Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, explores relevant communications to consumers.
If there are any actuaries out there, (they’re the ones who found accountancy too exciting), I have a fun challenge for you.
As we enter the second internet boom and bust cycle, it would be telling to add up the amount of ‘personalised’ , ‘location based’, and ‘SoLoMo’(Social, Local, Mobile) revenues that are being predicted in the business plans of the current wunderkinds of the digital world, and to then compare this with the current total advertising spend worldwide. My guess is that for all these new business models to work, total advertising spend will almost entirely be migrated to mobile devices, which looks fanciful.
Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, looks at whether there is such as thing as being too relevant.
We are well on the journey towards the reality of marketing becoming able to deliver on its long held promise of accurately and consistently matching the needs of customers with the outputs of suppliers.
With more customer data helping us to understand and target more accurately, more ways to ‘Connect the dots’ to understand cause and effect, more ways to talk to customers and faster feedback loops all promising to rapidly accelerate the relevance of our marketing messages towards the ultimate promise of ‘the right message to the right customer in the right place at the right time in the right way’.
There will be no excuse for suppliers and retailers to not know who their customers are, what they buy and like, what they aspire to, where and when they shop, what type of offers they respond to and so on. The capacity to anticipate customer needs, reward them appropriately and to surprise them with relevance will know no bounds.
Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, discusses why it’s a great time to be a marketer.
It used to be simple. Build the brand above the line, and attempt to influence behaviour more directly below the line, nearer to the point and time of purchase. At its simplest the model for many was to blast the audience with brand building TV ads while at home, and then tempt with a good promotion in-store.
As the opportunities to influence consumer behaviour at new points in the purchase process begin to proliferate, we shall soon need a new discipline within marketing to assess at which point in that process we should attempt to nudge behaviour the hardest.
This is because the distinction between place and activity is fast blurring. Now that we can talk directly to customers wherever they are and they can in turn purchase many items direct from their PC’s, Smartphones and soon from their SmartTVs, it is getting tougher to know when to build the brand and when to go for the nudge to purchase. It is now becoming possible to nudge consumers with an incentive to purchase at home, on the move, at a specific location, before store choice, on entering a store, on passing an aisle in the store, at the till and so on and so on.
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.
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Martin Hayward, Founder of HAYWARD Strategy and Futures, explores relevant communications to consumers.
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…
