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.

Which media forms will grow and engage consumers?

VSS, a leading PE firm that invests in media, communication & information industries released the next 5 year forecast of the communications industry. It has interesting trends on where consumers are expected to spend more time and therefore engage with marketers' brands. This has a direct impact on the kinds of media, investments & marketing programs that are expected to grow during the coming five years.   

What's expected to grow and shrink?

Here are some of the segments and sub segments of the communications industry which are forecast to grow over the next five years and those that are forecast to shrink over the next five years

"VSS reported that direct marketing benefited from the same trends as branded entertainment as marketers increasingly opted to reach their target consumer with one-to-one messaging as opposed to one-to-many. Digital technology has enabled marketers to perfect their techniques in targeting customers. While direct mail and telesales spending declined due their reliance on such stressed industries as automobiles and financial services, direct marketing still registered a 3.2% increase in 2008 to $106.52 billion, and is forecast to achieve a 5.6 % CAGR during 2008-2013. E-mail marketing performed even better, and continues to expand at double-digit rates because it offers a low-cost alternative to direct mail and other marketing strategies"

What is Growing?
Internet Media	Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Professional Information	Subscription Television
Business Information	Mobile Advertising and Content
Education	Videogames
Direct Marketing	Business-to-Business e-Media
Event Marketing	Tradeshows
Public Relations	Digital Out-of-Home
e-Books
What is Shrinking?
Newspapers	Yellow Pages
Consumer Magazines	Business to Business Magazines
Broadcast Television	Home Video
Radio	Recorded Music
Traditional Out of Home	Traditional Consumer Books

The impending death of voice mail

At the tone, leave a message.....When was the last time you logged into your voice mail box and checked the messages in it? Increasingly, more and more consumers rarely check their voice mail. Consumer don't have the time, it seems, to hear long voice mail messages, they would rather respond to people or friends who called instantly.  Also, it is not easy to search voice mail messages on your phone. Nobody has the patience to go through it one by one!

Here's an interesting statistic from an article that I had read:

More than 30 percent of voice mail messages remain unheard for three days or longer, according to uReach Technologies, which designs voice messaging systems for Verizon and other phone companies. And more than 20 percent of people with messages in their mailboxes rarely check them, said Saul Einbinder, the firm’s senior vice president for marketing and business development. A survey done for Sprint by Opinion Research Corporation found that with the exception of people age 65 and over, adults respond more quickly to a text message than to a voice message. Those under the age of 30 are four times more likely to respond within minutes to a text message than to a voice mail.

If you are a brand having a call center for customer service, how often do you make it easy for consumers to send text messages with their queries, if there is a huge waiting time on the call, so that you get  your service reps to either call these customers back immediately or  quickly respond back with a text message? I have rarely seen companies do so.

Remember, text message box has taken over  the voice mail box!

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.

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.

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.

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!

Open Social - The platform for customer aggregation

I have often wondered( when I receive mails from different folks inviting me to be a member of several social networking sites they were members of)oops, hear comes one more social network membership!  I was always left overwhelmed. Where is the time for me to become a member of one more social network and interact. Being an active user of linked-in, I have always felt, what if I had a way to get everyone of my contacts across all social networks into linked-in, be it professional and personal.

I think Open Social from Google just does that. Open Social provides a platform for aggregation of Social networks into the social network site of your choice. It's Google's solution of a connector like app for social networks. There are some lovely business application demos from Linked-in & salesforce.com there. I am sure there will a lot more applications, more than just business applications, which will help me get connected to my contacts and connections in Linked-in, wherever they are in any social network.

At the start of the year, I had read 2007 will be the year of Widgets and it's coming alive with this innovation from Google. I am sure there will be a lot more application development around this code but this is according to me is just the beginning. I believe this is going to have some profund impact on how data, information & interests about consumers will get shared and also how businesses will get a lot more collaborative in the future.

Take a look at the launch video:

Engagement and experience are your new 30-second spots

Don Shultz had done a review of the book "Profitable Marketing Communications: A Guide to Marketing Return on Investment," - A topic that's gaining attention among CEOs today. He picks-up 8 tips - 8 investor tips to marketing communications- from the book:

The eight tips are:

• Concentrate on outcomes, not outputs
• Forget consumers, target customers
• Manage your communication investment portfolio
• Differentiate in any way you can
• Engagement and experience as the new 30-second ads
• Apply a "focus investing" approach
• Establish a measurement culture
• Leverage your employee capital 

I quite liked two tips here.

1. The one on engagement and experience as the new 30 sec ads. This requires a lot of processes and breakdown of silos in the organization. But, it is a critical factor, if marketing has to make business impact.
2. Establish a measurement culture is also a great tip as it is a culture often missing among marketing fraternity. It's always the output that's the focus. Once the output is complete, one tends to forget to continously measure the business impact across all marketing investments not just TV ads only.

Accountable Mass Media

Well, don't these words - Accountable & Mass media present an irony of sorts to you? 

Yes, surely this has been the way things have been happening for last 3-4 decades. Mass marketing has never been accountable. It's never been addressable 'one household at a time' too. Either, it was not possible or it was too expensive to do it. Technology is surely breaking down these myths and introducing possibilities like never before. Take a look at how this happening or expected to unfold in the near future:

"Since May, Google has been selling ads on the 125 national satellite channels distributed by EchoStar Communications’ DISH Network. Cable networks routinely provide distributors with a few minutes each hour for local commercials; Google is responsible for a portion of EchoStar’s local time and creates an online auction market for it.

Google then analyzes the data from set-top boxes to determine exactly which ads were watched or skipped, with a second-by-second breakdown. With Nielsen’s help, Google will begin to take that information and overlay sampling-based ratings, adding a rich demographic layer to the raw numbers that EchoStar provides."

The reports from Google can pinpoint the moment when viewers most commonly changed the channel, potentially helping marketers shape the creative work on their commercials. For instance, if viewers are turning the channel after seven seconds, the agency might revisit the opening of the ad.

“We see a future in which, when you sit down in front of your television set, you will see ads that are more relevant for you,” said Mr. Steib of Google. “When we make advertisements more relevant to viewers, inventory becomes more valuable and the return on investment is much higher for advertisers.”