The new consumer journey

A while back, I attempted to create a model the way companies need to leverage new marketing to engage today’s consumers. I looked at a number of interesting approaches, but in the end opted to build around the idea of a marketing spiral.  I’m sure there are a number of other ways to illustrate the consumer journey other than using a spiral, but this is what I came up with. If anybody wants to take another stab at this, please do and let me know where you post it. Read on to discover how you can use this model to define your new marketing program.

Today’s consumers start with an Initial Considersation Set. Martin Lindstrom’s brain scan research in his groundbreaking book, “Buyology,” clearly shows that we all have an initial consideration set for every product category, many of which are completely unconscious. We choose a brand of shampoo simply because we are used to choosing it, or because on some unconscious level, our gut tells us that it’s better than the others for any number of reasons which we spend less than a few seconds consciously thinking about.

“It’s natural.” “It has a secret formula.” “It’s scientifically proven.” “I like the way it smells.” “It makes my hair feel nice.” “It’s cheap.” All these statements and a near infinite variety of others, which are completely personal to each individual, contribute to our initial consideration set.

Martin Lindstrom’s research also reveals that changing these ‘consideration sets’ is harder than it looks. In some cases, it even requires truly radical events. It took a global recession to turn affluent middle class shoppers into price savvy buyers. It took an end-of-the-world scenario involving climate change to get people to start considering carbon footprints when looking to buy a new car.

Advertisers historically have used creative disruption as a way to “open our minds” to another possible consideration set. For decades toothpaste that cleaned the teeth and kept them healthy was enough for us. Suddenly however, advertisers have effectively convinced us that we actually want toothpaste that doesn’t just clean, but makes them white, because we all know, white teeth are healthy teeth. The same consideration set has now been given a qualifier, healthy teeth = white teeth, so I need whitening toothpaste.

On the Internet, transparency means that marketers have to think and behave differently, because people can quite simply use Google to research a product to find out if it actually makes our teeth white, or even if white teeth are healthy teeth. Which is why where Affinity comes to play. Affinity is about building emotional connections between brand and consumer. To build affinity in today’s online world, marketers leverage social media strategies targeted around Influence and Advocacy.

Although common social media lore is that some people are better influencers than other, BzzAgents in the US has found that anybody can be an influencer. An influencer happens to be somebody you know or meet who says the right thing at the right time. You might happen across somebody on a train who is reading a book that looks interesting because a) they are laughing their head off and b) you are bored stiff reading the same old celebrity trash in the Metro. So you might think, “if I had that book, I wouldn’t have to read this lousy newspaper.” This is precisely the experience BzzAgent discovered when it sent out its agents to promote some of the latest reads. At the end of the day, building an emotional bond with consumers is all about trust. And that trust starts more often than not, through somebody else.

As we continue down the crazy funnel of consumerist choice, we move towards having Conversations. Back on our train, you’re likely start up a conversation with the book reader. “So is that a good book?” You might ask, though the roaring laughter would probably be a dead giveaway. In more structured mechanisms, brands can create opportunities for conversation using Presence & Participation, by participating in or even hosting conversations on their own blogs and in existing blogs, review sites and forums. These conversations can have a massive benefit. Your consumers get to talk to real people who speak like real people, not like an aggressive PR agent on a mission or a call centre in Bombay.

The next step in journey is to facilitate their Participation with your brand by creating Visibility & Distribution. This is achieved with seeding content and leveraging advertorial placements, content partnerships, relevant sponsorships and other forms of content generation around the brand. The key is to think like Coca-Cola. “Be everywhere the customer is thirsty.”

Use social listening to map out all of the places people are looking for content about your brand, and ensure your content is there. Going back to our toothpaste example, our toothplace marketer should find everyplace online where people might be looking for information on ‘clean and white teeth,’ then make sure they have positioned the right content to help consumers in their research.

The Engagement step is crucial. Even if the consumer walks away believing everything they heard about your brand and product, they will do more research and participate in further conversations or interactions with the brand. In fact, the higher the cost or level of complexity the product or service is, the more research consumers do.

So once you have seeded loads of content across the Internet, you need to make it easy for people to search and find it. Discovery & Search of content is so important that brands who get it spend disproportionate amounts of their budgets on search engine performance and optimization. Keyword optimization, social topic and taxonomy analysis, content submission to multiple social sharing sites, the use of rich metadata on content and content linking are all techniques that can be employed to make it easy for people to find and engage with your content.

To ensure that the content does what it needs to, i.e. convince the consumer that you have the best toothpaste for instance, it’s best to leverage the consumer’s voice as much as possible and target against consumer passions (fashion, music, film, whatever). The more relevant you can be, the more focused your message is to your audience, the more likely you will be included in their final consideration set.

In other words, if you can get a hundred ordinary people to test, record and talk about your toothpaste versus other brands, the more likely people will add it to their brand list. To ensure credibility, it’s best to foster conversations not just on your site, but on trusted forums and communities that editorially make sense for your brand.

After all of this interaction with you, your content, other customers, our buzz agents and the average guy or girl on the street, the consumer finally buys your product. Great! Job well done! On to the next one. Right? Wrong!

Winning a consumer is only the first round. Imagine what will happen if the consumer’s experience with your brand is completely not what he/she expected, or worse, is just plain awful. That disappointed consumer will write about those awful brand experiences. Other customers will jump on the brand-bashing bandwagon and the individual and collective experiences will get shared to every living person they can reach ensuring your brand is not on anybody else’s initial consideration set.

Sadly, bad reviews outnumber good reviews in just about every category. This is basic psychology really. People who feel cheated want justice. Because they are unlikely to get their money back, they will enact justice by trying to prevent others from making the same mistake. So they become detractors. Detractors can destroy a brand’s reputation online, which is why it’s important to make sure the product experience lives up to the hype. The good news however, is that detractors can be won over surprisingly easily. It often just takes a brand that is willing to listen honestly and is sincerely willing to try to do better.

Most agencies recommend social listening however as a way to find out want people are really saying about your brand, and observing as away to learn how they use your products; all with the goal of tackling negative word of mouth and to improve their marketing to consumers. The general problem with this advice is that the real reason to listen to word of mouth is not to rush into a PR campaign whenever you hear harsh criticisms, but to collect ongoing feedback and communicate these as insights to the product teams with the mandate of making better products and services. That’s the message you want to communicate. “Sorry, we listened. We are making it better.”

Naturally, if you have a great product, your toothpaste makes teeth brilliantly white, your book is a brilliant piece of literature, then social listening will give you the genuine testimonials of real consumers. Best of all, they’ll be testimonials delivered not necessarily by you, because let’s face it, how many people trust testimonials by marketers, but rather by consumers directly to consumers. All you had to do was make sure that a) you have a good product and service and b) you are in the right places having the right conversations and supplying the kind of content people need to understand and believe in your product.

For the past three years, I have become a huge advocate of using the Internet as a way to create dynamic, lasting business change. There is a phenomenal amount of corruption, incompetence and greed in the corporate world, with AIG being just the latest example. If one were to compile a comprehensive global list using a 12pt font, it probably would be a mile and a half long. And toping the first tenth of the list would be much of the global banking, hedgefund trading and other financial industries that have so screwed up the current global economy. So while government’s tinker with throwing good money after bad into a system that is either corrupt, incompetent, broken model or all of these, here are my own strategies for how business could be using the Internet as a way to rebuild what they have lost and are in danger of never getting back, consumer trust.  

Strategy 1: Implement a policy of total transparency

We are currently at the cusp of a fundamental change in business, and even political thinking. Customer activism and watchdog groups are growing apace. Each day, they get better at revealing corporate and government dirty laundry. Each day they seem to gain greater access to information that was once considered confidential and proprietary, either through various freedom of information government movements, or a near endless resource of existing and former company employees whose own loyalty and trust have been wiped out by a decade of loyalty-busting labour practices. Each day, they are grow in influence among an ever-growing cynical consumer base whose most powerful weapon is the easiest to utilize, to stop giving money to people obsessed with other people’s money. Their message: “if profit is your sole reason to exist, your days are numbered.” 

The time has therefore come to fundamentally rethink the notion that secrecy is vital to the successful functioning of business and government. The Internet should be used to publish information proactively. Useful information to publish will depend on the nature of the business and product. For some, detailed ingredients lists, along with explanations as to what each ingredient is, its health risks and why it’s used, are important. For others, cradle-to-grave environmental statistics and policies will be key. How much energy did it take to make the product? How much to ship and recycle it? What materials are used in packaging, construction, so on, and how are they collected and recycled and by whom?

When mistakes happen, CEO’s and business leaders need to get tougher skin, fess up and talk about immediately. Errors are forgiven. Customers are actually reassured to know that companies are human after all. Lies and obvious omissions won’t be forgiven. They will make it look like you have something to hide and customer’s won’t trust you, something they are more inclined to do anyway.

US footwear company Timberland provides a useful benchmark on product information transparency. Their product labels, which are designed like nutritional labels, indicate the name and location of the factory where the shoes were made, the amount of energy used in production and the percentage of renewable energy used. It even shows the percentage of factories assessed against code of conduct standards and the number of hours employees have volunteered in the community. When it comes to information transparency, it’s safest to err on the site of too much rather than too little.

Price transparency is also critical, while also being the most difficult part of total transparency to implement. In much the same way as Marks & Spencers exposed what was behind its labels to reveal its ethical supply chain, price transparency shows the real cost of delivering a product to the shelves. What percentage of the product’s total price is made up by sourcing, manufacturing, packaging and marketing cost? What are the margins for the seller and the manufacturer? For many marketers, this is indeed a bitter pill as few customers will support a 400% or more mark-up, especially on household necessities such as chicken and eggs. This is where having ethics at the core of the company’s business will really pay off. Customers are probably more willing to pay higher margins to company that gives 100% of its profits to charity, and less willing to pay the same knowing that profits will go to finance the purchase of a super yacht for top shareholders. If you are not sure you should implement price transparency because you believe that consumers don’t know your real cost, here’s a simple exercise. Go to Google and enter: “the real cost of product x” or “profit margin on product x” where product x is what you sell. I ran this exercise on the cost of a pair of £100 Nike trainers (£2 was the conclusion) and on a $0.99 McDonald’s Cheesburger (89 cents was the conclusion). Whether or not these numbers are accurate is irrelevant. Because they’re the only answers I found, they’re now the only answer I believe. So you can let consumers dictate what people believe is the truth, or you can be transparent and let them know the truth and use good business strategy and product differentiation strategies to justify your profit margin.

Increasing label sizes to communicate all of this information can be daunting for a consumer to read and even counter-productive as it increases the amount of packaging. A more environmentally friendly solution is to use QR codes. Essentially square bar codes, QR codes can be read by mobile phones and link consumers instantly to websites. Larger codes can even convey the needed data in the code itself. With Nokia starting to ship new phones with pre-installed QR code software, the technology is becoming a feasible alternative to labeling.

Strategy 2: Foster dialogue with stakeholders

Business partners are typically considered to be critical stakeholders. However, a growing number of corporations are realising that they can’t monitor their long supply chain alone and are starting to partner with watchdog organisations and NGOs. As independent groups, watchdog organisations are often more effective than the companies themselves at finding out what is really happening in their own supply chain. By using the Internet to provide open communications between the NGO’s, corporate managers and suppliers, companies can stay on top of any violations of its codes of practice and change suppliers who fail to live up to them.

Partnering with employees seems obvious, but 69% of companies surveyed by IBM don’t partner with their employees. These companies view employees at best as resources that can be cut from the bottom line to suit quarterly profit returns. This short-sighted and dangerous thinking has completely eroded employee trust. Through the own behaviour, CEO’s have taught employees to look after their own personal interest above the company’s. 

By creating internal web communities that connect employees and management around the company’s CSR objectives and initiatives, employees can be empowered to drive real corporate change and customer confidence. They can share best practice, discuss problems as they arise and create solutions. They can participate in the charity process or even help shape the way it functions.

Strategy 3: Empower your customers

The final strategy is to view one’s customer base as partners rather than consumers. As partners, the company needs to empower them with the ability to help define and drive the corporate agenda and business practice. This goes far beyond UGC, or participatory marketing. As with the second strategy, customer empowerment requires using web 2.0 tactics to involve customers in every aspect of the business. In practice, this means letting local customers define the community issues that are most relevant to them. It means letting customers voice their concerns about the way the company does business locally and globally. It means giving customers a conduit directly to the CEO or even to Board management rather than filtering their opinions through layers of corporate bureaucracy. Board level decisions are too far removed from the customers that keep their businesses running.

Just as the NGO and watchdog organizations can be partnered with to follow one’s supply chain, customers can be partnered with to follow one’s reseller and sales network. Not all outlets will act in the best interest of the brands it sells. By encouraging customers to report overcharging or questionable service bundling practices, companies can reign in rogue sellers and protect their own customer base.

In short, the more information, control and involvement one gives to customers, the more likely are they to remain so for life. For involved customers are committed customers. And committed customers are far less likely to quite on you when times get rough or migrate to your competitors for a promotional gain. By involving and empowering customers in such a core, critical fashion, you generate a loyalty that far supersedes anything currently experienced by today’s loyalty programs.

Further reading:

http://www.prweekus.com/Profit-transparency-top-consumer-study/article/123629/

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/1801.html

http://www.clickz.com/2221951

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34101.pdf

http://www.gaspricewatch.com/new/default_V3.asp

http://www.corpwatch.org