In the past 55 years, traditional media has been concentrated, focused and predictable. In the 10 years of “new” media we have been trying to find our feet, but new media has also changed consumers’ behavior. The combination of these changes make communication internally, with strategic partners, customers and potential customers, more important.
There are essentially two ways to get your message across:
• Sheer weight
This leads to price driven business and short term results.
• Communicate with Audience
This builds rapport, identifies with the customer and entertains them.
Developing this communication, becoming part of the customer’s life, sharing their interests is the only way to succeed. We must build long term loyalty through equity.
In a wonderful article in the Financial Times in June 2006, Maurice Saatchi says that the death knell of advertising occurred because the digital native – those who learned the digital language as effortlessly as they learned their mother tongue – has a differently wired brain. It responds faster. It sifts out. It recalls less. Day after recall has fallen from 35% in the 1960s to less than 10% today. Saatchi goes on to say that today a brand needs a one word CPB (Consumer Purchasing Benefit) which will come before all actions, in all media, at all times. In each category it will be possible for only one brand to own one particular word. The challenge will be defining the characteristic, the emotion, you are trying to make your own, in just one word.
This is one word equity!
For example, “Search” is now owned by Google, Apple owns “Innovation”, Royal Bank of Scotland own “Action”, Britain’s Labor Party won three elections with “New”, America’s one word equity is “Freedom”.
One word equity is the most priceless asset in the new world of new technologies. Of the 750,000 words in the English language, which word is yours?
Most communication programs are still limited and simplistic in their approach to their target groups who have moved on to another level because most businesses/advertising and marketing agencies are still anchored in traditional marketing methods.
What most marketers describe as “Cutting Edge” is not cutting edge at all. Cutting edge is not more inventive stunts, creative ideas, better copywriting, more testing. These are the basic minimums today of any marketing.
Today we need to consistently build customer relationship data mining and multi channel approaches that continuously:
• enhance knowledge of the potential customer.
• increase the dialog between the advertiser and the consumer,
• improve the lifestyle connection.
• build a bridge in every communication between the emotional desire to buy trigger and the pragmatic ‘show me the data as it applies specifically to me’ purchase decider.
This is true whether using traditional vehicles – such as print, radio, TV, outdoor etc or the so called new media.
For example, variable data multi-channeling enables data to talk individually to people using any channel. For instance, it allows for highly complex and highly creative direct mail packages to be fully personalized, with names, dates, an individual’s usage information, savings, graphs, even photos etc. in headings and all body copy to be totally customized to every specific customer within a normal print run.
One example is a program in September 2005 for a fixed line phone carrier who received a 22% response rate from a print DM using one to one variable data technology to over 340,000 customers, against a “traditional DM” response rate for a similar program of 1.7%.
While there is a proliferation of new technologies, I will mention just a few simple examples.
Firstly, integrated SMS and radio broadcasts.
By tying SMS response into radio advertising and radio station loyalty clubs, advertisers are data mining potential customers and interacting with them one-on-one to buy a pizza, attend an event or even enhance the radio audience at a specific time.
The radio station can SMS its data base advising that in 5 minutes there will be an advertisement for Pizza Hut and if they tune in they can win a prize. When they tune in they are asked to SMS if they would like a “Special” Pizza Hut Pizza for dinner. When they SMS they get a call center calling back immediately confirming the order and up-selling.
This cross communication marketing is achieving amazing responses depending on the promotion. It is both measurable and immediate.
Another example is “Up-selling Chat”.
Chat technology enables real time immediate post purchase on-line messaging and voice chat, in order to up-sell a customer who has just purchased on-line. This is not only permission based marketing but enables the sales person to talk to the client about something they are fully interested in, making the process so much more effective.
A third example is Behavior Triggered Emailing.
This software analyses data, both real time and historical, enabling immediate, automated opt-in campaigns based on in-store, catalog, on-line purchases, biographical data, events, dates or customer behavior. This greatly enhances sales performance.
Fourthly, Commercial Skipping Technology.
Products like TiVo have produced a new type of commercial which really engages digital video recorder users. For example, companies like Coca-Cola, GE and KFC have produced ads which contain hidden messages, secret codes and scrambled entertainment. KFC’s Buffalo Snacker Sandwich ads contained a subliminal message and secret code that could only be cracked if played back slowly, frame by frame, with a digital video recorder. Viewers then enter the code on KFC’s web site to win a sandwich. There were 75,000 winners.
Marketers today have to keep one step ahead of the technology or at least not too far behind. Don King, a group director at Coca-Cola North America, said recently “There hasn’t been a technology invented that can’t be leveraged as a marketing tool.”
With new technologies the traditional advertising response rates
are no longer acceptable.
Many direct marketers are getting response rates of 20+% and 30% and 40% rates are no longer unachievable.
Direct comparisons between an identical campaign using “traditional” methods and new variable data and new technology methods in some cases show increased performance of 2000%, so we need to be more analytical when choosing communication channels and I will address this shortly.
Axe leverages viral marketing at its best…
The Dare Digital Agency on London is wonderfully creative and has produced a host of results-achieving and award-winning campaigns. My favorite is the email campaign for Unilever’s AXE range of men’s toiletries. In 2005, Unilever had an email database of just 30,000 clients so they emailed to each a graphic of a sexy girl in red lingerie lying on a bed, with an invitation to use the cursor, which turned into a white feather when activated, to tickle her anywhere you fancy. Move the virtual feather with your cursor to tickle various parts of her body to get her to sneeze, giggle or writhe. When you tickle her she reacts accordingly, depending on where she is tickled.
The site is such fun that the recipients all emailed it on to their friends, the result being that over 50 million people, presumably all men, the intended target, have interacted with the site.
The most important point is that the average time spent interacting with the site is in excess of 9 minutes. Compare this with a television commercial which would be 20 times more expensive to produce, only lasts 30 seconds not 9 minutes, attracts a fraction of the audience, is not interactive, is expensive to put to air and does not allow on line purchasing or identification of the viewer.
This is cutting edge – this is the future of communication.
As key product and service offerings become similar and response times to market change become shorter, not enough direct marketers are using their skills to identify the communication channels that are having the most effect on influencing customer acquisition, buyer behavior or decision making, customer loyalty and retention. Even fewer are providing ‘advice’, education and specific instance comparisons tailored to specific customers, as opposed to ‘hitting them with yet another creative message’.
There is nothing wrong with any of the traditional communication vehicles we are using as a conduit for the marketing message. Despite the extraordinary proliferation of communication mediums in recent times, each have their own applications in which they are effective to varying degrees.
There are two essential causes of this lousy marketing performance,
both of which lead back to a combination of the complacency
of the marketing industry and the almost inconceivable gullibility
of the corporations employing their services.
What other business would have industry leaders saying that their applications are only 5-10% effective and still keep their head in the sand and go blithely on spending, spending, spending. You would think that they would have got the message twenty years ago when “50% of advertising is wasted…the only problem is we don’t know which half” was in vogue. What does it take to ring alarm bells? The acres of marble foyers may be down to quarter acres, but there is still an incredible lack of accountability and performance.
The first problem is the selection of the communication vehicle. Too little emphasis is put on selecting the correct vehicle, more accurately the mix of vehicles, to cost effectively impact and motivate the target market to buy. This is in large part due to the lack of effective measuring systems being implemented.
For example, it is ludicrous to measure the audience for television programs and then dissect it every which way in order to establish the target audience and advertising rates for slots in various programs. Why not just directly measure the viewing audiences for the advertisements? It is just as easy to do as to measure who watches the programs. There is a simple answer to this question. The advertising industry and its indirect masters, the media owners, have seen the extensive research that shows that in over 60% of the time advertisements are playing, there is no-one in the room and a substantial percentage of the remainder are “seriously distracted”.
The chain reaction effect of establishing advertising rates that reflect the viewing audience actually watching is too horrific to contemplate. The production budgets for shows would collapse, making most of them even more un-watchable than they are now, coverage of sports would drop from 30 cameras to 5, sports broadcast rights would drop from billions to millions, superstar athletes and entertainers would have to live on hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, instead of millions, advertising agency commissions would drop, less Ferraris would be sold and all of a sudden we would have a red wine glut.
Hell, reality in advertising is a dreadful thing. It could be the end of the world as we know it. It is much easier if corporate executives continue to fall for the great stories spun by those extremely smooth, but sneaky, ad guys.
The second problem is the message being conveyed.
Most businesses are driven by their company and their product. So are the messages they use to try to communicate with potential customers. It is in the development of the product and the machinations of building a business that the blood, sweat and tears have been expended and most businesses think that this is what the customer will also be interested in. At very least they want the customer to know what they have gone through.
Businesses do not seem to realize that the customer
doesn’t give a damn about them or, in reality, their products or service.
The customer only cares about solving his or her own problems or issues.
In today’s global marketplace, everything must begin and end with the customer. They are all that counts. They can screw up all the hard work that went into creating products and building businesses in a heartbeat…simply by buying from a competitor.
Yet how many companies are truly customer centric? I believe that it is less than 1%. Research shows that the public believe the level of customer service is at an all time low. This is despite the daily mantra of service, service, service chanted by corporate executives around the world. They remind me of Milli Vanilli. But there is a plethora of CRM programs out there, aren’t they designed to improve customer service?
Read the sales pitches for these CRM products, “cut staff”, “save money”, “cut processing time”…doesn’t sound like customer service to me, in most of the material the customer doesn’t even get a mention. Most CRM programs are a synonym for “cut heads, increase productivity’.
CRM is the tool that will drive the companies of the future…. but is it likely to make much difference to any but the few rare companies today that have a long-term perspective?
Have most companies embraced CRM because some high pressure nerd has espoused the quick fix end-to-end solution to improve relationships, cut costs such as staff, turn around times etc? Does the nerd have a dedicated listener in the finance people who run today’s companies and who are, in the main, totally obsessed with this quarter’s financials and the resulting stock price?
Is there almost a total disconnect with the marketers that keep talking about long term relationships, about understanding customers, about knowing customers past and present needs, trying to anticipate their future needs, about customization, about developing a long term sustainable advantage? Why don’t marketers understand that this stuff takes both time and money?
Do the financial people even care about spending more time talking to the customer? What is wrong with pouring buckets of money into totally ineffective, but immediately measurable, one size fits all monologue advertising? After all, we have been doing it for years. Do financial people even understand what dialog is? Or do marketers simply not grasp that it is cutting heads and acquisitions that drive the stock price!
Are CRM programs, the ultimate people solutions,
being designed and sold by nerds who have
no people skills whatsoever?
Isn’t CRM just simply a faster and more efficient way of returning us to the good old days when dialog was in vogue, when suppliers knew that Mrs. Jones had three kids named Tommy, Billy and Zacchariah that play football and need a dozen Krispy Krème donuts every Sunday morning from the first of September through January?
If so, why have we screwed it up so badly?
Sure, there has been an explosion in those wonderful, customer relationship builders, the call center, the fastest growing business in the world. I have a problem with my product in Boise, Idaho, and the guy at the call center is lovely…its just that with him sitting 7000 miles away in Karachi, never having been out of Pakistan, the first requirement of good customer service, empathy, is non existent.