Brand Loyalty, Blogging and Contact Lenses

I have a recent experience with Brand Loyalty that I want to share.

For many years I have worn contacts and my eye doctor always subscribed the J&J Accuvue lens. Recently I changed eye doctors for convenience and insurance purposes and my new doctor subscribed a lens that provided more oxygen and would be better for my eyes. Long story short, I was not happy with this lens so my doctor put me in another brand.

During my trial of different brands, I had the opportunity to meet with our client at J&J who owns the Accuvue brand and most recently launched the Oasys brand. My company, Biz360, tracks trends and issues in the eye care industry as well as specific brands such as Vistakon's Oasys and their competitors. As I was discussing his needs in building awareness around the Oasys brand, I felt exposed in the brand of lens I was wearing at the time... A loyalty of reciprocity I value.

After 3 visits, my doctor finally gave me a sample of the J&J Oasys lens. Ironically, I felt it best met my needs. I have subsequently met with my doctor and we mutually decided this was the brand for me. Why did it take 3 attempts to get her to recommend this lens? It was clearly the winner in my eye comfort and overall experience.

I write about this because I wonder, did my loyalty to J&J drive me to this conclusion or did I truly experience more comfort with this brand? I believe I was objective through the process, as if I was part of a market research project. But, why did it take my eye doctor 3 tries before she recommended the Oasys brand? Did the other manufacturers offer higher margins? Spiffs?

The relevance here is brand loyalty. For whatever reason you feel an affinity to a specific brand, you will select that brand due to your loyalty. Depending on your personality and influence in your social circle, you could also effect others decision to select that brand. If that loyalty is broken due to product quality, customer experience or unreasonable pricing, that's when you turn a promoter to passive - or worse to a detractor. This may be the case with Shel's posting of United Airlines recently.

People attach to brands, your experience with the brand will move the barometer from these key loyalty measures. Mining blogs offers organizations the opportunity to get unfiltered feedback on brand loyalty that can guide strategy and effect future growth.

Are you listening? I expect my colleagues at J&J are....

Blogging and Customer Service

Customer Service Exposed!

One of the benefits of blogging is an opportunity to share personal experiences with a company's customer service. As a community of blog monitoring and measurement providers, we talk about how blogs provide insight into consumer opinion, trends and issues that matter, and protecting your brand. Monitoring blog conversations also offers a significant opportunity to audit the quality of your customer service and it's impact on your brand. Here are several key stories.

I recently had a conversation with Shel Israel where he subsequently blogged about Why Support Matters? Great conversation. You can see by reading his postings his experiences with Lenovo, washers & dryers, and most recently United Airlines/United Vacations. In his brief discussion regarding United on the blog, he didn't point out one of the most important points about his experience. While United Vacations is not a part of United Airlines, they do leverage the United brand. Consumers experience, both positive and negative, with United Vacations will reflect on the United brand. Consumers don't care about the organization structure, they care about the ability to meet their needs. Shel's run around United Vacations uncovered the disconnect between them and United Airlines (not the same company). It doesn't matter, he will likely avoid United anything in the future. Now that he has also blogged about it, what will this cost United in loyalty?

I also ran across a posting from Tim Dyson where he refers to the recent AOL service incident that a consumer recorded, posted on the Internet and subsequently ended up on CNBC. The customer service agent was fired, but what damage did AOL suffer by the publicity of this one individual? How many other consumers called to cancel their AOL subscriptions as a result of reading the blog or watching the segment on CNBC?

In a recent ClickZ article from Peter Blackshaw, he describes what he would do if he was asked to take over the call center. A veteran marketer and leading promoter of Consumer Generated Media, Consumer Affairs: The New Advertising Department, lays out a compelling story about how the customer service department should move beyond being a cost center to providing more strategic value in market research, advertising and word of mouth marketing.

Consumer generated media, blogging, social media, whatever you want to call it, provides an outstanding opportunity for customer service professionals to collect feedback on their service. After all, how many of those after the call surveys have been sent and what is your response rate?

While I don't think we will change the corporate structure to put call centers in the hands of the CMO, I do think marketing professionals have an opportunity to audit their organizations customer service quality and better understand the consumers total experience with your brand.

I will say again, it's the customers experience of your ability to live up to your brand promise that will determine success. In this age of consumer connectivity, word of mouth travels fast and far. What will your customers say about your brand? Are you listening?

P.S. Peter Blackshaw, if you are listening, please remove that obnoxious pink poodle from your ClickZ site. It's distracting and annoying. You have great insight to share and the poodle does not properly reflect your brand =)

Marketing in a time of mass change, Web 2.0 and accountability

I have spent most of my allotted blogging time in the past few days browsing the vast web of available information. There is so much out there, available for everyone to read. Consumer opinions about brands, thought leaders prospective on where the market is going, case studies of success and failure, and research on a variety of subjects.

My reading path started with people I know. Following my own blogroll, I found a number of links to blogs and research studies of interest. As I absorbed all of this information, it is obvious that the world of marketing is changing. The world of how businesses communicate with, and listen to, their customers is changing. How will this change the marketing function?

In a study by CMO Council, they found that marketers lack direct contact with customers. Another New York Times article "To Charge Up Customers, Put Customers in Charge" identifies opportunities for marketers to engage customers with the brand and help in designing relevant products. (Disclaimer: this link will not provide full text unless you have a New York Times login. This is a topic for another time. What do publishers do in this time of mass content availability? Why bother reading articles behind a registration page when so much is available to me for free?)

While marketers need to get closer to customers, there is this vast sea of information already available and being discussed on the Internet. Marketers should be required to get out there and find it, read it and participate in it. They should get out of the office, visit customers and employees to learn more about their organizations' ability to deliver on the brand promise. After all, that's what the brand promise is all about - a PROMISE to deliver value, to serve a need.

What is evolving is a more honest landscape. Companies will be held accountable to deliver the value promised. What is critical to success is how well does your organization deliver on the brand promise? Everyone is watching. No matter what advertising dollars you spend, what consultant you bring in to craft your value proposition, what PR agency you hire to take your message to market, the customer is in control. They have the megaphone to tell the world about their experience with your brand. Are you listening?

It's a challenging time in marketing with several factors.

* NEED FOR CUSTOMER INTIMACY. Get to know your customers. According to the CMO Council study referenced earlier, most marketers rely on their CRM systems to help them understand their customers, yet 40% rated their systems as "weak". Get out and talk to someone, even if it's only on the web!
* MEDIA FRAGMENTATION. The media landscape continues to change. Consumers are in control of how and if they consume advertising messages. TiVo, RSS, satellite radio and of course, the Internet, are disruptive technologies that is changing the way marketers get their message to market.
* SOCIAL MEDIA. The connectivity of consumers and the ability to easily publish your experiences for all to see, creates a brand free for all. Anyone and everyone can discuss your brand and with the push of a button publish their opinions globally to millions of "would-be" consumers.
* WORD OF MOUTH AND VIRAL MARKETING. How do you leverage this powerful consumer connectivity to spread the messages you want about your brand? How do you manage communication of messages you don't want in the market?
* THE AGE OF ACCOUNTABILITY. How do you measure everything you do and still maintain a "sandbox" to try new things? What measures matter most? (see my last posting)

I propose that marketers create a "listening" budget. Marketers spend nearly $500B in advertising annually, take 1% of that ($5B) and allocate a separate budget to listen to customers. As a benchmark, it is estimated that the blog monitoring market was $20m in 2005, we have a long way to go!

Before you tell the world how great your product is, listen to what customers will tell others. That's the marketing channel that has the most impact today.

Brand Building and Marketing Measurement

I have been talking with other marketing professionals lately about the challenges we face today in the "age of accountability". I completely understand, support and agree with the need to measure the effectiveness of your marketing investments. But does every measure have to be leads?

At a recent CMO roundtable dinner I asked a colleague about how they measured the effectiveness in other geographic regions, she very promptly answered "I know exactly how many leads they generated". At CMO Council Marketing Performance Measurement forums every speaker talks about how their efforts translated to leads and eventually sales.

What happened to building brand preference? Customer loyalty?

While I clearly understand that businesses exist to make money and that money comes from leads that turn into sales, what about the activities that create preference and loyalty? These activities happen earlier in the consideration life cycle and cannot be directly tied to revenue.

As marketers, have we succumbed to the measurement game and only offered up the easy metrics? The metrics everyone already understands. The metrics we can get out of the CRM system. Is this the only one that matters? At a conference in Las Vegas I heard Pat LaPointe of MarketingNPV state "measure what matters, not just what you can".

Don't you think that brand building investments translate to higher response rates in demand creation? Aren't you more likely to response to direct marketing campaign from a brand you know, and trust? Don't you think that interacting with customers and providing them value throughout the life cycle of their experience with your brand builds stronger loyalty?

This topic really came to light for me when reading Charlene Li's recent posting on blogging ROI (a must read). Who can argue that in a business where you sell the knowledge of your people, that communicating WITH your market is not a good thing? While Charlene is backing off the $1m number she threw out, I agree with her premise entirely! Blogging gives her a communication vehicle to share her insights in real-time, and more importantly she can collect feedback that will make her research more relevant to her audience.

Building brands takes a multi-discipline approach to marketing. This is especially true for start-ups where you are not only building a brand, but in many cases you are creating a category. This requires market education and continued communication about why the product or service you offer is better than the current state.

Can we find a way to appease the measurement gods, while staying true to our trade? Let's not get caught in the measurement trap and forget that building brands and creating markets require you to do things that can only be measured by how many people you have shared information with.

We MUST continue to find ways to attach marketing activities to financial outcomes. However, while industry accepted measures are developed, we need to continue investment in building awareness, brand preference and customer loyalty.

Today, I found a posting on the Blackfriars blog that stated "consumer must be brand aware, brand attributes must be delivered as a brand promise, and the brand experience must live up to the promise. Any break in the sequence is the difference between success and failure". This cannot be measured in the currency of lead generation alone.

The Adoption Curve of CGM and Blogging

This week I attended a few events that gave me the opportunity to talk with several marketers from different industries. What became clear to me is that there is a real difference in understanding of blogging and consumer generated media. While some of my collegues in the media analysis business may consider me a late comer, I have found I am representative of the next wave of adoption and still ahead of many marketers.

There were the early adoptors, mostly the technical community talking to one another, this seems to be the class of Robert Scoble. The word spread, creating a buzz about this new form of "consumer generated media" and thanks to companies such as Six Apart and Blogger, blogging tools were created for the common man (or woman). As critical mass formed on the Internet, marketers began to explore the opportunity of participating in and listening to this new media. Organizations such as Intelliseek (now BuzzMetrics) and Technorati began to show the world how consumer generated media can be searched, read and analyzed. The buzz amplified.

I'm part of the next wave. The wave of marketers that have been exposed to the opportunities presented by blogging and consumer generated media and facinated with the possiblities. Thanks to books such as Naked Conversations and conferences such as WOMMA, I have heard a number of case studies and learned much more about the world of consumer generated media.

As I talk with our clients (CMOs, VP of Marketing, and VP of Corporate Communications in the Global2000), many believe this is either a phase that will pass, or irrelevant to their business. This is especially true of B2B marketers. B2C marketers have the most to gain at this point and appear to be more serious about getting involved. Some want to figure out how to advertise in this new media, some want to participate and create buzz, and some want to mine blogs for consumer insight. There are several opportunities to participate and leverage this new space for competitive advantage.

One thing is clear, the majority of marketers are still trying to figure it all out or have yet to identify this as a priority. For those of us in the business of providing analytics on CGM, we must continue the education and push the adoption forward. Every talk I have heard on the subject recommends you listen first and then talk. We (Biz360, BuzzMetrics, Cymfony) provide tools to mine through 2 million + postings per day to collect the insight companies need on their brand perception, consumer trends, and competitive insight. This is a great way to "listen" when there is a great deal of content.

My company, Biz360, shares many examples of the type of analysis available on our site MarketIQ. This may appear like a self serving commercial message, but my intent is to demonstrate the power of analysis of this content and to move the adoption forward.

It's a new media landscape. One that will have profound impact on how we consume information. Everyone should be evaluating the landscape and deciding how it is relevant to your business. I suspect there are very few companies that will not find an opportunity to benefit from this information source. Use the Internet and you will find many stories and tips of how to get started. Good luck and please share your experiences with us along the way.

Don't Buy Mercedes

While the title of this posting may seem irrelevant to our industry, it's highly relevant and here's why.

First, let me just restate, don't buy a Mercedes. Three years ago I bought a convertible CLK320. Since I was 18 I had dreamed of having a convertible Mercedes. Once my daughter was old enough and finances were strong enough I finally got my car. Since that time I have found myself on a first name basis with the service department, in and out of service for one reason - Mercedes quality has definitely declined. While I could go on and on at the ridiculous things that have gone wrong I want to make this relevant.

Yesterday I attended and presented at the WOMMA Basic Training. When I arrived at the Hilton in SF my Mercedes trunk would not open, leaving my speaker notes and laptop locked inside my car! During the conference there was some debate on the measurement of word of mouth online vs. offline. One of the studies presented showed that 90%+ of Word of Mouth is offline. My collegue from Nielsen BuzzMetrics blogged about that last night .

When I got up to make my presentation I started by sharing with the audience my dissatisfaction with being a Mercedes owner, and suggested to the 100 or so people in the room that they not buy a Mercedes. I have also shared this with all my collegues at work and anyone who sees my "beautiful" car and says "how do you like your Mercedes"? You can imagine my answer.

So, while there is a large percentage of word of mouth that happens offline, until we find away to get an RSS feed from people's mouths it's going to continue to be difficult to measure it's impact on your brand. However, if you assume that the online conversations are a proxy for what is happening offline, you see the opportunity to better understand the perception of your brand and what is top of mind to your target audience.

If we use my Mercedes experience as an example, I would agree that the majority of my Mercedes bashing has happened offline. To Mercedes that means that this posting (and any other postings like it) represents only a fraction of the people that have been told "Do not buy a Mercedes". If they were smart enough to mine blogs for consumer sentiment, they may find the impact word of mouth is having on their brand and multiply that by at least 100 since one online conversation may translate into 100s of offline conversations.

This weekend I think I'll visit the Audi deal. Audi owners have shared nothing but stories of satisfaction.

Web 2.0, Virtual Communities and Global Neighborhoods

There is much discussion about the changes and opportunities created by Web 2.0. The Internet infrastructure combined with tools for the average user have created an environment where all of us can participate and communicate with others that share our interests.

This weekend my Father and I were talking about his role as President of the Rotary Club in his region. The challenge in today's fast paced world with both the husband and wife working is finding time for fellowship and participation in your community. Web 2.0 is enabling individuals to participate in communities and build relationships online, at whatever time of the day you find the cycles.

Reading blogs of individuals I will be meeting at the upcoming WOMMA conference gives me some insight into their latest thoughts and opinions on common topics. This will allow me to build more meaningful and relevant relationships.

So, my observation is that our online discussions enable more meaningful offline discussion and allow us the opportunity to build relationship and participate in communities we may not otherwise have the opportunity to be involved in due to the demands of our everyday lives.

Our competitor, Cymfony, announced a new initiative today called Influencer 2.0. This appears to be targeted at educating the market on the opportunities for listening to and participating in the Web 2.0 world. Given the lessons of adoption in PR Measurement, this level of education is critical to moving the market forward and increasing adoption. I look forward to the conversation.

Tribute to Fathers

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend the day with my Father. Even though he only lives 2.5 hours away, we don't do it often enough. I'm glad there is a "Fathers Day" that creates the need to make the drive.

My Father has had such a major impact on my life. He is still one of the smartest people I know. He tought me about business, politics, parenting, and life. And even at my age, he influences my thoughts and decisions.

He always has an opinion about almost everything. So, yesterday I set up his blog to share those opinions with everyone else. The power of word of mouth extends again.

Here's to all the Fathers I know. Remember the impact you have on your children.

Thank you Poppa for your wisdom! Now it's time for you to share it with the world!

Blogging, Web 2.0, Brands & Customer Insight

I am excited to join in this new community of blogging. I woke up this morning and started browsing my favorite blogs before my coffee or my workout. For those that know me, they know this is extremely rare.

As I browsed around learning more about this world, it has become increasing clear to me how important Internet discussions are to brands. In less than one hour I read about American Airlines, Microsoft , Lenovo, Dell , Google and Lego .

The opportunity for these companies to collect customer feedback and evaluate market sentiment toward their brand (and their competitors) is significant. Experiences with the brand, product feedback, and service experiences are discussed openly and offer so much for those companies interested in listening to the market. Today the market research market is $20B. Much of this is to collect consumer opinions, gain feedback on product ideas, and collect a better understanding of customer requirements. There is an increasing opportunity to leverage the web to accomplish these same objectives.

I also saw how video logging can put a human face on the biggest of brands. The Channel 9 interview with Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates was more like a home video than an orchestrated MSNBC interview. It "humanized" some of the biggest names in the technology market and made the news much more interesting to watch. For me, it showed the "softer side" of Microsoft as Ballmer talked about how he worked for Bill for 26 years and Bill has worked for him for 6 years. Clearly more than a professional statement, a statement of feeling.

After all isn't brand equity built on the feelings of a brand. The feeling of trust, the feeling of stature, the feeling of loyalty? Reading stories and watching interviews without all the production & packaging makes a brand real and creates feelings about that brand.

As for my own brand building efforts. I am on the journey. Today I found when I typed my name into Technorati, someone else blogged about a podcast I recently did with Jennifer Jones of podtech.net. Yesterday I received my first comment thanks to my new friend, Shel Israel. So far, my experience in this blogging world is a positive one. I think I'll keep on blogging.

Building Brand Equity in the Blogosphere

I just returned from an event where Robert Scoble and Shel Israel (authors of Naked Conversations www.nakedconversations.com) shared their experiences and vision regarding blogging and other social media. It was entertaining and informative. I asked Robert about how you build readership on your blog. He described what sounded like a journey over a few years of participation in various social media. The question I still have is how does an unknown blogger (like myself) build readership and brand? Robert had the benefit of the Microsoft brand halo and being one of the first in this new media, but what about the rest of us?

I read the book, I'm practicing the art, I'm asking the experts, so time will tell whether I get the results. It will be helpful as I meet with other marketing executives dealing with this same issue. If you have brand awareness & site traffic, you can leverage your existing assets. For those building a brand, launching a new company or new product, how do you leverage this new medium to build awareness, advocacy and eventually demand for whatever it is you have to offer the world? Robert, Shel, I seek your wisdom...

I also wanted to say I was quite relieved to hear Shel express similar sentiment regarding blogging tools (see my last posting). It seems that while Shel is technical enough (or persistent enough) to get things working, his wife is not yet up to par with the html skills of the technical community. Thank God I'm not alone! Perhaps this helps us understand the demographics of the blogosphere and understand that blogging tools are a gating factor to extending the demographics to a broader audience?

Well, I think I'm finally ready for the public. It was not as straight forward as I thought. I wonder how many of the 40m+ blogs that technorati tracks are actually active. If everyone has to edit HTML code and upload pictures to a separate site, perhaps several would be bloggers "abandon the shopping cart". I wanted to participate, so I pushed through the challenges and got it done. I didn't even need my 15 year old daughter's assistance, although I'm sure she could have cranked out that HTML code for me.

Ok, let the blogging begin...

Blogger Tools

Well, I've been trying to put my blog together in my spare time. Between 12 hour days at the office, a 15 year old daughter, a husband and finding a little time for myself, it's hard to dedicate the time to set up the blog. Postings seem to be easy enough, but note to the blogging tool companies - make something easy enough for busy professionals that want to get in the game!

It's not intuitive, not easy to use, requires too much technical know-how...whatever.

But, once I get the framework up and running, I'm certain I can handle this editing capability on a daily basis.