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Marketing Learns to Live In the Moment

March 13, 2013

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

There are still marketers today who think of their mission as traditional advertising, direct mail, loyalty programs and the like. Defining marketing solely in those terms made sense just a few years back, but makes increasingly less sense today. Unified marketing platforms like the newly released Loyalty Lab® Reward 13.1 bring together real-time data context that has been available for other industries, but is now sweeping through retail.

The single biggest change is the move from static, predefined marketing to real-time interaction with the end consumer. This involves engaging, often at the time and place of the consumer’s choosing, with real-time offers of information, suggestions and enticements to act. This isn’t without a few paradigm shifts, the biggest being the shift to in-the-moment awareness.

In the moment

Engaging at the time and place of the consumer’s choosing involves being ‘in the moment’ at the point of sale, the Web, mobile (in or near the store) and social (engaged with the brand) using information that is down-to-the-second. This type of interaction is more analogous to how people actually think and drives much better and faster response than the static model. Executing it requires the right technology to make it work at speed.

Before you think this is over the horizon, Gartner’s 2012 report, Me Marketing: Get Ready for the Promise of Real-time, Context-Aware Offers in Consumer Goods, “By 2015, context-aware promotions will comprise 10% of promotional activity among consumer goods manufacturers in developed markets.”  This is sure to quickly increase as the early adopters are followed by the mainstream.

Ahead of the pack

Will your business survive as a latecomer to this shift? This is about being able to understand a consumer’s full shopping experience and habits at any moment so that engagement is relevant. As shoppers become more accustomed to this level of interaction, anything less will seem more and more old-school.

Therein lies the problem for those who don’t adapt: Consumers who see relevance will quickly learn to pay attention to nothing less.

To learn more, read the press release on Loyalty Lab® Reward 13.1 here.

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What is The Stream Economy?

March 13, 2013

by Chris Taylor

The ability to catch the consumer’s eye has become far more than flashy neon and holiday sales. As consumption becomes more digital and discerning, targeted offers to calculated demographics become so 2012. Getting and holding the consumer’s attention is now about engaging at the time and method of the consumer’s choice.

Likewise, creating brand loyalists involves moving from those first engagements to fan-level excitement. It sounds great but takes a very deft touch and very smart systems to engage in what Gary Vanyerchuck calls, “The Stream Economy.” In his own words, “The speed of the world is much faster and the skill-set and the understanding around the content are the biggest stakes in the marketplace.”

The best brands integrate content into a platform that is tuned to Vanyerchuck’s stream economy. Those brands wouldn’t be caught dead showing up with an offer when they’ve made no attempt to know and delight the recipient in advance. Self-serving ways are transparent and increasingly ineffective.

The secret to the stream economy is “seeing” context, meaning the sum of all things that describe the moments for engagement between buyer and seller. Context is a combination of the environment, like weather, and events, like arrival at a particular location. Traditional databases and queries can’t keep up with the stream economy. It’s far too real time.

Those who integrate with the stream economy are successful now and into the future.

To learn more, read our press release on Loyalty Lab 13.1. For more by Chris Taylor, follow him on Twitter @findchristaylor.

Originally posted at the TIBCO Blog.

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Climbing Into the Shopping Cart

March 4, 2013

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

Loyalty benefits are often thought of as offers that kick in before the shopping trip and discounts which are taken at the register. Rarely are they thought of as being delivered in the midst of the shopping experience.

These days, there’s no reason why it has to be that way. Consumers are gradually being asked to scan bar codes at self-checkout or to check prices, and retailers are learning how to monitor self-scanning.

This matters because before you get to the store, and by the time you’ve arrived at checkout, the timing isn’t ideal to provide customers with offers and advertising. The moment to communicate, build trust, and make an offer is optimal when the decision is actually being made.

In the shopping cart

Studies show that 50-70% of purchasing decisions are made at the shelf, not before, meaning that there is ample time and motive for merchants to climb into the shopping cart. When you add technology to determine in-store location, being along for the ride with the customer is the best place to be.

The implications are enormous. As customers grow comfortable with linking their loyalty reward accounts to other accounts and information, it becomes easy for a retailer to say, “Your son’s birthday is next week. Do you have the cake?” as they pass the bakery. Similarly, customers can be enticed to try new products based on their social connections’ likes.

Customers respond to convenience, and there’s nothing more convenient than being able to get the best offers from manufacturers and retailers at the time the purchase decision is being made. As we grow used to climbing into the shopping cart, we’ll wonder how we ever did it any other way.

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Loyalty Beyond the Punch Card

February 26, 2013

By David Rosen

This is the beginning of our blog series on loyalty for SMBs. We spend a tremendous amount of time with owners of small to medium sized businesses – restaurants, pharmacies, retailers – discussing how to build loyalty. One of their most basic challenges, hard as it may be to believe, is still just moving beyond the punch card.

Think about the number of businesses that keep track of customer relationships on a piece paper. If you’re like me, you have 2-4 punch cards in your wallet, but what was their original purpose?  Are SMBs just giving away that 8th cup of coffee, that 12th free frozen yogurt, that discount their 10th purchased beauty product, or are they actually changing behavior, driving another purchase, and shifting share away from the competition?

Sure, the punch card system provides a marginal reminder in your customers’ pocket, is a nice thing to do for them, might even get the loyal ones to return, and is certainly easy to understand.  But now that SMBs are finally moving beyond these frayed relics, it’s important for us to recognize what they failed to deliver in order to avoid the same mistakes.

Punch cards offer no level of CRM. There is zero ability to dynamically change people’s behavior because they are so static. Further, their whole medium is incredibly stale, and they get lost in the purse or wallet.  And let’s not forget the big customer care issues of combining punches, or heaven forbid, lost cards.

We admit it – we like the ease of punch cards, but these days it’s also easy to go electronic, and vital to move in to the 21st century. SMBs need to shift the identifier to the card swipe of a registered card, or minimum a phone number or email address look up.

Also what’s invaluable are the baseline capabilities of CRM – to identify people who have lapsed, promote products or offers, and target individuals.  SMBs need to ability to accelerate the rewards and use them to change behaviors, e.g. for a mid-week pizza or afternoon coffee purchase.

We are not talking about full CRM of purchase analysis at the product of category level.  SMBs can maintain simplicity in their loyalty programs, eliminate the customer services issues and add basic CRM capabilities through a burgeoning number of coalition, location based and mobile marketing solutions.

For many businesses, moving beyond punch cards represents the gateway to a more sophisticated customer loyalty management (CLM) program. The options are affordable, easy to implement, and with trusted players in the space, don’t have to be daunting.

Stay tuned for:

  • Do coalitions make sense for SMBs?
  • Mobile loyalty’s leap forward and the opportunity for SMBs
  • What role do game mechanics have in SMB loyalty?

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Blurring of the Marketing/CRM Line

February 20, 2013

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

There is a significant blurring of the line between marketing and customer relationship management.  This blurring has enormous impact on the way we operate our businesses and engage with our customers.

We need to stop thinking about functions and start thinking about fans.

Traditional silos

Traditionally, marketing has been about defining market segments and delivering offers while CRM was about knowing the fine-grained details of your accounts.

Even though we call it CRM, it has been, for most companies, about the sales funnel more than customer relationships; leads go in, revenue comes out.  Marketing sat above that funnel.

Expanding roles

Marketing is expanding and is less about segmenting the potential customers you don’t know and much more about finding prospects to know and interact with as marketers, before they enter “the funnel”. CRM, meanwhile, is being used to continually interact with customers in new ways of cross selling and upselling that used to look like marketing.  Where does marketing end and CRM begin? It’s very blurry.

Technology/strategy breakthroughs in recent years and changing consumer patterns allow each end of the marketing-to-CRM spectrum to continue to widen even as the difference between them blurs. This, in a nutshell, creates friction between applications, databases, departments, business owners, platforms, and ultimately prevents cohesive management of the spectrum.

Conflict

It manifests as battles over budget, politics over positioning, and conflict over control. It doesn’t have to be that way, and it isn’t for companies that recognize the benefit of seeing this spectrum as turning customers into fans.

Turning customers into fans must be the over-arching goal of any 21st century company that wants to stay relevant, build trust, open lines of communication and find success despite turbulence and a constantly evolving customer. Are you ready?

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Return on Relationship™: The New Measure of Success

February 15, 2013

By Ted Rubin 

Social media is quickly becoming a way of life… and a way of business as more and more companies are realizing they need to integrate social media into their marketing strategies. We can’t, however, expect to do “business as usual” and succeed in building an eager audience around our brands.

If you want to continue to reach your market in this social media age, the marketing focus needs to be on building relationships, and metrics need to expand beyond ROI (Return on Investment) to include ROR: Return on Relationship™.

–Return on Relationship™…simply put the value that is accrued by a person or brand due to nurturing a relationship. ROI is simple $s and cents. ROR is the value (both perceived and real) that will accrue over time through loyalty, recommendations and sharing.–

Most measurements and empowerment stats that are used with regard to relationships (i.e. number of Facebook fans, Twitter followers, retweets, site visits, video views, positive ratings and vibrant communities) are not financial assets, but that doesn’t mean they are worthless. Instead, these are leading indicators that a brand is doing something that is creating value that will be with you for the long term and will drive ROI if developed and used effectively.

So how do you build and strengthen relationships with your audience (as a whole, and as individuals) to increase your ROR?

1. Listen

If you want to be heard above the growing social media “noise,” you need to first listen to your consumers so when you do speak, you get it right. What are they saying, what are they feeling, what are their pain points, what solutions do they need?

2. Make it be about THEM

First think about and first address what matters most to your audience. Give them a platform to show you what they need, want, are interested in, and expect. Whatever matters most to them should become what matters most to you! We marketers like to think that social media is primarily a set of tools for our marketing purposes, but in reality, social media is also a strong set of tools our consumers use to share and influence opinion about our brand. Our consumers now have “the channel of me.” Consumers’ opinions now create the “reality” of the brand — if enough consumers say negative things about your brand, your brand loses its credibility, and (thankfully) vice versa.

3. Ask “How can I serve you?”

Taking the “ME” mentality one step further, when we are advertising instead of building relationships, we are focused on what our consumers can give us instead of how we can best serve them.

Your consumers will recognize in a heartbeat if you are simply trying to get something from them – and they will not stick around. It’s not that you aren’t allowed to want anything from your consumers, it’s that there must be a give to go along with every take. If you truly want to make an impact, aim to always put more energy and attention in your “give” column than in your “take” column. It will pay off.

4. Aim for Ongoing Engagement

Building relationships is about starting meaningful dialogue and taking the time to thoughtfully and genuinely engage in ongoing conversation. Relationships focus on getting to know your consumer and giving them reasons to stay engaged — not just getting them to react. This needs to be all the time… not simply campaign or initiative based. That is the biggest mistake being made today by marketers and brands… with consumers, and especially with influencers.

5. Know the People in Your Audience

Short and simple: if you are only focused on the money, you risk completely overlooking the people. Don’t make that mistake! If you don’t know who your people are, you might as well toss your marketing money down the drain.

Relationships ARE the new currency – honor them, invest in them, and start measuring your ROR!

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Meeting Your Customers Where They Are, Anytime, Anywhere

February 13, 2013

by Chris Taylor 

Many made predictions as 2013 kicked off, but one caught my eye. Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick called this new year the Year of Digital Business. As Fenwick points out, there has been a communications evolution that has many retailers scrambling to find ways to get closer to their customers with innovative new technology to beat the competition. Continue reading →

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Just Who Owns the Customer, Anyway?

February 7, 2013

by Jeanne Roué-Taylor

As technology expands rapidly to manage customer experience, a subtle shift is under way in who gathers and uses loyalty and other data to manage the customer relationship.

No one needs to remind us how quickly the nature of shopping and customer experience is changing. We see signs of it everywhere and need look no further than the startups, pattern of acquisitions and alignment of technologies reported in the tech press every day.

The big question

There’s a second shift happening that might not be quite as apparent as those news reports. It involves manufacturers creating ‘direct to consumer’ capabilities that open the door to the question, “Just who owns the customer?”

This is being driven partly by infrastructure spend by the biggest product companies that serve fashion, sports and fitness, grocery and every other major category. Technology now allows for personalized, one-to-one marketing relationships from the biggest manufacturers down to the individual consumer.

This side of e-commerce isn’t about the money, necessarily – that will remain mostly in the hands of the front-end of retail. It is more about additional touch points that build trust, relationships and communication that complement retailer activities.

Retailers playing catch up

This leaves the retailers needing to follow through on the brand-building investment of their suppliers. Many retailers are still slow off the blocks when it comes to customer-facing technology. That will need to change quickly to keep pace with rising customer expectations of convenient, in-the-moment offers and loyalty rewards.

Just who owns the customer will be decided based on who has the best system to manage the new model and set and meet those expectations.

Join us on February 12 for the webinar, The New Event-Driven Marketing: Success with Real-Time, Omni-Channel Engagement.

 

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Structure No Longer Has a Vote on What’s Data or Not

January 29, 2013

by Sukki Sandhar

Not so long ago, businesses didn’t care about information outside the normal structure of trusted outlets like print media, trade journals, academic research and other trusted system-generated information. In fact, I would go so far as saying that if it wasn’t structured, it wasn’t data. All of this changed soon after customers started to freely express their comments and opinions on websites and bulletin boards. Views became another data point to track and analyze to harness customer preference as an aggregate and per each individual. In some ways, unstructured customer data via connectivity and social media has multiplied the already growing challenge of big data.

Unstructured data now matters

Now businesses thrive or fail on what these un-controlled, unstructured data sources say. From retailers to job sites, what unstructured data says about a business and brand matters. Businesses don’t control unstructured data sources, and this scares them. But, just like structured data sources, business can ingest, understand, react, and even anticipate what’s going to happen if they are clever.  The speed and pace at which unstructured data sources spread has increased due to the nature of the Internet and global connectivity.

How employee and customer knowledge becomes a data point

This is not new in terms of customer service; customers have always been complaining. What’s new is mass proliferation of this information to a social media following. What once would have been between one disgruntled customer griping to his friends and family has now become a status broadcast to hundreds that can even go viral and reach millions (the absolute worst nightmare for PR).  To compound this shift in information structure, the once unstructured information of personal anecdotes now masquerades as a trusted, structured, information source based on the close personal relationship between the social media follower and the original poster.

To see the price of not knowing, look no further than Barings Bank, the oldest merchant bank in London, laid low by the behavior of one employee who lost $1.3 billion in speculative trading. Despite surviving the Great Depression and both World Wars, Barings was brought down in 1995 by its head derivatives trader in Singapore. It was reasonably clear something was amiss when employees started to clear their desks and leave the building, but the structured data sources like rating agencies did not, and could not, react faster than the word on social websites.

Combining structured and unstructured data for a single view

The Financial Service industry relies heavily on what rating agencies provide on the structured data side, however, it’s clear the structured and unstructured data sources have their place when time and sentiment matters.  The ability to have high performance integration with low latency and the ability to process and understand unstructured data is fast becoming a holy grail.

Whether it’s a disgruntled employee whistleblowing corruption at a big bank or thousands of frustrated sports fan providing unstructured reactions to a structured news story about their team, unstructured data sources and how these integrate to better inform business decisions is going to be an area of extreme value to all businesses.

Read more by Sukki at The TIBCO Blog.

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Sense and Respond: Event-Driven Marketing

January 17, 2013

By Jeanne Roué-Taylor

The concept of “sense and respond” has been around for years, but it’s a relatively new concept for marketers. Times are changing very rapidly, and the rise of mobile, social and far faster cache memory applications gives the field a whole new way to interact with customers. It is an ability to sense the environment and respond immediately.

This isn’t the kind of interaction that a call center handles, or the idea of ‘touch point management’. From a process perspective, sense & respond gets much closer to the customer than ever before.

From a technology perspective, it means being able to move the marketing function out of a database-centric world and into a real-time, location-aware, flow-based marketing opportunity.

This new world is both context aware and cross channel at the same time. It differs from traditional marketing, even its most recent developments, by focusing on interaction optimization more than just the nuts and bolts of interaction.

Operational real-time

Most companies, including startups, lack the ability to assemble and respond to context fast enough to change customer behavior.  Unfortunately, real-time too often means gaining important information in the moment but doesn’t go the extra distance to meeting the customer in the moment.

What’s more, many of the systems implemented in the last three to four years are already outdated in their approach. They are not operationally real-time.

Truly operational, real-time sense and respond takes interaction to in-location, in-store or even in-basket levels of timing. It means having innovative analysis of what to expect and sensing a combination of factors in the moments they occur.

More of the same

If we stop for a minute to consider how much has changed in the recent past, we can easily assume that the change will continue and the opportunity for greater context and interaction in real-time is only going to grow. Likewise, customer expectations will shift to a demand for rewards in real-time – wherever they are and for whatever they’re doing.

Anyone who isn’t taking advantage of sense and respond will see their competition pulling away in the very near future.  Time to get started.

Want to learn more? Sign up for our webinar on 2/12, Event-Driven Marketing: Success with Real-Time Omni-Channel Engagement.

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