In a world where more people are connected and have more platforms to communicate on, they also have a lot more power in their engagement with brands, says Michelle Beh, Senior Strategist at NATIVE.
What this means to brand owners is that they need to involve their consumers a lot more to build their brands and leverage their social influence shifting their focus from an internal brand-centric approach to a consumer-centric approach. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, calls it “being obsessed over customers” and being “a customer-obsessed company”.
Being a consumer-centric organisation doesn’t just mean advertising where one’s consumers are or understanding how best to communicate with them. It actually means re-defining the whole organisation’s approach to developing a consumer proposition and go-to-market strategy – from product development to distribution strategy, from marketing strategy to customer service strategy.
For example, Nike brings to life its brand positioning of ‘Just do it’ by helping its consumers fulfil their desire for self-improvement. They are giving their consumers digital tools to support their sports endeavours in the form of Nike + and now, FuelBand. On top of that, they provide platforms for users to connect with each other so they can leverage their network to motivate themselves and share their accomplishments.
What Nike has done is extend a consumer-centric approach by developing deep engagement with their consumers and building on-going relationships with them. The result – consumers stay loyal to the brand, and even advocate and co-create with the brand.
This is a relationship-centric strategy – a strategy that looks beyond driving awareness and acquisition, and aims to deepen engagement with consumers so they become loyal, believe in the value that the brand provides and recommend the brand.
To be a successful relationship-centric organisation, there are three key shifts that organisations need to make:
* The strategy needs to be an overall organisational approach to building true value for consumers, not purely a marketing function.
For example, Great Eastern Life, a leading life insurance company in Asia but increasingly becoming an irrelevant brand with their changing audience, had to build stronger connections with their consumers to stay competitive.
They re-defined themselves from being a life insurance company to a life company – a company that doesn’t just provide insurance products, but also supports its customers to live a healthier and better life.
This shift was driven by the organisation’s CEO down through to all aspects of its business – marketing, distribution, product development and customer service. They are now voted the top insurance company in their markets with highest customer satisfaction rate.
* To be able to implement relationship-centric strategies, organisations need to have a clear understanding of and knowledge about their consumers.
Traditionally, consumer research is carried out to find opportunities for the brand, measure success of marketing efforts and for concept testing. With conversations going on spontaneously on the Internet every day about brands and various topics, organisations now realise that they have to continuously monitor conversations, and respond to those conversations immediately.
For example, Gatorade, with VML, Fleishman-Hillard and OMD, created Mission Control as the source for athlete knowledge and real-time insights. The cross-agency team of different expertise monitors and engages in real time, builds time-efficient insights, experiments, and quickly takes action to provide their core audiences with the most up-to-date information to drive athletic performances.
Gatorade’s senior marketing director: Consumer & Shopper Engagement, Carla Hassan, said that Mission Control’s goal is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into the largest participatory brand in the world.”
Organisations need to re-think how they conduct consumer research from an occasional, once-off, post-mortem approach to a continuous insights-driven approach that is truly about finding out how their brands can respond to consumers immediately and on an on-going basis.
* One key measure that organisations usually focus on is their brand value or equity. If they want to make the shift from a brand-centric approach to a relationship-centric approach, their success and value measurements need to shift to focus on relationship health and consumer value instead.
The idea of consumer value is traditionally focussed on measuring transactions by the consumers and the aim is to increase the number of and/or value of transactions that a consumer makes.
However, if consumers are going to be leveraged to help build the brand by engaging with it and advocating it, then other values should also be considered such as the depth of relationship, advocacy rate and willingness to collaborate with a brand.
Imagine Linda, for example, who buys ‘M Spices’ twice a month because it is the cheapest brand she can find, versus Jacqui who buys ‘M Spices’ once a month because she likes the brand, and shares the brand’s recipes with her network of friends on Facebook and even shares her recipes on the brand’s website. Who is a more valuable consumer to a relationship-centric brand?
Linda who may continue buying until she discovers a cheaper brand or Jacqui who actually has managed to create awareness of the brand with 150 other consumers through her interactions with the brand?
The question for organisations today is not whether they should take a consumer-centric strategy, but how they can implement this approach across their organisation, and how they can move this further into a relationship-centric approach.
In an increasingly competitive landscape where consumers have the power to make their own choices and tell everyone else about them, organisations that are not delivering true consumer value and are relationship-centric, will very quickly lose out.
