How an Insight Community Creates More Effective Brand Marketing

Transcription

1 How an Insight Community Creates More Effective Brand Marketing

2 This is the age of the empowered customer. The relationship between brands and customers has changed. Customers, empowered by the internet and influenced by social media, are more savvy about the products they buy and expect companies to listen to their opinions. As many business leaders have learned, the empowered customer won t hesitate to abandon brands that refuse to engage and make changes that satisfy customers demands. As a result of this power shift, effective brand marketing has become a vexing challenge and more important than ever to earn customers attention and loyalty. A brand is a living entity. It is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures. Michael Eisner, former CEO of The Walt Disney Company. 2

3 Brands both big and small, established and young want to launch better products, create more effective marketing campaigns and provide a better experience for their customers. The changing customer-brand dynamic has made it much more challenging to reach, connect, and maintain strong customer relationships through traditional marketing efforts alone. Brand marketers are challenged by: A change in buyer journey consumers now hold the power. Increased competition and a rapid commoditization of new products. Changing media consumption, making continuous and valuable customer engagement difficult. Evolution of brands and products, which has created complex brand and product portfolios. 3

4 To conquer these challenges, marketers need to build a meaningful and authentic connection to customers. Today s consumers are no longer willing to accept inconsistencies between the image a brand projects and the reality of what it represents. A recent study by the PR agency Cohn & Wolfe revealed that customers expect brands to be honest and authentic. Authentic brands recognize what they are, what they do best and what customers value most about them this understanding ensures your marketing investments drive ROI, continuously form strong customer relationships and nurture customers into brand advocates. An authentic connection to your customers allows you to improve your marketing campaigns. You can: Identify growth opportunities and recognize emerging trends nimbly, 4

5 effectively capitalizing on them to expand the brand and drive growth. Confidently set your brand strategies and ensure your investments hit the mark with customers proving the ROI of your marketing budget. Consistently launch successful campaigns that strongly represents your brand and resonate with your customers. Optimize channel strategies. Accurately understand what your brand means to customers. This is all possible with a Vision Critical insight community. An insight community is designed to help your company face these challenges by enabling you to make data-driven, customer validated decisions at every stage of your marketing strategy. 5

6 In the following pages, we demonstrate how an insight community can help you be a more effective marketer as you work through the challenges you face in your brand marketing planning, strategy and executional efforts. 1. Identify Growth Strategies One of the biggest challenges for marketers is to recognize emerging trends and capitalize on them to expand the brand and drive growth. Marketers miss many opportunities by relying on general syndicated market reports/brand trackers or outsourcing market research projects, which are increasingly ineffective, slow and expensive. With an insight community, you gather continuous feedback on emerging trends, directly from target customers. A community will give you a thorough understanding of the competitive landscape 6

7 and an accurate measure of brand awareness and perception. It will help you to uncover market trends before the opportunity passes. An insight community allows you to: Map the brand landscape to identify areas of competitive strengths and weaknesses and unmet market needs. Develop a deeper, progressive understanding of your customers and hone in on the brand traits that matter most to them. Combine the data generated from your community with external sources for a more reliable view of valuable target personas and market segments. Gain a comprehensive understanding of which segments are likely to create the strongest connection and positive perception of your brand marketing 7

8 efforts ensuring you connect most effectively with brand advocates. Understand where customers truly find value in your brand. 2. Validate Brand Strategies Traditionally, brand marketers have relied on instinct when designing and launching campaigns. Instinct, built on years of experience or based on creative genius, was all you had to tell you if an idea would effectively connect with your customers. But instinct can lead you down the wrong path. And that wrong path can prove expensive to your company. Consider what recently happened at the department chain J.C. Penney: Ron Johnson, the company s CEO, attempting to reinvigorate the chain as a fashion-forward, hipper brand, alienated long-time customers. His mistake, based on gut-feel, provides an 8

9 important lesson for marketers and clearly An insight community validates your instincts with actionable feedback and hard data. With an insight community, you no longer operate in the dark, and can make brand strategy decisions with confidence. It helps you leverage the collective creativity and experiences of target customers to generate and identify winning ideas and reach target customers with resonant, authentic messaging and campaign ideas. An insight community allows you to: Quickly and easily test the appearance and perception of your brand strategies often with results in days rather than months. Test and iterate around message, positioning, promotion and creative in order to determine your best approach to reach customers. 9

10 Easily reach the same customers for additional feedback building a more precise understanding of customer wants and needs. Ensure consistency in your marketing communication by developing your brand campaigns with the same customers who screen ideas. Track and test with these same users throughout the buyer journey to get additional insight on the evolution of your brand. 3. Launch Successful Campaigns Building a solid branding strategy is half the battle. Next, you need to ensure that strategy is effectively brought to life in a brand campaign. Successful campaigns supporting product launches, advertising 10

11 or content marketing require a thorough understanding of customers. You risk damaging your brand if you invest in campaign messaging and creative that misses the mark. In the past, marketers made campaign decisions by relying on gut instinct or the feedback from small customer focus groups. With a Vision Critical insight community, you benefit from scalable feedback from thousands or tens of thousands of your customers to validate campaigns. An insight community allows you to test messaging and ads, and execute campaigns that get noticed and build brand affinity. An insight community allows you to: Generate and refine ideas quickly, capture customer feedback earlier, and invest in the most effective initiatives. Test brand campaigns for effectiveness before making a costly investment. 11

12 Obtain direct in-market feedback from customers to understand baseline brand attributes and monitor changes over time Assess new partnerships. 4. Optimize Channel Strategies Customers expect a seamless end-toend experience across every channel in person at bricks-and-mortar stores, through mobile and websites, and with customer support. Managing strategies for every channel poses a challenge and an opportunity for marketers. Most marketers currently allocate budgets for campaign and advertising promotion across different channels based on general market reports and past performance. Investment across different promotional channels doesn t maximize impact, and proves difficult to measure and tie back to meaningful and 12

13 actionable results. With an insight community, your most engaged and valuable customers help you to understand changing consumption behaviors and make confident investment decisions in different channels. An insight community allows you to: Build a better understanding of channel consumption behaviors and make the most confident investment choices. Gain actionable insight to optimize campaign promotion spend across different channels, getting you the results you desire. Adjust and refine your channel strategy quickly, saving you thousands of dollars and giving you meaningful, iterative feedback to act upon. 13

14 Conclusion The age of the empowered customer presents complex challenges to marketers. Today s buyer journey is led by the customer, a shift you can t ignore if you want to drive brand growth and continuously plan and execute effective marketing strategies. Many traditional sources of intelligence don t deliver contextual understanding of customer pains, values and aspirations. They re also slow, not providing you with the timely, actionable feedback you need to resolve issues and act on brand strategies. A Vision Critical insight community equips you to deliver remarkable brand strategies and the most effective marketing initiatives. It will also enable you to collect and share insight that can benefit your organization far beyond your marketing ROI. With feedback from an insight community, you can confidently launch marketing campaigns, build brand awareness and deliver success. 14

15 Customer Intelligence in Action: ELIZABETH ARDEN Elizabeth Arden, one of the world s most recognized names in beauty, got a makeover. Consumers now expect its makeup lines to have the skin benefits of wellness products. The brand needed to accelerate product innovation and develop a closer relationship to buyers. Elizabeth Arden found a solution in Arden Insiders, an insight community of more than 4,000 women who arm the company with the continuous feedback necessary to make quick, strategic business decisions. Traditional research often leaves you with a report and quite a bit of guesswork on next steps beyond that, says Kara Langan, the senior vice president of global marketing. Arden Insiders allows her to identify consumers in new markets, get to know their wants and needs, and put them at the center of business decisions. For example, consumer feedback has directly influenced the company s choice of models, concepts and copy in marketing campaigns. The brand now engages with consumers at every stage of the marketing cycle. Consumer feedback influenced a change of direction for Elizabeth Arden s gift-with-purchase promotional program, the company s most important sell-in vehicle every year. This insight allowed the team to justify its decision to regional partners, who in turn used the data to entice retail partners to participate in the gift-withpurchase.says Balladares. 15

16 Customer Intelligence in Action: ESPN ESPN, to remain the go-to source for sports coverage and stay nimble in a world of fastevolving media trends, needed a reliable and rich source of intelligence about its multi-platform audience. The company s solution was to launch ESPN FANography, an insight community of dedicated sports fans who provide ongoing feedback on everything from marketing and ad campaigns to program content and media usage. The FANography insight community includes mobile users, TV viewers, print magazine readers and ESPN Radio listeners. It gathers actionable intelligence to guide the highly specific needs of various ESPN departments. The ESPN Audio Sales team, for example, needs to know where listening occurs, how terrestrial radio listening compares to streaming and podcast listening, when certain means of listening are preferred and how engaged listeners are with content and commercial breaks. Armed with user behavior insight, ESPN Radio can better serve its audience, advertisers and clients.. ESPN wanted to know whether the inconsistency of the jersey colors of NFL players depicted in Monday Night Football promotions confused viewers. The company invited NFL fans in FANography to participate in a rapid-fire response test to identify team jersey color associations. ESPN, discovering that fans preferred the home jersey colors for most teams, reworked future promotions. Members of the insight community saw their feedback having a direct influence on decision-making at ESPN which reinforces their personal investment in the brand. 16

17 Customer Intelligence in Action: FRED MEYER In the high-stakes grocery game, gaining a clear understanding of customer motivation is critical. But what happens when there s a gap between what customers say they want and what they actually buy? Fred Meyer, a superstore chain with millions of customers across Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska, closed that gap with an integrated approach that utilized real-time mobile engagement, deep customer profiling and shopper data. They launched FMconnect, a secure and engaged online community of over 15,000 customers, to interact with and learn about its customers. FMconnect has been crucial in helping fuel decisions concerning store design, merchandising, marketing, products and services throughout the company. FMconnect has enabled the company to combine behavior and purchase data from transactional systems and overlay it with customer attitudes and intentions for critical product segments. This allows for more specific and targeted marketing and merchandising. Recently, the retailer made merchandising adjustments to its garden center based on feedback from FMconnect and, as a result, saw a 10 percent increase in customer ratings. Fred Meyer has also been able to develop marketing with insight from FMconnect. The Fred Meyer FMconnect community is a fast, efficient and innovative way for us to gain actionable insight from our customers. The customer feedback we receive through FMconnect spans the business and enables us to be one step ahead of other retailers, said Jeffery Temple, director of customer insights marketing and merchandising at Fred Meyer. Through FMconnect we bring our customers into our decisions, resulting in real business profit there is no other technology as powerful. 17

18 Vision Critical s software gives you valuable feedback from a trusted community of customers, helping you make data-backed decisions when you need them most: throughout the product-customer lifecycle. BETTER PRODUCTS Drive smart product building Generate winning ideas Build customerinformed market knowledge BETTER END-TO-END EXPERIENCE Drive business results Make CX scores actionable Optimize the customer journey BETTER CAMPAIGNS Build impactful messaging De-risk go-tomarket strategies Optimize campaigns with customer feedback WATCH THE DEMO /demo