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Are you talking to me? Thought Piece by Alan Gilmour, Head of Brand and CRM
Imagine if someone you worked with day in, day out, one day failed to remember your name or, even worse, called you by someone else's name, or got some information about you that you would expect them to know about you, wrong. How would you feel?
Probably not very valued or respected. The denial of identity or identity error goes to the very heart of who we are and the relationships we have.
And yet every day that is exactly what brands large and small do to their customers and all this does is re-emphasise how anonymous and faceless brands can be in the minds of the consumer. And no matter how much brands are endowed with human characteristics by brand managers such as personality and tone of voice, many brands still come across as impersonal, faceless and anonymous.
Just before the summer a local car dealer sent to all its customers a letter offering a summer holiday service check to ensure ‘you were not stuck in the car on the way to your hard earned holiday with the kids screaming in the back’.
Great idea. Great proposition.
However this proposition was somewhat spoilt by addressing it to ‘dear customer’ even though all customer details were on the system and were used to address the letter.
And what is the point of talking about ‘kids screaming in the back’ if the addressee, as in this case, doesn’t have children.
How well does this business really know and understand its customers? How much does it show it recognises its customers? Is this the sort of business that puts the customer at the heart of its marketing? How can this be fixed?
Many marketing agencies will tout CRM as the solution for problems like this but for a long time CRM has struggled to really deliver or get traction in many businesses. Why is this?
For too long CRM has been associated with a level of complexity leading to a lot of misunderstanding and fear. It is seen as being all about expensive computer systems and databases and rocket science statisticians producing complex analytical models. And that scares people off. And CRM as a three letter acronym will never excite with its emphasis on what it is about rather than what it delivers.
Alternatively it is over simplified around axioms such as ‘right message to right customer at right time through the right channel’. Sounds great but what does that mean and is often misinterpreted by some as measuring and analysing response rates and to see who is responding to messages. Surely marketing departments can do a lot better than this. Surely they want to be more imaginative, curious and thought provoking about the brand and its customers.
It is now time for a new definition. One that does not scare or intimidate or over simplify but which offers an exciting and emotional vision for marketers in all businesses and one which will help deliver business growth.
A much better definition is ‘personalised marketing’. The more brands can personalise their marketing programmes the more it can meet the consumer need of ‘recognise me, know me, understand me’. And all of us like dealing with brands and people that know and understand us. We trust people and brands which can deliver against this promise.
And how do you make marketing feel pesonal?
Think 4 Ds-Data, Decisioning, Digital, Direct.
In other words let the data and insight held on your customers inform your digital and direct marketing strategies, creative and messaging. Of course it should go way beyond this with the data informing all touch points on how to feel and look and sound personalised to the consumer but let’s face it getting the direct and digital messaging coming across as personalised would be a huge step in the right direction.
Data from or about the brand’s customers informs the insight that drives the decisioning that allows you make your business feel personal and alive to your customers across as many touch points as you can and lets the brand demonstrate the deep understanding that earns customer trust, making it more responsive to changes in customer behaviour, more relevant to customers’ individual needs and more rewarding in the way it treat its customers.
And customers will repay by buying more, staying longer and introducing others over time. Or, to put it more simply will drive the bottom line.
So let’s stop worrying about CRM and let’s start to focus on personalising our marketing to make our brands feel more relevant-a more rewarding aspiration.