First published in the New Zealand Marketing Association’s DLB magazine in 2007
People can fall asleep watching television. They can fall asleep reading a newspaper or magazine. Ditto radio. By contrast though, people generally don’t fall asleep in mid-conversation or when they’re surfing the internet. The difference? Dialogue – two way communication.
Advertising still works.
Brand advertising is still important to make your products known. It moves prospects from awareness through to trial of your product.
That’s when the real work begins.
Advertising in all its forms though is very different to dialogue. Creative for the two way dialog on the web needs to be done differently to that produced for the one way media of television or print. The adverts you put online are a substitute salesperson. The acid test of whether your online ads are on target is to ask – “how does my ad sound as part of a sales presentation delivered by a salesman on the shop floor?” A good example of the genre done well is the banner advert pictured here for Saturn – a Carlson client in the USA. The banner’s language is the same a salesman in a Saturn showroom might use.
The sale is only the start
According to Tom Peters “All business success rests on something labelled a sale, which at least temporarily weds company and customer”. What happens after that wedding; whether it be customers repeating that initial purchase or upgrading the first purchase to a premium product purchase over time is up to us as marketers.
Theodore Levitt’s view is that “The sale merely consummates the courtship”.
Then the marriage begins. How good the marriage is depends on how well the relationship is managed by the seller”.
Their schedule – not yours.
Whatever technologies you choose, expect to work at higher speeds than ever before. Many next-generation techniques reward immediacy—but that can be difficult to achieve in large companies with regulatory and organizational hurdles to clear.Companies that plan to use RSS, blogs, and podcasts as a more real-time way to reach customers, whether in the aggregate or in tightly focused messages, will need to redefine nimbleness on a corporate wide
level if they want to move beyond traditional legal department and marketing communications department approval and turnaround times.
Listen as much as you communicate
The internet allows dialogue. Data capture and analytics, though critical, need to be augmented with what is
learned in dialogue for a softer more qualitative take on latent needs. Lester Wunderman promotes going back to the “Listening Departments” of the 1950s. These days the technologies supplant this function and blogs, communities and wikis allow unstructured communication and dialogue
augmentation of the data and analytics.
Globally there are some great successes. On MySpace, the recent movie “X-Men: The Last Stand” has over 2.6 million “friends”. It may seem rather unusual to invite customers to become “friends” of your brand through the likes of MySpace or FaceBook but the rate at which customers are signing up for this friendship shows they’re after the dialogue that comes with these communities. Victoria’s Secret recently launched pages on both FaceBook and MySpace focused on its PINK range of underwear. These sites already have 320,000 and 215,000 friends respectively who, on their own personal pages, (now some 535,000 pages in total) carry the Victoria’s Secret PINK collateral.
We also know that 55% of the target market for this range of underwear visits MySpace daily.
These cases also illustrate another important distinction between advertising and dialogue: marketers have to cede some control of their products and brands to their customers when in dialogue. Whilst this may seem counter-intuitive, there are some clear benefits. Our research shows that customers most trust email that they have opted into receive over any other form of media including TV and print. For them it’s a dialogue that they’ve initiated (Interestingly – they least trust celebrity endorsements).
At the same time, some 90% of customers regard word-of-mouth as the best source of ideas and information. The interactive technologies now available to us as marketers are only making those in-built and existing social mechanisms more frictionless for us.
Realistically in New Zealand today – no marketer can really claim to have these technologies at the centre of their marketing strategies (though many of our clients are starting to install first generation versions of these solutions into their customer dialogue).
Without exception though, every marketer in New Zealand has a steadily maturing, website based, online strategy in place. There are good, demonstrated precedents of web-done-well globally. In 2005 Kia Motors was spending 85% of its advertising budget on television. Analysis of customer data and research led to a change of strategy
pushing the bulk of their USA marketing online. Traffic to Kia.com is up 27% year on year and it’s producing 15% more leads for dealers. In fact some dealers claim that 75% of their business comes through this channel. Recently Kia bought space on Yahoo’s home page to launch a new car model. According to Kia’s CMO “it blew the back off the servers and the model had instant name recognition”.
Maybe a simple first step for all of us comes from the CMO of Wells Fargo in the USA that marketing’s first task “is to see itself as an integrating force for the customer”.
Employees are the brand
“I am convinced that companies should put staff first, customers second and shareholders third – ultimately that’s in the best interest of customers and shareholders”. So said Richard Branson and he’s not alone in this sentiment. In fact there’s a significant body of research supporting this strategy and demonstrating the resulting customer advocacy it generates and the attendant financial benefits of this advocacy.
Despite decades of streamlining and adding
predictive processes to the operations of a company, employees still bring their emotions, dreams, hopes, and fears to work. Smart companies will capitalize on, n
ot quash, those emotions through employee engagement programs that can drive the equation that happy staff = happy customers = happy shareholders.
It’s no great stretch to understand that customers interact with your front line staff more frequently and more meaningfully than with any of your advertising or marketing. Employees and staff are the secret weapon – where the long term battle is won or lost. Employee engagement is the foundation on which all customer dialogue success is based.
HP, a Carlson client internationally, has gone from poor profits in it’s PC Division 3 years ago to the leading market share in its category today. Back then HP discovered through research and analysis that, whilst they were getting through initial sale without much difficulty, it was the relationship with HP customers after the sale that was important to their business. The majority of this customer initiated contact was to staff at HP’s support call centres.
HP trained its staff to understand the emotional connection between HP products and HP customers. It has also created the “Voice of the Customer”, an interactive tool much like MySpace for all staff to share customer feedback and insights. In effect, this is a company-internal deployment of the same tools companies are using to conduct dialogues with customers.
Sears Department stores, also a Carlson client, runs an employee recognition and rewards scheme that it can tie back to customer loyalty and financial goals. A 5 point increase in staff engagement delivers a 1% increase in customer loyalty which results in a 3.4% increase in earnings before interest and tax (EBIT).
JetBlue Airways in the USA entered the market in 2000 with a similar philosophy to Branson’s “employees first” thinking. In a market where many airlines have gone bankrupt and most are delivering middling returns, JetBlue’s financial metrics (ROA, ROE, operating margin and gross margin) have all been well above industry averages. Why? Engaged and motivated employees deliver the experience and service the JetBlue brand has promised.
Finally – a word of caution. Be authentic and be honest in using the new technologies because all these dialogues, like those in the real world, are only sustained by trust. Be transparent about your motives with both customers and employees. A 2002 campaign by Sony Ericsson Mobile for its T68i mobile phone and digital camera called “Fake Tourist” involved placing 60 actors posing as tourists at attractions in New York and Seattle to demonstrate the camera phone. The actors asked passers-by to take their photo, which demonstrated the camera phone’s capabilities, but the actors did not identify themselves as representatives for Sony Ericsson.
That engulfed Sony Ericsson in a media furore including a roasting from television’s 60 Minutes and write ups in the likes of the Wall Street Journal. Maybe they got lucky and people fell asleep watching and reading about it.
Simon Rowles 