the real challenge marketers will face in the days to come.

Reinventing direct marketing

In an interesting article written by Alan Mitchell, Iain Henderson and Doc Searls, they argue that direct marketing is facing endemic crisis. I can't agree with them more as there's a tectonic shift in the way customers have to be reached in the future. Direct Marketing needs redefinition. It needs a new approach and a re-jigged business model. It needs to 'co-opt' customers rather than 'target' customers. And the time to do it, is now. If direct marketers don't change, they would become extinct soon. Take a look:

Three core characteristics of direct marketing are responsible for these problems; (1) Data management: all responsibility for data management (collection,storage, analysis, usage, etc) lies with the seller; (2) Information flows are almost wholly ‘ top down ’ from sellers to buyers in the  form of selling messages; (3) Metrics: success is defined in seller-centric terms — costs versus benefits to the seller.

Direct marketing’s single most compelling USP is ‘ relevance'.  If a  buyer and a seller can connect about the right thing at the right time  via the right channel, a powerful win-win is unleashed. Both sides can reap significant value by using and exchanging the right information. Unfortunately, these win-wins are massively undermined and  sometimes obliterated by the industry’s seller-centric history and operation.

The industry's current modus operandi goes something like this. Organisations harvest as much data as they can about customers —  primarily transaction and behavioural data supplemented by data from other sources such as purchased lists, market research and so on. They ‘ mine ’ and analyse these data, looking for trends and patterns. Then they use the insights generated to create profiles of likely customers, distinguish highly profitable customers from less profitable ones, and  identify which customers are most likely to be open to up-selling, cross-selling or (perhaps) defection. They then target these customers with appropriate messages, designed to get them to respond in some way, such as take up an offer.

Data-driven marketing is still guesswork

....If they could then eliminate 10, 20 or 30  per cent of non-responders from this mailing, then their costs would go down and their response rate would go up. This is the central agenda  of data-driven ‘ insight ’ today: to reduce the wastage generated by guesswork.

Welcome to the world of reverse direct marketing - VRM

By empowering individuals to collect, store and share rich, up-to-date personal data with suppliers, vendor relationship management (VRM) offers a way through direct marketing ’ s current impasse. To realise the new win-wins made possible by VRM, the industry needs to start adjusting now.

...With VRM, the customer becomes the holder of his own master data. VRM tools enable organisations to access these data (on terms agreed on with the customer) to check and update their own files.With VRM, customers not only replicate vendor-side data, but also back it up and improve on it. They also possess means to organise a superset of data that, with the customer’s permission, can be accessed to improve vendors ’ product development and offerings to market.

Read more

My View

Direct Marketing has been broken in its old model and methods. Customers don't want to be disturbed, they care for their privacy more than ever before and new media is a lot more punishing than old media. When was the last time you ticked-off spam emails from brands that you  have done business with before and deleted them? There are millions in my email box and I don't care about them. So is the case with SMS( mobile) and other media. If old media created ' clutter', new media 'blinds' your messages very fast as customers shut their in-box or mailers or inserts even before they have seen the message. The new direct marketing mediums might cost brand marketers lesser to reach  the customer  thro'  many of these mediums  but they produce diminishing returns too fast. The only way is to co-opt customers, get them to share their interests, information & needs and collaborate with them. Direct marketing needs to become collaborative marketing to survive.

The conversation prism

Overall last couple of years, I have been writing about the seamless boundaries or should I say vanishing boundaries between various media. If you are in marketing, communication, media and the like there seems to be thin lines dividing marketing, technology and media/publishing. This has led to the need of host of new areas like Marketing Metrics - marketing accountability, marketing ROI, Conversation Media - Blogs, Social networks etc. Marketing technologies - Cool marketing apps, CRM, campaign management tools, analytical applicatons etc. There is an increasing need to connect them together and see them feed-off one another. Here's a nice post by Brian Solis on the same:

As a communications or service professional, you'll find yourself at the center of the prism - whether you're observing, listening or participating. 

As conversations are increasingly distributed, everything begins with listening and observing. Doing so, will help you identify exactly where relevant discussions are taking place, as well as their scale and frequency. This dialog can be charted into a targeted social map that's unique to your brand.

Building value in mobility - Some perspective

Over the last couple of months, I have been talking and meeting a lot mobile service providers in India across many forums. While most of them are in an acquisition binge, the challenges they seem to face are similar - irrespective of the vintage of operation or subscriber size. They either talk to me of huge shift from post-paid subscribers to pre-paid subscribers, reducing revenue from voice services, increasing usage of VAS and data services, lack of differentiation in their own offerings for customers to choose or switch, customer churn and many more! To add to the confusion, there are new service providers entering the fray. How do these service providers build value for their customers and become compelling?  Visionmobile provides an interesting perspective and approach to consider - Value Quadrants:

Value Quadrants maps value creation and revenue model changes by asking WHEN and WHERE is value being created. The WHEN of value creation is function of the handset lifecycle, from design, development and production (pre-sales phase) to point-of-sale and in-life use (post-sales phase). There WHERE of value creation is either on the device (hardware, software, patents and industrial design) or on the services ‘cloud’ (for designing and delivering content and services).

In one quadrant, value is created by intellectual property, in the other value is built out of licensing and in the other one it is out of infrastructure. Many companies have started to take position in these quadrants.

The revenue models that emerge out of these value quadrants are quite different and unique:

To me this is an interesting map for mobility service providers in India to evaluate their offerings and determine what  migration and transition of services that they need to make or build  to create value and stickiness in their offerings for customers either thro' alliances, product/service development, new revenue-sharing models etc.

Guess, there's lot to think now!