Evidence-Based, Customer Journey Management to Build Brands

The Opportunity for Marketers

As customers become exposed to a cascading list of product choices, store choices, and information sources, the opportunity exists to connect all the communications about any specific brand and product into a single consistent, coherent message relevant to the individual customer’s needs.  The customer journey has emerged as the concept that provides the opportunity to best deliver an integrated marketing communications approach at an enterprise level.

The various customer-facing functions in organizations now have the opportunity to integrate their individual, principal goals to deliver a single voice for building brands:

• Customer Experience — Every daily contact point a moment-of-truth to opportunity to exceed expectations
• Digital Communications — Automated intelligence and delivery to enhance daily relationships
• Traditional Communications — Process creation and delivery fully integrated with digital in driving marketing ROI
• Experiential — Events and sponsorships to cut-through clutter and energize the brand
• Corporate Communications — One unfavorable rating or post can undo the entire marketing plan; authentic information content drives brand growth
• Purchase site — Online and offline, 24/7 access and critical convergence of messaging

Common Ground toward Effective Brand-Building

All these functions have been departing from their parallel paths and converging based around the following premises:

• All brands are vulnerable to losing customers through a single bad experience.
• Brand strength is created through a history of positive experiences.
• Every characteristic of the brand involves communications and relies upon communications for success.
• The customer journey concept is an extension of past models for consumer decision-making.
• Traditional and digital communications must be integrated which requires their development processes to become integrated.
• All the functions involved still rely upon key, evidence-based, branding concepts – The MSW-ARS RDE model for brand-building links closely to the customer journey map for any defined product segment.

The opportunity exists to apply common metrics that measure short-term and long-term communications success across functions, within functions, and within elements of each function, across a customer journey.

Evidence-Based Metrics; the Common Language for Integration

Metrics that truly capture the reality of the interactive contact at each touch point along the customer journey must be evidence-based to ensure unified direction and consistent execution across organization functions for delivering an integrated communications approach.

MSW-ARS solutions for each step of the journey contain the Customer Commitment Preference metric that is more sensitive to immediate unit share and brand franchise shifts than any other metric in the market.

Source:  MASB

The validated connection between Customer Commitment Preference and customer lifetime value enables the team to know precise return-on-investment for each individual element and the collective program across functions.

To develop insights to addressing continuous improvement within each touch point, any customer journey analysis must address three basic questions:

To capture thinking (cognitive) and feeling (emotive) measurement requires empirically proven metrics that can uncover both the stated and derived importance of each touch point and communications for assessment of both expectations and delivery to expectations.

Convergence around Customer Journey as the Key to Brand Building

MSW-ARS has developed empirical evidence of how communications work that can accurately connect short-term sales and long-term brand development to the performance of the individual and collective touch points in the journey.

Taking Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning to another Level

Previous brand experience is a principal characteristic for segmentation and target opportunity determination at the need generation stage of the customer journey:

• Neuroscience-based, unconscious measurement of derived importance uncovers un-voiced concerns before they become lapsed or lost customers.
• Category measurement of attitudes and usage across all measurements and media formats to identify opportunities to get things right at the beginning and deliver a consistent, coherent message.

Linking the Big Idea and Content Development

Research on how communications works has been conducted across the MSW-ARS, fifty-year, database.  The evidence clearly indicates that the key message of any product is built into the product design.  This was reported most recently by the MASB, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board at the 2017 Annual Conference for the Advertising Research Foundation.

Therefore, the opportunity for integration of the various communications programs must start at the beginning.

The MSW-ARS Sifter product has been designed specifically to measure the strength of the Value Proposition.  Additionally, the approach provides an assessment of effectiveness in delivering this value proposition that can be attributed to various communications elements and that can be applied in long-form and short-form content for scaling across every customer touch point.

Sifter is not intended to replace AI in the CRM/Marketing Automation system.  Sifter complements AI by:

• Ensuring that the communications program has an effective launch.
• Supports first mover growth opportunities for the brand.
• Provides the foundation for insights at the need generation stage and future learning from AI contacts.
• Can be integrated into decision-support, desktop applications to help serve as a cross-functional theme for coordinated, daily message responses.
• Ensures delivery of the fundamental, brand value proposition across all touch points.

Touch Point Effectiveness

The MSW-ARS TouchPoint product is also founded on more than fifty years of empirical evidence for how communications work.  The successful application of this solution and the certainty of its ability to predict results and lower business risk have been proven in a study by the MASB involving multiple communications research firms across twelve categories.   The MASB study results have been presented to the ARF and the AMA, written about in The Economist, The International Finance Review, The Journal of Brand Management and CFO Magazine, and has been discussed with the IASB (The International Accounting Standards Board).  Customer Commitment Preference is linked to Market Share & Cash Flow and hence to the NPV of the brand.

The Touch Point solution is flexible to allow brand teams to intervene and test any point along the journey at any time to develop empirical knowledge for continuous improvement.

Success at the Moments of Truth

Effective communications during the consideration, engagement and evaluation stages lead to inclusion in the consideration set at the first moment of truth when the purchase is made.  Communications then strengthen the purchase and remove dissonance at the second moment of truth when the customer receives service for the product.

Application of the MSW-ARS ACCU*TRAK solution allows company and brand teams to invest resources at a precise point in the journey that will most effectively improve both the contribution of that single touch point, but, more importantly, the overall unit share results sought by each of the various marketing functions.

Conclusion

Organizational changes indicate that brands fully understand the need to integrate the various functions, but, don’t yet fully understand how to link them in an effective manner.  MSW-ARS has an answer to this need that will allow brands to move ahead of their competitors in making this critical adjustment to finding common ground… cross-functional, evidence-based metrics that will enable marketing organizations to successfully implement integrated marketing plans across each customer journey.

As the annual post turkey day sales event known as ‘Black Friday’ approaches, consumers are preparing themselves for the single largest shopping day of the holiday season.  In a recent survey we conducted of smartphone users, we revealed some interesting insights and methods behind the consumer madness of this epic shop til you drop event.

Prepare Yourselves for the Masses

This years sales event will be heavily attended, with only 12% of consumers stating that the will not shop Black Friday sales.  With 63% indicating the plan to shop, another quarter of the consumer audience is still on the fence.  With the advertising onslaught only just begining, it will be interesting to watch what percentage of those undecided will step into the fray.

Men and women will take part nearly equally, with women who plan to shop edging out men by only a slight percentage.  The largest segment 80% of those venturing out have annual incomes of between 35 and 49 thousand, while those earning between 100 and 150 thousand a year represent the largest group (20%) planning to sit this one out.

Planning ahead is a wise move.

Consumer’s planning ahead are likely to have the best experience this year as crowds and lines are likely to be large and long.

Less than a quarter of those we surveyed plan to camp out, have a saved place in line or some other method of arriving at the store(s) they want to shop at.  46% say they’ll simply arrive as the store opens, while just over 30% say they’ll risk the possibility of sell outs by waiting until crowds thin out.

Many plan this year’s Black Friday to be the shopping day on which they intend to do most of the holiday shopping, with over half (56%) reporting that they’ll do 50-75% of their holiday shopping during the event.

This year, consumers are coming armed with smartphones, and the use of these devices is nearly certain to influence purchasing behaviors.  Nearly 100% of those surveyed said they would use their smartphones on Black Friday, with 30% stating that comparison shopping using the device would be their number one behavior.   Another 20% say they’ll redeem coupons with their smartphone, a trend that is increasing gradually as brands adopt the powerful method of delivery, but coming in a surprising third, 17% say they predict they’ll use their device to scan QR codes on Black Friday.

So, what will consumers be purchasing at these popular sales?   Popular gifts for kids, such as video games or consoles, tops the list for Black Friday consumers, followed in close order by clothing, computing electronics and video.

 

When PUSH becomes shove.

 

Brands might be looking at PUSH messaging as the holy grail of consumer CRM & dialoging, but it begs the question; how much push is too much?  Smartphone consumers find value in getting messages from brands that know just the right way of reaching them with valuable news, information or offers, but is there a secret formula?  How and when is the line between dialog & disruption crossed, and how can brand marketers both capitalize on this powerful mobile medium without risking alienation or worse, driving their target market into the arms of a more ‘relationship friendly’ brand?

 

It’s a slippery slope, to be sure.  Consumers have new and broad abilities to be discriminating in the PUSH channel that differ from most other mediums.  In television, for instance, a consumer can now push a button to zip past a commercial, or even all commercials in a television program.  They must, however, do this for each and every commercial they wish to skip, their remotes lacking any button that says ‘skip all commercials’ nor any button reading ‘skip all car commercials’.

 

The PUSH channel, by way of comparison, is precisely the opposite.  Not only can a consumer selectively turn the messaging medium on or off at will, they may also do this app to app, allowing one app to PUSH while preventing it from another.

 

To dig into the mindsets of consumers relating to PUSH, once again we’ve invoked the power of our mighty SurveyApp panel to get at some attitudes and opinions related to the PUSH messaging medium.

Surveying broadly across iPhone & Android users, overall, the news is good. People like PUSH, and very few of them (10%) have a ‘block all’ mentality where they refuse any PUSH messaging to occur.

 

 

 

 

 

Of those roughly ten percent that have determined that no PUSH message is a good message, those responding seem to

find it disruptive, invasive or annoying. Other reasons cited were

data consumption, lack of ability to control the messaging and cost.

The broad majority of people not only allow PUSH, but they are actually ok with moderate to high frequency of the messages.  Nearly 45% of those surveyed said that 2 to 3 messages a week were ok, with another 40% reporting that even 4 or more was just fine.

 

 

This notwithstanding, there is clearly a cap to how many messages are too many. What exactly that cap is, however, is a moving target, fluctuating broadly between the type of message, the reason for the message and the type of app sending it.  Spamming a consumer with product info, for example, will be far less tolerated than a message related to a game or social app. In other words, the purpose and context behind the message dramatically impacts the level of tolerance of the receiver.

But it begs the question, when that line is crossed, when you’ve simply sent a consumer too many messages, then what?  With email, you’ll get blocked or tossed into junk mail.  With television, you’ll get skipped over, direct mail – trash can.  In mobile it’s a little unnerving to realize; far worse might happen as backlash for PUSH spam.

 

The penalties for crossing the boundaries of ‘just enough’ and ‘too much’ can be severe.  When apps send PUSH messages too frequently, over 40% of consumers will disable the apps ability to send them, 13% will delete the app entirely, but a whopping 40% will do something to a brand I personally believe to be a fate far worse than ‘death’, they’ll ignore the brand message altogether, perhaps indefinitely.

 

Think about it. It’s the mobile app equivalent of being put on hold – indefinitely.  Your attempts to rekindle or cultivate the consumer relationship are futile because they haven’t removed you, they’ve just screened you out, leaving you unable to act.

 

In the end, I think this is worse, because if you know you don’t have a dialog with a consumer, you simply endeavor & take the steps to establish one. If you have, however,  no idea that your dialog is simply being disregarded, well, you’re maybe falsely raising the flag of triumph for consumer conversations you aren’t actually having yet, so you won’t make the effort to establish a conversation with them – you’ll think it already exists.

 

Worse still are the minority, but still very serious phenomena of those consumers who will badly rate or review an app they feel is going overboard with PUSH.  Of those, at least some say they’ll use a social channel such as Facebook or Twitter to gripe and the results of that could range from minor to catastrophic, depending on how many people are listening on the complaining consumers channel(s).

We also found out that less than 20% of those we surveyed claimed that opening or closing the PUSH door on an app was a one way street that they would never reconsider.  We asked our panelists if they had ever gone back and changed the PUSH settings of an app after the fact, and 40% of those who responded said that they had both enabled PUSH in an app where they’d previously refused it, and disabled PUSH in an app where they had once allowed the messages to come through.

 

 

So the door on PUSH can swing both ways.  Gain the trust of a consumer and even if they have previously said ‘no’ to your messaging, if they get the sense that there is value, they’ll turn it on.  Cross ‘the line’, whatever that might be, with them and they are just as apt to turn it off.  In fact, the data suggests that by a slim margin, about 6%,they are more apt to turn it off than on.

 

As obvious as it might seem to some, one thing is clear about PUSH.  You have to earn right to PUSH to consumers, and for those who allow you to use this intimate and direct channel, value momentum must exist to keep that right.   When asked what it is about a PUSH message that makes it worthwhile to a consumer to receive, value propositions are the ruling party.

 

By asking our audience ‘which things can a brand offer as value to get PUSH permissions’, the top five drivers are:

1. Special Offers
2. Coupons
3. Sales
4. VIP Offers
5. ‘Member’s Only’ Offers

 

Of those, the majority claimed that coupon type offers would be enough of a driver for them to allow an app to message them, however just making mention of sales or promotions alone didn’t seem to be enough of an enticement to warm them up to the idea.

 

A few things are becoming increasingly clear.  PUSH is, essentially, a one way dialog, but it doesn’t have to be.  Sure, you PUSH the message and it shows up with no real idea if the consumer saw it, but there are plenty of ways to tie that message to a response mechanism that can close the loop on the medium, establishing a clear lock on the number of folks who ‘did something’ in response to your push.  This is essential in measuring not only the success of a brands efforts that utilize PUSH, but also instrumental in helping define the limits that consumers are willing to endure.

 

With the data we’re seeing, it’s apparent that measuring the impact of PUSH is critical to not only measuring success, but also avoiding potential negative impact on the brand.

It’s also very clear that PUSH, while a powerful tool at keeping an open dialog to your consumers, simply must have some intrinsic value behind the message, one that trades well for the attention the consumer is granting you.

Ultimately, respecting the fact that the keyword here is ‘granting’ is probably the central insight to take away.  The mobile PUSH channel is a direct link to the consumer to be sure, but it is also their channel, under their control.  Consumer’s seem fairly forgiving in opening up the channel when the right value proposition is in place, but clearly, the data also shows that they will slam that door shut if they don’t like the knock.