Written by Paul Avery, Business Development Manager, San Francisco, ICLP

Having recently attending the Social Media & Mobile Strategies for Travel event in San Francisco, I noted many discussions based around the possibility of achieving lifelong loyalty in today’s increasingly promiscuous, price-sensitive and deal-driven digital world. It has never been more evident that mobile device proliferation and the social media phenomena of recent years will continue to have a strong influence on the ways in which brands engage with customers. Especially within the travel industry, understanding how these areas can transform marketing strategies or even business models is key in differentiating in a competitive environment and ultimately developing longer and more profitable relationships with both new and existing customers.

Some of my key takeaways from the event:

Understanding the mobile consumer

• More than 50% of US travellers are now browsing for travel on mobile devices and 15% are actually booking via their mobile device, making it vital for travel brands to optimise their mobile experience to support how consumers find, buy, experience, and review a brand

• With mobile hotel booking rates poised to overtake PC bookings and even mobile flight booking reaching 15% of overall bookings, it has never been more important to get right to ensure brands in the travel sector secure their share of mobile commerce growth market which according to Forrester is predicted to reach $31bn by 2016 in the US alone

• Effectively measuring, improving and maximising mobile ROI is proving challenging to all but the savviest travel brands.

Making the most of user generated content

• A monumental shift in consumer marketing is taking place with the declining influence of brand communication and travel consumers are increasingly turning to friends, family and third parties for recommendations, reviews and brand/product insights

• From moderating and responding to consumer reviews to blogger and influencer outreach programmes, word of mouth and user generated content is a growing and valued marketing currency. There is increased importance for marketers to understand and implement influencer marketing programmes to generate trusted word of mouth

• Understanding how to use into this content to feed into co-created content for proactive marketing campaigns is growing in importance for travel brands – now with the ability to tap into the invaluable collective experiences of travel consumers, rather than the more insular marketing model.

Achieving social success

• 50% of direct travel bookings are reported to have been generated originally by social media in 2012. While many travel brands are able to track some or all over the booking conversions from social media platform, the debate of how social media ROI measurement and accurate attribution rages on

• Despite almost 65% of US travel brands claiming to have increased spend in social media strategy in 2012, the overwhelming majority also admitted confusion and/or inability to effectively integrate and manage their strategy across existing corporate structure and culture. The resulting internal conflicts, brand inconsistency and missed revenue opportunities begs the question of how to effectively manage and ultimately monetize social media as a channel

• Although some travel brands are able to see a direct correlation between social media click through’s to bookings, others still have a blurred view. Rather than aiming to directly drive sales, perhaps the focus for social media should be to drive consumer engagement, provide information about the brand and create a network of brand ambassadors

• With the dizzying array of existing social platforms and new ‘Facebook contenders’ emerging daily, it’s vital for brands to analyse their social investment decisions and ensure that valuable time and resources are focused in the right areas to achieve social success for your brand. Moving beyond Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, many innovative travel brands are now engaging and converting customers on channels like Pinterest, Instagram and Google+. Whilst not specific to travel, ICLP’s research with Forrester highlighted that US brands need to better balance their efforts in social media channels especially as they are over-delivering against consumer expectations in this area which are also not core channels in driving loyalty to that brand.

Today’s traveller is time-starved, increasingly digitally savvy and still highly price-sensitive. Brands that fail to harness and utilize the vast amounts of customer data generated on social media sites and unwillingness to expand business models effectively to cater for the mobile generation could see their hard-earned loyal customers of days gone by fall prey to their competitors.

Written by Gunjan Kumar, Sales Director, ICLP Mumbai

ICLP recently attended and sponsored the Loyalty Summit, a 2-day conference in Mumbai, India. The strategic loyalty marketing event is now in its 6th year and brings together multi-sector B2C brands to focus on customer engagement and loyalty marketing strategy.

Following our attendance and speaking session at the event, Gunjan Kumar, Sales Director for ICLP Mumbai shares some key take-aways from the conference and offers some insights into loyalty in India.

The Loyalty Summit

As the only dedicated event for loyalty marketers in India, the Loyalty Summit  was attended by loyalty practitioners, CRM, Social Media, eCommerce and technology specialists. It was really encouraging to see that brands from the public sector such as BPCL, HPCL and ACC were present together with private players like Jet Airways, Dish TV, Shoppers Stop etc. The conference also drew some new younger companies like Games 24X7 and Fun Cinemas who stand out with their customer engagement programmes. The summit brought together varied industry experts covering retail, telecoms, logistics, travel and entertainment.

State of the industry

Loyalty in India is still quite fragmented, with the differences between engagement strategies, acquisition strategies and pure play loyalty programmes still not fully understood. However some pioneering brands are leading the way with engagement strategies and loyalty programme launches,so brands and customers are progressively increasing their understanding around the advantages. Instant benefits are the order of the day with loyalty programmes in India and several retail (Hypercity, More Supermarkets, Aditya Birla Group) and telecoms players (Airtel and Vodafone) now driving the market in this direction. Indian consumers are also now ready to pay to be enrolled into an appropriate loyalty programme which previously was not the case.

Technology plays a big role in delivering next generation loyalty programmes in India. These programmes are built on new mobile and social media platforms. With India’s core population within the 18-35 year age group, these new technologies have flourished and brands want to build on this momentum.

A good example is a frozen yogurt company who are using mobile devices to sign in customers as they walk into their store and offer them instants points on their purchase. On completion of 12 transactions, the 13th transaction is free for the member. The highlight is not that the 13th transaction is free but the fact that the programme has instant enrolment on a mobile device - which also creates excitement and engagement with the walk-in customers.

Social media is also being used significantly to drive customer engagement and loyalty in India. Almost every brand now has a social media strategy and you see more and more offers and promotions being delivered through social media channels. The importance of developing consumer communities is becoming more prevalent through either social media or other engagement techniques. Communities can foster strong brand advocates and become a medium for customer acquisition and ultimately brand loyalty.

Many organisations are also talking about 360° loyalty - not restricting loyalty just to the customer level but looking beyond to inspire loyalty in your vendors, employees and distributors - which will ultimately influence customer loyalty.

Beyond today

In the last few years brands in India have taken baby steps towards creating customer affinity and customer reward programmes. It is becoming increasingly important to really develop and invest in established customer engagement and loyalty strategies. The market is slowly evolving, customers now understand the principles behind loyalty, there is technology now available for brands to implement even basic loyalty points engines to facilitate efficient programme set-up and launch.

A key challenge is for those organisations who don’t have designated in-house resources for loyalty management as the focus remains on core business strategy.

We highlight some key insights for India on what is most important to consumers in driving their loyalty and where brands fail to meet consumer expectations, in our recent global consumer research in association with Forrester Consulting. To download a copy of the research click here or for further information, contact Gunjan Kumar on gunjan.kumar@iclployalty.com or call on + (91) 22 6134 2206.

Written by Stephen Hay, Regional Director - Asia Pacific, ICLP

Playing games is in our DNA; we cannot help but like it. As children, it’s how we learn and practice engagement with our peers and adults. And as grown-ups, the corporate world is full of game-play techniques as we war-game and role-play our way through work. Airline pilots spend much of their time playing multi-million dollar flight simulator games. A word we are seeing more and more is gamification. What does this mean for the customer relationship?

So what is it?

Gamification is the use and adoption of game techniques and mechanics in non-game applications to engage users and solve problems. While it has broad application in a number of fields, for example, education, brand building, and science, we are seeing some of the most rapid adoption and development in the management of the customer relationship, CRM, or customer loyalty.

There are elements of games that we are all probably familiar with. These include:

• Game design and architecture
• Points – awarding, redeeming, trading, gifting
• Virtual currency
• Achievement and recognition badges
• Achievement levels
• Leadership boards
• Visual progress bars and other cues
• Character development and interaction

Potentially all of these have a role to play in the management, development, and delivery of the customer relationship.

Is this new?

Possibly not. It can be argued that much of customer loyalty is one big game, particularly the recognition programmes offered by airlines and hotels, where customers earn coveted status and benefits from flying more and sleeping more. Check out any of the popular travel forums and you will find members displaying their elite status as proudly as any Foursquare mayor.

But programmes also understand that they need to learn and do more. One of the most ubiquitous elements of games is to unlock new levels as the player progresses and achieves performance goals. This approach is starting to be lifted into customer loyalty programmes where benefits and rewards can be “unlocked” as the customer reaches spend or performance goals. This provide a new, intelligent, and more dynamic mechanism for the customer to work that little bit harder. And with the widespread adoption of games and apps, the customer is fully familiar with the concept and is fast to adopt.

What about rewards?

Traditionally, reward programmes have offered their customers more tangible rewards, for example, free flights, electrical gadgets, and cash vouchers. These are great, but they cost money and sometimes take the customer too long to save up for. This can lead to disengagement. We are starting to see the appearance of games themselves as being used as rewards for points collection programmes.

AeroMexico offers a game platform as part of its reward proposition including allowing members to wager their miles for additional rewards.

Gambling is not for every culture or jurisdiction, but there is no denying its appeal to consumers or for the reward programme with the obvious economic benefits of burning off that point liability for as little as  the cost of a server and a bit of electricity.

Just rewarding sales?

The introduction of virtual rewards, typically used in multi-player game environments, opens up the opportunity to reward non-purchase customer behavior and low-margin spend. Allowing new brands and verticals to move into consumer rewards, where cost, tracking, or margin has traditionally excluded them, for example, FMCG and media. Ifeelgoods is one example of a number of emerging platforms that look to offer digital rewards to a brand’s customers.

An interesting convergence where loyalty, education, and gamification come together is from educational publisher Primary Mandarin. Their Mandarin Matrix, an online classroom that helps children to learn Mandarin, using games and loyalty techniques to motivate, reward, and encourage progress.

Where do I start?

Some ideas and pointers for getting started:

• Apply principles, don’t copy: Don’t just copy Angry Birds; apply principles of game techniques to your programme. For example, a simple status bar on your website will help to visualize a customer’s progress
• Test and trial: Research and test new ideas. Digital platforms allow us to precisely measure performance and in today’s more transient world disposable is OK
• Small can be beautiful: We do not need to build a huge and complex platform that takes people months to complete and can be very hit and miss. It might even act as a distraction. Small applications strategically placed along the customer journey may work well
• Brand and customer specific: With many programmes feeling much the same these days, use the gamification experience to differentiate and truly reflect your brand and your customer profile
• Use games to educate: Much of our business can be complex for consumers. Games are a great way to walk customers through procedures and educate them about brand and products
• Make it social: If you can enable peer interaction and introduce peer-to-peer engagement, this can support recruitment and make activities more sustainable
• Ethics and laws: Tread carefully with issues such as promotion laws, gambling, and incentives to kids or for controlled products such as tobacco or alcohol. These need to be carefully considered across all the markets in which you operate
• Consider virtual rewards: Cannot afford real-world rewards? Develop virtual rewards, either your own or rewards already in circulation in the online world.

For a long time I was somewhat dismissive of games as being something of a niche activity with little mainstream consumer application. However, the numbers speak for themselves. Every morning, on my daily Tube ride, I make a point of counting the numbers and profiles of people playing games on the train. Niche it is not.

Game on!

Written by Stuart Evans, General Manager, ICLP UK

How do you build loyalty in a world where brands no longer own and control their own messaging? A world where — like it or not — consumers share information, insights and opinions on social media platforms 24/7.

Traditional approaches still have their place. However today’s loyalty strategy goes beyond the transaction. Social interactions are becoming the new currency. Many brands are playing catch-up, evaluating how they can mine valuable social data and use it to re-evaluate how they best engage with customers in these and all channels.

New expectations
Today, customers have a 360 degree view of your company. They expect to have an ‘always on’, consistent, value-added and interactive multi-channel customer experience. In today’s digitally-connected society, weekends and evenings are times when customers are looking for information, sales and service. Engaging with them during normal office hours is no longer good enough.

Many brands have struggled to keep up with the increased scrutiny and round-the-clock demands from their customers. Some have made mistakes — witness the number of loyalty programmes where an associated Facebook or Twitter presence has been created in a hurry and then left dormant. Offering points for “likes” or cash for checking-in will create interest but brands should be clear at the outset as to how they intend to use that information and drive genuine engagement.

Social influence
So brands must respond to the needs of their customers – be there, and be engaging – wherever those customers are. If you apply the 90-9-1 principle of social engagement (passives – editors – creators), it is the 10% of active participants who present the greatest opportunity to influence the 90% of spectators who consume brand or user-generated content. Passive consumption of media is still vital in contributing to brand perception, improving levels of loyalty and prompting purchasing decisions.

According to research by Bain and Company, customers who engage with your brand via social channels spend 20-40% more with you. Moreover, those people that spread the word about your brand are a significant catalyst for growth and should be recognised — not just those that buy.

With this in mind, the challenge is to establish loyalty strategies that create value for both the brand and the consumer, regardless of their channel of interaction. The opportunities for generating valuable data from social channels are huge and greater still, integrating this with relationship data across all channels. The key question brands need to keep asking themselves is how do we look through our customer’s eyes? And by customers we don’t just mean the people that buy from you, but the ones that interact with you at every touchpoint, 24/7, and share their experiences across the digital landscape.

Reward and recognition are still fundamental loyalty drivers; but brands who do not embrace customer experience and social engagement do so at their peril.

Written by Stuart Evans, UK General Manager, ICLP

As the internet levels the marketing playing field, brands that lack real differentiators are finding it tougher to compete, and harder to capture the customer’s attention with compelling reasons to click, engage, decide, buy and recommend. This means brands now have to focus intently on their differentiated strategy. If they’re a discount or commodity brand then they have to lead with price. But, for all the others, that’s a quick way to devalue the brand; they need to protect their ability to command a price premium, push the aspirational value of the brand, and differentiate on the features of the product and the strength of the relationship benefits they offer.

Yield protection and maintenance is perhaps the most effective way to increase profitability, as no brand wants to ‘trash’ its retail price. In low margin businesses, a small gain in yield can have much bigger profit impact than a large increase in sales, so price or margin protection is the key, long term. After all, once prices are lowered, it’s hard to raise them again.

So what’s the practical answer? Simple. Go under the radar on price. Your retail pricing must always be maintained (unless you’re clearing redundant stock) but you can target discounts at individual customer segments, which avoids cannibalising existing sales. And these discounts, whether they’re done with special offers, newsletter subscriptions, or complex segment-specific pricing strategies, are even more effective if positioned as a ‘relationship benefit’ attached to a loyalty programme. You can use these loyalty rewards to target different customer needs with discreet ‘under the radar’ preferential pricing - for example, a bundle deal or reduced rewards points redemption pricing.

But today’s consumer wants immediate benefits, so ‘Save and collect’ is no longer the game they want to play. It’s instant gratification they want. Digital currencies like Microsoft Xbox Points allow instant access to various services, benefits and even in-game features, while social currencies like Linden Dollars for Second Life and the EBay Plus Points trial proved the value of virtual currency that could be turned into cash or discounts. Moving on from their success, they have announced their recent partnership with Nectar using their points as a ‘currency’ which can earn and redeem Ebay purchases.

I see the big wins in this space coming from virtual currencies that create unique and sustainable value for customers, using gated digital content and other virtual assets as a reward. And because it’s all individually targeted, it takes place under the competition’s radar. They’ll never know what hit them.

Written by David Langton, Luxury Specialist, ICLP

After recently attending the Walpole Luxury e-Business Forum in London, it was clear to see that luxury brands are still grappling with some key issues in and around their use of digital, and in particular social, as part of their overall marketing mix. It stimulated some interesting thoughts and discussions – most notably around the use of Facebook – and a big question still remains around delivering real, tangible value (i.e. revenue) back to brands.

There was no magic answer from the Retail Industry lead at Facebook or anyone else for that matter – engagement has value of course, but ultimately marketers are still searching for the justification that social activity has a direct impact on the bottom line.

Luxury brands need to use digital media increasingly more to target affluent consumers

Looking back 7 years, Facebook had only just been born. Only the true pioneers of digital were trialling how social media could support their businesses – luxury brands took a long time to embrace digital and become comfortable with it. It is understandable why this was the case – to hand control over their most precious asset – their brand reputation – to the public was a big leap of faith.

Today, many luxury brands are considered to be at the forefront of digital – for example Burberry, Mr.Porter and Oscar de la Renta. However the key consideration for luxury brands then is the same today. How to build brand awareness, advocacy, engagement and enhance the luxury experience online without diluting their brand values, ethos and reputation.

Similar concerns were voiced at the Walpole event – even today brands are still cautious about how they are represented in digital media, and primarily social channels. There seems to be conflict between those who believe social is crucial to building direct customer relationships and those who think it makes the brand too accessible to consumers who cannot necessarily afford to buy their products. Usually a battle between the brand marketing traditionalists and the digerati.

Some other key take aways:

- There were some good examples of social engagement. Sephora have been particularly savvy when it comes to digital and social. They built strong customer engagement via reward mechanisms such as their 15 days of beauty ‘thrills’ and Fan Fridays, where they offer exclusive make-up tips and beauty gifts to fans only on Fridays, and a Facebook app which allows customers to spin a wheel to win random prizes. The brand has proven itself to be a leader in the social space, with digital think tank L2 assigning it a “genius” Facebook IQ.

- Technology in store – affluent consumers have a much greater expectation that brands will provide mobile or tablet technology to store assistants, who will have greater ability to recognise them on a more personal level – and thereby really demonstrating the art of ‘clienteling’.  For example Neiman Marcus offers an ‘Associate’ app (called NM Service [dl1] ) that enables customers to engage personally with their in-store assistant. The app lets customers create wish lists around their favourite collections, receive alerts about exclusive in-store events, and communicate with their regular sales associates. It also gives the sales associates access to things like purchase history and Facebook photograph identifications when their most frequent, and loyal, customers enter the store.

Bridging this gap between online and in-store, and reacquainting themselves with their original  shopkeeper ethos, will become increasingly more important to luxury retail brands over the next couple of years.

- Employ social on your own terms – although Top Shop might have been the brand that stood out on the ‘luxury’ agenda, Justin Cooke their new CMO (ex Burberry) gave an inspiring talk on the art of storytelling, and in particular how he and his team catapulted Top Shop up in the digital leagues with their 2012 London Fashion Week social campaign. By integrating Facebook’s open graph technology into their own campaign microsite they were able to digitally stream their live catwalk, but on their terms – not Facebook’s. They also incorporated some clever engagement tools – such as providing links to purchase fashion show soundtracks on iTunes. The results were astonishing – over 2 million web views and a significant increase in sales resulting in new lines selling out.

Although there is still a lot that luxury brands can learn from mainstream retail in their use of data and CRM, it is refreshing to see a case of retail learning from luxury. Nevertheless it will be interesting to see how Top Shop and others evolve their digital and social efforts – it continues to be exciting times for retail.

Written by David Langton, Luxury Specialist, ICLP

After recently attending the Walpole Luxury e-Business Forum in London, it was clear to see that luxury brands are still grappling with some key issues in and around their use of digital, and in particular social, as part of their overall marketing mix. It stimulated some interesting thoughts and discussions – most notably around the use of Facebook – and a big question still remains around delivering real, tangible value (i.e. revenue) back to brands.

There was no magic answer from the Retail Industry lead at Facebook or anyone else for that matter – engagement has value of course, but ultimately marketers are still searching for the justification that social activity has a direct impact on the bottom line.

Luxury brands need to use digital media increasingly more to target affluent consumers

Looking back 7 years, Facebook had only just been born. Only the true pioneers of digital were trialling how social media could support their businesses – luxury brands took a long time to embrace digital and become comfortable with it. It is understandable why this was the case – to hand control over their most precious asset – their brand reputation – to the public was a big leap of faith.

Today, many luxury brands are considered to be at the forefront of digital – for example Burberry, Mr.Porter and Oscar de la Renta. However the key consideration for luxury brands then is the same today. How to build brand awareness, advocacy, engagement and enhance the luxury experience online without diluting their brand values, ethos and reputation.

Similar concerns were voiced at the Walpole event – even today brands are still cautious about how they are represented in digital media, and primarily social channels. There seems to be conflict between those who believe social is crucial to building direct customer relationships and those who think it makes the brand too accessible to consumers who cannot necessarily afford to buy their products. Usually a battle between the brand marketing traditionalists and the digerati.

Some other key take aways:

• There were some good examples of social engagement. Sephora have been particularly savvy when it comes to digital and social. They built strong customer engagement via reward mechanisms such as their 15 days of beauty ‘thrills’ and Fan Fridays, where they offer exclusive make-up tips and beauty gifts to fans only on Fridays, and a Facebook app which allows customers to spin a wheel to win random prizes. The brand has proven itself to be a leader in the social space, with digital think tank L2 assigning it a “genius” Facebook IQ.
• Technology in store – affluent consumers have a much greater expectation that brands will provide mobile or tablet technology to store assistants, who will have greater ability to recognise them on a more personal level – and thereby really demonstrating the art of ‘clienteling’.  For example Neiman Marcus offers an ‘Associate’ app (called NM Service [dl1] ) that enables customers to engage personally with their in-store assistant. The app lets customers create wish lists around their favourite collections, receive alerts about exclusive in-store events, and communicate with their regular sales associates. It also gives the sales associates access to things like purchase history and Facebook photograph identifications when their most frequent, and loyal, customers enter the store.

Bridging this gap between online and in-store, and reacquainting themselves with their original  shopkeeper ethos, will become increasingly more important to luxury retail brands over the next couple of years.

• Employ social on your own terms – although Top Shop might have been the brand that stood out on the ‘luxury’ agenda, Justin Cooke their new CMO (ex Burberry) gave an inspiring talk on the art of storytelling, and in particular how he and his team catapulted Top Shop up in the digital leagues with their 2012 London Fashion Week social campaign. By integrating Facebook’s open graph technology into their own campaign microsite they were able to digitally stream their live catwalk, but on their terms – not Facebook’s. They also incorporated some clever engagement tools – such as providing links to purchase fashion show soundtracks on iTunes. The results were astonishing – over 2 million web views and a significant increase in sales resulting in new lines selling out.

Although there is still a lot that luxury brands can learn from mainstream retail in their use of data and CRM, it is refreshing to see a case of retail learning from luxury. Nevertheless it will be interesting to see how Top Shop and others evolve their digital and social efforts – it continues to be exciting times for retail.

Written by Stuart Evans, UK General Manager, ICLP

With the explosion of social media, loyalty has evolved. We shop differently, we interact with brands differently and transactions are very fast paced. The instant nature of social media means that when it comes to loyalty schemes, customers no longer want to accumulate points over a long period of time.

For this reason, it’s crucial that we separate the concept of loyalty from purchases, in this new era of relationships with brands. If a customer has to essentially pay to receive a benefit, then it is really no more than a bribe to keep them coming back. If a reward is free, it’s more of a ‘thank you’ for what they have already done.

This new behaviour brought about by social media, is creating new emerging consumer needs. The desire to be recognised, share opinions and information and the need to be part of groups is bringing a new ‘fourth dimension’ to loyalty marketing – building on the brand, product and relationship marketing it has been based on up until now.

“I want to be involved; I want to be social; I want to be seen to have opinions; I want to be seen to be doing good things”
– these customer needs have only truly developed in the last couple of years. As marketers, we have to understand what is driving those needs and look at social space alongside the other aspects of marketing.

This doesn’t mean we have to discount the traditional points and rewards based loyalty programs – we just need to build on them, as brands such as Play.com and Costa Coffee have done recently. Brands must find ways to reward customers for different types of interactions. Whether a fan consumes a brand’s content, shares it with others or creates new content for the brand, their interaction is valuable in different ways and should be rewarded.

We’re already seeing some brands realise this but it’ll be interesting to see how other brands follow suit in the months to come.

Written by Stephen Hay, Regional Director, Asia Pacific, ICLP

A recent Burson Marsteller Social Media Check Up reassuringly trumpeted that big corporations (Fortune Global 100 in their case) have truly embraced social media. Consider;

- 87 percent are using social tools and channels in one form or another

- 79 percent have YouTube channels, up 39 percent on the previous year

- 74 percent have Facebook pages, with a corresponding strong growth in the numbers of “likes” from users

All very impressive. But, are we for the most part missing the point about social media by adding it to the already long list of one-way communication and PR channels that we use to direct messages to our customers?

While there are some notably good exceptions, mostly consumer brands like Coca-Cola or what Nutella calls its kitchen table, a typical corporate Facebook page can be a pretty disappointing mix of:

- Press release-like statements about products and services

- Tired reproductions of marketing campaigns

- The ubiquitous “like” and “share” buttons

- Links to TV commercials that we have seen before

- Suspiciously positive comments from users

Social media is about facilitating peers talking to each other, sharing ideas, content, and creativity. Simply recycling marketing content onto social channels is a bit like those Lycra-clad drinks promoters that interrupt your conversation with a friend in a bar. They may be attractive, but a disruption none the less and it’s not going to end in a relationship.

We have an amazing opportunity with social media to engage customers and prospects differently. To give them a voice and to build a more sustained dialogue based on customers choosing what, where, and how they want to participate.

Building long-term engagement is important; this can only be done by offering choice and control and constantly building trust.

Burson Marsteller suggests that every corporate Facebook page gets an average of 152,646 “likes.” It could be argued that in today’s transient world, clicking on “like” is a pretty non-committal action and from that simple starting point, a whole relationship needs to be constructed. One that keeps the customer engaged and moves the relationship forward, deeper, and more profitable.

The nature of any digital tool or platform is that it allows us to measure almost everything customers do. Social content typically has a pretty short half life, as it slides off the timeline, but that is not an excuse for not measuring. Measurement lets us monitor, improve performance, continue to target and serve better content. This leads to greater relevancy, greater engagement, longer term relationships, and true customer loyalty.

There are those that have daringly taken peer-to-peer social developments to a new level. Consider airlines: having been slow into the social space, some are pushing the envelope. KLM’s Meet and Seat and Satisfly are initiatives that allow you to search fellow passenger profiles and then book into the seat next to them.

So how might we build more relevant and longer lasting relationships across the social spectrum – some pointers:

- Facilitate peer engagement and expression. Dialogues are two, even three-dimensional.

- Version your marketing to do special and different things on social channels such as Facebook. Make fans feel special for turning up.

- Look to facilitate user-generated content. Be the gallery that showcases the creativity of your fans and customers.

- While staying within the realms of decency, avoid the temptation to over-control things. A few negative posts are not going to hurt you and often encourage loyalists to jump to your defense.

- Customise from simple versioning of fan pages by interest or demographic to more sophisticated custom content serving.

- Don’t do creepy stuff. Companies like Facebook already have a fairly bad rep for privacy and encouraging stalkers and the ‘like’ isn’t going to strengthen your brand.

- Facilitate spontaneity. From fans and the brand, not everything needs to come out of the approved PR machine.

- Encourage interaction beyond feeble “likes” and “shares.” Quizzes, games, and surveys are all a good start.

- Respond to people. If they ask questions, try and answer them as you would if they called or wrote to you.

- Weave social interaction into a long term customer journey and corporate relationship model that goes beyond social channels.

Original post Clickz Asia - August 2012

Written by Stephen Hay, Regional Director, Asia Pacific, ICLP

The smartphone and other smart mobile devices, continue their march across the consumer landscape; with each new model upping the stakes for new functionality and the quality of its user interface. The mobile device is rapidly becoming a third hand for consumers, permanently attached to them and becoming an essential part of almost any interaction, be that shopping, travelling or socialising.

With so much going on and dangerously so much white noise in this space, what should consumer brands be doing to establish, maintain and grow stronger and more beneficial, genuinely useful, customer relationships across this exciting interface? Below, I consider some that we believe to be important from a relationship management point of view.

Simple things first

Before we all jump on developing more fancy apps and interfaces to social networks and the likes; a well designed mobile website would be a great start. Optimised for use on different sized small screens and that understands that needs on the go may be different from those at a desk. There has been a tendency to rush to develop applications in the past couple of years, when a mobile site would have done the job just as well. This has resulted in a certain amount of app clutter; we are starting to see competition teams and functions with client companies building competing applications, which is certainly not good from a customer point of view.

And let’s not forget that the phone is probably the world’s most successful social network ever. Before we charge off interfacing into the latest social network, consider those more widely accepted social tools already in the ‘dumbest’ of smartphones: voice call, text and email.

Embrace change, don’t fight it

Hong Kong’s recent Dolce and Gabanna street protests have died down, but there are still plenty of retailers that really don’t like the idea of customers taking photographs in store. This is understandable, but completely wrong. Every smartphone user carries a camera and according to the TNS Mobile Life survey growing numbers use their smartphone to compare, research and remember products when they shop.

Embracing change and understanding behaviour evolution, Best Buy has taken this behaviour a step further by actually adding QR codes to product labels in-store that facilitate the customer learning more about a product with their phone. The traditional retailer’s concern is that this only leads to customers switching to the lowest price, i.e., not your price. A valid concern perhaps, but brands that provide better, faster access to trustworthy information, via the mobile in this case, will end up building the stronger customer relationship over time.

It’s about love

The more rational customer motivators still have an important role to play: price, discounts, rewards and so forth. Indeed, we are starting to see rewards creeping onto mobile, location-sensitive programmes like TopGuest. But increasingly brands want their customer to love them.

Customer passion is always going to come from getting the basics right like having good products and good service. We also need to converge that with the right sort of relationship and real-life brand experiences. Apple Stores realise this, facilitating the “always-on” connectivity that only comes with mobile devices. In-store Wi-Fi is likely to become a future hygiene factor like air conditioning or man couches, needed to give your customer a basis level of experience. The mobile introduces the concept that when you are near or in a store you should log on and let the brand help you in a way that sometimes the retail assistants just fail to do. Looking for shoes, follow the augmented reality directions, want to know what sizes are in stock…point and click. Need help with fitting, just press here. The phone becomes a seamless extension to the entire brand relationship.

The interesting challenge here is to fully integrate the mobile device into the physical world brand experience both inside and outside of the store.

The new mobile media

Mobile is just one of the latest new media tools and channels that have emerged over the years. It is obviously different from things like TV, in that it is user controlled and far more interactive. Although it is worth noting that the TV of the future is going to look and behave a lot more like a smartphone than an old TV.

We all dream of coming up with the next mobile app that will go viral and consume the world, capturing millions of consumers making us new media owners. Probably someone else will, but almost certainly they will want to cash in on their success by getting the big brands to pay to participate in their new media. The benefit for the brand owners is access to new customers, either promotional or for acquisition. This suggests we should be looking out for these new killer apps that come and go, be better at understanding them and look to leverage them quickly to engage with customers or prospects.

A recent example of note is iButterfly, a fun AR game that lets you capture cute digital butterflies that turn out to be vouchers for things like coffee or baby formula. It takes advantage of people’s natural desire to collect, interact and swap.

While using these intermediaries is not a relationship in itself, it is an example of how innovative and engaging media is adopting the mobile space. Just like any traditional direct response marketing activity, the key next step in media use is to capture a response and contact from the consumer and build your own relationship from there.

Original post: Clickz Asia, June 2012