- The quote: “For Mercedes-Benz, its competition isn’t Audi, Lexus, or BMW. ‘We have to look at the best out there in customer experience like Nordstrom, Zappos, and Four Seasons,” Stephen Cannon, President and CEO, Mercedes-Benz USA said. “Those are our competitors because we know that our customers consume those experiences and they can take that experience from Four Seasons and that becomes their expectation walking into a Mercedes-Benz store. So shifting our focus against the real competitive set has been a bit of an eye-opener inside our company.” – Mark Johnson (Loyalty360)
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- Why it matters: Stephen Cannon wants to give his customers a best in class experience from the moment they like the brand on Facebook to the first time they turn the ignition in a Mercedes vehicle. In order to be ahead of its competition, Cannon knows the car company needs to strive for more than the other luxury brands to offer something different. This article in Loyalty360 is a great one because for Cannon, loyalty begins with buy-in from his employees across all dealerships and eventually trickles down to the customer.
“Often the lovers or haters of a product can be the canary in the coal mine.” – Jill Avery
- The quote: That’s fine if you only want to keep making incremental improvements to your products, says Jill Avery, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and a former brand manager at Gillette, Samuel Adams, and AT&T. “Traditional market research is all about studying the average consumer, which gets rid of the noise in an effort to study the majority of customers, but also gets rid of people who are potentially leading the category,” she says. “Often the lovers or haters of a product can be the canary in the coal mine.” – Jill Avery in an article by Michael Blanding (HBS)
- Why it matters: A company’s best and worst customers should be held at a higher esteem than the status quo. These customers highlight the strengths and weaknesses of a brand in ways that help dictate areas to build on as well as areas of improvement. The average customer is often a fickle one, choosing a brand out of convenience or promotion while the advocates of a brand are often invested in a company’s success. Choosing to listen to the customers who love or hate a brand is the key to better understanding it. The canary in the coal mine should always be the goal.
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- The quote: “Only 38% of Facebook user wall posts were responded to by US brands in June, far below the 65% threshold considered “socially devoted.” (MarketingCharts)
- Why it matters: Brands need to hear this and hear it well, responding to fans is the most important thing a brand can do on social media. It’s proven that more brands engage with fans, the more they will return to re-engage with that brand community. Fostering conversation in this manner not only encourages communication, but it also breeds advocacy.
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- The quote:“1. Put the relationship ahead of the sale.Early in the call, Block admitted that he was switching to a different provider. Lower price? Better options? Block doesn’t say. But if the rep had left him feeling warm and fuzzy about Comcast, there’s at least a small chance he’d have considered switching back if the new service proved unsatisfactory. The odds of that now are zero.” – Minda Zetlin (Inc.com)
- Why it matters: Every customer counts. Tech journalist Ryan Block, a nine year customer, asked Comcast to cancel his service this week and the results were painful for the internet provider. In a call that lasted upwards of ten minutes, Block was repeatedly spoken down to, argued with and disrespected by Comcast’s “retention specialist.” What this shows is that the sale is more important than the experience to company. The odds of Block returning as a customer would have been much higher had his experience been painless in canceling and returning his cable box. Now? Millions of people have been made to feel his pain and look sourly on the brand. The brand’s reputation continues to tarnish in a storm of bad customer service and net neutrality lobbying and has truly become a lesson in failing to understand that every customer matters.
- The quote: It’s more like a series of statistics that really stood out to us on this post from We Are Social‘s Deniz Ugur. Here are the most impressive ones.
- 37% of CMOs believe that digital will account for more than 75% of marketing budgets over the next 5 years
- 27% of CMOs believe that earned media will be more important than paid media over the next 5 years
- 42% of CMOs believe that analytics skills will become a core competence in marketing
- Why it’s important: Those numbers are not nearly high enough. For only 42% of CMOs to believe that analytics will be a core competence in marketing tells us that the weeding out of the truly digital brands from the cement molds that companies unwilling to embrace change have become. Be the digital brand. The ability to understand and react to your customers is of too much value to pass up.
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