Welcome to MCorp.'s Brand Perspectives Blog.
Visit Our Company Website>>Spending Smart: Wooing the Right Customers
July 20, 2007
A waiter has taken flak from a table of elderly ladies during a two-hour luncheon. They’ve changed their minds, complained, reshuffled their orders, and made the server’s life miserable. When they finally ask for the check, he delivers it with the question, “Was anything all right?”
In direct marketing, few enterprises understand that it’s more profitable to market to your best customers than to attract the millions of potential customers who aren’t yet buying your product or service – or even those infrequent buyers.
Let’s pop open your database and take a peek at The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It may not be a nice thing to say, but in truth, most of us have a mix of all three.
• Your good customers are the ones who buy your product time and again. They tell their friends, family and colleagues about you, acting as spokespeople. You love these customers. If you could, you’d clone them.
• The bad customers are the ones that buy just once; then they just disappear. They’re often cherry pickers – they change mobile services over and over, lured by cheaper rates and bigger incentives; they hop from bank to bank, chasing higher interest rates and free toaster ovens.
• And the ugly customers? Don't get me started! They’re never satisfied. They’re never going to be. They cost more than they’re worth. Let them drift over to your competitors, and be thankful.
Successful companies identify and satisfy their ideal customers, doing everything they can to please and retain them. Simply stated, you should target most of your marketing to these best customers, developing relationships with them, bringing them closer to loyalty – and advocacy.
Example: A telecom operator in South India, struggling with high customer churn, planned to develop a blanket rewards and relationship program with mobile subscribers – but realized that rewarding all subscribers may not be the answer.
Why? The bottom 28% of their subscribers were actually eating up half the profits generated by the others, in operational and servicing costs. Another 12% did not generate any profits. And 30% were only slightly profitable.
By deciding to focus on this top 30%, the operator saved 70% of his marketing budget, and was able to retain 98% of these high end customers in a market that was witnessing over 50% churn.
Bottom Line: It can actually be more profitable to lose bad customers than to gain new ones! The Bad and the Ugly cost more money to service than they generate.
Retaining the right customers is common sense. And one day, it will be common practice.
Comments (0) | Posted by MCorp. at 12:35 PM | Permalink
Baseball Winds Up Its Branding Pitch
July 18, 2007
If you saw the Home Run Derby on July 9th or the Major League Baseball All-Star game on the 10th, you know that fans love this stuff –– and that branding plays a major role in corporate sponsorships.
San Francisco shined brightly as the host city and our AT&T Park took the spotlight for these two back-to-back events.
Which sponsors muscled up to flex their marketing dollars? Here are just a few examples:
• The DHL FanFest at Moscone Center offered five days and three floors of hosted souvenir shops, pitching, catching, and throwing exhibits that accommodated a few hundred thousand fans.
• Fans paid $100+ per ticket to watch glorified batting practice for the State Farm Home Run Derby, with the insurance company using gold baseballs with its logo for the 10th out for each participant. You can now buy the souvenir balls for $39.99 each on each team’s Website through www.mlb.com. The stadium had over 42,000 fans for this three-hour exhibit.
• The Chevrolet All-Star Game Red Carpet Show literally rolled out a red carpet along The Embarcadero to the ballpark with All-Stars Cal Ripken Jr., Tony Gwynn, and Willie Mays (among others) parading down the street in Chevy convertibles.
• MasterCard and Visa created special TV spots and newspaper ads for the game.
• Chevy also made a splash hit with its giant floating baseballs in McCovey Cove beyond the right field fence, also a huge logo baseball stuck in the mitt sculpture in left-center field, next to the perennial Coca-Cola slide.
• The game itself drew a huge TV audience at AT&T Park and a record San Francisco crowd for a thrilling game that went down to the last pitch –– and the final branded marketing sponsorship.
Comments (0) | Posted by MCorp. at 12:34 PM | Permalink
iMedia iBlitz: The iPhone
July 16, 2007
Steve Jobs has done it again. He launched his highly touted iPhone on June 29 with the global brand marketing machine that has truly set Apple apart from the competition.
This media blitz fed the ravenous appetite of the legendary Apple fan base, which camped out at his retail stores for days – coping with 90-degree heat, humidity and thunderstorms in New York City, and braving the conditions in other major cities worldwide.
And it again captured the magic in the bottle that Apple has created over the past few years with its $10 billion iMac business and its $10 billion iTunes/iPod venture.
Now, with an estimated 950,000 phones sold in just the first two weeks, Apple and its exclusive carrier AT&T are basking in the positive media glow of the initial product reviews, hoping to sell up to 14 million phones by the end of 2008 and become a major player in the cellular market.
Is Apple the only company that could have engineered such a marketing coup? Not necessarily. Behind the larger-than-life media blitz were some very basic, if pricy, elements:
• A PR blitz of major proportions that created story after story in newspapers, magazines, broadcast news, editorials, blogs, and more, so that Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and other media darlings became a footnote instead of a headline.
• An extremely strong TV demo showcasing the amazing capabilities of the touchpad all-in-one device containing an iPod, organizer, camera, email reader, Web browser, and phone with a horizontal/vertical screen.
• An integrated marketing program with print, outdoor, and digital ads -- in synergy with the TV spots -- to further propagate the Apple “too-cool, gotta-have-it” brand message.
So whether you own an iPhone, want to buy one, love reading the critics’ comments, or even couldn’t care less, there is no escaping the media snowball that Apple generated for its largest product launch ever.
On top of all this, Steve Jobs launched another major product the same day: “Ratatouille,” a Pixar-Disney movie about a rat that loves to cook. But that’s another Brand Perspectives success story...
Comments (0) | Posted by MCorp. at 12:33 PM | Permalink
What’s The True Cost of Customer Lifetime Value?
July 13, 2007
How often have you heard the phrase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)? According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia with over 1.7 million articles, it’s “a metric that projects the value of a customer over the entire history of that customer's relationship with a company.”
But even if you’re unfamiliar with this phrase, don’t ignore the dynamics of marketing to your base. Politicians do this especially well. But no one does it better than the TV networks.
A few years ago, ABC was in last place among the big three. But now, by giving its base what it wants, Disney’s network has runaway hits like Lost, Desperate Housewives, Dancing With The Stars, Ugly Betty and Grey’s Anatomy.
In fact, many companies totally ignore the impact that loyal customers can have, when the benefits of increasing it are so dramatic:
> A 5% increase in retention can create an 85% increase in profits;
> A 10% increase can translate to a 20% increase in sales;
> Extending customer lifecycles by three years can triple profits per
customer.
As you’ve no doubt heard, it's difficult to improve what we cannot measure. So it's even more difficult to accurately project how much you should spend to acquire, service and keep your customers if you actually don't know their value.
But it’s ALWAYS far less expensive to reach out and market to your current customers than to your prospective customers. That's why tracking your CLV will help you –– and your organization –– find, keep and profit from the right customers.
Comments (0) | Posted by MCorp. at 4:51 PM | Permalink
Branding Your Brand Equity
June 29, 2007
OK, let’s face facts. Managing your brand is paramount to any business. Right?
After all, it's the best way to boost its perceived value to your customers so you can drive brand equity, boost business growth, and increase profitability.
It was launched by the brand geniuses at Procter & Gamble in the early 1930s. But in today’s über-competitive marketplace with an increasing number of media channels ––digital, print, broadcast and mobile –– brand management is more critical than ever to product and corporate success as organizations attempt to communicate promises, build preference, and create other barriers to competition.
But brand management isn’t just about enabling multiple brands from a single company to compete in the same product category. You know that. I know that. Heck, even my kids know that with the Apple iPods or the Abercrombie & Fitch clothes they buy with their weekly allowances.
But building brand equity is even more imperative to organizations with just one single brand that must overcome the odds and out-market their competitors to create stronger bonds with their customers. This fact is key to the relationships between your divisions or product groups who are constantly cross-selling, up-selling, and trying to corral as many customers as possible within a branded family.
So whether your organization is large or small, multinational or regional, statewide or local, each article in Brand Perspectives can provide insights, guidance and counsel as you contemplate the various ways to manage ¬¬¬–– and grow –– your brand.
Comments (0) | Posted by MCorp. at 4:50 PM | Permalink