Customer World

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.

Capital One's Card Lab - Get your customized credit card

Capital One recently announced the launch of Card Lab.  Ron Shevlin writes about this:

Capital One launched Card Lab, which it claims is the first “do-it-yourself” credit card offer. It’s an interactive tool that lets prospective card applicants choose among a number of options to build their own card package. Not surprisingly, you can’t get a 25% annual bonus and 2 points per $1 charged and 1.25% back on purchases and….you get the picture (otherwise see below).

My take: Card Lab is a winner because it:

1) Builds up versus narrows down. Card Lab’s approach puts prospects in charge, and presents the options in such a way that they can easily see the tradeoffs they make when selecting certain options.

2) Engages with interactivity.Card Lab, on the other hand, is a great demonstration of the interactivity the channel is capable of delivering. Serious prospects can play what-if to their hearts’ content in order to understand the product features and tradeoffs available to them.

3) Yields actionable data.The web analytics folks at Cap One are going to have a field day with Card Lab. Analyzing the usage, trends, clickstream, etc. should help Cap One marketers get a really good understanding of who’s looking for cards online, what their preferences are, which features are most popular, and so on.

I agree with Ron completely. It's a great idea and extremely customer-focussed.But, CardLab sounds a little intimidating to me.Another key issue though is actually the process of accepting or rejecting applicants - that is, how customer-level data is connected real-time for approving and disapproving an application as credit cards are fraught with credit-risks. Am sure Capital One has the process taped-up for this.But, this is a key factor for positive customer experience and product adoption. 

Here's one more product that fits-in with all the advantages what Ron is talking about:

Closer home in India, my example is HDFC Bank's NetSafe card for customization,customer-centricity and the method to manage the process well. It's a lovely little product. In fact, it works on the fear of Net Security which is a primary concern for credit card customers using their cards online.

NetSafe, is a unique online payment solution that offers complete security while shopping on the Internet. With NetSafe, customers can shop online through a virtual credit card, without revealing their actual HDFC Bank Credit Card number. What's more,they can use the HDFC Bank Debit Card(Check Card) also for online purchases. Customers here choose their account limit for this specific card - Value of credit limit, date of expiry of the card etc.! Customer can create as many online credit cards as possible(subject to the overall accepted credit limit).

21st Century CEOs - The emerging specialist CEO

BusinessWeek has an interesting article on the challenges of finding the right CEOs for corporations. The article goes on to mention that it will soon be the age of specialist CEOs. Take a look:

James M. Citrin, corporate kingmaker, has long had a close-up view of the leadership demands of the world's most dynamic companies. As founder of Spencer Stuart's technology, communications, and media practice, the executive recruiter has placed 165 chief executives, chief financial officers, and directors since 1994.

Citrin expects five specialist CEO types to be in the greatest demand:

• THE BRAIN
  Whether they're algorithm geniuses, coding prodigies, or merely credentialed scientists or designers, CEOs in touch with their inner geeks will be a sought-after breed. As global competition intensifies the pressure for top-line growth, innovators-in-chief will be more clued in to the next breakthrough business. ARCHETYPE: Arthur D. Levinson, the CEO of Genentech. (DNA ) Levinson has a PhD in biochemistry and is known for sending out late night e-mails to his researchers on details in scientific papers.
• THE AMBASSADOR
  A two-year stint in London may have counted as enough international experience in the past, but that won't be the case much longer. "More and more of our CEO specs are calling for explicit business experience in emerging markets," Citrin says. Boards are looking for CEOs with passports showing frequent visits to China and India, along with Russia, Brazil, and Dubai.ARCHETYPE: Citrin points to News Corp. (NWS ) CEO Rupert Murdoch, who has long wooed Beijing officials and launched alliances with local companies. Another example, he says, is PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi, who was born in Chennai, India.
• THE DEALMAKER
  Citrin believes dealmaking specialists—those able to both sell off noncore assets and go toe-to-toe with private equity players on big acquisitions—will be in heavy demand.ARCHETYPE: Retired AT&T (T ) CEO Edward E. Whitacre Jr., who turned SBC Communications (T ), once the smallest of the regional Bells, into a powerhouse with a market value of $242 billion.
• THE CONDUCTOR
  Corporations' walls are only going to get more permeable, as companies form alliances with outsiders and turn to networks of innovators for ideas to put into practice.ARCHETYPE: A.G. Lafley, who says half of all new Procter & Gamble (PG ) products should come from outside its R&D labs.
• THE CASTING AGENT
  If you think "people are our greatest asset" is an overused bromide today, just wait. The talent war is only expected to worsen as boomers begin retiring en masse and emerging-markets managers remain scarce.ARCHETYPE: Xerox (XRX ) CEO Anne M. Mulcahy, who named operating chief and heir apparent Ursula M. Burns to the president's role in April.

To me the most interesting point from this article is that company boards need to decide what kind of leadership do they need for their companies at the moment and well into future - say next 3 -5 years.There might well be good and brilliant CEO prospects to choose from but they might not fit the specific need keeping in mind the company's current plans and objectives in the near future. Therefore, it needs careful planning, thinking and then selection.

Getting into next gear

Sometime early last week, I announced my decision to quit iContract, one of India's leading one-to-one agencies.

It was a job that I had really loved to do for the entire part of the last 14 years of my working life -  building and growing iContract. iContract is a one-to-one division of Contract Advertising ( a subsidiary of JWT in India and also a part of WPP Group).

Over the years at iContract,there are a lot of people who made this happen. I must admit this is not an individual effort but it was a team effort. It was just people who made a big difference to iContract without whom this would not have been possible. The most important of them include Bimal Nair(Currently Executive Vice President, Rediffusion DY&R), Samir Shanbhag(Currently Group Account Director, BrandCom Middle East), Leroy Alvares(Currently Country Head, Tribal DDB), Harsh Grandhe( Currently Vice President, Rediffusion DY&R), Allwin, Vineet Kumar, Parag Sen and Nishad Ramachandran. They have been great colleagues, friends, evangelists and advisors for me at various points of time during my years there. Each of them gave more than 100% commitment when needed, carried the organization and its agenda as if it were their own and it was  great fun working with them. 

I am now in the midst of setting-up my own venture. Will let you know how things progress at my end.

Viewing Nation vs Reading Nation

NY Times has an article on how young adults in the US are givng scant notice to newspapers. The article reports that:

Thomas Patterson, a professor of government and the press at Harvard who conducted the survey, said that young people today do not make an appointment with news every day the way older adults do.

“We found that most young adults don’t have an ingrained news habit,” he said. “Most children today, when watching television, are not watching the same TV set that their parents are watching. So even if their parents are watching the news every day, the children are likely to be in another room watching something else and aren’t acquiring the news habit.”

“My sense is that newspapers in their traditional form are not going to be able to recapture this audience,” said Professor Patterson. “What’s happened over time is that we have become more of a viewing nation than a reading nation, and the Internet is a little of both. My sense is that, like it or not, the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we don’t really know what that form is going to look like.”

'Physical Size Does Not Guarantee Success; What Matters Is Mental Size'

Subroto Bagchi, COO of Mindtree Consulting makes some lovely points on what it takes to build an organization. Frankly in my view, it's the 'soul of the enterprise' that makes all the difference.Everything else is replacable. Business  will follow if you cultivate the right culture. Ask yourself this question- Does your enterprise have a soul? Surely, your customers will know it, everytime your employees interact with them. May be you can start by asking them first. Be ready for a lot of suprises!

If you then want to go back to the drawing board, you can start thinking with Subroto's advice:

• Being big is not about size, but about mindset - Let us imagine that you want to someday build a skyscraper. You have to pre-think what plumbing must go into the skyscraper. It cannot be an afterthought.So you have to pretend that, "I am a skyscraper." The inlet and outlet for the skyscraper is going to be very different. So pretending [or imagining] is a very, very important thing.
• Countries like Singapore, or Israel, or Finland, are world leaders in many ways. These are developed countries. These countries are at the top-end of GDP. But they are so tiny. They're microscopic when you compare them to countries like India or Pakistan. Many of the African countries are significantly larger. In today's world, physical size does not guarantee success. What is important is mental size. Nokia was created out of Finland. Singapore's GDP is way bigger than the GDP of India, and ... the population of Singapore is half the population of Bangalore.
• Process to Empathy Ratio(PE Ratio)- Process is not a substitute for building an emotionally rich organization. Process without emotion can quickly bring you down to the lowest common denominator.
• Inventive Thinking -When you look at building an organization, yes, the first idea is important, but an organization is built only as an idea of ideas. Sometimes people fail because they don't take a long view of time. Sometimes they fail because they do not adapt. I think adaptability is very important.
• Create the right organization infrastructure - An organization, an enterprise, is about infrastructure.We have to continuously build infrastructure.Many companies do a good job of building the physical infrastructure. Some companies even do a good job of building the intellectual infrastructure. But above these two layers is what I call the emotional infrastructure. This is the most difficult - the most difficult to build and the most difficult to sustain.In a hyper-competitive world, it is easiest to demolish a company at the physical layer. It's less easy to demolish a company at the intellectual layer. But it is the most difficult to break a company apart at the emotional layer.
• Have the right balance - Look at your enterprise as a three-legged stool. One is the employee, one is the customer and the third is the investor. The three have to be balanced at all times. If you try to deliver to the investor at the cost of the employee, or at the cost of the customer, this three-legged stool topples over. So we need to be careful.

Read more

Networked Readiness Index

Economist has an interesting article on ranking of countries on Networked Readiness Index. US has lost its top place and has fallen to the seventh place. India is ranked 44th while China has been ranked 59th. About 122 countries have been ranked in the report.India has lost 4 places in the ranking since the last time this report was published. The reports ranks countries on 67 variables which includes parameters like regulatory environment, measures of technology infrastructure and usage.

India seems to have a long way to go if it needs to get to the top of the list. Being a preferred IT destination and projected to be a fast growing economy, it is important this gets the attention of the policy makers here in India.

Download rankings2007.pdf

Leveraging Mobile Marketing @ Mobile Monday, Mumbai

I spoke at Mobile Monday in Mumbai yesterday and shared my thoughts on how brands could leverage the power of mobile marketing. With over 2 billion mobile phones worldwide and 200 million mobile subscribers in India( and growing!), mobile as a marketing medium is reaching a tipping point. Marketers, publishers, aggregators, application providers, mobile operators and agencies have to unlearn a lot of old marketing principles and adopt new marketing rules for mobile marketing to gain widespread acceptance.

Why mobile advertising is different?

I have in the recent past seen a host of advertisers and mobile shortcode operators treat this medium the same way as many other mediums. Most of them are "text and response" campaigns. But, I certainly believe mobile offers greater opportunities and what is needed is a bit of imagination and forgetting what one has learnt from other media. Paul Golding makes an interesting point about this:

"...the ability to reach consumers at any time and in any place, with the added potential to know the user’s context (e.g. location) is potentially valuable to content and service providers. If they know how to monetise the “mobile attention” of the user, then let them pay to do so.The challenge is trying to normalize and define the economics of engagement.

The problem here is that the mobile world is not like the Internet. There are multiple ways of engaging with the users. Whereas those from the Internet world (e.g. Mads Moller from Google) were talking about banners and text ads, those from the messaging world, like Arie Baak from LogicaCMG, were talking about “in-service” ads like messages appended to top-up and voicemail alerts etc.

Understanding the context of the user was discussed a lot. Operators know a good deal about their customers. There’s a lot of information buried away in call records, texting profiles and other sources of context. Add location to this and the potential exists to track the intent of users in a powerfully unique way. Indeed, operators have access to a resource that is so powerful that it scares the likes of Google and other ad-brokers. An operator can track everything the user does (i.e. every site visited, every number called) whereas Google can only track your search habits. Even the most sophisticated web-tracking agencies can’t track every site visited (i.e. using cookies).

No doubt there is potential to exploit and monetize the rich assets available to operators. However, the question is how.

Rural India & Digital Era - Customization will help

In a digital era, how do rural and poor communities share stories with one another? By a Nokia mobile phone, with adapted software, if academics in London and campaigners here get positive results from their project.

Using mobile phones with simplified icons, which villagers would find easier to deal with, this British-linked project seeks to zero in on what kind of information local users find useful.

Ramnath Bhat, 25, working in communications-based NGO Voices, is part of the Story Bank project, in association with University of Surrey.It is part of a larger project called 'Bridging the Global Digital Divide' and is based in the rural area of Buddikote, in southern Karnataka's Kolar Gold Fields area. 'We've seen in a prior research that in a lot of cases, information and communication technologies, or ICTs, don't encourage communication among the poor.'

ICTs - primarily computers and electronic communications - imply centralisation, complicated methods of participation, language, and design issues.The project is quite exciting, says Bhat. It uses the Nokia N80 mobile phone, together with easier-to-use software for villagers, including Dalits, to create multimedia content.

'We're modifying the phone interface to make easy the process of creating content. It will be all done by using icons. We'll have separate icons for recording ambient sound, for voice and for clicking pictures or taking video,' he added.

A computer icon is a small pictogram, used to supplement the normal alphanumeric tools used to relate to the computer.With these buttons, an unlettered villager should be able to record small video clips with audio tracks. These digital stories will be then sent to a nearby central server, connected to a touch-screen.

The project aims at making it simple to create and access digital content. Voices also runs a project in the area, where radio-type programmes are put out to local houses.

'We've noticed that villagers cannot access our community centre, because timings don't match or because of their work. With a touch-screen device located outside, they could create and send stories here anytime,' argued Bhat.

What information do villagers seek, really?

'For men, their primary needs are info on governance, legal awareness, agricultural, health. For rural women in this area, it tends to be career information for their children, profiles of other self-help groups, and options for financial loans,' he says.

Children, meanwhile, wanted info on general knowledge, sports events, film stars, and themes science (including seemingly remote themes like dinosaurs or space).

The NGO is also linking the Internet with radio, by adopting the Sri Lankan idea of 'radio browsing'. Villagers ask for the information they need, someone in the NGO searches the Net for it and then reads it out over the local radio 'station'.

thro' contentsutra