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.
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:
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.” Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Am I really such an idiot that I have no clue what I want to buy until I’m actually on the way to the shops, or even in the shop? Are my lifetime preferences built up from so many £millions of brand-building budgets and personal experience and recommendations from trusted friends and family really going to be overwhelmed by a little promotional offer as I pass an aisle or a high street store?
Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, considers how customers are feeling about the data trail they are creating – and whether they’re starting to expect something in return…
Continuing our new weekly series, where Marketing Society editorial and social media assistant Maddie York corners members to pick their brains on film, Martin Hayward, former director of strategy and futures at dunnhumby, answers one big question: what are the ingredients for fantastic customer service?
Martin was cornered after the Marketing Society Question Time debate a couple of weeks ago.
Alan Mitchell reads the future of marketing, responding to a report by fellow Marketing Society columnist Martin Hayward commissioned by the Royal Mail.
Martin’s key point is that many long-standing obstacles to achieving communication efficiency and effectiveness are dissolving, basically thanks to the “digitisation of everyday life”.
That doesn’t mean the end of branding and brand building, but it does mean that how brands reach and talk to consumers is changing – towards “continuous and unobtrusive direct contact with customers”.
For me, the most important point in the article is “the end of proxies”. As Martin points out, proxy measures are necessary only where there are no hard data. Over the years, proxies have been getting more accurate but, by definition, they’re still far from perfect.
Common proxies include geodemographic data, psychographic segmentation, and more recently transaction and behavioural data. We need all of them – when they are fit for purpose.
But the new, transforming ingredient is the fact that consumers now have voice as well as choice: they can talk to brands and companies. So, the report suggests, the future basis of segmentation may turn out to be not where you live or what you do, but “what you choose to release”.
Martin Hayward, former director of strategy and futures at Dunnhumby explains how loyalty is diminishing.
I’ve mentioned my bank in previous posts – I’ve been with them for 30 years, joining as I headed off to university, and probably with a free student railcard or book token thrown in.
Statistically that puts me pretty close to the top of the pile of loyalty measures as defined by behaviour, but emotionally I’m in a very different place.
I don’t like my bank and I don’t think they’re very good, but I haven’t switched. There are two reasons for this. Firstly I’m not sure that the competition are much better, judging by the huge amount of media coverage of their mis-selling and frequent ineptitude. Secondly however, I have in the back of my mind a feeling that it will one day be useful to me to have been so loyal. If I do ever fall on hard times, the voice in the back of my head tells me that my loyalty will be rewarded and they’ll cut me some slack when I need it.
Of course, the other side of my head knows that this will never happen because the banking machine is built upon selling new products to new customers, I have no relationship with my ever changing ‘relationship manager’ and the risk algorithms that lie behind business decisions don’t value the cutting of slack.
Martin Hayward, former director of strategy and futures, Dunnhumby says the concept of ‘owning’ your customers is outdated.
The last few years have been a great time for companies and brands that have had good access to data about their customers, and the ability to turn that data into insight quickly. Fast, granular customer insight has proved to be a significant competitive advantage for retailers particularly, but also to many web-based and direct businesses with easy access to customer behaviours.
It is likely however that this competitive advantage may now begin to diminish as customer data becomes an ever more plentiful asset. The tidal wave of customer data that a modern life creates is now starting to reach such scale and detail that it is unlikely that any individual proprietary set of data will be able to match what is potentially available from third parties.
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#WLTM: Marketing Society Business Leader Paul Wilson, CMO, Sunguard http://t.co/xZYSkyovFebruary 3, 2012 2:39
@BrainJuicer: How Can Brands Show Us They Care? http://t.co/SoDI8XQnFebruary 3, 2012 12:13
@RobinHoughton Thanks for braving the cold last night and joining us @SohoHouse. We will send you another book to review for #bookclub soon.February 3, 2012 12:03
Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, discusses why the recession has led to personalised marketing being temporarily put on hold:
Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, considers how customers are feeling about the data trail they are creating – and whether they’re starting to expect something in return…
