Marketing Advisor Blog

Do you listen to your ‘super-consumers’?

Earlier this week Eddie Yoon, a Principal with The Cambridge Group, posted an interesting article on the Harvard Business blog.

Yoon wrote that “in any product category, roughly 10% of the consumers account for more than 50% of the profits”.

His company calls them the ‘super-consumers’. The consumers that clearly know what they need and want, buy a lot of what they need and don’t mind paying more to get it.

Furthermore these ‘super-consumers’ are “passionate and engaged, sometimes even a little obsessive” as Yoon describes them. We guess you also have ‘super-consumers’ and are very glad to have them. We also guess (or at least hope) that you do everything you can to serve these ‘super-consumers’ who might be your best brand advocates. Or do we hope in vain?

Poor customer service in UK online travel sector results in missed rebooking opportunities

According to the latest eTravel Benchmark Study by eDigitalResearch, the online travel sector needs to invest more in online customer engagement if it is to encourage people to return and re-book.

With 94% of people researching their holidays online, eDigitalResearch believes that the travel sites that win loyalty will differentiate themselves on best practice customer service.

The survey explored the end to end website experience from first impressions to the booking process across 29 leading travel websites including cruise lines, cross-channel ferries, package holidays and airlines.

Price-quality defines customer satisfaction in service firms space in economic crisis

What’s influencing the satisfaction of customers of business service providers the most in these times of recession? According to Dutch research it’s the price.

The research, organised by Dutch business magazine Incompany and conducted by local researcher ‘Blauw Research’, asked the opinion of 4750 decision makers about their satisfaction regarding their business service providers.

Companies, that are known for high hourly rates, like corporate finance specialists, receive a lot of criticism the report says. Those with cheap hourly rates, become more popular.

No wonder that ‘big names’ such as McKinsey, Michael Page, ABN Amro Equity Capital Markets and ING Corporate Finance drop in the ranking of Incompany.

In times of recession, Incompany concludes, a correct price-quality ratio seems to be more important than ever for customer satisfaction in the service firm space. The report further found that especially the satisfaction about lawyers and notaries drops fast. It’s the first time in six year that a law firm is not leading the ranking of Incompany.

The service firms that get the best scores regarding customer satisfaction are banks. And that’s good news for these companies that have received a lot of negative press with the credit crisis.

For those who understand Dutch, visit this site, and click on ‘Incompany 100’ for information about the research.

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Improving the customer relationship delivers the best return

According to a survey of the ‘Chartered Institute of Marketing’, many marketers find that Customer Relationship Management operations generate the best results.

It’s an illustration of the fact that more marketers start to understand the importance and efficiency of improving the relationships with their customers but also of a more customer-centric approach.

Probably the results of the survey are influenced by the economic recession and a return to more conservative and risk-free forms of marketing, amongst which optimizing the return of marketing investment by focussing on existing customers.

An introduction to the (value of) the customer lifecycle

The lifecycle of a customer for a company starts when he is a potential customer and ends when he stops being a customer. Seems obvious. In the customer lifecycle there are many phases and there are many methods of defining these phases. In the end we need to have models and methods to understand reality and translate it from a business perspective.

Let’s take one approach: that of Jim Sterne and Matt Cutler, as published in 2000 in a paper called "E-Metrics, Business Metrics For The New Economy". This is how they divided the phases of the customer lifecycle (later other elements were added that were more based on the customer interaction):

• Reach: trying to get the attention of the people we want to reach. Simply said: who could be our customer and how do we get in touch with him.
• Acquisition: bringing the reached person, the prospect, into the influence sphere of our company and communication. A simple example: “hey, nice you visited our website or called us, can we please send you our monthly e-mail newsletter?”
• Conversion: that so important phase where the people we reach or have a more established relationship with, decide to buy something from us.
• Retention: trying to keep the customers and trying to sell them more (cross-selling, up-selling). “Hey, you just bought a printer, got that USB cable yet and that nifty photo paper?”
• Loyalty: we would like the customer to become more than a customer: a loyal partner and sometimes even a ‘brand advocate’. The customer that says to everyone how good the interaction with our company, how nice our employees and how fine our products are.