Re-imagining customer-centricity
Written By William Corke, 9 days ago
Today I received an email from Vocus. They were writing to me – via a rented list – to introduce the Vocus offer:
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Today I received an email from Vocus. They were writing to me – via a rented list – to introduce the Vocus offer:
Our most recent campaign for Hertz UK went live last week and today has been featured on Adweek as ‘Ad of the Day’. Here’s what Adweek has said about the campaign:
“Fake-product advertising can be irritating, but this campaign, from London agency Corke Wallis, gets everything right. The video is extremely well produced and believable—the retraction demo, in particular, is hypnotizing. And the banner on the website is just so unassuming that you have to smile. Being fooled never felt so good.
Now, can someone work on a real prototype for this, please?”
Big thanks due to our partner Paul Dixon of MoveMakeShake for his vital work on production, direction and CGI effects.
Social Distribution: customers passing on product recommendations to their family and friends when making a direct purchase from (for example) an insurance company or broker.
It doesn’t sound like a revolution. Haven’t people always done this?
For the past month we have been working on a brand project in Insurance. The product is an add-on policy that has real (money-saving) value for many consumers, but most don’t know that this kind of product exists and so are not searching for it. As a result, conventional direct response channels for customer acquisition don’t work.
There’s a piece on MyCustomer.com today – “Is Facebook’s ‘want’ button the saviour of social commerce?” – which talks about a US-only pilot scheme:
“A new application called ‘Collections’ that allows retailers to create a catalogue in Facebook and post ‘like’, ‘want’ or ‘collect’ buttons on product images within newsfeeds.”
‘Showrooming’ is a useful US term for window shopping at a physical store then buying online, probably from a different retailer; and the practice is gaining pace, fuelled by mass smartphone ownership and improvements in bandwidth and mobile devices.
Yet research from BDO published this week suggests that nearly 90% of retailer CFOs are not concerned about showrooming. Complacency? Perhaps all these CFOs are justifiably confident that their multi-channel strategies are in good shape.
The battle lines are being drawn between corporations and individual consumers for control of personal data.
A shift in power is inevitable, towards more ownership and control of personal data by the individual. This shift is at the heart of the next phase in the development of the digital economy.
It’s hard to avoid acronym soup when you discuss this subject – VRM, PIM, VPI etc. – but the reality of businesses offering their own customers more control and the proliferation of data warehousing and management platform providers tells the real story. Legislation in privacy law is inevitable too, but it is the individual consumer’s realisation – on a mass scale – that they will be better off (financially and in other ways) if they take control that will be the real driver of change.
There’s a really interesting piece in Marketing Magazine today about Tesco’s plans to give consumers more control of the personal data that Tesco holds.
Tesco has been at the forefront of data-driven CRM for nearly two decades and we think that this is a move with potentially huge implications. It is recognition of the fact that personal data is going to be the battleground on which marketing wars are fought, whether forced by legislation (like the UK’s Midata project) or consumer pressure and desire to Opt-out).
We are a brand agency that gets technology. We have property industry clients. So, inevitably, we obsess about the role of technology in the property business (not just in property marketing).
At times it seems to us as if the worlds of property and tech are very hard to reconcile – the speed of the Moore’s Law driven digital revolution vs. the 10-30 year investment horizon of real estate asset and fund management.
Doc Searls’ recent book The Intention Economy (subtitle; ‘When Customers Take Charge’) has been much debated in this office over the past few months. We’re quite sure that some proportion of consumers will, in the course of the next few years, choose to remove their personal data from the hands of corporations, and begin to manage the organisations that will have access to it, including which parts of it and when. Power to the people!
This then is Vendor Relationship Management – VRM – a 180 degree shift from the corporate database marketing programmes of the past 30 years that have fallen under the label of Customer Relationship Management – CRM.
I have had a business account with HSBC for more than a decade, and during that time have used mainly the online banking service to manage company finances, make payments etc.
Yesterday the epic mailing pack pictured above was delivered, containing nine separate leaflets:
What am I supposed to do with this lot and why have they sent them all to me now? First thought: perhaps it’s an attempt to camouflage price rises.