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Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, discusses why the recession has led to personalised marketing being temporarily put on hold:
It must be very confusing being a student of marketing at the moment.
In the lecture theatre and in the business press there is widespread excitement at the stream of news and analysis proclaiming that it’s never been easier to target marketing at individual consumers.
New streams of data, new devices and channels and new media services are all supposedly creating the opportunity to get the right message to the right person at the right time in the right place. We are told that the snipers rifle is clearly going to usurp the inefficient old days of wildly blasted shotgun messages.
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Posted: January 12th, 2012 | Author: Leah.Latimer | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: Customer Champions, Hayward strategy and futures, Marketing Blog, Marketing Society blog, martin hayward, recession, targeted marketing | Leave a Comment »
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Mark Sherrington, Marketing Society fellow and director at Brandtone, discusses customer satisfaction.
I was thumbing through a French car magazine last week and was interested by a regular feature they do on levels of customer satisfaction for various car models. The methodology was clearly explained – a decent sample of owners were asked to evaluate their cars based on 10 questions covering most aspects of quality, reliability and economy. The results are aggregated and an overall percentage given for some 40-50 cars.
Two things struck me. Firstly, all the cars scored more than 70%. Yes, modern cars are all pretty good these days, not like the 70’s when some cars – sadly the British and Italian ones for the most part – were so poor they would have got scores similar to the approval rating for an outgoing Italian or British Prime Minister. But the second thing that stood out from the tables was that no car got more than 78%. Not much of a spread. That is largely due to the methodology – aggregating lots of views over lots of criteria will give flat results. So would you change your choice of car based on this survey because it scored 3-5% less than an alternative model but both scored between 70% and 80%? I doubt it.
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Posted: November 24th, 2011 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: Brandtone, customer satisfaction, Mark Sherrington, marketing society fellow, social media | Leave a Comment »
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Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, discusses the impact of an individual’s comment in a volitile stock market.
A couple of weeks after my last post (Is it time to share the pain?), which argued that in tough economic times, customer loyalty can be more important than City loyalty, I was pleased to hear the following comment from the CEO of Tesco addressing the IGD on October 11th:
“Sometimes you need to put aside the pursuit of profit in a market in order to get in tune with the nation. We’re absolutely committed to doing what we can to help customers by cutting prices on the nation’s shopping list”
Although it’s hard to isolate any individual effects in a volatile stock market, the comments didn’t seem to generate any great comment or more importantly have any direct impact on share price as the chart of Tesco price for October shows:
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Posted: November 10th, 2011 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: CEO, Marketing Blog, martin hayward, tesco, Volitle stockmarket | Leave a Comment »
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The narrowest strip of land between North and South America is Panama,
It’s only about 50 miles wide.
But it’s wide enough to separate the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
For ships, this meant sailing thousands of miles south.
Then through the terrible storms at Cape Horn.
Then thousands of miles north again.
Obviously it made sense to dig a canal across this strip of land.
The French didn’t see it as a problem.
Especially as they’d just built a canal twice that long through Egypt. The Suez Canal.
They thought if this was half as long it should be half as difficult.
And in 1880, Ferdinand de Lesseps began building.
But it wasn’t half as difficult.
It was much, much more difficult.
Men began dying from malaria, a problem they hadn’t had in Egypt.
Because Egypt was a desert, whereas Panama was a jungle.
So there were many, many more insects everywhere.
Since insects were obviously the source of malaria, the brief was also obvious.
Stop them crawling onto the beds and biting people.
The solution was ingenious.
Insects can’t crawl across water, so use it as a barrier.
And they dug trenches around their tents and huts, and filled them with water.
And in the hospitals they placed a saucer of water under the legs of each of the beds.
And it worked.
Every morning the saucers and the trenches would be full of dead insects.
So why were people still dying of malaria?
It made no sense.
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Posted: October 11th, 2011 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: Dave Trott, Malaria, Panama Canal, The Suez Canal, wrong brief, wrong solution | Leave a Comment »
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Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures discusses consumerism.
When times are good in consumer markets, it’s easy to get away with being both the consumer’s and the city’s friend….and times were good for a long, long time…so we’ve got used to the schizophrenic nature of corporate reports. It was possible to boast of significant growth in revenue and profitability on the one hand, but also to use offers and promotions to assure the consumer that they were getting a good deal too.
But it’s different now, and the foreseeable future for the UK consumer is one of great pressure as wages fail to keep pace with inflation, unemployment remains high and economic growth remains muted as the deficit is repaired. As the CEO of the Co-op said today: “I’m normally an optimist but I can’t find anything to be optimistic about when I think about the economy. When you look at the fundamentals, you have house prices falling in value, people’s jobs are under threat and inflation is eating into real incomes.”
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Posted: August 26th, 2011 | Author: stuart.treasure | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: consumers, Customer Champions, marketing society, martin hayward | Leave a Comment »
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In theory Apple, Google and others can – without your knowledge – monitor your behaviour and use this information for sinister marketing purposes. Everything you read or do, everywhere you go, everyone you know, can be fed to conniving marketers and used to manipulate you and sell you stuff. Mark Sherrington talks permission based marketing
In 1948 George Orwell wrote about a world in which every aspect of your life was monitored by Big Brother for the sinister purpose of manipulating your behaviour. He set it well into the future – 1984 – which as it turns out was 6 years before Tim Berners-Lee gave birth to the world wide web, that useful bit of technology that has made Big Brother a potentially very exciting marketing tool –weapon if you like. With a little retrospective irony, in 1984, Steve Jobs and his agency Chiat Day used Ridley Scott to make the ad to launch the Apple Mac based on Big Brother, without knowing that its potential would only be fully realized by access to Big Brother aka the interweb aka Google.
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Posted: August 1st, 2011 | Author: stuart.treasure | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: big brother, Mark Sherrington, marketing society, permission marketing | Leave a Comment »
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John Gilbert, business analyst from JGFR on consumer confidence, exploring the high public demand and interest for London 2012 Olympic tickets.
Just what is happening to the cash put aside to meet the expected envelopes notifying millions of people that they were to be part of the London Olympics?
Strangely there is little in the news about this aspect to the ballot procedure and the impact on spending and savings.
In the GfK/ JGFR London Olympics Barometer carried out last March 17% of adults intended to apply for 2012 tickets, with over a third of adults in London and the South East likely to bid. In March and September 2010 similar ticket application intentions were found.
Demand for tickets was always set to be huge given most people would send in multiple ticket applications. Overall 20 million applications were received for the 6.6 million tickets. While only people who registered could apply it is likely that millions of people were unable to register and apply at the last moment as the system overloaded.
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Posted: July 18th, 2011 | Author: stuart.treasure | Filed under: Customer Champions, Uncategorized | Tags: 2012, Consumer Confidence, financial research ltd, JGFR, john gilbert, London, marketing society, Olympics | Leave a Comment »
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I have long been troubled by hearing the interweb and all things digital referred to as “New Media”, and especially the use of “Social Media” as the collective for blogs and social network sites. My problem is with the word ‘Media’ and I admit it may be a generational thing. Media creates a very particular mindset if you entered marketing any time in the last century. You pay for Media, it works by interruption and is generally one way.
We used our brand budget (traditionally 60% of it) to get loosely targeted people to listen to something we felt would win their hearts and minds when they’d rather be doing something else – watching a TV show, reading a magazine or just concentrating on driving their car. Oh I know we tried to make it entertaining and our message had been honed by discourse with a few people in focus groups but nevertheless when it came to media, the more we paid the more we could make people listen.
We spent a bit on PR – Public Relations – but not much in comparison to how much went on media. It would be nice to think we could sit down and have a chat with people, get to know them and let them get to know our brand but how many could we reach this way? One 30 second TVC in Corrie and we’d reach almost everyone. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 13th, 2011 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: Mark Sherrington, social media, the marketing society | Leave a Comment »
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Martin Hayward says it’s time to redefine what we really mean by good customer service
I’m beginning to wonder whether our understanding of what constitutes good customer service is going to have to undergo a redefinition, as there seems to be potential for a growing mismatch between what companies and brands believe is good service, and what consumers really fundamentally want.
Talking to older consumers is illuminating as they remember a more local, personalised era of consumption that was slower, probably less efficient, but generally a nicer human experience. Today the onus is less about the experience, but more about the efficiency – speed, choice and minimal face time.
There seems to be a real shift occurring from right brain satisfaction to left brain satisfaction. This is clearly reflected in the metrics of ‘customer satisfaction’ dominated by wait times, transaction length, number of complaints etc. This is understandable as our lives have become commercially busier and more focussed on consumption. The benefits of choice, and value and speed have to date outweighed the declining pleasantness of the interactions.
But where will it go from here? Either the next generation of consumers will accept that there is no time for small talk and pleasantness in dealing with companies and be happy with the cost benefits of this, or maybe we will see a growing demand to be treated as a human being rather than a transaction.
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Posted: July 7th, 2011 | Author: elen.lewis | Filed under: Customer Champions, Customer Stream | Tags: Customer Champions, customer service, martin hayward | Leave a Comment »
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The field of Behavioural Economics has been developing some fascinating insights on how we humans make decisions. According to Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning behavioural scientist, we use two very different mental processes, or systems, to make decisions.
System 1 is perceptual and intuitive; it’s fast to react, automatic, associative, effortless and learns gradually over time. System 2 on the other hand is slow to react, effortful, analytical, rule-governed but flexible enough to assimilate and process new information. Studies have shown, however, that our capacity for processing information using System 2 thinking is very limited, and so for much of our decision making, we tend to go with System 1: gut instinct.
This has some fairly profound implications for how we think about advertising. The traditional view is that, in order to be effective, advertising needs to communicate a rationally persuasive message that gains the viewer’s conscious attention. But if behavioural scientists have taught us anything, it’s that many of our decisions and judgements are actually made using the intuitive System 1 gut-feel approach. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: June 22nd, 2011 | Author: will.armstrong | Filed under: Customer Champions | Tags: behavioural economics, brainjuicer, Daniel Kahneman, Orlando Wood | Leave a Comment »
Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, discusses why the recession has led to personalised marketing being temporarily put on hold:
