Moving Tribes - making marketing work

Time for a change

Not only have I enjoyed writing the posts on this blog, I've learned a lot too, from the conversations they have sparked up. I've had the pleasure over the last few months of talking to a whole range of businesses from retail to financial services and beyond, and what they have all shared is a growing understanding of the importance of really connecting with their customers. New media like social networks and blogs give us new tools to do that, but the fundamentals remain the same - we need to understand our customers, we need to be thoughtful about how we communicate with them and we need to be as good at listening as we are at talking. Best practice in customer marketing is breathtaking, but all too rare.

Well, it looks like I'm about to get back to practicing rather than preaching, so this may be the last post on Moving Tribes for a little while. I will stop by to add some additional thoughts over time, but in the meantime thank-you - if you've been a reader of this blog over the last few months, have commented on the posts or if you are one of the many people who have offered me your perspective over coffee or a beer, I'm indebted.

Now, time to turn the page and start the next chapter.

Community and tribe

What do you think of Foursquare? If you are a marketer, your answer to that question is likely to be somewhere on the spectrum from “I’ve no idea what you are talking about” to “I’ve joined because I keep hearing about it on Twitter, but I haven’t really done much with it yet”.

Me too. I joined today. It’s a fascinating experience, the badge-earning instantly addictive.  I found myself wondering, though, whether it had any relevance for consumer brand marketing. Then I started to reminisce. I’ve been on Twitter since June 2007, which in social networking time is about a thousand years. When I joined, though, to be completely honest I didn’t see the point. Not only did I not know many people who were also there, but I couldn’t really see the application for all these micro-blog posts.

Wind forward to today and, whilst there is still a healthy debate in some corners about whether tweeting constitutes a healthy pastime, there is no debating that Twitter has become a major media in its own right. It’s a great way to sample opinions on any topic under the sun, and (critically for the marketer) a powerful way to connect with your customers. The holy grail of CRM has to be a great two-way conversation you have with your customer which has the potential to be overheard by thousands of others who can be suitably impressed with your responsiveness. This “one-to-one-to-many” communication has become a major part of the marketing mix for those businesses which “get it”. I’ve certainly experienced brands who invest in creating empowered groups of tweeting staff to champion them online, and get a great return from it. Increasingly the brands which are not present, or which only tweet their PR announcements and don’t respond to their customers, look old-fashioned and out of touch.

And it’s not just Twitter that provides a venue for this kind of marketing. I was struck the other day when standing in one of the UK’s largest retailers that the banners  over the aisles advertising their new own-label product had, as a call to action, not a unique URL but a Facebook page. When I checked, that page had over 30k friends – a great platform for customer interaction by any measure.

Now, a note of caution. The fact that some social media sites like Twitter and Facebook become important business tools and powerful marketing media does not mean that they all will. I have no more insight than anyone else about whether Foursquare is the new Facebook, or a flash in the pan.

But there is a key point that as marketers we should reflect on. What online social networks have in common is their ability to bring groups of like-minded customers together. They can genuinely and quickly build tribes, not just of people who are friends “in real life” but of people who share hobbies, careers, geographies or interests.

Those tribes can be influenced, carefully, by active brands which choose to make themselves part of the social network landscape. But they can also form and share opinions about brands without any input at all, and in a way that can spread fast and wide around the tribe. Foursquare, chock full of tiny reviews of bars, restaurants and businesses, is a case in point.

So the question for us is this. Do we want our brands to be talked about behind our backs? Or do we want to be there to state and defend our case. And if our choice is the latter, how are we going to mobilise our teams to make it happen, and when are we going to start?

Tribes and Parties

In this UK election season, I’ve found myself reflecting on the theme that inspired this blog in the first place. I’m constantly searching for how marketing can make a “tribe” of our customers  and get them to react – to move en-mass to take up a new product or exhibit a new behaviour. Only rarely does marketing deliberately achieve that goal – to set a new trend, define a new category.

Elections demonstrate a very particular way of creating a “tribe”. Political parties are very good at describing themselves by what they are against, and by creating an enemy of “the other lot”. A really effective way to build a tribe is to give them a common enemy to rail against.  Thus many political systems, the UK no less than others, are defined by polarity, by a “left wing” and a “right wing”.

This polarisation works because we seem to be very deeply hardwired to want to join a gang – to define ourselves by who we are with, and who we are against, whether its politics, football teams, academic debates or many other aspects of life.

We’ve seen a very successful, and quite unexpected, bit of tribe-building over the last few weeks in the UK. The third party, the Liberal Democrats, have traditionally polled sub-20% in the UK and been, let’s face it, pretty marginal. Over the last few weeks, since the leaders’ debates started, their poll rating has shot up and (even if it’s only a short term blip) at the time of writing this they now regularly poll second at around 30%.

Only time will tell what actually happens in the election on May 6^th, but in the meantime I think the Liberal Democrats have stumbled on a lesson in tribe-building that we marketers should take note of. I believe that the real under-pinning of their recent poll boost is more fundamental than a good performance by Nick Clegg in a couple of debates. Instead, their success has come from re-framing the “polarity” of UK politics from “left wing versus right wing” into “established parties versus new ones”. Notwithstanding that they are one of the oldest political parties, they’ve managed to create a debate based on “look at those two old parties battling it out with the same old arguments – only we represent real fresh-thinking and change” – and they’ve managed to make it stick, so far.

This has had an amazingly galvanising effect on the public. When the Liberal Democrats were positioned as just “somewhere in between the other two”, our natural tendency to want to join a gang worked against them – they were neither one thing nor the other, and it’s much less satisfying for our “gang instinct” to be moderate and on the fence. As soon as they changed the spectrum from left-right to old-new, and positioned themselves at one end of that spectrum rather than in the middle, they became a gang worth joining – suddenly defined by being “not like the others” - and people have responded in droves.

The election campaigns will now rest, I think, on the Liberal Democrat’s ability to retain the assertion that that spectrum is the one that matters, and to resist being pincered back into being “somewhere in between the other two”.

In the meantime, here is some food for thought for us marketers. How is your tribe of customers defined? What statement are people making when they join with you and use your product? Who are the “others” that your customers define themselves against? Is there a clever re-framing trick like the one the Liberal Democrats have stumbled on that could transform your product or service from being “in the mix” with everyone else to being clearly differentiated from them?

This kind of thinking is not a recipe for comparative advertising, though our politicians would seem to think otherwise; being clearly distinct from your competitors can be a positive position to take. What the election teaches us, though, is that with an effort of will we can choose what that distinctive position is.

Learning from coffee

You can learn a lot from coffee. Or at least from the business of selling it. I was reminded of this during a recent fantastic week consulting to a business in Seattle. When not working, I ended up spending some quality time hanging out in various branches of a global Seattle-based coffee empire that needs no introduction from me, and whilst I was there they taught me a lesson which I’d like to share with you.

Before I get to that, the US experience was not my first bit of coffee-shop based education. Many of the most powerful lessons in sales and marketing are those you can learn if you just look at what’s happening around you, and one of those happened for me a couple of years ago in a service station on the M25.

Picture the scene - a big queue of people waiting to get their foamy caffeine injection in order to make the next half an hour of crawling along the motorway a little bit more bearable. At the front of the queue is a sales assistant taking orders. Each bedraggled business traveler in turn gets to the front of the queue and says “latte, please”. The assistant’s response? “Small, medium or large?” Interesting to note that every single person, without exception, responded with “medium, please”.

I’m about halfway along the queue when the sales assistant is relieved by a colleague. Same thing - “Latte, please”. However, the new salesperson chooses a different, more directive response - “Large?”. Sure enough, every single person (including your intrepid reporter) says yes. And I re-learned a vital lesson for any marketer. If we frame the choices we offer customers carefully, and are brave about asking for the up-sell, we can add huge value to our businesses. If you want to make your eyes pop, spend a bit of time calculating how much extra profit that coffee business would make if every medium coffee was sold as a large, earning an extra 50p or so for a few more ccs of hot liquid. All that, just by changing the assistant's language a tiny fraction.

So back to Seattle. My lesson this time was a different one. Firstly a confession - I have very ordinary taste in coffee. The first time I had to queue behind someone asking for a “double shot half-caff hazelnut mocha with soy milk” I was a bit embarrassed to follow up with “latte, please” but I got used to it in the end.

So ubiquitous is this coffee chain that there was actually one underneath the hotel I was staying in, and so my morning routine was to eschew the expensive hotel breakfast and go downstairs for a coffee and a bun. The first morning was a nice experience - chatty staff who noticed and commented on my accent, and a nice coffee and bun.

The lesson came on morning two, however, when as I came downstairs they started making my coffee before I’d even come in through the door, and picked out my bun for me. It was reinforced on the third day when again my coffee was made for me but I was asked if I wanted the usual bun or to try a different one.

Naturally I put this personal service down to my own sheer charisma and magnetism, but I’m realistic enough and curious enough that I started listening to what was going on, and in the end I noticed an extraordinary thing. Not only in that branch but in every other one I visited I overheard customers being greeted like old friends, asked if they wanted their usual and generally treated like they were just as much a part of the business as the staff themselves. I even heard one customer, who had obviously been away for a while, issue a friendly challenge to see if the staff remembered his unbelievably complicated usual drink, which they did.

The adage that people in the US are more comfortable with delivering a great customer service experience than people in the UK is an old one. The real lesson from my coffee sessions, I think, is a different one. All of these branches, of one of the biggest brands in the world, succeeded in making themselves feel like small local businesses and in making their customers feel like valued regulars - the real “Cheers” experience. For a big business, that’s an incredibly neat trick, and one which even that company has not succeeded in replicating in the UK as far as I can see. A thought provoking challenge for all of us - how close are our big brands to genuinely delivering the local experience that shows individual customers how valued they are? What kind of culture do you have to create in your business to get that to happen? What could we do to transform our businesses to get closer to that wonderful, loyalty-inspiring goal? Something to ponder over your next coffee.

The language of brand

What language do your customers speak? This being the big wide world of the internet, the literal answer to that could be any one of dozens, but that’s not what I mean. The real answer is that they speak their own language, and if that’s different than the one you use when you speak to them, you might be in trouble.

Your customers will have their own way of describing your products, their own way of describing how to use them and their own way of recommending them to each other. As I discussed in NPS and  you, getting an active recommendation from our customers is amongst the most powerful results our marketing can achieve. Understanding in detail how our customers come to recommend our brand requires us first of all to listen to their language.

One of the lessons you learn when you really listen to your customers is about the names they give to bits of your product or service. Does a pay-as-you-go mobile customer actually refer to a “top-up” when they add money to their account, or do they use a different word? Does your frequent flyer customer actually refer to your frequent flyer programme by the name you slaved over, or do they refer to it as “air miles” – even more irritating when it’s someone else’s brand?! Do they talk about adding an additional service from you as “upgrading” or just as buying something else?

So the lesson is that we need to talk to our customers about our brand and products in the language that they use if we are to make ourselves easy to understand. If we want to change the language that customers use, that’s a worthwhile objective but it needs a marketing campaign in its own right and will take time to deliver. There is no use just assuming that if we dogmatically refer to our “loyalty programme benefits” that our customers will stop talking about our “discount coupons”.

The difference between the language our customers use and our internal terminology becomes a particular problem when we accidentally use that terminology in our external communications.  I’ve actually rung a subscription business with a view to closing my account to be put through to someone who announced “hello, this is x from the Customer Turnaround team”! Not the best way to open a conversation which was, for that brand, a critical one in their relationship with me as a customer.

Do you really know how your customers describe your brand and your products when they talk to each other? If not, how are you going to find out? Are you ready to drop your own terminology and forget your own in-depth knowledge of your industry (all those lovely acronyms!) and really listen to your customers?

Once we start listening to our customers, we’ll quickly realise that they are not only telling us what they think of us and our products. There are also clues in their language about which marketing messages they will respond to most. A good understanding of how language, psychology and marketing fit together is a recipe for very effective marketing – more on that next time.

NPS and you

If you want to join a really hot debate, get into the discussion about how best to measure how happy your customers are with your brand. On the one hand you have the gurus of Net Promoter Score (NPS) – the simple measure that takes the percentage of people that say they will recommend your brand to their friends and subtracts the percentage who say they won’t, to give you the net result. On the other hand is the set of people who think NPS isn’t the most robust measure and who advocate traditional customer satisfaction measures and any of 1001 esoteric variations.

If you are a marketer you probably just want all the researchers to argue amongst themselves – you’d rather get on and do something about how your customers feel about your brand. Me too. After more than 15 years measuring and managing customer satisfaction indices of one kind or another, I’ve concluded it’s too easy to get lost in theoretical debates, and much more important to take what you know about your customers’ views and actually do something about it!

NPS is a great place to start. Whatever the theoretical arguments, most of us would agree that having a load of customers out there actively recommending our brands would be a good thing. The key thing is how to get that to happen.  As you can see in this great blog on customer experience, NPS scores vary hugely and usually correlate pretty well with business success. Once you have an NPS score, there is a whole industry offering to measure, analyse, create multi-variate analyses of your data and more. Some of that might even be useful, but here are a few action-related points I find to be true in most cases – they might just work for you too:

NPS is about your individual experience. Whether you recommend that brand of car or of washing powder is about the personal experience you had – buying it, using it, dealing with the company behind it. When you take this as your starting point, you realise that driving NPS isn’t about big marketing campaigns or process re-engineering programmes. Those might be ingredients, but only in as far as they impact the individual customer’s experience. The right starting point is to understand that experience from the customer's point of view.

NPS is incredibly fragile. It only takes one rude sales agent or call-centre agent to put a customer off recommending your brand to their friends. A recommendation is a big big deal – if I recommend to you, I’m putting my own reputation on the line and the thing I want least is to be embarrassed that I made that recommendation – so if I have any reason to believe a brand might not deliver for my friend, I will not recommend them. As I wrote in Marketing Madness, the collection of individual customer experiences creates my impression of a brand – they need to be both positive and internally consistent.

NPS needs language. I’m going to talk more in a later post about the language of marketing and the importance of words to our customers, but NPS is a particularly interesting case. As consumers we don’t generally go around recommending brands to each other – it just doesn’t come up in conversation all that often. So for a brand to get a positive NPS score we need to give consumers active reasons to recommend us – things that they personally can “brag about”- “look what I got because I’m a brand x customer”.

NPS can’t be bought. The flip side of giving customers reasons to recommend us is that it’s very hard to bribe them to do it. There will be cultural differences in different markets, of course, but I remember vividly the first time I launched and then researched a “recommend a friend” scheme – we realised that offering a big financial benefit for introducing a friend actually reduced recommendation, because customers did not want their friends to think they were so easily for hire.

Conclusion? NPS of course isn’t the be-all and end-all. As Valeria Maltoni says in this post, you need to get behind the simple figures to really understand what is going on in your customers’ minds. A great start, though, is to consider the customer not as a statistic but as an individual. Are you delivering experiences to individuals that make them inclined to recommend your brand – not just at the big marketing and sales touchpoints but in the everyday contacts which really matter to the customer?

What do you think? What brands do you recommend and why, and what practical lessons would you add to mine for brands to consider?

Selling the brand

Let’s explore the link between marketing and selling. Of course, one should lead to the other, but the relationship is more complex than that.  If a customer’s view of your brand is the result of all of their interactions with you, it will of course include all of the interactions they have with you when they are not buying anything. I’m going to write a bit more in a later post about Net Promoter Score but if this powerful measure of customer attitudes tells us anything, it’s that every interaction with the customer is critical. Whether I recommend a particular brand or not is a function of my own, direct, personal experience with that brand, and that changes every time I interact with them.

A special case happens when we are selling, and particularly when we are using direct marketing techniques. I’ve been reading the excellent article on Ian Brodie’s blog on downselling. In it, he talks about creative ways you can switch over time to selling a smaller or lower commitment version of your product if the customer is not going to buy your main service. The reason that the article made me think about consumer direct marketing is that it represents an example of how to creatively respond to a situation which happens all the time in consumer marketing but for which we are singularly unprepared – the situation where we make a sales pitch to a customer, who then doesn’t buy from us.

Think about it. A really terrific response to a direct press ad, a direct mail campaign or a telesales campaign to consumers might be 10-20%. That means that every time we run a campaign, 80-90% of the customers we contact are declining to buy from us, at least at that time. And the scale of this activity is simply huge. I calculated that over one five-year period I was responsible for over 1bn direct marketing contacts, and that was in one country for one brand. The sheer volume of sales messages we are addressing to consumers who then do not respond to them is enormous.

Of course, one response to that realisation is to try to increase the success percentage, and hence the whole industry of direct marketing was born.

As brand owners, however, something else is going on. It may well be that for many actual and potential customers these unsuccessful sales calls and advertising presentations are the most frequent interaction they have with your brand.

So here’s the question for today. What brand-building impression are we giving our customers when we make a sales approach to them which they reject? Consider this example. You are running a campaign to contact your existing customers to tell them about a discount they are entitled to on an additional product that you have for sale. On the face of it, everyone is a winner – you make additional sales and your grateful customers get a discount to reward their loyalty. However, if I asked one of your customers after they had been made that offer but rejected it, what would they say? Would it be:

“Those great guys at brand x rang me to tell me about a discount I’m entitled to that I didn’t even know about! I’m not going to take it up right now, but great to know I get rewards for being an existing customer”

Or would it be more like:

“Some wide-boy from brand x rang me up to sell me something and I told him to get lost. Aren’t those guys happy with what I’m paying them already?”

For many brands, and reflecting on the experiences I have had as a consumer, I think the second answer is closer to the mark, don’t you?

So there you have it – the interaction you might be having with your customers more frequently than any other – the unsuccessful sales approach – might be actively turning them off your brand.

What can we do about it? A lot, I think. We can actively design our sales messages with the brand take-out we desire in our minds. We can change the way we incentivise, measure and control our sales teams. We can creatively use “downselling” and other techniques to still get a positive outcome from the customer. We can test and learn, with our CRM systems, the best sequences of messages and follow-ups for our brand. Is your CRM system today optimised around the brand impression you want to give your customers, or around maximising short term conversion rates? I bet I know the answer!

If every customer interaction is critical to the customer’s view of our brand, then marketing suddenly looks a lot more all-encompassing, and a lot more difficult, than it once did.  We’ll explore that a bit more next time.

Customer blindness - the postscript

OK, I confess, the main point of this post is to do this:

Technorati claim token: DH9XYWTK8WWE

If you know what that means, you'll understand - if not just assume its some really cool web thing - that's my best guess.

I did think it highly amusing, though, that the major UK insurance company who were the subject of the customer blindness post down there managed to excel themselves again just this morning. They also insure my wife's car and apparently because we told them we'd moved house but didn't explicitly give them permission to change the premium accordingly they've just ceased her cover. After 5 years as a customer. I kid you not. Not only that, but none of the departments in the call-centre seem to know who can undo the action.

Anyway, enough on that - Moving Tribes is not going to become a consumer rights forum anytime soon. Instead, next post I'm going to talk about the biggest blind-spot any direct marketing operation can have and how it can lead to 95% of your customer communications actively turning off your customers.

Customer blindness

Since writing the last post I’ve been reflecting further on how it is that brands, and the marketing teams behind them, can become “blind” to what’s really important to the customer. Over the years I’ve seen countless examples of product design, processes and marketing communications where it is all too apparent that the customer perspective has been lost along the way.

My favourite example is from the insurance industry. I had been asked to present to a financial services conference as a favour – my role was to be the “outside observer” – to provide them with a marketer’s perspective on their industry. As luck would have it, just as I was beginning to wonder what I was going to say, it came time to renew my own house insurance.  What an eye-opener. The conversation went something like this:

Me: “last year you quoted me about £400 for house insurance. How much for this year?

Hapless insurance salesman: “that would be £1200, sir”

Me: “what?? Nothing has happened this year that has led to me claiming on my insurance – why on earth would you think you can triple my premium?”

HIS: “ah, well, last year we also quoted you £1200 but you then got a competitive quote for £400 which we price-matched. Do you have a competitive quote this time around?”

Me (seeing where this is going but curious to see how badly this process is designed): “why no, I don’t, but we both know I can go and get one, so why not just give me your best quote now and save us all some time?”

HIS: “I’m sorry, I can’t do that – you need to call around our competitors and get another quote, and then call me back so I can match it”

Me: “so what you are telling me is that I have to go and get a better quote from your competitor. If I do that, what incentive have I got to ring you back at all?”

HIS: “err”

You can see where the story ends – and yes, I do now have my house insured with someone else.

My message to the financial services conference was simple. An industry insider, reading that account, is bristling to respond. “Ah”, they’ll say, “what you don’t understand is the industry economics – let me explain it to you”.

Well, no, don’t.  Because whatever the industry economics, any customer process designed like the one above is just plain wrong. It might maximise short term return, but it does nothing to build loyalty or any kind of long term customer relationship.  The fact that it’s difficult to break out of that industry model does not make it any less important to do so.

We are surrounded in our own businesses by examples which, though maybe less extreme, are just as frustrating to customers. I’ve been reading the great post on Jeff Ogden’s site on “the curse of knowledge” and I think that that is at the heart of it. It’s very difficult indeed to see your business the same way a customer does once you know all the inside details on how it works. The result is that it is much harder than it looks to genuinely put the customer first.

I’m going to talk more in coming posts about how to put the individual customer experience at the heart of what we do as marketers, but for the time being here’s a handy test to avoid the curse of knowledge. Whenever you catch yourself or someone in your business, explaining an odd-looking process or customer experience by saying “well, what you need to understand is...” – stop them right there – it might just be that they already understand too much.

Marketing madness

You meet someone at a party. They make a good impression – seem attractive, interesting and interested in you. A connection is made.

Then it all unravels. You meet them again, in a different place under different circumstances. Oddly, they’ve forgotten who you are altogether and when you remind them the conversation takes a really weird turn – they appear to be an entirely different person and reveal a totally different set of interests and values. Far from being interested in you, they make clear that they couldn’t care less and are much more interested in someone else they’ve just met.

Unsettling, isn’t it? There’s a good reason for that – there are a whole raft of psychological disorders which have this appearance of rapidly changing personality as one of their symptoms. We are programmed at a very deep level to find this kind of thing unpleasant and to run a mile from it.

So why do brands do it to their customers over and over again?

Now I know what you’re thinking. All your marketing materials are checked for brand consistency before they leave you, and you’ve just invested all that money in a CRM system to ensure that your inbound and outbound communications fit together into a neat pattern for the customer. You have done that, haven’t you?

If not, you have some important projects in front of you. But even if you have, it does not guarantee that your brand is demonstrating one consistent personality to your customers all of the time. What about the written communications you probably never even look at? The despatch note that comes with your product delivery, the instruction manual, the form letter your call centre sends back to someone when they change their address, the error message your website gives if an underlying system is down? The list goes on. And that’s before we even get to the unscripted conversations your customers have with you every day – with your sales people, your call centre agents and even people who don’t work for you at all, but deliver some part of your brand experience to the customer.

These are the hard yards of bringing a brand to life. Every interaction we have with a brand counts towards the overall impression we form of its personality. If two of those interactions are wildly different to each other, or give a totally different impression of what the brand stands for, we have the same reaction as we would if an individual person behaved that way. In fact, I believe that a good rule of thumb for successful relationship marketing is to assume that the consumers’ “mental picture” of your brand is the same as the picture they’d build of an individual personality. The fact that brands are made up of thousands of different people all doing different jobs is too hard for us to process, so instead we think of them as amalgams – as effectively an individual.

If you accept that model as your starting point, here are some pointers to delivering great execution:

• Accept the fact that the communications a customer believes are the most important to them will not match your ranking of the ones that are important to you. The direct mail piece you’ve sweated blood over might get a casual glance but the system-generated one-line descriptions of your charges on your bill will get read intently. Make sure your marketing teams really understand which of your communication points is critical to the customer experience.
• Be the customer yourself. It still amazes me how many businesses are populated with senior people who don’t use their own products, at least not the way customers do. Do you have to listen to all the “on hold” messages that your customers do, or do you have your own internal line to your call centre? Do you get a bill for your own services, or is that handled for you internally?
• Really listen to customer feedback. Not just the complaint itself, but the root cause and what it tells you about how your brand’s personality is perceived by the customer – chances are high it will not match the set of positive words you have on your wall.

In future posts, I’m going to talk about how we might craft each individual customer experience in such a way as to make every customer an advocate of the brand.  I’m also going to highlight some other blind-spots I think big brands often have which prevent them from achieving greatness. In the meantime, however, think about whether your business delivers a truly consistent customer experience across all its touchpoints. Get involved; let me know what you think. After all, none of us want to be the weirdo at the party, do we?