The Marketer Perspective

How do you connect with consumers in an environment that is filled with a plethora of traditional and new media alternatives? Persistent conversation to ensure that you’re heard above the roar?  Narrative that attempts to bind using data points about your consumer to personalize the message, albeit somewhat blindly? Certainly not. Persistent conversation and extended narrative don’t drive a connection. Relevant and meaningful conversations do. 

In the Pulizer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch shares some insight with his daughter, Scout, regarding understanding others. He said, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” When it comes to connecting with consumers, we can all benefit by aligning with this sage advice. 

Many marketers struggle with the challenge of how to connect with consumers in our new, connected culture filled with the likes of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, iPhone apps, citizen journalism, and augmented reality games. The marketing world has changed, with consumers taking more control over the relationship. Now more than ever, it’s important to engage your consumers with relevant conversation to earn their trust and loyalty. In order to do this, we need to genuinely understand our consumers and, as Atticus Finch suggested, “consider things from his point of view.” 

A few years ago, Forrester introduced the concept of Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD)¹ - a “systematic approach to interacting with customers that consistently builds loyalty.” The concept suggests that marketers need to dramatically raise the bar on the customer experience. And while originally conceived to assist in driving the direction of Web experiences, we contend that in today’s dynamic media environment, the concept of “customer experience” should extend across all communication channels.  

Forrester suggests that successful EBD efforts focus on three key principles. Let’s take a look at these three key principles through the lens of today’s dynamic media ecosystem:

1. Obsess about customer needs

Intuitively, marketers will leverage demographic, transactional, and behavioral data to seek to identify customer needs. Some may even develop models to identify prospects/customers that likely have a particular need set. The forward-thinking marketer, however, is augmenting those data elements with insight derived from conversations with consumers.  

In our recent article, Data-Driven Marketing Strategies to Watch in 2010, we wrote about the power of harnessing the insights of your customers.  Strategies being used today include Marketing Research Online Communities (MROCs) and ongoing online surveys. Of course, unsolicited customer conversations are happening in the social media space as well via blogs, forums, message boards, review sites, and video sharing sites to name a few - and more and more marketers are monitoring those conversations. In order to best understand the needs, attitudes, and behaviors of your customers and prospects, traditional techniques such as data analytics need to be considered in concert with today’s social media alternatives.  Without this foundation, relevant and meaningful conversations with your consumer are difficult, if not impossible.

2. Reinforce brands with every interaction

Forrester indicates that to master EBD, firms must “translate brand attributes into requirements for how they’ll interact with customers.” Clearly every customer touch-point is critical given that marketers\' control over their messages has shifted to the consumer. Branding efforts need to expand beyond traditional marketing communication efforts to include, for example, all aspects of customer service, the in-store experience, and the ecommerce experience.  In fact, now more than ever, marketers need to provide consumers with more of a reason than price to remain loyal to your brand. 

Successful marketers are able to translate the essence of their brand into tangible consumer benefits.  Lexus has done this quite well with their focus on superior service while embodying the “pursuit of perfection” across all customer touchpoints.   J.D.Power and Associates has named Lexus the most reliable brand in the U.S. fifteen times, most recently in 2009, and Consumer Reports named Lexus among the top five most reliable brands in 2009.  As important, Lexus customers have become powerful advocates with stories spreading virally about the legendary levels of Lexus customer service.² Reinforcing the essence of your brand with every interaction paves the way for a relationship with your consumer built upon a foundation of trust and genuineness.

3. Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function

To build and maintain an enterprise-wide focus on customer insights, Forrester recommends building a Voice of the Customer (VOC) program.  VOC programs help organizations optimize the customer experience in order to develop and/or sustain a competitive advantage.  A leading manufacturer has leveraged a VOC program to their advantage by the following:

• Surveying customers after every service interaction to determine a Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Sending another subset a more extensive survey each month to pinpoint why scores went up or down, and
• Carefully monitoring and responding to questions posted on social networking sites

This relentless focus on the customer accompanied with quick responses to issues has paid off as the manufacturer reports that customer satisfaction is up 25 percent, NPS is up 19 percent and “win backs” of dissenters through social media is up 90 percent.³  VOC programs are becoming standard components of any successful CRM effort, and are particularly important given the power shift from company to customer.

There are some that suggest that the only sustainable competitive advantage in marketing is a superior understanding of your consumer.  From our perspective, without this understanding,  efforts to connect with today’s consumers and have relevant and meaningful conversations will be handicapped.

Read the Consumer Perspective

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¹ Source:  Bruce Temkin, Forrester Research, Experience-Based Differentiation, How to build loyalty with every interaction, January 2, 2007

² Source:  Lexus fan sites & blogs; AutoSpies.com; Lexus service chief keen on “kaizen,” Japanese for continuous improvement, The Post and Courier, June 7, 2009. 

Example #1: In response to problems with the first Lexus 400 sedans, more than 300 Lexus officials traveled across the country to visit the affected customers at home, brought them a gift, apologized for the glitches in person and, of course, brought along a technician who fixed the problems, on the spot, in their driveways.

Example #2:  The company discovered that the new ES350 had gear issues. The problem affected about 700 cars before the Lexus factories fixed it. This time, rather than visit customers at their homes, Lexus did ask them to visit their dealers. But instead of just fixing the problem, Lexus gave all the affected customers a brand new car, no questions asked.

³ Source:  2009 Gartner & 1 to 1 Award Winners:  Enterprise CRM, 1 to 1 Magazine, 9/15/09.