Customer Service Marketing: The Neglected Medium

As we approach the Christmas shopping season – the busiest shopping season of the year – consumers will be out in hoards, shopping, buying and mentally logging their experiences. With the rise of gas prices, the mortgage crunch, the credit crunch, and a resulting lower discretionary income, manufacturers, retailers and their brands need to be cognizant of consumers’ perceptions. Consumers this year have less money to go around and will be more choosey as to where their money goes.

Marketers (and retailers) are very conscious of this shopping season. The deals are already ringing loud and clear. However, retailers are neglecting a key part of their integrated campaigns - what I call Customer Service Marketing.

While most consumers have exposure to your brands and products through carefully planned and executed advertising (which I’m happy to say keeps me employed), the real interaction for most brands happens in-store at the point when a consumer is making a purchase. Based on my experiences at stores lately, it seems that retail workers, those people who we turn to for help in the store and who check us out, are becoming increasingly miserable. While a retail worker’s attitude doesn’t reflect completely on the brands I’m purchasing, it does reflect on the overall shopping experience, which in turn reflects negatively on the retailer themselves. With more outlets for purchasing the products I need, retailers are going to have to make Customer Service Marketing a priority if they want to maintain the lion’s share of sales this (and future) Christmas season.

My challenge to retailers (and even marketers and brands) is this: concentrate on making the overall shopping experience a positive one. This includes everything up to and including the in-store experience. We already know that baby boomers are experience seekers anyway, so why not use this insight and make the shopping experience an engaging one. You might even build some brand loyalty for your store in the process.

Consumer engagement: Stimulating interaction with your brand.

Consumer engagement has been a buzz word throughout the advertising and marketing industry for at least the last few years, and arguably beyond that. It’s not enough for a communication piece to grab the reader’s attention, it must engage them. So what does engagement really mean, and how do we achieve it?

In my experience, whether we’re talking about advertising or general communication between two people, it’s easier to engage a person with emotion rather than logic. Emotion elicits a chemical response in our brains that gives us a physical sensation. Sometimes the sensation is good, sometimes bad.

Logic, on the other hand makes you think (which, in itself, is not always a bad thing). It is a rational response based on a series of steps that reinforce what we perceive to be true. It is important that we distinguish perceiving truth rather than knowing it, because as we all have experienced, our perception is our own reality.

The fundamental flaw to logic is that people (consumers) don’t make decisions based on logic. We want people to think we make decisions based on logic, but in the end it’s pure gut feel. I’ve seen it in many focus groups and my own buying experiences, I know the logical selection based on perceived price, quality, functionality, etc., yet I still choose the product that is more expensive because it just seems cooler – think Axe deodorant.

While emotion aids in engagement, simply bringing emotion to advertising is not enough. We need to identify with consumers on their terms. Our brand must reflect what our consumers believe in and how they live their life everyday.

Method products have done an outstanding job of this. Method has not only produced products that create a connection with their consumers, they produce products that identify with their consumers (in a category that is often referred to as a commodity or low-involvement category). Method’s products are not only safe (many household products contain various levels of poisons), they are also the epitome environmentally friendly, mirroring the views of their core consumers.

Beyond that, Method has even taken it a step further. They have made their consumers brand ambassadors. They create an interaction with them to try new products, to give feedback and to help spread the word. As a result, these consumers are the most brand loyal I have ever seen.

Consumer engagement is more than just sprinkling the emotional fairy dust over our advertising. It is about creating a two-way dialogue with our consumers. Your consumers want to talk to you, you just have to give them the forum and listen. And that’s the catch, you have to listen. If you listen, your consumers will pay you back with loyalty. If you don’t they’ll pay you back by switching to your competitor – who is listening.

The Creative Brief: What is the purpose?

It seems the relationship between an agency and a new client is all too often rocky at the beginning. You spend the first few months trying to get all the details of the relationship figured out: the contract, the team, scope of work, etc.

I ran into a creative brief issue with a new client of ours. Call me territorial, but the creative brief, in my view, is an agency document. The entire purpose of the creative brief is to provide the right insights to the creative team that will inspire creative ideas.

I met with the client of ours last week for “emergency meetings” to get some projects going. We began talking about a specific print ad. At the beginning of the discussion, the client stated, very matter of fact, “I don’t like your creative brief format.”

She then proceeded to give our team a “seminar” about the proper creative brief. At first I was a bit taken aback. I mean, the brief is our document – not the client’s.

The information she presented was covered in our brief format (under different headings, though). I thought, “Fine, we can work through this.” But then came a point of difference that I cannot work with. She presented a consumer insight from the top of her head. How can you come up with a true consumer insight without even talking to your consumers or at least doing a little background? She might as well have pulled it out of a hat.

The kicker: she wants to include the creative idea in the brief. I tried as diplomatic as possible to dissuade her from doing this, explaining the true point of the brief, but to no avail – it must be in there.

So my question is this, “What is the point of the creative brief?”

Is it, as I have been taught, simply a document to provide our creative team with the insights to inspire their ideas? Or is it a document to set up our creative presentation – as our client wants?

If I could have my way, I wouldn’t even show the brief to the client. What started as a way of covering our ass has turned into a ceremonious process of letting the client dictate the creative process. Most of the time we have two briefs anyway. One the client approves and the one we brief the team from.

“How do we, as an agency, entice clients to let us do our best work for them instead of stifling the creative process?”

Behavioral Ad Targeting: The Future of Facebook and Myspace Advertising

I read an article this morning from Adweek, entitled: Social Network Ads: Too Close, Too Personal? (Bryan Morrissey, November 5, 2007) about how MySpace and Facebook are using hyper targeted ads for users based on information mined from their profiles. I also recently attended a presentation by Facebook Vice President of Media Sales, Mike Murphy, at the AAAA’s Account Planning conference in San Diego (August 2007) in which Murphy discussed this very subject.

As an account planner, I am truly excited about the opportunity to not only learn more about consumers and what motivates them, but to also find ways to deliver messages that will connect with consumers. The executives at both Facebook and MySpace have it right – this changes everything.

An advertising message must do two things to be successful.

1. The message must be relevant to and connect emotionally with consumers.
2. The message must be seen by the consumers in which it is trying to connect.

This new technology gets us closer to the second point. By targeting users’ based on their profile information, we can get a whole lot better at providing ads that are truly relevant. Making sure the message connects emotionally to consumers is on the shoulders of the agency.

Although consumers might not want to admit it, there is a benefit to them too. By targeting advertising messages to users’ profiles, advertisers will be able to provide relevant messages (based on consumer insights) that they might actually want to see. As the article states, some of these ads are already receiving click-through rates of over 10% – further proof that consumers are clicking on ads that interest them.

While the media accurately portrays that there are opposing sides to the story, they often prefer to discuss the privacy (or anti-privacy) side of the story.

So, is this new technology a violation of users’ privacy?

It’s a very good question, and one that I’m sure will be disputed for a very long time. I’m a little biased, being an account planner, but I don’t agree with complaints about privacy violations. First of all, I’m constantly reading blogs and user postings to mine for insights on various issues anyway. Second, if the whole world can see your MySpace profile or your blog post, you aren’t exactly exhibiting a concern for real privacy to begin with.

As account planners, we are constantly trying to find ways to glean insights and reach into the hearts and minds of consumers – all in the name of better advertising. As technology continues to evolve, we will continue to find new ways to target consumers and mine insights from them.

Hook 'Em While They're Young

It works for the tobacco industry – o.k. bad example. Illegal and unethical products aside, the concept of introducing brands to children as a way to create loyalty can be a very successful and lucrative marketing strategy. I was looking through a Christmas toy catalog last night, when I noticed many mainstream brands that are being manufactured as toys for kids.

For example, T-Fal has come out with an entire toy kitchen. This has come a long way since the Easy Bake ovens of Christmas’s past. But it really got me thinking; how do these “branded” toys affect brand loyalty among children?

Even Tiffany & Co. has a line of products for babies and small children. My fiancée and I recently bought a Tiffany & Co. branded piggy bank for our goddaughter’s 2^nd birthday. We bought it because of our relationship with the brand – only the best for Sophia. And then something happened. When we handed her that signature blue box with the little white bow, she said, with pure admiration and her limited vocabulary, “Pretty.”

I thought, “Wow, they’ve already got her.” Now when she grows up and starts dating, no gift from any boy will have quite the same effect if it doesn’t come in that signature blue box. Granted, this will be the result of many years of reinforcement through exposure to Tiffany & Co. advertising and her mom’s admiration for the Tiffany & Co. brand.

But I think it goes beyond simply introducing brands or providing a line of toys for kids. It is reinforcing the brand and what the brand stands for to kids. For example, if Tiffany & Co. were to offer a line of children’s jewelry for them to play with, it would most likely cheapen the brand. Tiffany & Co. is about obtaining the unattainable. It’s about pure luxury and indulgence. If it is available at any age for any reason, the brand is no longer enticing.

This brings me to my main point. Branding products for kids is a great idea to create and build loyalty, but only if the product reinforces the brand and what the brand stands for.

Many of the brand loyalty studies I’ve read indicate that brand loyalty, especially for the younger generations is extremely low. While I do agree with these studies, I have to wonder why that is. We as consumers are naturally connected to certain types of products that we identify with, so why is the younger generation so anti-brand loyal. Is it because they are truly immune to advertising as much of the generational cohort research says? Or is it simply because no brand has been able to crack the code to the younger generation’s set of desires and really identify with them?

The Entitled Generation

I recently read an article in the NY Times entitled, “She’s Famous (and So Can You)” (Guy Trebay, October 28, 2007) that really got me thinking about a group of consumers and how they view not only themselves, but their place in society. The article goes in depth about a new type of celebrity that can gain fame (or is it notoriety?) without talent. We seem to be infatuated with famous people who have done nothing special (Paris Hilton, Tila Tequila) – and some have even become famous for being shockingly un-talented (William Hung).

All that aside, it got me thinking about this group of consumers – the millennial* consumers, who are increasingly fascinated and captivated by these “celeb-realities”.

And my question is, “how can we create an emotional connection with a group of consumers who feel entitled and truly important themselves?”

As Guy mentions in the article above:

When Jake Halpern set out to write “Fame Junkies,” his book about what is now a universal obsession with celebrity, he was surprised to uncover studies demonstrating that 31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)

This is truly fascinating – millennial consumers see themselves as truly important and fame as an option. In the past, depending on the product, we have been concentrating on consumer targets such as Baby Boomers and Gen Xers. These generational cohorts have their own nuances when we try to create emotional engagement. For example, with Baby Boomers, we are talking to a generation that has grown up with larger than life experiences and now wants her buying habits to be centered on an experience or a feeling. They grew up seeing other people in the limelight and want to experience larger than life sensations.

Since we are in the beginning stages of targeting this millennial group with advertising, I predict a large shift in the way we communicate with this group. Since they want to feel entitled, we will have to find ways for our brands to fuel this feeling of entitlement. I could be wrong, but I expect we will see more campaigns that are centered on identifying influential members of this group and a more “celeb-reality” approach to brand building.

*The dates of this generational cohort are often disputed, but for this article I am assuming those individuals born somewhere between 1980 and 2000.