Your Business From the Customer’s Point of View
By Dave Howell
The customer decides how and when to buy.
I am amazed at how many business owners or executives forget what drives their revenue stream – the customer’s point of view. Innovation is not about creating the next Facebook, it’s about operating your business like a very large rubber band with the customer holding one end and you the other. You are never sure how much pressure the customer will put on your business (forecast), or how long any pressure will last (life cycle management), or even when the customer will release pressure (SWOT). Because business has so many variables it is wise for owners and leaders to pay attention to what the customer is saying about your product or service (voice of the customer).
In marketing 101 we learned that two types of businesses exist, push and pull. Push is where you create demand and deliver the product, while pull means the customer is creating the demand. Simple isn’t it? Not so fast. In today’s world, the Internet has helped shape a connected world, where more and more, the customer owns much of the product cycle and the customer cycle. If customers, through research and referrals, decide when to consider and make a buying decision, where does that leave businesses?
Enter integrated communications and marketing. Leaders and marketers should find out from the customer what they want, how they want it and when they want it in order to define how to deliver their product or service. Innovation then is about looking at the buying process from the customer’s view. This becomes a requirement for all innovation, as pushing products into the market place rarely produces the desired results.
Designing or re-designing your product or service delivery system should align with the customer’s desires. If this is the case you may find product, pricing, placement and other marketing strategies constantly in flux, but with a fast moving world, you should expect fluctuation as part of your continuous improvement and evaluation. Business intelligence is not just about the competition and what they are doing for the customer, it’s about what your customers want from you.
Now the question begs, “How do I best go about obtaining and assessing my customer’s views?” The answer is necessarily not that easy but is a worthwhile function within every business. Let me give you some tips on the customer’s point of view:
1. Start thinking through what your client’s International product or service life cycle is and how the world is impacting the customer.
2. Consider how the product or service is viewed in the United States or the country primarily where it is sold.
3. Next, examine how the product is performing in your customer’s region to see what market forces are impacting it.
4. Assess how the customers are using the product or service locally.
5. Finally, design a continuous assessment of the industry, segment and location to understand how your product or service is being used on a regular basis (at least monthly or quarterly).
I like to think that if we are a customer of our own product or service, then our own wish list about how the product or service is delivered, priced or performs serves as a reasonable benchmark of how other customers feel about the product or service. However, our own ideas are jaded by being too close and we see it through rose colored glasses. Removing these filters require you talk to real customers and have them define what they want and need from the product or service.
So, we come full circle back to voice of the customer, as this is the key driver for your product or service, despite what we may think the customer determines when they will buy and how they will buy because they will have a need or want to fulfill. Marketing employs the sales the team to tighten the focus in lead generation after marketing creates an awareness and at least part of the consideration, and sales appeals to the customers needs and wants to close the sale how and when the customer decides – they current customer’s point of view!
For more information about how Blue Planet Marketing can assist your leadership and marketing team, call 210-618-6566 or visit #bpmktg.com.
Leader Strategy Gaps or Are They?
By Dave Howell
Are you doing you part to achieve company objectives?
Company leaders and marketers all fail on strategy. I’m not saying everyone is a failure, what I mean is that all of us tend towards the tactical, and avoid the “long pole in the tent”, or even ignore the “elephant in the room”.
With the complexities of companies, structures, business models, customer savvy and marketing plans that need to sync all of these components up is a tall order. As much as we’d like to think it is too complex, I challenge that thinking. My perspective is that it is never more important than now than to break things down to their simplest form and understand what the customer is asking for and needs. Your business better be designed around this component first, or else you’ll be one of the Fortune 500 companies that went bankrupt last year.
In marketing, reality often falls short of what would be ideally strategic. This forces me to be a proponent of fact-based decision making which ordinarily accompanies planning. If we plan our work and work our plan we establish the strategic and execute the tactical, meeting the customer’s needs simple!
I heard recently that up to 40 percent of all measures planned are never executed because underlying assumptions turn out to be wrong or material or human resources designated for a campaign are no longer available. This planning gap may have occurred as a result of some of the following reasons:
• Failure to plan for human capital needs.
• Failure to adapt to market changes using SWOT.
• Increasing complexity of organizational structures and processes in marketing making it difficult to manage the customer to their satisfaction.
• Lack of feedback as to which measures have contributed to what extent to achieving a campaign’s objectives.
• Insufficient information leading to inaccurate estimates of resources needed.
• A lack of meaningful, reliable data and balancing this against objectivity of budgeting by a 3rd party such as the CFO or controller, as planners resort to the previous year’s figures, gut feeling or generic corporate guidelines.
• Poor project management – unawareness of consequences of missed deadlines, and of how to deal with additional requirements.
• Leader waffling – waning decision-making confidence when basic conditions such as budgets, competition or demand change.
• Lack of technical integration between strategy, planning and evaluation. As marketers mainly rely on PowerPoint and Excel, a switch between media becomes inevitable when turning promotional plans into action.
For the purposes of this article I’d like to draw your attention to reason number 1 – YOU! Notice the “Lack of technical integration between strategy, planning and evaluation…” You can’t make excuses because you haven’t implemented or reasoned out the customer needs and the resulting actions. I don’t care whether it is a thought process, an EXCEL spreadsheet, VISIO, or any tool you’d like to rely on or use as a crutch.
You are accountable to your CEO or President. He or she hired you to get the job done, not them – they hired you because you have the skills to problem solve, investigate and make decisions which will grow the revenue stream by understanding and executing processes to the customers needs.
I have written in past articles about the use of strategic planning, management control plans, scorecards, and action plans as tools to plan and execute with, and I have also written about unifying communications internally and externally around your brand. The 5-7 objectives this year make up your brand so get with it and stop blaming everyone else.
In closing let me leave you with clarity of thought, “marketers must ensure the brand alignment, the strategy to achieve it, meeting the customer’s needs, and the execution through proper planning”.
If you need help aligning your company, please call me at 210-618-6566 or request an appointment at www.bpmktg.com.
What the Heck is “Gamification”?
By Dave Howell
Gamification for GEN X, Boomers and Seniors
Old school gaming, or
Gamification for all ages
New school king of gaming – Zynga
Clever. Invite visitors to your website, blog, posts, or tweets to respond in a way that is fun for them. Gamification is most like Facebook’s rollout of “Farmville” by Zynga. Users sign onto Facebook, and their friends invite them to play. Have you noticed that Facebook’s open source for app developers boggles one’s mind based upon the sheer number of friend invites to play games? Think of the ad opportunities contained in these forays into gaming. Wow!
(Via: Entrepreneur) In July of 2010, NBC Universal’s USA Network used gamification to increase engagement on their website Psych, on of its TV shows. This is a good example of both web and social media gamification. The first element of the campaign was launching a fan loyalty program called Club Psych that let users win weekly prizes by complete different challenges. Second, USA launched Psych Vision, a mobile app the let users access behind-the-scenes videos, play trivia games to earn points/unlock prizes, and chat with other fans while watching the show. With a 130 percent jump in page views and a 40 percent increase in return visits to the Psych website, USA create a social media mystery game called #HashTagKiller. The game engaged fans with puzzles, clues, and Facebook chats with the show’s actors. The game has driven more than 95 million page views from 300,000 unique users since its launch in September 2011. Jesse Redniss, senior vice president of digital noted that, “288,000 shares on Facebook’s platform have provided us with over 38 million exposures of the “Psych” brand to our users’ friends and families.”
Via: Oktopost) This gamification campaign was promoting Volkswagen Fox’s sponsorship of Planeta Terra Festival in Brazil. Tickets would be given away through a game mechanic on Twitter. When someone tweeted #foxatplanetaterra , Volkswagen would zoom in on a map that showed locations of the free tickets. In response, followers tweeted the hashtag in an effort to track down the free tickets. The results? Within two hours this hashtag became Brazil’s top trending topic. The greatest strength of this campaign was its simplicity. Anyone could join and it was a quick and easy way for Volkswagen to increase awareness and connect with their online audience.
Based upon these examples, one would think that the Hashtag and a giveaway idea are the keys to world dominance, but wait a minute. By another name, we used to refer to “loyalty marketing” (old school) as a marketing scheme in which a company focuses on growing and retaining existing customers through incentives. Branding, product marketing and loyalty marketing all form part of the customer proposition – the subjective assessment by the customer of whether to purchase a brand or not based on the integrated combination of the value they receive from each of these marketing disciplines.
The discipline of customer loyalty marketing has been around for many years, but expansions from it merely being a model for conducting business to becoming a vehicle for marketing and advertising have made it omnipresent in consumer marketing organizations since the mid- to late-1990s.
In recent years, a new marketing discipline called “customer advocacy marketing” has been combined with or replaced “customer loyalty marketing.” To the general public, many airline miles programs, hotel frequent guest programs and credit card incentive programs are the most visible customer loyalty marketing programs.
Enter the Gen Y Internet marketers and gamers. Now combine what we know about brand loyalty marketing and add a Hashtag and and a giveaway and you have Gamification. So is Gamification the same as designing a game? Gamification should never be confused with game design. When creating a Gamification strategy or campaign you are not creating a deep, immersive experience like Call of Duty or Halo. Instead, you are “gamifying,” or integrating game mechanics into your site, service, content, online community or campaign with the goal of increasing participation. Since you are enticing a user to go deeper, designing a Gamification system requires you start with simple rules, attainable goals and near term wins.
Why Does Gamification Work? Gamification works to satisfy some of the most fundamental human desires: recognition and reward, status, achievement, competition & collaboration, self-expression, and altruism. People are hungry for these things both in their everyday world and online. Gamification taps directly into this. Can Gamification replace good content? No, your website needs to stand on its own and be compelling for visitors.
Game mechanics should enhance the site by adding an element of community, competition, and fun that engages your users. For example, no amount of gamification is going to enhance a news site with outdated news.
So what do I need to get started with my Gamification strategy? Do I need a Community?
Gamification usually requires a supporting Community. The fundamental human desires we mentioned, such as status and self-expression, are bolstered when others bear witness to it. It is also important to have other people with whom to compete and compare accomplishments. Of course, there are some exceptions like banking websites, where people want to maintain privacy. But as a general rule, humans want to interact and compete with others. This is where social media seems to wok best.
Wanna start with points, badges and incentives to use your website by existing clients?
Want to attract new clients to your website for conversion?
Do you have a social media program and strategy? Is you company spending 20% of their ad budget on social media? Does you marketing department measure the success of social media through ROI, and ROO or other suitable metrics on return of dollars spent? Answers to these questions and more require a call to Blue Planet Marketing. 210-618-6566 for help getting started.
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