Where do good ideas come from? Is there a science to innovation? How important is intuition and imagination?
6 min read
The science behind good ideas
By Roy Wollen on Jan 24, 2022 11:23:06 AM
8 min read
Marketer’s guide to measuring email effectiveness
By Roy Wollen on Oct 21, 2021 2:19:01 PM
Email is still the darling of digital when it comes to ROI: Email is low cost. By definition, email marketing is addressable media, so brands know immediately who is responding. In a survey, eConsultancy showed that brand managers feel email marketing is best at ROI, relative to other channels.
4 min read
Consumers have a love/hate relationship with email
By Roy Wollen on Dec 1, 2020 9:57:29 AM
Research shows that consumers receive more than 300 emails per day. As an industry, we spend tons of energy figuring out how to stand out in a crowded inbox. Maybe we should insert a consumer’s first name in the subject line? What if we repeat back what a consumer browsed on a brand’s website? The tactics make a difference, but we’re missing the most important part.
The difference isn't the email; the difference is the customer
7 min read
Interview with a DTC expert
By Roy Wollen on Nov 20, 2020 10:01:12 AM
I had the pleasure of interviewing Akin Tosyali, one of the nation's leading Direct To Consumer (DTC) experts. No surprise: DTC is on fire. Most brands are accelerating their digital programs to meet consumer demand; some have adopted subscriptions and membership programs. As usual, Akin was open to sharing best practices from around the web and I guarantee you will be a better digital marketer after you read this, so meet the expert.
Akin Tosyali, DTC expert
3 min read
Enough with the great ideas
By Roy Wollen on Jul 28, 2020 12:14:30 PM
Enough with the good ideas already
3 min read
Not everyone wants your email
By Roy Wollen on Jul 1, 2020 11:26:05 AM
Not everyone wants your email. If that's true, why do customers signup anyway?
Many customers register their email address, but don’t opt in for email marketing. This is surprisingly common, and is a mystery to email marketers. Clients struggle to explain why 20% of their e-commerce customers are on a poorly named “suppression list”? What’s going on here?
When customers don’t opt in, are they saying they don’t love the brand? Could it be: our “fabulous deals” fall flat? Is it a matter of love the brand/hate the email?
The marketer in me doesn’t want to admit customers don’t want promotional email. Maybe I didn’t explain the benefits properly. If I used magical words, maybe that would’ve changed a customer’s mind. The best practice here is obvious.
The best email marketers set expectations properly. What types of emails will subscribers receive? How often? What are the benefits of receiving marketing email (not just sales incentives, but value-add)? How are subscribers in control?
Nordstrom has given this some thought. Their signup form says “Yes, sign me up for emails about the latest looks, sales, events and more.”
Amtrak features discounts, but there is value-add for news and information
Remember customers who love your brand, look forward to your emails. They pick them out of crowded inboxes. This DSW fan enjoyed getting 2 emails the same day. But not everyone wants to receive promotional, deal-centric emails. What are the best practices for how communicate without email?
- Think customers, not email addresses. When a customer does not opt in, it may mean there is another email they use more often (work versus personal email). The best email marketers see customers, many with multiple email addresses. In b2b, clients can associate email addresses to a site to support Account Based Marketing (ABM). Who else at that site is purchasing or engaging with your brand?
- Reach customers beyond email. A customer’s email address usually connects to terrestrial address, phone number and other juicy bits of data to help you communicate with your Direct mail is expensive, but may make sense for the most profitable customers
- Onboarding email addresses. Many brands use email addresses for onboarding - the process of matching to Google, Facebook, LiveRamp etc (with names like Google Customer Match, Facebook Custom Audiences, LiveRamp Data Matching). Onboarding gives brands a way to use display advertising when they can’t email directly. A best practice is to vary the message for cart abandoners, new customers, big spenders, customers nearing attrition, old customers who just visited your site. This is where email marketers can be creative, but don’t forget to test these ideas before you buy expensive paid media
Opt in, Opt out – make up your mind
Are you afraid of subscribers who opt in but subsequently opt out? From my experience, these are true opt outs in the sense that they experienced the email marketing program then said “forget it.” Fortunately, most brands discover these numbers are tiny as visualized using a brand in the home improvement industry.
2 min read
Great. You signed up for email. Now what?
By Roy Wollen on Jun 2, 2020 3:06:24 PM
What brands do with the 1P data they collect is the key to success. What customers share with the brand is not nice-to-know information. It’s customers telling brands two things - What they expect to get back and their level of trust. The greater the brand trust, the more customers will divulge.
Many email programs collect lots of 1P data. Customers expect value in exchange for creating a login, building a profile and sharing what they want. The way brands start the conversation is called a welcome email and the best come in streams of communications, not just one automatically generated “hello” from a robot. From our experience working with hundreds of email marketers, here are the best practices:
- What happens after signup? A welcome message triggered upon signup is good, but what comes next is more important. The best brands consider these campaigns over time in a stream of communication
- Use the 1P data customers share. The best brands have a formal email welcome campaign, built to nurture the customer relationship. These emails help users get started with suggestions and ideas. They are designed to encourage people to re-engage. They take the opportunity to remind users what they signed up for, and may repeat back 1P data. The email program then uses customer data to customize the relationship
- Let's get personal. The best brands make their email campaigns completely personalized using 1P data. For example, different customers get different offers, messages, creative assets and cadence and this begins from the welcome stream. Check out this great example...
Nordstrom’s welcome stream explains the benefit of the email program as well as its loyalty program and is customized to reflect recent purchases
2 min read
Email signups are the perfect way to capture 1P data. So why are brands so bad at it?
By Roy Wollen on May 26, 2020 1:00:00 PM
The way users sign up for email and what happens next is a best practice in email marketing. This is a chance for Marketing leaders and Technology to show the organization they can work together. The problem spans marketing technology, content management systems (e.g., forms), tag management, Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) etc. Without Marketing leadership, they become disjointed tools. But how brands use 1P data is foundational to success.
What are the best practices for customer signup?
- The process is easy. Customer can find where to signup and the form is intuitive. We know there are a lot of ways users can sign up for email (web pages, footers, social media fan pages). And a lightbox can interrupt at any time and to ask for an email, which customers find annoying. So, the best brands plan this out. The lightbox is intelligent and doesn’t ask customers for emails if they’ve already provided one
- The signup form is short. Signup form only asks for the information necessary, but has a way for consumers to disclose more about themselves and what they are looking for. The best practice here is to make it very easy to signup, but allow customers to add more either with other forms or the welcome stream of email communication that follow. Many brands set expectations during signup, for preferences, but also how email marketing will provide value (not just promotional deals)
- Brands use what they collect. This is the most important practice – if brands collect information, customers expect the brand to customize the experience.
1 min read
Recently featured on Northwestern's post talking about analytics
By Roy Wollen on May 15, 2020 10:54:12 AM
I was just featured on Northwestern University's thought leader series on digital marketing. The topic was how retailers are embracing digital as fast as possible to not only counter the Covid crisis, but improve the customer's UX in the process.
4 min read
4 Tools to Help You Make a Great First Impression with Email
By Lizzie Hoffman, TowerData on Apr 15, 2020 9:00:00 AM
It’s easy to market to loyalty program members; their extensive history with your brand provides you and your marketing team with the necessary data to know what they love, what they hate, and what they’re probably in the market for next. That said, how do you extend that same level of customer service to your newest customers, or even those who haven’t made a purchase yet? In 2020, everyone is looking to AI for marketing help. Sure, a great marketing platform can help segment your database and schedule your content, but it can’t perform at its best if the customer data in your database is a little lackluster.
2 min read
Email is Relevant Now, More Than Ever.
By Roy Wollen on Apr 3, 2020 8:46:08 AM
Email is effective, has great ROI and customers depend on it for information in times of crisis
You may be asking yourself: should I write to my customers about Covid-19? What about sending promotional emails? Is email still a good way to communicate? The answer: Email marketing was there to help in 2008 and it is indispensable now.
3 min read
Measurement Beyond Opens & Clicks
By Roy Wollen on Oct 16, 2019 9:53:00 PM
Marketers Guide to Effective Email: Part 5
Analytics is the key to an effective email marketing program. Email campaign analytics usually have numbers for the basics including:
4 min read
Integrating Email with Digital and Offline
By Roy Wollen on Oct 16, 2019 9:51:12 PM
Marketer's Guide to Effective Email: Part 4
It’s easy to forget – email marketing is part of a brand’s Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC). The best email marketers see email holistically along with mobile, social and offline marketing. The broader our vision of email, the more successful we can be in the eyes of the customer. The customer sees brand not channel. How does email integrate with Customer Service? Field sales? Store associates? Each of these touchpoints can- and should trigger an email. If we ignore this, we will never get off the wheel of batch and blast and our customers will become numb to email communication.
4 min read
A Culture of Continuous Testing
By Roy Wollen on Oct 16, 2019 9:50:33 PM
Marketer's Guide to Effective Email: Part 3
The best email marketers I know welcome “failure.” What I’m referring to is cultivating a culture of continuous testing where failure is seen as learning. Marketers play offense by testing everything and that moves the ball forward. But failure is a way to play defense and a test result can be an early warning not to rollout a message, price change or offer and make a costly mistake.
5 min read
Not Everyone Wants Your Email
By Roy Wollen on Oct 16, 2019 9:49:28 PM
Marketer's Guide to Effective Email: Part 2
3 min read
Best Practices Start with Sign-Up
By Roy Wollen on Oct 16, 2019 9:45:48 PM
Marketer's Guide to Effective Email Part 1:
The most successful marketers leverage email to strengthen the bond with their best customers. Customers seek out brand emails in a cluttered inbox. Customers feel like they are having a conversation with the brand. We have spent years analyzing email strategies from the best marketers in the world to uncover five things that make them great:
5 min read
Business To Business Research Needs To Change
By Hansa Marketing on Sep 1, 2019 9:55:00 PM
By Wayne Marks, President, Hansa|GCR
Marketers confront a real paradox when dealing with business customers, and this paradox is often not realized or addressed in approaches to understanding what drives corporate decisions. The paradox is: Am I selling to a person or a company? The answer is “both.”
At a basic level, interactions between companies are simply interactions between people. That may sound silly, but consider its implications. Buyers who work in companies don’t change their bodies when they leave work and then they go home and become purchasers of consumer goods and services. As consumers, they walk around as a package of thoughts, feelings, and attitudes, along with a history of experiences in buying goods and services and an ever-evolving set of expectations. None of this goes away when they go to work the next day and dress up in their corporate buyer persona.
2 min read
Master the RFP Process: Start with your Needs Analysis
By Roy Wollen on Sep 1, 2019 10:27:00 AM
By Roy Wollen, President, Hansa Marketing Services.
6 min read
Customer Acquisition: How to Attract the Right Customers
By Hansa Marketing on May 30, 2013 7:00:00 AM
By Roy Wollen, President, Hansa Marketing Services.
New customers are either loyal advocates in training or a hole that will drain company resources from the moment they land in your database. Taking the long-term view of customer acquisition programs will give you tools to identify both types.
Avoid those Pesky One-Time Buyers
The sad truth in our industry is that most new buyers never blossom into loyal fans and customer advocates. In fact, the majority of new customers never even buy twice.
Different offers, channels, or seasons attract a different crop of new buyers. You would think it would be relatively simple to predict who will blossom and who won’t. We certainly put a lot of resources into marketing communications from welcome kits to catalogs to e-mails - you name it.
3 min read
Building a Better Product: New Options for Conjoint Analysis
By Hansa Marketing on Apr 4, 2013 7:00:00 AM
By Dan Llanes, Director of Analytics, Hansa GCR.
Listen up product managers, researchers, designers and marketers. No matter what product or service you are designing and selling – there is a better way of narrowing down what is important to your buyer.
Companies face the continual search for which product/service options best meet the needs of the market. Techniques commonly used include flat-out guessing, focus groups and simple surveys. The preferred method has always been Choice-based Conjoint Analysis, or CBC. The CBC exercise walks respondents through choice sets between various product/service attributes in a randomized fashion. The result is deep insights into a respondent’s decision-making criteria.
Despite its widespread use, there are potential problems. Namely, the randomized choices may all fall outside the realm of what’s important to the respondent’s ideal, making the selection less realistic. In addition, a respondent will answer a choice-based question in a few seconds. Not so when actually considering a purchase.
3 min read
If this is your Marketing Automation, you’re probably doing it wrong
By Hansa Marketing on Mar 14, 2013 7:00:00 AM
This is part 1 in a 2 part series about marketing automation and trigger events.
Campaigns are nice to have, but they don’t mean anything; they’re not important to customers. Customers go through a continuing process of making purchase decisions. Marketers are the ones who said ‘this is the campaign, it’s going to start here, it’s going to end here.’ Now, you as customers have to fit yourself into this campaign idea. -- Professor Don Schultz, Northwestern University |
When I check my phone in the morning, I usually have at least 15 marketing emails from various companies. I wouldn’t mind if the messages I received were relevant, but most of the time they are examples of bad marketing automation.
Verizon emails me about a new phone even though my upgrade is over a year away. West Elm emails me about a couch sale, even though I bought a couch (from West Elm) a month ago. These emails were probably automated marketing communications, which were set up without looking at me as a customer; at Hansa, we call this “let’s just message everybody” practice “batch and blast,” and it’s the wrong way to implement marketing automation.
The perception many marketers have is that email is basically free, however that simply isn’t the case; just because there are minimal monetary costs doesn’t mean that there isn’t a customer cost. Here are three potential consequences of over-communicating with customers:
3 min read
Click Data is Not Customer Focused, and Vendors Want It that Way
By Roy Wollen on Mar 7, 2013 7:00:00 AM
By Roy Wollen, President, Hansa Marketing Services.
How do you take control of click data when your vendors want to make things more complicated? Clicking behavior is complicated enough. Customers click on both paid and organic search listings. Customers use browsers and mobile devices. Customers ask their social community for buying advice. When they land on your website, their navigation provides clues as to how interested they are in your brand. The bloated weblog that gets produced from all of this is a mess. It’s voluminous, redundant, noisy and much too granular to make business decisions in its raw state.
What you need is a way to make things simpler – to understand the customer prior to the sale. You need a way to determine what to offer new customers, what to say, what to feature, how to ensure a good brand experience.
4 min read
Is Customer Experience Mapping for You?
By Hansa Marketing on Feb 14, 2013 12:10:00 AM
By Kathryn Stevens, Client Services Director, Hansa GCR.
As far as you know, your customers use the processes you provide for communication, in-person transactions, online purchasing, or order placement successfully. When you take the customer pulse with satisfaction polls, you generally don’t see any completely unhappy customers. The limitation here rests with "as far as you know."
If you listen to the undercurrents, you may have some nagging suspicions that all is not well. Customer service reps may tell you that your customers can be anywhere from mildly upset to completely hostile after a transaction. The flow of online orders, such as for takeout lunches or tickets to your events, has been going steadily downward in recent months. Customers indicate they are not willing to recommend your services to friends or relatives.
How do you figure out how well your customers progress through your processes and what they really feel after interacting with your company? The answer: Customer Experience Mapping.
4 min read
Living a Qualitative Lifestyle with Ethnographic Research
By Hansa Marketing on Feb 7, 2013 12:16:00 AM
By Julie Meyer Asp, Sr. Project Director, Hansa GCR.
I get paid to meet up with people I don’t know. I set up these rendezvous at bars and restaurants, coffee shops and boutiques, and sometimes at people’s homes. These brief encounters give me amazing insight into people. And they should: I am an in-field qualitative researcher.
Encounters with Reality
Recently, my encounters changed my team’s and my client’s assumptions about a new product that bridges the world between personal accessory and technological device. The change started during a meeting with a 35 year-old male (an early adopter of technology) at the fine jewelry department in Bloomingdale’s.
This tech-savvy guy didn’t shop with a list of specs or buy his “only brand” as he’d told me in our previous conversations. He started the way I had expected; he picked up and carefully reviewed all of the products. That continued until one sparkled and glittered in just the right way. I could see it in his eyes; he’d found the right one. He’d fallen in love. He bought with his heart. And he loves the product he bought.
4 min read
Consulting on Marketing Dashboards: Get the Insider's Top Ten Tips
By Roy Wollen on Jan 31, 2013 10:43:00 AM
By Roy Wollen, President, Hansa Marketing Services.
If you’re responsible for marketing dashboards, you know you’re off to a bad start if you hear people say: So what? That’s nice to know, but what do I do with it? It’s pretty, but what’s next?
Business people are already inundated with numbers. To help you cut through the clutter, let’s discuss some pitfalls to avoid and top tips for developing marketing dashboards. But I will start by telling you the main takeaway: it’s not about creating cool gauges and dials, it’s about solving business problems.
Dashboards require planning. Dashboards embed actions. Dashboards have champions that socialize the work. This doesn’t happen because of a cool gadget.
2 min read
Customer Experience vs Customer Service - Learn the Difference
By Mary Valenta on Jan 16, 2013 5:31:00 PM
A Hansa Thoughticle™, by Wayne Marks.
How we view brands and the customer experience is governed by paradigms, or mental models, if you prefer.
The brand model, for example, goes something like this: The brand is this “thing” or idea that represents the essence of what the company stands for.
For many companies, managing the brand means marketing communications – conveying the brand value proposition to target audiences. Indeed this communication has expanded in recent years with the advent of social media. But, we still manage brands as if we were advertisers pushing messages out to the receiving audience. As Seinfeld said so well, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
3 min read
Moving Beyond a Commodity-Provider Mindset
By Liz Ryan on Aug 7, 2012 8:58:00 AM
Can utilities develop new products to drive opportunities with small businesses?
Magazines and newspapers are buzzing with articles on energy-conserving products for consumers, such as electric vehicles, solar power options, and zoned temperature controls. But how can utilities take advantage of the buzz? Portland General Electric (PGE) wanted to find out.
PGE theorized that ductless heat pumps can offer constant comfort to small businesses without the cost or hassle of a major HVAC overhaul.
PGE engaged Hansa GCR to conduct research with the small business market—ranging from a tattoo shop to a winery to a dog daycare to a printing company. Research explored their current needs, their perceptions of the ductless heat pump product, and the hurdles they perceived in adoption.
4 min read
Brand Triumvirate
By Liz Ryan on Jul 20, 2012 10:00:00 AM
By Wayne Marks, President, Hansa|GCR
There are a gaggle of ways to look at brand and define what a brand is. We at Hansa like to think of a brand as a gestalt. No matter what elements we put forward as the ingredients of a brand, the whole will be more than the sum of the parts. This fact explains why there are so many different ways of looking at brands – we are implicitly trying to understand this gestalt.
Beyond the gestalt, we also advocate that a brand is much more than a logo, tagline, or the position a company communicates to the market. While these are important, customers and prospects judge the company and its products by far more than that. They don’t experience just the brand communicated in messaging; they experience all ways in which they touch the product and company. They form their thoughts and feelings about the company based on this total experience. The experience is the brand. This total experience shapes the customer mind space occupied by the brand.The mind space occupied by the brand should not be accidental. It needs to be purposeful. This requires the company to be clear about what it wants the brand to stand for. What the brand stands for needs to set the company apart and provide the customer with a reason to buy its products rather than a competitor’s.
3 min read
Results Generated from Adaptive Choice-based Conjoint Analysis
By Liz Ryan on Jul 19, 2012 8:38:00 AM
By Dan Llanes, Director of Analytics, Hansa GCR
If you’ve been reading along or perhaps attending webinars we’ve been taking a look at the many benefits of Adaptive CBC (Choice-based Conjoint). Now it’s time to turn our attention to the types of results we can generate with this technique. The Adaptive CBC questionnaire contains three major areas, the Build Your Own (BYO) section, the screener and the choice tournament. From these areas we can learn the following from a purely descriptive standpoint:
- BYO: How often levels were included as part of respondents’ preferred concept
- Unacceptables: How often levels were considered unacceptable
- Must-Haves: How often levels were must-haves
- Screeners: How many products were screened into the consideration set
- Choice Tournament: How often levels were included in the “winning” concept
These are all important questions, but they only begin to scratch the surface of what is possible with Adaptive CBC data. With the use of a simulator tool, conjoint data comes alive.
4 min read
Refreshing the Brand: Putting the Brand to the Test
By Liz Ryan on Jul 10, 2012 8:35:00 AM
By Wayne Marks, President, Hansa GCR
In a prior Thoughticle™, Refreshing the Brand: Focusing on Key Brand Elements,” we described Hansa’s proprietary Brand RJVNTR™ process and the brand elements that need to be addressed to create your brand promise. These elements are summarized in the following exhibit.
4 min read
Refreshing the Brand: Focusing on Key Brand Elements
By Liz Ryan on Jun 7, 2012 8:35:00 AM
By Wayne Marks, President, Hansa|GCR
Is you brand current and impactful? Does it need to be refreshed? Where would you plot yourself on the following chart? Is your brand still on it is initial growth curve? Is it starting to level off? Perhaps decline? Should the brand be refreshed and readied for its next evolution?
To answer the above questions, consider the following:
1 min read
Small Firms Need Analytics Too: Here's Why
By Liz Ryan on Apr 25, 2012 8:40:00 AM
By Ed Jaffe, Customer Intelligence Consultant, Hansa Marketing Services
Often, when one hears about business analytics, big firms (Amazon, IBM, Google) come to mind. However, analytics aren’t just for the big guys – small companies can also reap the benefits of business analytics to increase revenues and improve the bottom line.
Last year, I consulted with a small Consumer Product Goods (CPG) company. This two year old company’s primary sales channel was the internet, and they had received about 13,500 orders. The owners came to me knowing they had a retention problem (92% of customers ordered two times or less); however, because they had never analyzed their data, they were unaware of
4 min read
Why Most Brand Tracking Research is Almost a Complete Waste of Time and Money...or Worse
By Hansa Marketing on Feb 7, 2012 8:47:00 AM
By Wayne Marks, President, Hansa|GCR
Think of any well-known (niche or global) consumer or business-to-business brand: Oracle, Apple, Coke, Burger King, etc. What comes to mind?
Logos, taglines, symbols, stories, images, and other more abstract meanings we associate with the brand. The better known a brand is to us, the more extensive our knowledge and perceptions will be. In combination, these elements reflect the brand promise. When you buy something, you are essentially buying the promise underlying the brand.
Incredibly, most brand tracking research does not explicitly measure brand promise or whether brands deliver on that promise. Instead, they focus on important – but often less critical (and certainly incomplete) measures like awareness and relevance.
Let’s take a look at what happens when a brand fails to deliver on its promise.
6 min read
Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Money Pits or Business Critical Management Tools?
By Liz Ryan on Jan 11, 2012 1:01:00 PM
4 min read
Stated and Derived Importance - Is it a Mistake to Ask Customers What's Important?
By Hansa Marketing on Jan 9, 2012 8:47:00 AM
Written by Dan Llanes, Director of Analytics, Hansa|GCR
At the risk of stating the obvious, marketers care about what’s important -- what’s important to customers relating to products, messages, and brands. Understanding what is important, however, is easier than understanding the why and the how of importance. More specifically, market researchers usually talk mainly about two kinds of importance: stated and derived. We tend to think this view is oversimplified, however, and that it actually interferes with truly understanding customer behavior. In this article, we’ll review stated and derived importance and then discuss why we think there’s more to “importance” than meets the typical researcher’s eye.
2 min read
Creating Emotional Bonds
By Liz Ryan on Sep 9, 2011 12:21:00 PM
5 min read
Brand Assessment Tools: Measuring Relative Importance with Shapley Value Regression
By Hansa Marketing on Aug 31, 2011 12:23:00 AM
Be careful that you use the right analytic technique in asessing your brand's performance!
Hansa’s brand assessment approach utilizes numerous methodological tools – perceptual mapping, maximum difference scaling, and key driver analysis to name a few. Typically, these tools focus on predicting the factors that most directly impact the bottom line: behavioral outcomes.
These behavioral outcomes are frequently viewed as loyalty metrics and include purchase behaviors, willingness to recommend, and increases in wallet share.
Among the methods of predicting outcomes, key driver analysis is by far the most popular method to assess the relative importance of brand attributes. Key driver analysis answers which brand attributes are critical in predicting customer loyalty. Is it the perception that a brand is cost effective, a leading innovator, or provider of top-of-the-line customer support?
5 min read
Don't Lose The Product In The Customer Experience
By Liz Ryan on Aug 9, 2011 12:30:00 PM
If customers didn’t like Starbucks coffee, they wouldn’t go to their stores. Period. Of course the Starbucks customer experience goes quite a ways beyond the latte.
One might even argue that objective evaluation of the coffee is not really done by consumers. The cache of the Starbucks brand and being a Starbucks customer brings all sorts of nuances to likeability of the product per se.
But the coffee has to be good enough to at least pass a threshold of consumer-perceived quality. Indeed, when Starbucks broke into the market, the coffee was decidedly different, save for a few American roasters like Peets and the Italian baristas that are the Starbucks heritage.
6 min read
International Research: Where to Go, What to Do, and What to Expect
By Liz Ryan on Jun 8, 2011 12:37:00 PM
3 min read
The Power of Feelings: Building Resilient Customer Relationships
By Liz Ryan on May 24, 2011 12:37:00 PM
4 min read
Segmentation: B2B Customers Are Different, And So Must Be Your Approach
By Roy Wollen on May 11, 2011 12:38:00 PM
Hitting a golf ball down the middle of the fairway may be good in golf, but not so good in marketing. As with B2C, B2B marketers see value in understanding their customers and potential customers through segmentation. We need to ask whether there are different groups of customers with different needs or other characteristics that require different go-to-market strategies and possibly different products or services. Segmenting businesses, however, presents some complications that require careful thinking to navigate successfully.
5 min read
Shattered Loyalty
By Liz Ryan on Apr 18, 2011 12:39:00 PM
I have been a truly loyal customer to my insurance company. I don’t even want to count the years. I am so loyal, that a colleague of mine once was astounded when he learned that I don’t even compare prices for insurance. I simply stay with my company.
I must be a dream customer for them. While I have had a few claims, their net profit from me would be an aspiration for all their insureds. I have been one of those customers to whom they couldn’t sell enough products. I have homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, umbrella liability insurance, life insurance, and once had earthquake insurance until they got out of that business. Within these product lines, I have multiple policies.
The company to which I have been truly loyal is one that would position itself as always there for me, with agents who provide very personalized service, looking out for my interests. I frankly would not have been interested in the many firms now warring over who has the greatest discount. I was not their target customer. But “was” is the operative word here.
8 min read
Delivering the Brand: Nine Principles of Change Management
By Hansa Marketing on Mar 30, 2011 12:40:00 PM