Usability: how does it function for customer, CNN.com

Metrics: successfulness

-have to be honest

-migrate customers to low cost channel

-have a person available 24-7

Sample costs channel

-Telephone with live rep $9.50

Customer service themes

-what gets measured gets managed

-customer service orientation must pervade all departments of an enterprise

-superior customer service requires long-term commitment

-build culture of customer service using quality management principles

-technology can help improve customer service

-customers want multiple service channels

-customers want the option of human contact

-improve the overall customer experience

Summary

-customer care is a key marketing discipline

            -customer satisfaction/loyalty, enterprise profit

-need business processes, customer segment, and relevant technology

-customers want choice to how to access service

-cost per customer contact varies by channel

-develop service strategies based on CLV

-be sure technologies are satisfied, not dissatisfied

A safe prediction

-the future belongs to marketers who best capture (surveys, online, past R&D…), analyze and mine, and use marketing data

Data: lower level

Information: analyze data and put it together

Knowledge: add expertise to information

Role of knowledge in marketing

-Enable human agents to work better, faster, with more customer satisfying results

-to create automated systems

            -as good as the best human agents

-complaints/feedback

-what do you do after you get feedback?

-call 1-800 numbers

            -free for customers

            -expensive for company

-outsource to India

-live chat

-FAQ’s

-time, improve quality of experience

-to fit with the internet

            -does the personality of the product align well with the internet?

-fit with the target audience

            -what are the internet usage characteristics of the target audience?

Summary: A Bay Area couple’s pet Shiba Inu, a kind of Japanese hunting dog, had puppies so the owners decided to train a webcam on the newborn pups so they could keep an eye on them from work. The live video feed debuted October 8 on Ustream.tv, a video site that lets anyone set up a broadcast. On the first day of the broadcast, the puppies had about 750 viewers. But after a Upstream employee spotted the webcast and began passing it around to friends and family, it soon had over 6 million viewers. Upstream says that the puppies are drawing an audience that is as big as the one that watched its recent election coverage.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/21/puppy-power-propels-web-start-up/?scp=1&sq=puppies%20power%20a%20web%20video%20start%20up&st=cse

-one simple way of distinguishing them used to be whether they are offline or online

-more and more cross-over is blurring the line

-examples include yahoo, egghead.com, wingspanbank, Schwab, ragu

How have the 2Is affected branding?

The 2I’s of internet-based communication help to establish and maintain brand meaning in several essential ways:

-message timing

-message frequency

-message content

What is brand equity?

-a set of assets (and liabilities) linked to a brand’s names and symbol that add to (or subtract from) the value provided by a product or service to a firm and/or that firm’s customers

-brand equity is a combination of intermediate customer responses and both customers and firm benefits

-customer responses can take two broad forms: awareness and associations

            -strength of associations (relevance and consistency)

            -valence

            -uniqueness (distinctiveness and memorability)

Measuring brand equity

-some online and offline examples of direct measures of brand equity:

            -internet retailers with strong customer awareness  Amazon.com and CDNOW) can charge prices that are 7-12% higher than those of lesser-known retailers

            -all things held constant, a compact car would have approximately 5% more market value if it carried the Mitsubishi rather than the Dodge name

-Magne Supphellen recommends the following process for understanding a brand’s core equity

            -Principle I: depth interviews

            -Principle II: portfolio of techniques

            -Principle III: research findings should be thoroughly validated

-techniques for measuring brand associations:

            -thought listing

            -visual techniques

            -projective technique

            -sentence completion

            -depth interviews

            -rating scales

Marketing programs to build brand equity

-pricing program

-product program

-distribution program

-promotional program

Seven-step branding process

1. clearly define the brand audience

2. understand the target customers

3. understand the competition

4. design compelling brand intent

5. identify key leverage points in customer experience

6. execute the branding strategy

7. establish feedback system

Summary: Marketers continue to prize e-mail for generating results. Yet consumers are getting more selective about opening marketing e-mails. The challenge is to make e-mail compelling, starting with a shorter subject line.

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006733

Objective         Positioning      Current relationship phase

                        Lever

Segment                                  Targeting

Principles for marketspace matrix design

Which lever should be used?

-chose levers that can effect change

-determine which levers have the most leverage

-consider barriers to advancement

-consider the medium’s effect on desired behavior

-level of involvement matters

-understand customer learning trends

-credibility of the channel matters

-the choice of levers must be consistent with positioning choice

-the medium can be the message – or the product

-matrix design must be adaptive

Customer attributes       Community       Product attributes

                                    Pursue

                                    Creation

-Customer attributes are behavioral

-Product attributes are emotional

Distribution:

-getting products to customers

-flows of information, funds and materials

Internet allows:

-an electronic flow

-reduced costs