By Stuart Evans (ICLP)

Loyalty strategies were initially only focused on incentivising customer behaviour. Then brands woke up to the need to, and value of, collecting data to build insights. However, this is now coming full circle. 

Successful pure-play online brands already know a lot about their customers, even where they don’t have a loyalty programme in place. Online transactions automatically capture personal details that can be cross matched to other data sources to build customer profiles. The loyalty challenge here is building and maintaining customer engagement. Similarly, for multi-channel brands, the challenge is to understand how customers interact with them both online and offline and how loyalty can act as a bridge between both.

For example, having realised the importance of nurturing its ‘omni-channel’ customers, John Lewis installed Wi-Fi in its stores to facilitate price comparison and product research in-store. Having introduced a policy that allocates all online sales in a set geographic radius from its stores against the performance targets for the local store, John Lewis not only provided an enhanced offering to customers but avoided conflict between its channels – a smart use of its data. 

HMV has also incorporated free Wi-Fi in-store to integrate loyalty online and offline, as part of the launch of My HMV platform. Consumers entering the store will automatically receive a welcome message from My HMV, inviting them to join the programme. The aim is to make the brand experience more personalised, enabling shoppers to gain instant access content via the online platform, such as music streaming and reviews, whilst in-store.  

Today’s customers have a 360 degree view of your company, not the other way round.  They expect to have a consistent, value-added and interactive multi-channel customer experience across both directly controlled and indirect channels to a brand. Customers increasingly expect brands to not only have a presence on their social networks, but to use them to engage and feed their needs for interactivity and instant gratification.

Starbucks recognised this through the launch of the @MyStarbucksIdea initiative in the US – inviting customers to submit ideas on how to improve the business via Twitter and crediting the successful pitches on their blog. With over 70,000 ideas submitted in the first year, the successful strategy ensured customers felt empowered and part of the brand experience, building their confidence in the brand.

This paved the way for My Starbucks Rewards loyalty programme, enabling customers to redeem points and benefits for each transaction made with a Starbucks Card. Through developing this further to offer payment via mobile through the Starbucks App, the brand has ensured the customer remains engaged with the brand experience across numerous channels, and importantly, customer data is captured to allow the brand to make more personalised offers in the future.

By Helen McCall

In-store terminals are not necessarily new – in the past customers have been able to view products and sometimes order items via terminals physically located in the retail space. However, nails inc’s in-store terminal in Harvey Nichols goes above and beyond the standard terminal, creating something that helps it stand out from the retail crowd.

The nails inc retail experience is fashion and trend led. It’s all about customers exploring colour and effects, whether that’s through its range of special ‘mani’ and ‘pedi’ services or through the product range either online or in store. Therefore the brand’s innovative and trend-focused values need to be a reflection of how they position themselves online.

News

Market localization for Starbucks means foie gras sandwiches in France and ‘bacon butties’ in the UK.

News

Last week’s post focused on Kraft’s risqué new name for their snack food spin off. This week, we decided to look at Kodak, who some claim might have survived if they had created new names for different markets.

By Giles Ivey

Online advertising needs to be more transparent, accountable, and also more engaging. Marketers who believe that engagement starts and ends with the click of a Facebook ‘like’ button are missing the point.

We need to think about how brands can move away from more traditional ‘look-click’ ads, and instead work towards building stunning creative that drives deeper audience engagement and participation. This type of creative can deliver measurable results with the metrics that marketers need to demonstrate ROI.

The term ‘engagement’ has come under fire lately. The great marketing buzzword is now seen as little more than smoke and mirrors term designed to get brands to part with their cash. Perhaps that’s a little melodramatic, but we are seeing a backlash from brands against some of the traditional forms of engagement marketing because much of this activity is inherently unaccountable.

Flooding Liverpool Street station with dancers at 11am is one tactic, but this type of stunt engagement is at best difficult quantify. It’s also somewhat haphazard in that it is almost impossible to know exactly who will be passing through the station at that time. That’s not to say it isn’t a clever marketing trick to raise awareness of a brand or product, but in these tough times brand owners need something more than ‘clever’; they need results. They need to be able to see people interacting with their brands and they need to know their campaigns are delivering. Unfortunately, much of the time, we don’t really know that this is happening. Yes we can surmise, or guess, but we don’t know for sure.

The fact is, to corrupt the famous line from Orwell’s Animal Farm, some forms of engagement are more equal than others. For one thing marketers seem obsessed with Facebook ‘likes’, but what is the real value of this if brands are driving people to Facebook but then doing little with them once they are there? It would be interesting to see exactly how many people come back to a branded Facebook page after clicking the ‘like’ button. Currently these stats are conspicuous in their absence.

Like for like's sake: The rush for empty engagement

For engagement to work, it needs to lead to a consumer action rather than simply being engagement for engagement’s sake. Clicking the ‘like’ button is not enough…spending time with a brand online, sharing something on social networks or making an online purchase directly from an ad are actions that can be measured and quantified.

Over the past decade, we have seen an increasing migration away from traditional media towards digital. This has led to brands looking for new ways to connect with their target audiences. Times were a lot easier for marketers when all they had to worry about was which paper to run their ads in and what time slot to show their TV ad. Today they have a raft of choices, yet the reality is consumers are most likely to interact with brand advertising online or on some sort of mobile device.

However, the current structure of online advertising leaves a lot to be desired. The go-to model for online advertising is CPM (cost per thousand), with brands paying every time someone navigates to the page their ad is on. Not surprisingly CPM doesn’t deliver staggering results – an industry standard of 0.3% or 3 clicks out of every 1000 page impression, and how many of those are people clicking on them by accident?

CPE (cost per engagement) on the other hand is a model that delivers transparent and measurable results, as well as a click through rate of 1% (almost 300% more than CPM). How does it work? By putting a time delay on expanding online ad units (normally a 3-2-1 countdown), advertisers are only charged once the online ‘experience’ has fully loaded – this removes charging for any erroneous rollovers. These online experiences can include anything from video, to games, to social network interactions. And they are also measurable. We can tell exactly how long people have stayed with the brand experience, what they have done and also, where they have interacted with a social network - way beyond anything you could possibly hope for via CPM.

The fundamental basis of CPE is about creating online experiences that encourage consumers to undertake an action on behalf of the brand – sharing, posting, tweeting, starting a conversation or watching a video. Through CPE consumers spend an average of around 23 seconds with brands. This is as powerful as any other form of engagement marketing channel and can be crucial when it comes to building relationships between brands and audiences.

No media channel is 100% measurable and there are faults with every measurement. But an engagement online when you are putting a message in a certain environment, where you know your target market will be and only paying when someone actually spends time with your brand, has got to be more appealing – and indeed more transparent – than trying to capture the attention of whoever happens to be walking through Liverpool Street at 11am on a Tuesday morning.

Giles Ivey is UK Managing Director of SAY Media.

By Bambos Neophytou.

Stay one step ahead with these predictions and tips for 2012. Are we heading for a world without Apple?

Detail goes into 'pretail'

Despite the ever evolving ways that agencies and clients use digital technology to enhance and encourage retail experiences, the realisation will come that digital is at its most effective prior to the point-of-puchase, and that’s where efforts and budgets will be spent.

Friendship groups are the new target audiences

The combining trends of social-commerce and powerfully accurate user-data will enable highly targeted exclusives for socially connected audiences or small groups of friends.

Big bold brand entertainment

Amid the doom and gloom or global economic meltdown, there is a huge appetite for big, bold, fresh live entertainment experiences. There will be a resurgence of brands putting on big events and experiences (as Nokia did at Millbank), and with activity building around Jubilee and Olympics. If the experience is impressive enough, products will act as souvenirs that people will want to take away from the live event.

Nokia Lumia projection event at London's Millbank tower

The beginning of the end for Apple

The shine starts to fade,  Andoid’s 70% market share starts to erode the iPhone’s perceived dominance, and their share of computer sales still does not exceed 5% of the market =  Apple’s leadership credentials without Steve Jobs start to look considerably more shaky.

Designed in China, made in Europe

As the East moves further west, Chinese brands will start to enter mainstream awareness, and the current designed/manufactured duality will begin an irrevocable reversal.

Splendid isolation

In its pursuit of an increasingly impossible tightrope act, the UK (distancing itself from Europe, yet being unavoidably drawn in to its economic vortex) will invite all the world in for the Olympics, but behave is an unusually insular and self-regarding way, initiated by the spectacle of the Queen’s Jubilee.

The revenge of heritage formats

Analogue trumps digital, as new media gurus espouse the value of print media and paper books (cf. Clay Shirky). The tangible, multisensory experience of using cassette tapes, vinyl, old printing presses provides a thrill which proves irresistible to those who did not grow up with them.

Initiatives like Record Store Day reflect the rise in popularity of traditional media formats.

Death of despicable brands

Only the fittest and most necessary brands will survive. The new logic of necessity will obliterate a host of familiar brands that have no (functional, emotional, experiential) reason to exist, whether old school badly integrated retailers, or fmcg dinosaurs that have no visibility.

An eruption of niche business models

Youtube is revenue sharing with users for popular uploads, other brands are involving ordinary folk in monetising their consumer generated ideas and content, there are no boundaries to the kinds of new business models that brands and consumers can co-create. Co-creating content with no revenue stream is so 2009.

Bambos Neophytou, Head of Strategy at Inferno, specializes in retail, environmental issues, cognitive science and author of Guilt Trip: From Fear to Guilt on the Green Bandwagon.     

 

by Bob Nash, 

‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half’. So said the American advertising pioneer John Wanamaker nearly a century ago – and today a modern version of this problem is causing today’s marketers bigger problems than ever.

The trouble is this: as we all develop ever-more complicated multi media campaigns, it becomes exceptionally difficult to assess exactly which elements have the biggest effect on the campaign as a whole.

By Paul Fifield

Long before the consumer and content, there was The King. 

The customer has long reigned as king in the world of retail and yet the way in which some brands attempt to communicate with them, doesn’t really reflect the high position in which they are supposedly held. But there is another king called ‘content’ that is getting an increasing amount of attention from brands as it may well hold the key to engaging with customers in a much more effective way.