All posts tagged: customer engagement

Brands and regulators: rethinking compliance

By Mark Di Somma

It’s easy to see recent surges in regulation as a reaction to the corporate scandals of previous years and to characterise the return to a much more compliant environment as one of bureaucracy on a roll (and a role for that matter). But one of the reasons re-regulation is back, surely, is that the world is moving away from a pure market forces model (driven by business) towards a marketplace model that incorporates drivers such as consumer rights, environmental concerns, ethics and responsibility. Whether you agree with the politics of this or not, that new marketplace model is much more sympathetic to a regulatory approach. It’s also a sign of a shifting sense of consequences. The former model left it to the market within reason to decide what would and would not happen, pretty much relying on efficiency to sort out what needed to be rectified. The GFC proved that the market wasn’t the world’s greatest policeman and that sectors on a roll aren’t necessarily all that thorough about a whole bunch of things. This …

Customer loyalty: 3 ways to win if you’re a retailer

By Mark Di Somma

These findings from research of the ways we go about our lives have confirmed people are nowhere near as random as previously thought. In point of fact, after tracking more than 100,000 mobile phone users over a period of six months, the clear conclusion from this research if you’re a brand is that people mostly visit a limited number of locations time and time again. Customer loyalty pays. Literally. What’s interesting to note, given that we live in this much heralded era of mobility, is that most people also move around over very small distances – five to ten kilometres. No surprise then that this infographic by FlowingData shows a pizza-chain within a 10-mile radius across the United States. Some people, of course, range much further, but even then, they stick to remarkably similar patterns, once again tending to return to the same places over and over again. So customer loyalty is also limited. For the most part, it operates within finite parameters. But a recent study of grocery buying habits also reveals something stranger, …

How would you like your brand story to end?

By Mark Di Somma

Bill Taylor has said that if your customers can live without you, eventually they will. Conversely, I’m fascinated by how so many industries will stick to business-as-usual for as long as they can before they have to change. In each case, the rules of supply and demand will at some point over-ride the sentiment of legacy. The more people who do what you do, the more easily you can be replaced, and the less noticed your absence will remain. Everyone nods at this point. But … That realisation actually spurs a fundamental question that businesses and brands should be asking themselves. And it’s a very uncomfortable question to confront. How would you like your brand to come to an end? To reference TS Eliot, with a bang or a whimper? Your answer will drive your strategy. Or rather it will drive the mindset behind your strategy. You can ride your current train of thought all the way to silence – do what you do for as long as you can until the margins become unbearable …

Should you save your brand or let it die?

By Mark Di Somma

Recently Patrick Hanlon wrote an interesting piece on branding a DOA brand. In it, he laid out a well thought-through plan to resurrect a dying marque: rediscover your reason for being; define your zealot consumers; define your brand assets; discover your relevancy all over again. His conclusion: “Even brands that seem out of date, irrelevant, and barely resonant with consumers can be re-imagined, reconceived, and reconstructed using this simple, regimented path.” Hanlon’s approach for bringing a brand back from near-death seems logical. My question: Should you do it? Birthing brands doesn’t seem to be an issue. In fact, marketers have no problem introducing new brands to market at a dizzying rate. As Professor Jerry Hausman explains, “The number of new products introduced in any year is astounding. New varieties of consumer goods such as cereal brands are evident, as any shopping trip to a local supermarket or Wal-Mart demonstrates. Potentially even more important are the new products based on technology: more than 55 million cellular telephones are in use in the United States.” In an …

Brand extension: when is it an extension of perceived risk?

By Mark Di Somma

We tend to judge the likelihood of whether a brand extension will work on the compatibility that consumers will feel between the brand they know and the extension they are being asked to accept. As Brad VanAuken has observed, “Any brand extension into a new product category must reinforce one of those primary associations without creating new negative, conflicting or confusing associations for the brand. If this rule is followed, the brand extension will actually reinforce what the brand stands for.” In fact, providing that association is strong, Nigel Hollis says, “the fit between the brand and the category does not need to be based on a direct application of the brand’s functional credentials”. The need for structure Now, in a new study discussed here, Wharton marketing professor Keisha Cutright and co-authors James R. Bettman and Gavan J. Fitzimons of Duke University, contend that, alongside the quality of the product, the way it is marketed and the fit with the current identity, consumer psychology also has a role to play in whether a brand extension flies …

9 factors that help anchor your brand price

By Mark Di Somma

Behavioural economists refer to the decision making process brands use to set a price in the minds of consumers, especially when those buyers are dealing with something that is unfamiliar to them, as “anchoring”. Anchoring provides a reference point from which to perceive and negotiate “worth”. Brands looking to set a high value on what they offer anchor highly; brands looking to position themselves as accessible and everyday do the opposite. De Beers anchored the value of their rings around “two months’ salary”. The message to purchasers – in this case, men in a jewellery store (perhaps the ultimate social fish out of water) – was that it will hurt but it’s worth it. At the other end of the value scale, when Coca Cola originally positioned their “delicious, refreshing” drink at 5c a glass, they were sending a clear signal to drinkers that Coke was the affordable beverage everyone could enjoy every day. Both messages were on brand, even though they presented vastly different value propositions. De Beers’ “price” of course takes no reference …

When projects don’t stack: the fine art of understanding mistakes

By Mark Di Somma

By Mark Di Somma When a project doesn’t meet expectations, I’m fascinated by what gets asked, who does the asking and what, if anything, emerges as the key learning. My view is that we should treat projects that don’t go to plan not so much as wreckages but rather as breakages: they occur when the picture we have in our minds of what will occur shatters, splits or simply falls a different way than we had led ourselves to expect. That can mean something as elemental as having the wrong picture in the first place – or it can come down to developments that pulled things out of alignment. Faced with picking up the pieces, here are 22 questions I use to try and get to the truth, and to move on: 1. What exactly went wrong? (What did not happen?) 2. How “wrong” was it – in the sense that how much did it differ from what we had told ourselves would happen? 3. How realistic was our prediction in the first place? (How …

Where do you stand on fair pricing? A conversation starter

By Mark Di Somma

Buyers have convinced themselves that they are entitled to deprive brands and shopkeepers of a degree of the asking price profit in the hunt for a bargain – yet in almost the same breath, they’ll tell you that businesses need to be responsible and to behave ethically and that they shouldn’t take shortcuts that compromise people or safety. But there are prices to pay for things being cheap. In fact, one could go so far as to say that once prices get below a certain point, someone has to suffer. Some of the side-effects are obvious and horrendous: child labour; unsafe working places; the flourishing replica and fake markets; food scandals. Some are less obvious but still telling: the ongoing effects of over-production on environments and economics; the free-fall decline of high street retail in the face of online trade; and declining employment in the retail and service sectors. You don’t have to look far for predictions that retail is about to close its doors. In this interview on Pandodaily, Marc Andreessen says, “Retail guys …

Whose buying – and whose purchasing?

By Mark Di Somma

At first the question appears nonsensical. But only if you assume that buying and purchasing are synonyms. Most financial systems treat them as exactly that because, from their perspective, the result is the same. Income. But there is a difference – and being able to define and quantify that difference is important. Semantics doesn’t just split hairs. It splits customers. It isolates loyalties and behaviours. And in so doing, it potentially defines different actions. But it only does so for those prepared to look for the nuances. As big data hands marketers and decision makers more and more detail, the ability to read between the lines and find the nuances of behaviour in the numbers will be more important than ever. In this case, being able to tell the difference between your buyers (“the people who actively choose to buy from us”) and your purchasers (“the people who happen to have bought from us”) reveals two very different parties in terms of inclination. The first will be back. The second may not. Things become a …