Companies trying to retain customers and build sustaining brand loyalty in a tough economy — all while cutting costs by reducing employee head count — may be working against themselves, creating significant and lasting collateral damage. It is yet another liability resulting from the current recession that is not getting due consideration from most CEOs.
The problem is that too many CEOs are too focused on shareholder wealth and not enough on customer value, or employee engagement.
We know that brand perception is largely shaped by customer experience, which is directly affected by interactions with the company at various touch points, the most impactful of which are personal, not media encounters. This is why psychologists like John H. Fleming, Ph.D., have been preaching for years that true and meaningful customer engagement cannot be accomplished if employees are not first engaged. Personal engagement is built on trust.
Filed under: Marketing Models | Tags: email, gimmicks, mass marketing, spamming
My new friend Chuck Falco, who is with an “Internet marketing firm” in Chicago called the Hyper Text Group, has been corresponding with me for the past couple of months. I’ve never met Chuck, nor have I heard of his company, but he keeps sending me messages trying to sell me email lists — not just the lists, he’s offering to manage “highly targeted” campaigns for me, using their exclusive Hyper Mail software. He claims they have 85 million opt-in consumer email addresses, updated as of July 20, 2009, and can tailor a “niche market” list that’s just right for my needs. It’s hard to fathom that so many people have given Chuck permission to sell their names and email addresses on the Internet to anyone possessing a credit card.
“With a click of the mouse,” Chuck says, “I can mail out millions of targeted emails.” It’s a pretty big target.
Is this a trick? It certainly won’t be construed as a treat. And no amount of marketing spin is going to sell this idea to the kids.
A company called Tetra Pak that produces shelf-stable single serve cartons of milk has launched a social media campaign through Twitter and Facebook urging people to “give something healthy to the little monsters” this Halloween. What they’re suggesting is we hand out little cartons of milk rather than candy. That’ll go over like a lead balloon. Why not just give away raw vegetables?
The posts are intended to lure us to www.trickortreatme.com where we are offered a discount coupon good at any participating retailer. Here’s the viral marketing part: we’re also asked to tell our friends about this great idea through a number of social media links provided. There’s also an option to leave a comment, though nobody has. Obviously there are some pretty sharp minds at work in the marketing department out at Tetra Pak USA, who claim to have “the experience and the flow of ideas to help us exploit the magic of milk.”
Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: customer value, push-to-pull, taglines
Dick Damrow was a long-time friend and associate, and one of the better marketers I’ve had the honor to know. We worked together in the ad agency business back in the mid-1980s when he was a top exec in one of the larger agencies in Minneapolis, before he decided to get into database marketing. We remained close friends over the years and when I started my own marketing agency a decade later, I engaged Dick as a consultant to help define a competitive position in what was then a market driven by advertising and brand development.
He asked what my vision was for our fledgling little agency and I told him I believed the Internet was going to empower the customer in a way never seen before, shifting the market dynamic from push to pull. This would require companies to stop obsessing about their own brands and adapt to a more customer-centric business model, focused not on selling but helping customers buy. It also would create the need for a different agency model designed to help companies adapt to a pull marketplace, driven by data insight rather than creative intuition. The challenge, I told him, was communicating this in a credible way to potential clients.
It will be interesting to see how social media sites like Facebook and Twitter maintain governance in controlling unwanted exploitation from bottom-feeders like Leon Hill, founder of uSocial, an “online marketing” company based in Australia that has — as of September 16 — begun selling friends, fans and followers to anyone with a valid credit card.
For just $654.30 you can buy 5,000 Facebook friends. Or, $229 buys 5,000 Twitter followers. Who would’ve thought tapping into social media could be so easy?
