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Targeting Beyond Transactional Behaviors
MediaPost,
August 05, 2008
by Phil Leggiere
Serious brands, most marketers well know, cannot be built, nurtured or sustained by transactions alone. Yet most behavioral targeting platforms remain entrenched in a purely transactional model of customer behavior rooted in direct response. Moving to a truly brand based model of BT, David Rosen, senior vice president of Loyalty Lab, explains below, means identifying, encompassing and integrating a wide array of non-transactional behaviors.
Behavioral Insider: What was the motivation for developing your technologies — and how do they expand conventional understandings and the practice of how behavioral data can be deployed — especially across channels?
David Rosen: Loyalty Lab was founded as an alternative to traditional, legacy CRM platforms. Our direct exposure to retailers and consumer product brands told us that there was a very high level of demand for managing best-customer relationships across numerous touch points and channels. There was not, however, an appetite for the cost or time required to implement what had been the only technology options.
We addressed this challenge by using software as a service (SaaS) approach to deliver a leading-edge CRM and loyalty platform in as few as two months.
The platform itself is first and foremost a means of expanding marketers' understanding of their understanding of how their customers behave. We never meant for behavior to be limited to merely transactions. From the start, we committed ourselves to capturing actions such as viral behavior, community engagement, user-generated content (UGC), customer service interactions, and Web browsing to be part of the overall equation of customer value.
BI: How does the behavioral targeting aspect specifically relate to branding?
Rosen: Behavioral activities that go beyond transactional activities are beginning to rival the mass media investment that great brands are spending in terms of their overall effectiveness (well at least that's the trend that we are seeing). Simply put, we have proven analytically that there are no better advocates of a brand than best customers. For example, the two single characteristics that I would want to know about my customers are: To what extent had they successfully referred friends to purchase or join a program — was the source of their own acquisition refer-a-friend? Or another way to think about this is the notion that best customers in terms of purchase value are worth at least that much more in terms of their true value based on their viral and behavioral activities.
BI: What are some of the most important things brands have to learn to deploy relevancy driven menus effectively? What changes in conventional understandings or skill sets are necessary?
Rosen: Brands must deploy programs and campaigns that align with their overall goals. It's cute to have a Facebook application that people are willing to share. It's valuable to have a Facebook application connects buyers back to the brand. We're not saying that fun, viral, smart applications must be overtly commercial — in fact the opposite is probably true. They must, however, have a reason, to bring people back.
Consistent with that thought is the notion of relevance. An average customer — even better, a highly valued customer — must see the logical connectivity. A good logic check is whether someone new to the brand (e.g., someone referred to the application) immediately gets the connection.