Would the real CRM please stand up?

Would the real CRM please stand up?

Most people have heard of it, some claim to understand it, and others even think they’re doing it. Customer Relationship Management is one of the most misunderstood terms in business today, and for good reason.

I’ll refrain from using any of the thousands of definitions one can find online, and I’ll summarize it as “how to build a profitable and valued long-term relationship with your customer”, and frankly even that doesn’t really hit the spot. There are as many definitions for the term as there are people working in the field (go ahead, google it).  I’ve heard people say “yeah, CRM, that’s call centres isn’t it?” all the way to the more informed but still off the mark “direct marketing infused with a bit of IT and finance”, which is certainly part of CRM, but hardly the whole picture.

The principles of CRM have not changed for decades, forever defined, in my mind by the OgilvyOne mantra, in reference to the customer, “win, grow or retain, where is the biggest gain?”. The discipline of CRM however has changed immensely over the past decade thanks to the internet and the smart phone. Where once you had frequent flyer programmes embodying the very essence of CRM, today new dialogue and engagement platforms, powered by data, has meant businessess, at least the successful ones, are becoming more customer centric and focused on creating brand experiences rather than simply selling products and services. This is what CRM has been trying to achieve all along but people have mislabeled, wrongly defined and ultimately misused it.

Here are four important reasons I have found over the years for the failure of CRM.

1-    It requires re-management of the entire business: Becoming customer focused needs to happen at every level within an organization, not compartmentalized within IT or Marketing as is often the case. Becoming a customer-focused organization should happen before implementing CRM; Job descriptions, processes, policies, performance metrics, vision…practically everything needs to be geared towards meeting customer needs. “CRM” alone will not make a non-customer focused organization become one.

2-    Long ROI models: A fair amount of investment goes into setting up and maintaining CRM programmes; IT, communication channels, HR, training, content providers, agencies etc. The ROI models in most developed markets look at breaking even after two to three years at least, even with amortization of overheads. In Jordan you have to also contend with a relatively smaller population, particularly those with disposable income, where any investment needs to be met by a critical mass of customers to generate a positive ROI. This is also true for most other MENA markets, with the exception of Egypt and Saudi, but in their cases they have marginally more successful CRM initiatives, particularly in the FMCG sector. The long-term approach to CRM often times is a big disincentive to initiate effective change. Though CRM is scalable, it helps to not think of CRM as a “thing to spend money on”, but rather “how do i focus my business on becoming customer centric”.

3-    Not knowing how to leverage the data: Data is the new gold and many companies ignore or struggle to use the vast amount of data on their customers (think Banks and Telcos). Knowing what to do with the data is the other half of the battle where CRM comes into its true purpose. Segmenting, analyzing, testing, learning and ultimately creating great experiences for customers that translate into more profitable relationships. Knowing what to do with the data is just as important as knowing not to stalk and harass your customer, but rather lure them with relevant and timely value and offers.

4-    Investing in Loyalty: Loyalty is very much a two way street and many companies don’t invest enough in giving individualized value and recognition. Emotional bonds with brands have shown to foster more profitable relationships, and emotional bonds cannot be bought, but rather have to be earned. Winning loyalty through monetization, only means you’ll lose their loyalty to someone else for the same reason.

Many of these problems are universal and not simply unique to Jordan or the region, though lets be honest, we seem to struggle significantly with them. But the biggest failure of CRM is in its very own definition, or rather the multitude of definitions. It means all things to all people except the one thing that it is; simply better business.  

(First appeared in Venture Magazine (Jordan) for June 2013 issue)

Brand dissonance in Jordan

Brand dissonance in Jordan

To borrow and evolve a phrase; a brand is only as strong as the worst part of the experience. Brand Dissonance, when over promising and under delivering creates an added sense of frustration due to expectations being unfulfilled or little effort is made to deliver on an implied quality of experience. Dissonance has always been around, but brands today have a far more difficult task of living up to the experiences they claim to offer and indeed define their brands as being. Jordan seems to suffer greatly from this condition, particularly at the customer service level and sometimes the basic fulfillment of transactions.

Gone are the days when “branding” a product with a logo would satisfy the customer with some quality assurance, as are the days when making claims of differentiation were demonstrated within carefully controlled environments, like on the product packaging, basic service or store space. Today customers are becoming accustomed to, and indeed expect, a brand experience that is true at every touchpoint and at every engagement, and that includes the simplest things in the customer journey, even down to the parking experience outside your store, not to mention personalized recognition or amazing mobile apps that improve my life and experience with a brand. If a brand is to be defined as the sum of all the parts of a business, then it goes to reason there needs to be a brand consideration for every aspect of a business, and especially any aspect that engages customers, its shareholders and stakeholders.

As brands have become more entrenched into our lives and technology enables more mass customization, brands have moved from commodities, to products to experiences in the span of a generation. Today brands have to work harder to engage and win customers, not to mention the efforts to maintain the relationships by adding value to their lives and attempting to become indispensable. It has only made the task of creating genuine and meaningful brand engagements more difficult and costly, particularly when said efforts are un-genuine and ineffective.

Many brands in Jordan seem to be suffering from an amplification of brand dissonance in recent years. Telcos and increasingly banks are particularly good at raising expectations, almost to near impossible levels, only for the real experiences to be frustrating, unfulfilled and needlessly complicated. But even though the experiences we have are overall better than many years ago, the amplification of the dissonance can be attributed to a number of reasons. Higher expectations from customers as the benchmark for brand experiences are raised with more competition, more exposure to foreign best practice, partly due to the web but also from more regional and foreign brands upping the stakes in Jordan. But ultimately it is hollow campaign slogans and half baked efforts that make the experiences so much worse because they fail to fulfill the expectations.

Customers have become more savvy at assessing and scrutinizing the overall experience of engaging a brand as people are exposed to global best practices that contrast heavily with what is experienced in Jordan. Its amplified by the grossly exaggerated claims and dizzyingly meaningless brand campaigns that reflect nothing of the reality, and in fact do more damage to a brand and a business when the actual experiences contrast so much.

Its almost advisable to set expectations low and surprise and delight people with brand experiences, as the first thing people tend to do these days when confronted with severe brand dissonance is share their experience on social media, and sometimes, though much more rarely, share their delight with positive brand harmony. Brands need to spend less money telling people how great they are and more on showing them and demonstrating their value propositions. Social Media can then let customers amplify your qualities rather than experience dissonance and undo all your advertising and marketing efforts.

There’s a trend in advertising that’s frankly refreshing, where honesty to the point of self-deprecation is finding more resonance with audiences. Even in subliminal ways brands are turning away from using beautiful models and actors for their ads and instead using more homely, and in some cases ugly people. It’s a movement towards making brands even more human, with traits that most people would admire in real people, like humility, honesty and genuine effort to self improve, something brands in Jordan need to consider.

(First appeared in Venture Magazine- Jordan,  May 2013)

My 3 Golden Rules on Consumer Research

My three golden rules on Consumer Research.

A rudimentary search on Google for “consumer research jokes and humor” gives very little in the way of anything funny, but rather a lot of articles and studies on use of humor in advertising discussing its effectiveness, and though this article has nothing to do with the former or the latter, the fact that I started this with a search on Google is.

When I first started working in advertising, consumer research was either Qualitative (focus groups) or Quantitative (clip boards), and though that sort of cumbersome and time consuming approach still has a role, albeit a smaller one, the real strategic driver today is data. From a consumer research standpoint, the digital age has passed, where connecting with consumers was revolutionized by reaching people easier and having them input the data through online surveys saving both time and cost, but also until a critical mass of people were digitally accessible, had teething problems of skewing the data to a certain subset of early adopters.

Consumer Research 2.0 however is like a virtual laboratory where marketers can observe, in real time, how consumers behave, what they think about your brand, your communication and the competition’s. And with social media, marketers are provided incredible depth in psychographic profiling, not to mention advocacy and engagement with brands. Testing concepts and offers before rolling out to broader audiences has never been easier, nor more accurate in predicting actual behavior as there is no questionnaire bias or any number of issues associated with traditional concept and offer testing in controlled environments, but I seem to be getting ahead of myself again.

My three golden rules on consumer research, though “guiding strategies” may be more apt than rules:

1-    Capture the DATA: The data is out there, you just need to know where to look and make sure you are capturing it and ultimately how to use it, and that goes for both existing and prospect customers. At the core of all this data should be a decent CRM engine that integrates with all your activities. If your business does not approach data correctly, it will struggle to capture purchase behavior, customer satisfaction, campaign effectiveness metrics, attrition rates and causes, share of wallet and customer equity, online traffic metrics and media habits, and ultimately where customers fall in terms of their lifetime value. Aside from existing consumer hard data, there is a wealth of data on general population metrics that could help drive your product, service or inspire the creative. And as for focus groups discussing creative, from my experience, only serves to dilute potentially great ideas into flat ones that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Rather, put things out there in perpetual beta mode, in test cells, and optimize the rest to the best designs, messages and mechanics. Even if you want to adapt the work to offline media, the real life lab of the internet will tell you what works best.

2-    Elicit, don’t Solicit: Last century when I worked with FCB (now DraftFCB), they had a brilliant methodology for understanding consumers to better resonate on a creative and message level. By spending time in their natural environments and having the subjects clueless as to what they are researching, and throughout the engagement, they lure them into talking about life and surreptitiously have them weave in products and brands into the discussions, and thereby extracting pure insights that would go on to inspire great campaigns. The value of extracting genuine emotions and thoughts is they are un-skewed by questionnaire bias nor by the unconscious need to please, or even to antagonize the questioner. Also, avoid all incentives; they just make your results meaningless.

3-    Research trends to predict behavior: Assuming you’ve taken the first two rules to heart, the biggest questions that should keep a business owner up at night is less about what is happening now and more about what is going to happen in the future. What are the trends and what does that mean for my business? The plethora of subscription based consumer and industry data is, if selected and analyzed correctly, extremely valuable to a business in doing just that.

Bottom line is, research today is less about asking, and more about observing, assuming you have the tools and competencies. 

(First appeared in Venture Magazine -Jordan in April 2013 issue)

3 Golden Rules for Premiums and Giveaways

After working in Advertising for the better part of two decades in a dozen markets all over the world, I like to challenge myself by making three golden rules for most everything in the industry. It’s as much a cathartic mental exercise as it is a practical guideline, however its always good to remember that in advertising there are no rules, just effectiveness.

My three golden rules for Premiums and Giveways.

Its that time of year again when brands and their agencies leaf through lengthy catalogues of items from all over the world to brand and give away to customers and prospects. A throw back to a pre-digital age that frankly a disproportionate amount of time and money goes into every year. There are desk calendars, mousepads (I know! Who uses mousepads anymore?), paperweights, key chains and various other things that never get used and at best function as an ice breaker for a sales call or a reminder of your stall at a trade show.

Nevertheless, business owners feel compelled to give something physical away and hopefully instill a sense of guilt that may initiate some future enquiry or even a purchase, or at the very least act as free advertising that the recipient carries or places on his desk or in his car.

That’s not to say premiums and giveaways can’t be a powerful marketing tool, as they can also double up as incentives for customers and even sales staff, so long as you follow my three golden rules. So put that 600 page catalogue of generic bumpf away and consider these rules:

1-    Novelty: There has to be a sense that this is something one cannot get for love or money. Its value is in the fact that it is unique and cannot be found anywhere. This is where catalogues are a waste of time and one has to think of commissioning something unique, which any number of Chinese companies would be more than happy to make for you. Another successful approach is to commission art or individually crafted items that doubles up as corporate social responsibility by supporting artists, and/or cottage industries and handicrafts. Its an opportunity to be creative and ideally reinforce the brand personality and messages, but don’t get carried away with overt branding on the item as this tends to put people off unless you are in fact a cool brand like Ferrari or Harley Davidson.  

2-    Functionality: If it does something then it is more likely to be used (exposed) and appreciated (resonate). And unless it has a function, it’ll probably just end up collecting dust on a shelf, chucked in a drawer or the bin, so steer clear of paperweights and ornamental plaques.

  

3-    Relevance: If you’re a financial services provider, give something that falls neatly within your service, like a credit card carrier case, or a subscription to the Economist. Don’t send car sun shades or beer cooler sleeves, it just comes across as shameless advertising. Giveaways ideally enhance the experience of using your product or service, like Amazon vouchers from an ISP, or even a cool shoehorn from a shoe brand. Giveaways are far too often a lost opportunity to elevate the brand experience.  

The best corporate “give-away” I’ve ever received is a lazer pen with a USB flash drive that also has buttons to remotely navigate between your powerpoint slides. The company was AFS, who offer back end IT for banks. It was useful, relevant (corporate) and frankly I’d never seen one before (novel). I still use it occasionally after over 5 years and here I am writing about it. That was an effective premium back in 2007, but try to avoid the USB flash drive in 2013 as I actually have a massive pile of them in my drawer, as most people probably do by now. Some of the best giveaways that I’ve personally worked on was the fun and perverted material that we developed for g+ ginseng, the drink brand, which included spank paddles, leather whips, erotic beach towels, handcuffs and various other items that went a long way to reinforce the brand personality, but as far as their utility is concerned, I can only imagine. 

(First appeared in Venture Magazine Jordan March 2013)

My 3 Golden Rules on viral marketing

After working in Advertising for the better part of two decades, in a dozen markets all over the world, I like to challenge myself by making three golden rules for most everything in the industry. It is as much a cathartic mental exercise as it is a practical guideline, nevertheless it’s always good to remember that in advertising there are no rules, just effectiveness.

My three golden rules….

Viral marketing.

Viral marketing is seen by many as the panacea of advertising; its free media and has the potential of elevating a brand to global superstar status, but most viral campaigns, at least those that are designed as so, fall flat on their face. Some of the greatest examples of viral campaigns are somewhat accidental, and RARELY brand centric. Dove’s “campaign for real beauty” saw an accidental viral video turn into a global campaign. A 60 second video originally made for an internal Unilever sales conference in Canada leaked online (or so the story goes) and became so viral that it was quickly adopted as a global TV commercial. You can watch it on youtube- “Dove evolution”.

In the digital age where consumers have trillions of terabytes of content and distractions to seek and consume, a brand has to really stand out and offer something genuinely valuable to justify engaging with you.  With media being fragmented to the incredible degree that it is, brands are increasingly relying on consumers to evangelize for them. A consumer being a willing brand advocate or happily associating themselves with a brand, will have far more impact than any advertising can ever do. 10 years ago we used to call that word-of-mouth.

When clients come asking for a viral campaign my initial reaction is to cringe, as i know they are asking for it in the hope of saving money, and besides, when you consider my three golden rules of viral marketing, most clients turn away from the idea, while those who embraced these guiding principles, have come away with tangible success:

1-    Inherent Value: Whether it’s comedic value, high production values, sheer audacity or shock factor, there has to be something genuinely valuable in the video/microsite/app or whatever it is you are expecting people to spend time and effort sharing. Alternatively you could incentivize (win something by sending this on, liking etc ..), but that, strictly speaking, isn’t a viral initiative. Viral also tends to be very topical, and brands having something emphatic to say at the right time have a better chance of success. Sadly most brands in this region are very timid when it comes to taking any sociological or political stance lest they offend anyone. There were many lost opportunities for brands to take emphatic positions on issues during the early days of the Arab spring, but few if any did.

2-    Effort: Whether its integrating the initiative with offline activities, Search Engine Optimization, intermittently getting all your staff to initiate sharing with their friends and family or simply using cold lists to get the critical mass of people sharing and engaging, there is a tremendous amount of effort that runs behind any successful viral campaign, and that’s assuming the initiative has a big idea that resonates with people.

3-    Keep it simple: Asking people to make their own video, upload it and share (a common formulae deployed by brands) is inherently laborious and is probably asking for too much and greatly limits the number of participants. Of course there are loads of internet memes that people replicate in their own way showcasing their individuality, wit and creativity, but it is rare to see them coming from a brand. Again, incentivizing participation makes it promotional with a viral element rather than purely viral. 

4-    Pushing the boundaries: Though arguably linked to the first golden rule, this is where brands fear to tread. Lets face it, no one is going to share your 3 minute corporate video with all their friends unless you are appealing to a darker aspect of humanity: sex, voyeurism, sado-masochism, or dark humour. Ofcourse the opposite is also “virable”; demonstrating acts of selflessness and altruism and giving, but lets be honest, we rarely see that coming from corporations.

For those who astutely observed that I’ve offered four rather than three golden rules, remember there are exceptions to every rule. Next month I tackle the odd and irrational world of corporate premium giveaways, a throwback to the fax age when branded key chains, pens and desk diaries reigned supreme.

First appeared in Venture Magazine (Jordan) February 2013