It’s about customers, not brands

Brand strategies. A 360˚ view of the brand. Brand engagement. Brand management. Brand identification. Brand reputation. Although marketers claim to do nothing but service the customer they spend most of their time focused on the brand. While the growth of brand management has done much to elevate the sophistication of marketing, it has – to its detriment – shifted focus away from the customer. Let’s face it, the very reason that businesses (and indeed brands) are in business is to serve the customer. It’s as simple as the economic bedrock of supply and demand. Supply (read businesses or brands) exist to serve demand (read customers).

Brand managers need to refocus their view of brands. In the age of brand or marketing-led companies there needs to be a return to the basic business fundamentals. In essence, brands are simply tools for building long-term and profitable relationships with customers. However, while brand management may have stolen the spotlight from customers, technology is putting it right back.

The marketing department of the future will include two key functions or areas of specialisation, which in some smaller organisations may be represented by one person. Enter the era of the brand champion who is also the customer segment specialist. While branding creates a synchronised whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, customer segment specialisation ensures that all parts of the whole are completely focused on knowing, understanding and meeting customer need. This is where technology plays a crucial rule.

Previously the sole preserve of the information technology (IT) department, software solutions will play an increasingly important role in marketing departments as brand executives seek to help build the bottom line through customer understanding, intimacy and delivering on customer need. That’s where smart technology steps in to build speedy yet exacting segmented profiles of customer sets. The right technology can do a lot to help build long-term relationships with customers to improve profitability in the long term by enhancing customer loyalty and retention.

Without technology there’s the temptation of using a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to branding with subtle market variants. Technology is so exacting that it enables marketers to segment different levels of loyalty and brand affinity within a customer base and create a strategy for enhancing each accordingly.

Because smart technology enables multiple customer views of segmentation, marketers can slice and dice their database according to bespoke criteria that have been chosen by them because of its importance to the brand strategy. Once marketers start understanding the profile, and the needs and behaviours of customer segments, they can develop marketing campaigns to communicate the brand message to their target audience via traditional media or through digital media. When using digital media as a preferred channel, the right technology solution will show marketers which channels customers prefer to be communicated through (web or mobile, for example). The right technology should also report on whether e-mails are read, replied to or whether email addresses are no longer relevant so the integrity of a marketing database is ensured.

Its one thing understanding customer segments and talking to customers, but the silver bullet is matching customer profiling with customer spend and involvement with your brand. Smart technologies should allow marketers to capture and compile data on customers at any touch point, such as point-of-sale systems, web sites, events, and call centres to determine levels of loyalty, brand affinity and potential lifetime value of individual customers.

Once individual demographic information on customers and their interactions with a brand are captured across every possible channel, marketers can begin to accurately identify their brand’s most valuable customers in order to reward and stimulate increased spend and involvement with the brand.

The biggest headache in marketing has been the mystery 20 per cent, the 20 per cent of your customers who generate 80 per cent of your revenue. Now if only marketers knew what 20 per cent that was. Smart marketing technology never needs guesswork and will deliver a crystal clear picture of your most valuable customers with revealing business intelligence reports. So your marketing becomes much more cost-effective as you begin to “market to your best customers first, your best prospects second, and the rest of the world last,” to pull a quote from John Romero, co-founder of id Software, developers of popular first person shooter games like Doom and Quake.

As brand and marketing managers seek new solutions for responding to times of economic crisis and feel greater pressure to deliver to the bottom line, technology can become their best friend. Technology can help brand and marketing managers become adept customer segment managers who build profitable, long-term relationships with customers to build business growth.

Jon Jacobson

managing director, Global Vision