I’m No Angel (#ImNoAngel) by Lane Bryant is a good example of Movement Marketing
In today’s “hyperconnected, ultra-competitive, and supercluttered marketplace,” doing more of the same big idea advertising on mostly mainstream media channels isn’t going to work anymore.
Consumers are getting jaded and overloaded with information – much of which has little or no relevance to their lives nor their interests.
Marketing is broken. At least in the traditional sense.
Focused on customer acquisition, promotions and sales volumes, traditional marketing views customers as “targets” to be arrowed.
Bigger, bolder and flashier campaigns are launched to attract their rapidly diminishing attention while carrots like discounts, freebies and lucky draws are dangled to coax them to open their wallets.Â
According to the latest post on Church of the Customer, the most important platform for consumers to talk about brands isn’t on Facebook, Google +, Twitter or even SMS! Rather, it is good old person-to-person communication in the flesh (well at least in the US).
Have a look at this chart here from eMarketer:
Source: eMarketer.com
Sometimes, the best folks to market your brand are not advertising agencies, publicists or sales persons.
Just ask Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, stalwarts of the highly popular Church of the Customer blog and founders of Ant’s Eye View.
Image courtesy of Billboard
“Sorry” might have been one of the hottest hits by Justin Beiber ever (with over 3.15 billion YouTube views to date). However, it is still incredibly hard for companies to say.
And that has led to so many countless cases of organisational grief over the years.
There is something which I always suspected about offline versus online Word Of Mouth (WOM) marketing. And that is that nothing beats the real thing.
While reading my favourite blog about WOM, which is the Church of the Customer, I came across these interesting statistics through its links. They hail from the US, the world’s most wired nation:
“Around 3.5 billion word of mouth conversations take place in the U.S. on a daily basis, of which just 7% take place online via instant/test messaging, chat rooms, email and blogs. The remainder take place offline either face to face (75%) or on the telephone (17%).”
Yesterday afternoon, my wife together with my son and maid got into an accident along CTE (I was attending a work lunch then). What happened was a tale of God’s divine providence mixed with extraordinary service excellence.
My wife was driving towards the city and encountered the usual Saturday afternoon jam. Traffic was extremely heavy and crawling at a snail’s pace. Unfortunately, a slick black BMW driven by a young 19 year old guy crashed into the rear of our car. He must either be driving his dad’s car or distracted by his girlfriend.
The shock was so hard that the beamer’s airbag popped up. Fortunately, my family didn’t suffer major injuries although my maid had a swelling on her head (currently under observation) while my wife’s back hurt. Both cars stopped and my wife took down the driver’s full particulars (NRIC, license plate, hand phone photos of damage, insurance company, car model).
Used car salesman (courtesy of Chaka Raysor)
I am always puzzled why companies spend a lot more energy and focus on trying to sell rather than pleasing their customers. If you don’t already know, customer retention is a far more profitable strategy than customer acquisition. That, plus the fact that word of mouth is taking off more than ever in this ad-saturated age of increasingly powerful social networks. Here are some sobering statistics which tells you why you should pamper your existing customers rather than court new ones:
(Source: Customer Are Always)
Studies have also shown that a Customer’s Lifetime Value (CLV) can be far greater than that of a single transaction. In fact, 70% of a telco’s revenue comes from 30% of its customers: those who stay for years and purchase increasing levels of service. There is a nifty way to calculate CLV here.
Now shouldn’t you start paying more attention to those customers who made you who you are?
Church of the Customer’s Ben McConnell pointed to this interesting bit of research by BIGresearch recently. Apparently, advertisers have been making all the wrong investments in mass media advertising when most people still relies on family and friends to give their recommendations on what to buy.
According to BIGresearch:
As more marketers seek to make media expenditures accountable to the bottom line growth of their company, the consumers in the survey don’t seem to be on the same page as advertising expenditures. When asked which media most influence their purchase decision for various product categories, consumers’ choices are rarely in line with advertisers expenditures.