3.0 Evolution: Chapter 2 – Co Creation

“The war is over. The people have defeated the corporation…  They are the ones who are in charge now.  They are using the Internet to tell companies what products to make or telling the world what a word means.  That’s when they’re not developing new products of their own and marketing them.”

This shift in power has been happening for the past few years, but as it moves towards the next decade, it will become more inclined and weighted towards the audience and hence, will change a few ‘rules’.

a. The customer will be a key determining party when it comes to the kind of engagement.

b. Companies especially retail, will need to now know their customers far better than ever (particularly those who rely on distributors and other channel partners, such as retailers, for customer contact, sales and delivery) – maybe they can go the B2B way where customer accounts and records are maintained with every detail through CRM processes and systems.

c. Brands must look at transferring the brand experience to the customer through relevant and planned communication across the key touchpoints i.e. mobile brand communities, diverse communication channels and digital platforms.

The key underlying factor here is ‘power to the customer’ i.e. the power of co-creation – customer and other customers and brands collaborating together to develop a joint output that is mutually beneficial to all within an environment that builds and leverages the brand experience.

Today’s youth is looking to empower expression, discovery and ambition. If brands can give them the opportunity to co-create through initiate involvement and engagement on different aspects it creates a sense of empowerment that leads to a positive inclination – channeling this need for empowerment in a positive direction by seeking their help to redesign and optimize processes, products, solve each others’ problems and even, business models in some cases.

Blurring the line between a brand’s objectives and those of the customers leads to an experience that is integrated and two-way – a win-win situation for the parties involved.

 

Brands must also credit this informed and aware audience with intelligence and be more humble in their approach. Customers think in terms of collaboration and story – major portion of their stories being experiences with brands. Brands must LISTEN and spot OPPORTUNITIES that come with the listening. Brands must encourage conversations and WOM – if nobody is talking about a brand, does it really exist? Is it on top of mind? And if there is a positive or a negative buzz, join and participate in the conversation, contribute and show them that a brand you do pay attention and will continue to pay attention to them as your customers.

 

4 key elements (Source: Maltoni) that will enable marketing co-creation and the subsequent level of engagement are:

a. Letting go of messaging and taglines: The best brand positioning strategies are holistic.  They are about a feeling and an experience and they transcend specific words.  And to enable true co-creation, customers must be able to put positioning in their own words.

b. Meeting on neutral ground: Marketing co-creation, in order to be most effective, means that customers and brands must interact on an equal footing.  Finding new opportunities for neutral ground, whether it is an online social-media platform such as Facebook or an offline music festival or sporting event, will facilitate this interaction.

c. Participating in customers’ channels and platforms: Whether it is a mainstream broadcast network channel, or a set of Twitter feeds, if customers are engaging with brands, the brands must be there, participating in the dialogue.

d. Embracing negative feedback as a critical component: Not only should you be open to negative feedback, you should embrace it and respond to it in a constructive fashion.  This is an opportunity, not a challenge in the world of marketing co-creation.

3.0 Evolution: Chapter 1 – A New Era

“If you think backward from the audience you’re trying to reach and the channels and methods you’ve used to try to reach them, it all argues for taking a much more integrated approach to the work of marketing and communications…” – Jon Iwata, Senior VP of Marketing and Communications at IBM.

In today’s day and age of crisis, competition and customization, companies are consciously and increasingly applying techniques from mass customization with personas, customer scenarios, and the like, to improve personalization of their marketing practices. The digital age allows for technology to manage, maintain and evolve this marketing discipline. But, these are still the nascent stages, where guess work w.r.t personalization still plays a considerable part and might result in costly mistakes, possibly due to misjudging customer scenarios and personas or the channels for interacting and connecting with a given persona.

As mentioned, with the advent of the new digital age, new technologies such as semantic analysis and social graphs are enabling the shift from 2.0 to 3.0, through exhibiting potential to not only get closer to the audience more than ever before, but also catalyzing true ‘co-creation’ of the experience. The power is now with the audience – who are the content and the conversation and hence, the communication. The audience will shape the experience together – with their individual networks and with brands/companies. This shared experience will be a partnership – an experiential partnership that will positively impact customer-brand engagement, leading to lower acquisition costs, increase marketing ROI, lower attrition rates and maximize value to increase share of wallet.

And web 3.0 techniques are the keys to realize this vision.

Connecting with the digital youth in the Middle East

Our region is still very new and hence, receptive when it comes to digesting content from companies. Comparing with the USA and Europe, where people tend to treat every mail received from companies as spam, because of the bombardment of information, the people in our region pay attention to each mail and read every mail. They are intrigued by engaging colors, layouts and content.

This translates into the online and digital medium as well.

Information receipt and information exchange is getting more popular in our region.  WOM, Viral and Buzz marketing have an audience in the MENA region – even though the concept is in its nascent stages, the audience is present. They are looking more and more to the online space for information about brands, products and services.

The right strategy is to tap into the right customer segments and introducing these concepts to them. The MENA audiences love a social, community life and hence, believe in a culture of togetherness. Maximizing and utilizing this culture and getting together trend through the WOM and Online/Digital medium can generate the desired buzz, awareness and engagement.

YouTube & Facebook are one of the top and most popularly visited sites in the region. For example, the growth of members on Facebook is astronomical – in within the last year, the number of users in Lebanon has grown 399%, in UAE 704% and in Saudi Arabia 644%. Social networking, chatting and community interaction online is the in-thing – and the BIG thing. A major portion of the population is also accessing the internet via their mobiles. According to a study conducted by Maktoob, in the region, there are approximately 40 million users on the internet and this figure excludes mobile internet users.

Traditional and conventional web advertising is not sufficient to cut through the communication of competitors. The need of this digital hour is innovative, engaging and interactive communication – viral, digital WOM devices that should form a key component of the media mix for the audience. Thus, innovative and engaging WOM & Viral marketing is important to connect with the audience – building truly customized connections -  differentiating from the competition and getting ahead in the market.

Retail 3.0: In Store Activity

Hawkins Strategic has published a new position paper on ‘In-Store Activity’, the latest installment in its Retail 3.0 series (which examines the full spectrum of technology-assisted retail operations), addressing an area in retail that has long been a black hole: how shoppers interact with products in the store itself.

According to Sterling Hawkins, vice president for Hawkins Strategic, customers’ in-store activity represents something of a gap in most retailers’ customer intelligence, but technology is beginning to shine a light on in-store activity, providing tools to actually measure and manage these interactions for the first time.

The paper agrees that all stores already have the option to measure transactions, tracking the products flowing across their checkouts, and most stores have receiving systems, giving the retailer control over what goods end up on the shelves. Some stores have traffic counting systems, allowing them to measure the number of customers coming through the doors.

“But what happens between products flowing into the warehouse and shoppers leaving with them is the retail equivalent of a black hole,” argues Hawkins. “In fact, at best, retailers are able to measure only the periphery of what actually happens in-store.”

Category management is in place for many retailers, helping them to decide which products are on the shelves and how to price them, and great deal of planning and science can go into developing category plans. But executing such plans at the store level is always challenging, and often prone to breakdown in the dynamic store environment.

Despite attempts to reign in out-of-stocks through new technologies and store-level operations, these frustrations to both the customer and the store management continue to dog the retail industry. The typical estimate is that 8% of sales are lost to them, but Hawkins Strategic argues that the real figure is likely to be much worse: many shoppers simply leave the store – and all of their other would-be purchases – when a key item is not available.

The industry has long wrestled with promotion compliance, with many manufacturer-funded promotions being improperly executed at the retailer’s stores (whether its signs not being posted, special displays not being built, or new products not being cut in). New item launch assortment voids observed include major beverages (41%), major detergents (54%), major food items (46%), and even display programmes are subject to voids of up to 20%.

Many retailers have tried to fix this problem, and several firms now provide promotional compliance services. But, in the end, most of these are manual, labour-intensive processes (such as a person photographing certain categories, shelf sets, or displays). While these services deliver value today, the whole area demands an automated solution.

“Retailers also invest huge sums of money in store design and research to maximize the number of shoppers exposed to high margin products during their shopping trips but, at best, this is simply good guesswork,” said Hawkins. “The industry has no mechanism by which to accurately measure traffic flow around the store and conversion rates within aisles and categories on an ongoing basis.”

With a few exceptions, retailers do not know who their shoppers are at any given time while they are actually in the store – until the shopper is at the checkout, and even then this can only be retailers that have some type of loyalty programme or customer card.

As a result, new technologies are beginning to improve the level of insight available into in-store activity, and retailers have increasing access to the tools needed to measure and manage it. Brand manufacturers, which have steadily increased promotion budgets for in-store shopper marketing initiatives, have become focused on establishing some type of measurement so their money does not disappear into a black hole, as it has so often done in the past.

But it is not only brand marketers who are trying to obtain this level of information. Sophisticated retailers are now looking for technological solutions that will allow them to better measure and manage in-store activity, right through from store deliveries to promotion management and from shopper tracking to on-shelf availability.

These new solutions, Hawkins argues, will help to open up the in-store environment in real time, connecting previously disparate systems and beginning to share information in the Retail 3.0 ecosystem: “This is the vision of Retail 3.0: aligning interests and optimizing supply chain activity up to and including in-store activity, to maximize customer lifetime value (CLV).”

Courtesy: The Wise Marketer

Epiphany + Videos = Epipheos

One of the prominent trends these days in exciting, intriguing customers and triggering co-creation is the growth of viral videos. These videos need to be used by marketers as a medium to create a shared experience – to educate and enlighten – to be an illuminating discovery that is interactive, collective and collaborative i.e. an epiphany!

There are a few things that are as powerful as an epiphany. These illuminating discoveries can be leveraged as unique, engaging tools that serve the ideal mix of content, words, ideas and other key aspects of a brand experience to the audience in such a way that they arrive at epiphanies faster. An epiphany from a brand, when it finds you, should be able to transform the way a consumer/audience thinks and lives.

People also love to pass and share these epiphanies with their networks and peers through access to a variety of social 2.0 tools.

Check out this very relevant ‘video’ about “How the Internet is Changing Advertising” that gives a short history of communication and how the internet is a new medium that has gone beyond traditional rules and methods of communication.

a video that creates a shared video, a video that educates and enlightens