The two killer apps of 21st Century marketing

Image via  http://www.alchemyofchange.net/

Neither of the two killer apps of marketing in the 21st century is part of most marcomms plans or marketeers skill sets.
How so?

A quick reminder on where I stand on how consumers make choices today:
1. Brand: Makes the promise
2. Marcomms: Brings the promise to life
3. Social Media: Is where we turn for proof of the promise (in the experience of our peers, the Google ZMOT if you will).

This is driven of course by who we trust. If we trusted brands and marcomms we'd accept their promises. Sadly its a rare brand which can command that level of trust today. Mostly we ask each other for the proof. This means of course that much more spend and focus should be on number 3 versus 1 & 2.

It also begs the question: how do you inspire people to publish the good experiences (the proofs of the promise) they have had.
First, of course, you must prove that promise.
Over delivering seems to do the trick. Go beyond the normal and I'm likely to post a positive review or comment.

Our ability to generate “wow” moments worth sharing with peers (reviews included) come down to what we are prepared to GIVE over and above normal service. Primarily the give is great customer service (delivered by a human) or an upgrade of some kind ( a cost).

This is bottom-up proof that the brand has our best interests at heart (the true measure of trust). That's killer app one.

Scaling this is tough and relies on peer-to-peer discovery and pass on. Often this can appear too slow to a brand with a broken connection to its promise they are desperate to fix. They may not have the will or capacity to deliver the small moments of wow which have made google, amazon, spotify etc more trust-worthy than long established rivals. They use your data to deliver things to you in a way that makes us feel they have our best interests at heart. We can rationalise and note that they have a business imperative. But actually, us consumers aren't very rational at all when making decisions. How we feel is most often more powerful than what we know. (Read Mark Earls Herd for a primer on that if you aren't convinced from your own experience).

With what brands can learn from your data, we can deliver the feeling that the brand concerned has our best interests at heart: Top Down - killer app two.

The magic, the wow, is not now in what we are given by way of over delivery of goods or services, but in the surprise and delighting we do by showing we know our customer's needs so well that they feel we really do have their best interests at heart (the foundation of building brand trust in a world of relationship marketing (as discussed in my book The 10 Principles of Open Business).
My guess is that we will continue to need BOTH top down and bottom up.
Trust in the brand can be built at scale via the top down approach, but to deliver the TripAdvisor-topping reviews and publication of peer recommendations we will need to continue to GIVE more than expected, not just fit need exceptionally well.
After all, when was the last time you tweeted about how well Amazon made you a recommendation?

Scaling Passive and Active Customer-Centric Innovation

Those familiar with my approach to 'social media' will know I think the marcomms element is a happy outcome rather than a primary objective.

The marcomms-first approach - best characterised by the phrase 'using the channel of social media' puts the cart very much before the horse, in my view.
You get efficient, contagious and joined-in with marcomms as an outcome of the really juicy value creation bit of our digitally enabled socially connected lives.
But the juicy bit is better-fitting innovations. (Image courtesy RachelVoorhees)

If you involve the people for whom the product or service is intended you get a product or service which is a better fit with their needs. And that's customer-centric innovation.
The outcome is better for the customer and since better fit equals more sales that means better for the producer (assuming you can maintain margins, of course).

Working with small groups of customers to co-create is not new. Scaling that is.

For example just three or so years ago no one would have written a blogpost to tell the world they were having a cup of tea. Too much effort to go to.
Now, with tumbling technical barriers to entry for anyone to publish their thoughts (no matter how 'trivial' when viewed by traditional criteria) 135k conversations about tea are published in a single month in the UK alone.

All those tweets and Facebook status updates, (forums and blogposts too) reveal how people are using a product, why, where and when, and what they do and don't like about it. And how they'd make it better - if only you gave them a chance.

Gathering what they have to say, analysing it and sharing the resulting data and strategic insight with the right part of any organisation (for action) can be described as Passive Customer Centric Innovation.
You ask no questions. You require nothing more of your customers and potential customers. But from their open publication to their peers and the world, they provide you a low-cost fast track to innovation to mutual advantage.

The second, Active Customer Centric Innovation, takes the same gathered data, identifies (through nodal network analysis) the most appropriate members of communities and invites them into a process of co-creation with key stakeholders. This requires their active engagement; and rewards for their skills and knowledge.

In both cases the key outcome is a better product - one your customers like more.
The marcomms benefits are a happy bonus - and all the better for being derived this way.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so I may have to tidy it up later ;-)

Related articles

• Customer Centric Employee Engagement (customerthink.com)
• Amazon acts exactly like a customer-centric org shouldn't (fasterfuture.blogspot.com)

It ain't customer service until the customer receives the service.

I like Ikea. So please, this isn't meant as a specific attack - more an illustration of a general point.

And the general point I'd like to illustrate is: It ain't customer service until the customer receives the service.

Case in point: I left Ikea in Milton Keynes today having handed over a bit more at the till than I had expected. Now, anyone who has wandered through an Ikea store will tell you this is not an unusual experience. By the time you've thrown a dozen or so items of small value alongside your main purchases, you're soon in the realms of 'guess the basket'. I am used to failing at this game. So when my bill rolled up at approximately £15 more than my ready-reckoning had reckoned, I thought little of it - paid up and headed home.

En route my lovely wife and I did a bit of mental totting up. No matter how many times we did this we still fell short of the total Ikea's happily chatting checkout staff had got to.

So when we pulled on to the drive at home, I rooted out the receipt and... sure enough, we'd been double charged for a picture frame.

No matter, I have the receipt - and it's full of very useful info. Including a number to call for this kind of eventuality. Yes it was a call centre and yes there were a number of robots to select options against between me and a conversation with a human (a couple too many for comfort) but when I finished the interminal option dance I got straight through to a very nice, friendly lady. In customer service.

And what she did was tell me that this was absolutely no problem, they had a record of the transaction, they could see the error, they'd refund my card. One small snag... she couldn't actually refund the card herself. That's down to the store. Who she would alert. And they'd call me back. This afternoon.

They never did.

And there-in lies the problem. Ikea's customer service is just more marcomms unless it can actually deliver the service the customer needs. And it can't. So it's a misnomer.

Customer Service, it appears, is actually DONE (rather than talked about) in store.

And the bottom line is this: no matter how charming the people you call your 'customer service' team, no matter how professionally and courteously they deal with the customer's call, they are just another marcomms lie unless they have 100% back up from the do-ers - the deliverers of their promises.

The distance between what you say you will do and what you actually do, is a lie.

Harsh? Perhaps but for those on the receiving end of this mismatch, it's painfully true

UPDATE: Aug 7, 2010.
I had to call them back today - having not heard from Ikea to refund the money they had taken from me. This time they told me it 'takes 12 working hours'. When I probed further it turned out they would be reviewing CCTV evidence before giving me the money they have misappropriated from me. And that wouldn't happen today. I may get a call on Monday at the earliest. I told them in future I would be going v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y through their checkouts. And I advise everyone else so to do.

The initial pretence of trusing the customer was clearly a sham - a pretence - a lie. Marcomms at its very worst.

Now I'm not only out of pocket - I am angry about the misinformation and misdirection.

Ikea, not only is your customer service a misnomer, it's clear you actually don't trust your customers. Well, in at least one case, that feeling is now entirely mutual.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Customer Service is Dead, Long Live Customer Experience [Baiju "Performance" Solanki] (ecademy.com)
• Customer Is Always Right? Right? WRONG! Here's a Better Thought (book excert) (customerthink.com)
• Customer Charters: Good or bad for customer satisfaction (customerthink.com)