Category: Marketing

How to Measure Customer Delight and Prove Its Impact on Brand Loyalty

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

As we all know, customer satisfaction is no longer enough to secure brand loyalty – if it ever was!

Companies must strive to go beyond mere satisfaction and aim to delight their customers.

Customer delight refers to exceeding customer expectations to create a positive emotional reaction, leading to stronger loyalty and advocacy.

This post explores the importance of measuring customer delight, its impact on brand loyalty, and practical methods to achieve and assess it.

If you prefer to listen rather than read:

The Evolution from Satisfaction to Delight

Customer satisfaction has traditionally been the benchmark for evaluating customer experiences. However, research shows that satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal customers. According to a study by the Harvard Business Review, 20% of satisfied customers reported they would consider switching to another brand. This indicates that satisfaction alone does not guarantee loyalty.

Customer delight, on the other hand, involves creating an exceptional experience that surprises and excites customers. This emotional engagement fosters a deeper connection with the brand, leading to higher levels of loyalty. A delighted customer is more likely to become a brand advocate, spreading positive word-of-mouth and contributing to long-term business success.

 

Measuring Customer Delight

Measuring customer delight requires a different approach than traditional satisfaction surveys. Here are some effective methods to assess customer delight:

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a widely used metric that gauges customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend a brand to others, on a score of 1-10.

It categorizes respondents into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. While NPS primarily measures loyalty, it can also indicate delight when customers express a strong willingness to advocate for the brand.

According to Bain & Company, companies with high NPS scores grow at more than twice the rate of their competitors. For instance, Apple, known for its high NPS, has consistently seen strong brand loyalty and customer advocacy.

Trader Joe’s also uses NPS to understand customer loyalty. Their high scores reflect the company’s emphasis on friendly service and unique product offerings, creating delighted customers who frequently recommend the store to friends and family.

2. Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES measures the ease with which customers can interact with a company, including problem resolution and purchasing processes. A low effort score often correlates with higher delight, as customers appreciate frictionless experiences. Gartner found that 96% of customers with a high-effort service experience become more disloyal, highlighting the importance of minimizing customer effort.

Glossier, a beauty brand, simplifies the shopping experience through a user-friendly website and seamless checkout process. Their low customer effort scores contribute to high levels of customer delight, evidenced by their strong customer retention rates.

3. Emotional Response Surveys

Traditional surveys can be enhanced with questions designed to capture emotional responses. For example, asking customers how they felt during their interaction with the brand can provide insights into their level of delight. Emotions such as joy, surprise, and excitement are strong indicators … Click to continue reading

Successful Brand Building for SMEs: Overcoming Your 10 Biggest Frustrations

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Brand building for SMEs is a complex journey. As an SME owner, CEO, or CMO, you may often be overwhelmed by the challenges of establishing and maintaining a strong brand presence.

In this article, we’ll explore ten common frustrations of brand building for SME leaders and provide solutions and inspiring real-world examples of overcoming them.
If you prefer to listen rather than read:

 

1. Inconsistent Brand Messaging

Consistency is key to building a strong brand for every company, but achieving it can be a significant hurdle. Inconsistent messaging across various channels can dilute your brand’s identity and confuse your audience. This inconsistency often stems from a lack of clear guidelines and miscommunication among team members. Unfortunately, these are common problems for brand building in SMEs.

Solution: Develop comprehensive brand guidelines that detail your brand’s voice, tone, visual style, and key messages. Ensure that all team members, from marketing to customer service, are trained and aligned with these guidelines. Regularly audit your content across different platforms to help maintain consistency and make necessary adjustments when needed.

Example: Beardbrand, an SME focused on beard grooming products, maintains consistent brand messaging through detailed brand guidelines and a strong, unified voice across all platforms. Their commitment to consistency has helped them build a loyal customer base and grow their brand significantly.

2. Limited Marketing Budget

Many SMEs operate with tight budgets, making allocating sufficient funds for branding activities a real challenge. This financial constraint can hinder your ability to invest in high-quality content, advertising, and innovative marketing strategies.

Solution: Focus on cost-effective branding strategies that provide high returns. Leverage social media platforms, which offer affordable advertising options and can help you reach a broader audience. Collaborate with influencers and use content marketing to share valuable information that establishes your brand authority. Remember, creativity often trumps budget when it comes to effective branding.

Example: Hiut Denim Co., a small UK-based jeans manufacturer, used storytelling and social media to build its brand without a large marketing budget. By focusing on the quality of its product and the story behind its brand, it attracted a dedicated following and increased its sales.

3. Difficulty Measuring ROI on Branding Initiatives

 

Conclusion

Brand building for SMEs and larger companies is an ongoing process that involves overcoming various challenges. Addressing these frustrations head-on can significantly enhance your brand’s presence and impact as an SME owner, CEO, or CMO. By implementing the solutions outlined above, you can navigate the complexities of brand building more effectively and set your business on a path to sustained success.

If you are looking for expert guidance to overcome these challenges and elevate your brand, consider partnering with a consultancy specialising in SME branding strategies. With the right support, you can confidently transform your frustrations into opportunities and achieve your branding goals.

For more insights and personalized assistance, visit C3Centricity and discover how we can help you build a strong, cohesive,

… Click to continue reading

How to Power up Your B2C Marketing Strategies with Surprising B2B Secrets

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

As has been claimed for decades, there are differences between B2C marketing strategies and business-to-business (B2B) strategies.

However, as companies continue to evolve in an increasingly digital landscape, these disparities, while significant, share the underlying goal of establishing meaningful connections with the people who buy their products and services. 

As companies strive to navigate the complexities of their respective markets, the lessons learned from examining the nuances of B2B and B2C marketing become self-evident.

This is why I decided this week to examine not only the unique challenges and opportunities inherent to each industry but also to reveal the transformative insights one sector can adopt from the other.

If you prefer to listen rather than read:

 

Understanding the Landscape of B2B vs. B2C Marketing

At the heart of all effective marketing strategies lies the principle of satisfaction and connection. It involves understanding the needs, desires, and behaviours of your customers/consumers/clients (C³ – now you know where our company name comes from!)  and then composing messages that resonate with them. However, the path to achieving this relationship differs significantly between B2B and B2C marketing.

B2B Marketing: The Complex Web of Decision-Making

B2B marketing focuses on addressing the needs, interests, and challenges of the decision-makers who purchase on their organisations’ behalf. This realm is characterized by:

Longer Sales Cycles: B2B transactions often involve substantial investments, necessitating a more extended period of deliberation, approval, and procurement processes.

A study by Gartner highlighted that 77% of B2B buyers stated their latest purchase was very complex or difficult. B2B transactions, such as IBM’s enterprise software solutions or Caterpillar’s heavy machinery, involve substantial investments and can extend for months or even years. This complexity necessitates marketers to engage in continuous nurturing strategies, educational content provision, and stakeholder management to guide decision-making.

Rational Decision-Making: Decisions are driven by logic, return on investment (ROI), and efficiency gains, requiring marketers to focus on the value proposition and detailed product information.

B2B decisions are driven by logic and ROI. For instance, Salesforce markets its CRM solutions by highlighting efficiency gains, scalability, and improved sales metrics, appealing directly to organizational goals and the bottom line.

Relationship Building: Given the smaller target market and higher stakes, forging strong, long-term client relationships is paramount.

The emphasis on cultivating long-term relationships is exemplified by the account-based marketing (ABM) approach, where companies like Adobe focus on individual client accounts as markets in their own right, customizing their marketing efforts to each account’s specific needs and history with the brand.

B2C Marketing: The Emotional Journey

In contrast, B2C marketing targets individual consumers, tailoring strategies to meet their preferences and behaviours. This sector is typified by:

Shorter Sales Cycles: Purchases are often impulsive or based on immediate needs, leading to quicker decision-making.

B2C purchases, from impulse buys like a new pair of Nike sneakers to more considered purchases like a Peloton bike, often involve shorter decision times. Nike excels in creating an emotional appeal

… Click to continue reading

The Promise of AI and ML to Take Digital Marketing to the Next Level

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Everyone seems to be talking about the impact of AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) these days. As if ChatGPT wasn’t enough to get everyone excited, OpenAI surpassed itself by upgrading to ChatGPT4! And competitors are forced to launch their AI platforms earlier than planned.

If you haven’t tried them yet, I highly recommend you jump on the bandwagon and give these new tools a spin. They are great fun. But they can also be handy for businesses and bloggers. 

Before getting into their uses, I wanted to start with a summary of where AI and ML are today.

 

From Text to Voice

Most of us have grown up with text communication and the written word, but Gen Z, born after 1996, is more comfortable with voice. They are less formal but far more impatient than previous generations.

They expect Alexa, Siri, Cortana and similar voice-activated personal assistants to be available whenever they have questions. With this type of search expansion into daily life, being on the front page of Google is no longer good enough. You have to be the number one answer to their questions!

[easy-tweet tweet=”Being on the front page of Google is no longer good enough; you have to be the number one answer in this voice-activated, personal-assistant-supported world we live in.” hashtags=”voice-activated, SMX, CEX, CRM”]

 

AI is Not One Technology

Despite what digital marketers may have hoped, AI and ML are not the solutions to all our problems. It is a series of technologies addressing various current and future customer needs.

Unlike normal analytical processes, using AI needs developers and users to start with the end in mind. Knowing what we are looking for, rather than waiting to see what the analysis brings us, needs a very different thought process. The questions asked to become as important as the answers received, if not even more so. Therefore it is advisable to make them the best you can ask. Your digital marketing has everything to gain and nothing to lose.

[easy-tweet tweet=”Being on the front page of Google is no longer good enough; you have to be the number one answer in this voice-activated, personal-assistant-supported world we live in.” hashtags=”voice-activated, #CEX, #CRM, #SMX”]

AI and ML are Not 100% Accurate

AI is still in its infancy, despite great leaps forward in some areas in the past year or so. For example, the language translation is still inaccurate today, but that doesn’t mean it’s not helpful. Anything that moves us towards increased customer satisfaction from our digital marketing efforts is significant. However, we must understand their limitations and not be fixated on perfection or rely totally on them.

One of the biggest challenges still prevalent in businesses today is siloed data. It is easy to see that the more information sources we integrate, the more accurate our platforms will likely be. But until we finally break down our internal silos, AI will not be able to deliver its full potential.

 

Taking the Robots Out

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5 Secrets You Need to Know About Brand Portfolio Success

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

How do you know when your brand portfolio has too many variants? In my opinion, the answer is that it’s when you can’t answer that question! Can you?

One of the most popular evergreen posts on C3Centricity is “The Beginners Guide to Brand Portfolio Management.” It seems that we all suffer from a deep-rooted fear of managing and reducing our brand portfolio, especially when it includes many historic or regional variants.

That is why I decided to write about these best-kept secrets in portfolio management, which even large corporations are not always aware of!

 

MORE IS RARELY BETTER!

We live in an over-abundant world of consumer choice, but more is rarely better. The paradox of choice is a powerful concept  popularised by Barry Schwartz.

It states that people actually feel freer when they are given fewer choices. Have you never ended up walking out of a store without the purchase you had planned, because you had been faced with too many choices? I know I have – often!

It is said that the limited choice offered in hard discounters is one of the reasons for their success. It appears that it’s not only about lower prices.

Retailers such as Aldi and Lidl present just one or two brands of each category they stock, in addition to their own brand. The branded products they do sell are almost always the cheapest offering the brand has or one of their older versions that are no longer very popular. And they are usually at the same price if not even higher than in normal supermarkets!

More than fifteen years after the first research on which Schwartz based his theory was conducted, new studies have given some alternative perspectives on choice. They claim that large assortments are not always a bad thing. In the study by Gao & Simonson, they propose that many factors were forgotten in Schwartz’s original study.

You can read the full findings of this latest work in Neuromarketing. What I found of particular interest in this article, being the customer champion that I am, is that they conclude by saying that it all depends on understanding your customer – doesn’t everything?! Their summary findings state that:

“In certain situations (when the ‘whether to buy’ decision comes before the ‘which option is best’ decision) a large assortment CAN increase purchase likelihood. Especially in eCommerce, it is possible to reap the benefits of a large product assortment, while helping customers make choices?”

In other words, the online searches that we all now perform before purchasing many articles will benefit from a wide selection of offers. Once we decide to buy, a large choice can become a barrier to the final purchase.

Although Schwartz’s original book was published in 2006, he more recently commented on consumers’ current choices in “The Paradox of Expanded Choices.” He concludes the article wistfully by saying:

“We can imagine a point at which the options would be so copious that even the world’s most

… Click to continue reading

Packaging: Are You Using This Free Channel For Communicating With Your Customers?

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Do you consider your packaging to be a part of the product, protecting its contents and framing its on-shelf life? Or do you consider it to be an integral part of your connection with your customers at an important moment of truth, that of purchase and usage? Or both of these?

If you answered both, then I believe that you are making maximum use of your packaging or at least you recognise its potential for communicating.

If you answered only one of the choices, then you may be missing an important opportunity. Let me explain, with a few examples.

 

People don’t read instructions

We all expect most things that we use or consume to be intuitive these days. In other words, we assume that we will understand how to build / cook / use them without reading the manual / instructions.

If you are like most people – myself included – this has nothing to do with the complexity of the product concerned. I myself will only turn to the instructions when something doesn’t work: I end up with left-over screws when mounting a flat-pack piece of furniture, or I can’t achieve multi-recordings on my smart TV or cable box.

In the article How Likely Are You to Read the Instructions they link behaviour to personality types. It makes an interesting read and offers at least some explanations as to why many (most?) of us still don’t read instructions.

Since the internet arrived, we have access to more and more information, and yet we seem to be reading less and less. Therefore as marketers, we need to ensure that any vital information we want to share, is clearly highlighted on the pack.

 

People do look at packs

Whether it is the cream we put on our faces, the cereal we eat for breakfast, or the dip that we offer to friends on match night, there are moments when we are faced with packaging for more than a split second. It is at these times that we are likely to read at least some of what is written on the pack.

It therefore makes sense to provide more than just a list of ingredients. After all you have your customer’s attention, so make use of it to impress or educate.

Here are a few of the best examples I have come across:

Nestlé does a great job of providing useful information on their pack,s with their “nutritional compass.” This includes four different pieces of information: good to know, good to remember, good question and the nutritional data.

What I particularly like about what Nestle has done, is to combine mandatory information on nutritional values, with useful information for the consumer. Although they may not be the most consumer centric company around, at least they did think consumer first in the development of their “compass.”

Juvena message on Packaging is Part of Product or PromotionJuvena of Switzerland: The short message to “Enjoy the smoothness” on the back of the Juvena hand cream sample tube, makes the experience both … Click to continue reading

The Exciting Future of Brand Building comes from Customer Centricity

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Marketing is an old profession. It’s been around for hundreds of years in one form or another. But with the advent of digital in the early 80’s, companies began taking a serious look at their marketing strategies.

Many organisations realised that it was time for a major overhaul of their primarily outbound strategies. Consumers no longer appreciated being interrupted in their daily lives, if they ever did! Marketing had to find ways to stimulate more inbound engagements, but how?

However, after trying multiple inbound marketing strategies, they find that they are still irritating their customers with spammy emails, intrusive pop-ups and over-complicated cookies, that gather far more information than most organisations will ever need or use. At least those will soon be a thing of the past!

Despite these changes, CMOs remain one of the leading c-suite members who struggle to keep their jobs for more than four or five years. The reasons are many, but the post “Head of Marketing, How Can You Keep Your Job When Most CMOs Are Losing Theirs?” explains what you can do to ensure that you leave your position when you want to and not on your CEO’s terms.

Brand Building

Many large CPG companies, such as P&G, Coca-Cola and Nestle, have changed the name of their Marketing departments in the past twenty years, to Brand Building. They hoped that it would revive sales and give new vitality to their communications to better engage their customers in the new social world. But most failed miserably, because they remained very much in a state of business as usual. They continued with the same processes and mind-sets. And with few exceptions, they prioritised thoughts about themselves and their brands, and rarely took their customers’ perspective.

A more recent change is bringing more marketing tasks in-house, as P&G has done. Read more here. While this certainly saves a considerable part of their budget, the biggest advantage from my perspective, is that these companies automatically learn more about their customers’ behaviour. When you are planning communication campaigns and deciding on ad spend, you need to understand where your customers are and when they are most open to receiving your messages. That for me is far more valuable than any savings on agency costs. What do you think?

Even without making such a drastic move, many other consumer goods companies have realised that to satisfy the consumer they had to do things differently. They were the ones that moved to customer centricity. Or to be exact they started on their journey towards putting the customer at the heart of their businesses. Customer centricity is not a destination, because consumers are constantly changing and their satisfaction never lasts for long. It is a journey where you are accompanying your customers with the aim to satisfy and delight them, however they change.

One of the issues that has been created by marketing is that I believe we have taught our customers far too well! They understand a lot more about … Click to continue reading

You’re Not Competing In The Category You Think You Are! (The 5 Steps to Category Identification)

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

The first step of any business is to identify the category in which they are competing. This may surprise you, but you’d be amazed just how many brands are not in the category they think they are. When was the last time you checked how your customers saw you?

Just think about the consequences of an incorrect attribution; you would be concentrating on competitors that your customers never compare you with! And you would waste resources defending yourself against the wrong brands. Talk about squandering valuable resources! That’s why I decided to dedicate a whole post to this important topic.

But before I get started, I suggest you first read the post (Customer Centricity is Today’s Business Disruptor, Insights its Foundation) as background information. In it you’ll discover the full description of the seven steps of the CATSIGHT™ process, which I know will also be useful to you. In the article, I summarise the very first step of Insight development, that of category definition, like this:

C = Category

Whenever you want to develop an insight, the first task is to decide on the category you want to study. This may seem obvious to you, but in many cases, it isn’t as clear as you might have thought.

For instance, suppose you are planning on launching a new fruit-flavoured soft drink. You may think that you are competing with other juices or perhaps other soft drinks. But rather than just assuming the category in which you are competing, I highly recommend that you check; you may be very surprised.

Identify the category by zooming in

In working with one client who was in this exact situation, we actually found that their main competitor was an energy drink!

The reason for this was because this category is seen as being for lively, energetic, fun-loving people who need a boost. Whether this comes from the caffeine of an energy drink, or from the added vitamins and minerals of real fruit juices, which was my client’s offer, it didn’t seem to matter.
If we’d only looked at other fruit-flavoured soft drinks, we would have missed a whole – and much larger – segment of potential category consumers. By starting our analysis as wide as possible by looking at all beverages, and then slowly zooming in as we learnt more, we were quickly able to discover this perhaps surprising positioning for the new drink.
This shows the power of taking the consumers’ perspective, especially when segmenting a market. But more about that in a moment. 
The above example is a great start. But so many clients ask me to help them with their own category definitions, that I decided to detail the five most important steps in defining your category, so that you can do it for yourself for each of your brands and products.

Step 1. What is the category definition you are currently using? 

In any process, we should always start by identifying where we are today. In the case of your category definition, it should be the … Click to continue reading

Should CMOs Concentrate on Brand Building or Business Growth?

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Which is more important, brand building or business growth?

Do you remember when Coca-Cola did away with their CMO in favour of a Chief Growth Officer? Then two years later they brought back the position. At the time, I asked if they were wise or foolhardy to make such a change, but they answered the question themselves!

In an interview with Marketing Week, their global vice president of creative claimed that it had “broadened” the company’s approach to marketing. Obviously, this didn’t live up to their optimistic expectations. I think that other companies who followed suit, also realised that they need a CMO after all. However, their role has changed significantly. 

 

HOW MARKETING HAS CHANGED

Marketing is an old profession. It’s been around for hundreds of years in one form or another. If you’re like me and are fascinated by how change happens, then I’m sure this complete history of marketing Infographic by Hubspot will be of interest.

With the arrival of digital marketing in the early 80’s, many companies began to take a serious look at their marketing. They realised that their primarily outbound strategy had to change. Their consumers didn’t appreciate being interrupted in their daily lives. However, with the creation of inbound marketing, they still irritated their consumers with spammy emails, popups and “subtle” cookies for following their every move. No wonder the EU felt inclined to develop its GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).

What has changed over the past five years is marketing’s deeper awareness of, if not complete adherence to, what customers like and dislike. The major trends that we have seen and their impact on marketing, include:

  1. Chatbots, especially through Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, to catch consumers on the go with highly personalised messaging.
  2. The use of voice. With the battle between Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the voice search and commands domain, customers can get answers just by asking. This is a huge challenge for businesses because being on the first page of search results is no longer enough; you have to be first!
  3. Video is taking over social media, with its rapid rise on YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Facebook.
  4. Influencer marketing is giving way to customer journey mapping with the increased detail that IoT can provide. Many organisations have moved their marketing plans to mirror their customers’ path to purchase. Or rather paths, as personalisation continues to trump mass engagement.
  5. Zero-party data. As social media platforms have seriously reduced the collection of their subscribers’ data, brands are increasing their direct engagements with their consumers. Through polls, quizzes and competitions, they openly ask for consumers’ details, bypassing the need for cookies.

Have you taken these megatrends on board and adapted your marketing accordingly? If not, why not? 

 

BRAND BUILDING

In the past decade or so, many large CPG companies such as P&G  and Nestle renamed their Marketing departments as Brand Builders, in the hope of adapting to this new world. They failed, miserably.

I believe the reason they failed … Click to continue reading

The Good, Bad and Downright Ugly Parts of a Head of Marketing Job

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Did you know that the average tenure of a Head of Marketing continues to fall, reaching just 41 months according to the latest Spencer Stuart research published by the WSJ?

It is still one of the shortest average terms of office of any chief in the C-suite, according to a recent report by Korn Ferry. But one piece of good news in the past year is that although conditions for CMOs have become more difficult since the coronavirus pandemic, “In many cases, CMOs are not being removed, but it’s been pretty dramatic layoffs beneath them” said Greg Welch, practice leader for marketing, sales and communication at Spencer Stuart.

So just how long have you been in your position?

The Bad News

A global survey by the Fournaise Marketing Group provides one possible explanation for the continued decline in tenure. It highlights the ongoing tensions between CEOs and CMOs. A huge 80% of CEOs don’t trust or are unimpressed with their CMOs, compared to just 10% for their CFOs and CIOs. Why is this?

Perhaps it’s because CEOs don’t understand the role of a CMO or is there still an issue with the ROI of the marketing budget? I’ll let you be the judge of this in your own situation.

Another piece of research by HubSpot reported that Marketing as a career suffers credibility issues as well. It ranked the most trustworthy jobs, with Doctor ranking number one and near the bottom, just above Car Salesman and well below Barista, was “Marketer”. Car salesmen? Really? That is scandalous!

The Opportunities

Let’s start at the beginning. What opportunities are there, for marketers to keep their jobs? Despite the short lifespan of a CMO, and while the position is plagued by high turnover, this could also be because CMOs are highly visible.

Therefore they can be targets for promotions or a steal by their industry competitors. Nice to feel wanted, isn’t it?

It is understandably important that a new CMO quickly makes an impact. More so than any other c-suite function, bar the CEO of course, who sometimes faces almost immediate criticism by shareholders and the financial world, upon being named.

Another piece of good news for the head of the marketing function is that being on the executive board they have access to resources. The bad news is that as the CMO is a member of the EB, management expects them to make (profitable) changes fast.

And even more so if they have just been hired! The board trusts the new CMO to analyse the situation, identify what needs to be done, develop the plan to do it and then take actions. And all of this in their first 3 months or so!

Are you or have you yourself ever been in exactly this situation? If you have, then you understand how tough it is, don’t you?

That’s why many CMOs hire a supportive advisor or sounding board such as myself to accompany them on this stressful early part of their … Click to continue reading

A Winning Marketing Plan: 9 Questions Every Marketer Should Be Able To Answer

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

What does it take to write a winning marketing plan? Every marketer writes a marketing or business plan each year don’t they, so how difficult can it be, right?

Well, writing a marketing plan isn’t hard at all, but writing a winning marketing plan is very difficult. And time-consuming. And getting it approved by your executive board is perhaps the most challenging part of all.

And it’s not only in the formal marketing plan presentation that you need your “A” game. Management is renowned in most organisations for “innocently” posing questions when passing marketers in the corridor or while socialising at a company event.

Answer the CEO’s questions to their satisfaction and you will stand out from the crowd. Provide an incomplete or, worse still, no answer at all, and they might just wonder if it isn’t time to restructure the marketing group!

So here are my 9 actionable tips on how to write a winning marketing plan, so you can answer any question your CEO or boss throws at you – EVERY time.

The simple rule is to NEVER say you don’t know, but also to never drown them in a long-winded answer. Neither will win you brownie points. Make sure you have an answer like those proposed below and your name might just be on the next list of promotions. (Do I congratulate you now?!?)

 

1. WHO ARE OUR BRAND’S CUSTOMERS?

There is far more information needed than just age and gender, to answer this question. Prepare a short description (often called a persona or avatar) of a typical user, in the same way as you would describe a friend. See “13 Things your Boss Expects you to Know about your Customers” for further details on what you should already know about your customer.

Once you’ve checked out the above article, why not also download our 4W™ template? It will help you put everything in one place so it is always handy and more importantly makes it easy to update it whenever you learn something new about them.

GOOD ANSWER: “Our customers are middle-aged women, whose children are in their late teens or early twenties. She shops in local supermarkets and gets advice from friends on Facebook, about the best brands to buy and what’s on offer.”

If the CEO / your boss looks interested or asks for more, then continue with “She’s been buying our brand for over two years because it satisfies her children’s hunger when they get in from playing sports. That makes them happy and she then feels proud of being a good Mum. We call her Patty.”

With this answer, you will have given them a short summary of the most important elements of your persona. By adding the name you have given the avatar, you might get them to also refer to her in your next meeting. That’s when you know they listened to you and that you won an important step up in their estimation.

2. HOW

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How Understanding Shoppers Can Save Retail

Posted on by Denyse Drummond-Dunn

Did you know that understanding shoppers has become a business essential in recent years? Do you want to know why? Because retail is in crisis!

Investment in brick-and-mortar stores has declined 30% in the US and a staggering 50% in Europe. In the UK 50,000 of the 500,000+, high street stores are empty, that’s a whopping 10%. But that level can even be higher, double or triple that in some parts of the country. The government in the UK upped its rescue fund to a billion pounds and slashed its rates in the hope of lowering rents last year.

And as if all that weren’t enough, the pandemic has been the final straw. With its lockdowns and restrictions, covid has pushed many shops over the brink and into bankruptcy. If retail as we know it is to return to “normal” – and many, including the HBR have already declared this to be near impossible – it is important to understand what is going on in our shoppers’ brains.

 

Background

Shoppers, that’s you and me, are changing. We have an insatiable appetite for instant gratification and novelty. More clothes stores are shut down than any other category because sales have gone online. And eating at home is now the norm, other than cheap, fast food stores, so restaurants and bars are suffering too. Both of these trends have been further exacerbated by the pandemic of course.

So if brick-and-mortar stores are in difficulty, are we helping our customers to buy online? I don’t even think so. It seems as if we are trying to benefit from their desire to do so. Something rather sinister has been happening. Let me show you.

 

Capturing Customer Data

Online, even more than offline depends upon capturing customer data. Retailers need it to deliver products of course, but we all seem to have become data-mad! We collect masses of information from our (potential) customers and then probably do very little with it all. But in the process, we have surely alienated a few, if not many would-be shoppers, to the point of them abandoning their carts and buying elsewhere.

According to MarketingCharts.com, shoppers now believe that their data benefits companies and brands more than it does themselves.

In the Janrain report “Brand Trust Survey” 48% of US internet users try to buy exclusively from companies they trust to protect their personal data. But most don’t trust us with their data, and for good reason, it seems. As claimed by Thales, 75% of US retailers have experienced a data breach, 50% in the last year, up from 19% in 2017. Despite this high level and mistrust, one thing shoppers do agree on is that technology has made things better for them.

More than three out of five consumers say retail technologies have improved their shopping experiences, according to a survey by the National Retail Federation. Eight in 10 say that they’ve had better interactions as a result of these technology investments. This is further … Click to continue reading

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