Evan Magliocca, brand marketing manager, at Baesman Insights & Marketing, discusses what marketers can be doing to better learn about customers and create more meaningful retail experiences.
December 12, 2018
By Evan Magliocca, brand marketing manager, Baesman Insights & Marketing
Marketers are a loud group. We're constantly yelling promotions, trying way too hard to show how cool our brands are, or peddling product to the masses.
We're so focused on the outbound that we've completely cannibalized any chance at having conversations with our customers.
Even with voice of the customer strategies, that methodology doesn't help the customer to confirm that his or her voice matters. Most customers feel that the only way to show their voices is to either publicly fan the flames of social, or to use the power of their dollars to show their dissatisfaction.
Marketers would be smart to just shut up and listen. It's better for the customer, it's far less inflammatory, and it's better for business.
Customer sentiment programs are a great foundation for feedback. At the very least, they get marketers thinking in a more customer-friendly mindset when customer feedback permeates the marketing bubbles once per quarter. At their best, they occasionally help marketers to forge new paths for their marketing strategies by giving them the information that they need to prove their points. But it's not enough and those programs lack teeth to make much of a measurable difference.
To make change possible, most marketing departments will need to rethink their departmental layout and process flows, and they will need to develop marketin— not only around strategy, but also around customer experts. A new layout could sit strategists with VoC experts to create synergies between the overall strategic output and omnichannel execution, as well as make strategic initiatives as potent as possible for the customer. By combining VoC with strategic marketing, brands can make sure that the customer's voice is coming through with every new campaign. All of those surveys, focus groups, user-testing sessions, and customer service analyses will help to guide strategy in the right directions.
Brand projects are most effective when they're driven by leadership to associates. It provides direction, clear guidance, and the support needed to move forward. Unfortunately, the higher people rise in brand organizations, the less they understand their customers. They have no touchpoints with them any longer; the relationships are diluted through a host of associates that are much closer to the customers. Customers become numbers, revenue generators, and puppets to make dance with marketing levers.
If brands really want to start listening to their customers, leaders need to go interact with real people — not read about them in a report or hear about them second-hand from others. They need to go to stores at least once per quarter and talk with customers face-to-face. The interaction of asking questions, hearing the pain points, and understanding what customers care about and find positive is always an eye-opening experience. We get so lost in our bubble that what we sometimes believe is a priority for the customer, may not have ever been in their consideration set. By keeping a quarterly pulse on customer sentiment, it helps us to stay grounded in what matters.
No matter what data sets or behavioral analysis we have, nothing will ever replace the understanding we gain from constant face-to-face interaction with our target audience. For most marketers, the chances of that happening and scaling to a large brand are slim. But just because we can't do that doesn't mean others aren't already in those positions.
Store associates know more about our customers than we ever will because they talk to them every day. They know what products are becoming popular, what pain points are in the store experience, the sentiment for creative campaigns, and much more that we really can't get from the average survey. But if we find ways to empower our store associates to provide valuable input, there is so much we can glean on customer behavior. A true voice of the customer strategy will give voices to those that know them best. Whether it's informal or a standardized process for feedback, store associates have great insights to offer to help us get better at understanding our audiences.
Marketers love to over complicate the customer. It's challenging enough keeping a message consistent or figuring out the experience across different touchpoints, but customers aren't really that complicated. Think about your favorite brand. Why do you like shopping with it? The answer is probably pretty simple.
We live in our own world where we think customers see every advertisement, absorb every message, and shop across every touch point. In reality, they spend far less time thinking about the things that we think are important. We don't need to think deeper, we just need to reshape the way we think in general. We need to shut up, listen to our customers, and gain a deeper understanding of their points of view. We do that, and customers will start to see that their voices truly matter.