Tag Archive for 'loyalty'

How to earn your customers’ trust and capture their lifelong loyalty

Published on December 6, 2010 in Roger Brooks. 0 Comments Tags: customer loyalty strategy, customer trust, Customer value, loyalty, loyalty strategy, thanking customers.

You’ve all experienced the surprise and delight of being treated like a valued customer. There’s no better feeling than being pampered when buying a new pair of shoes, or being attended to when trying to find cold medicine at the pharmacy. On the flip side, there’s no worse feeling than being pushed too hard, ignored or even unnoticed when you are ready to buy.

Do Unto Others…

Staying attentive to your customer’s needs is a tough and delicate balance, and it is key to achieving your customers’ approval and earning their loyalty. Treating your customers like they’re made of gold is an important layer in the foundation of building your own loyalty strategy.

To win your customers’ confidence – and eventually their loyalty – there’s a prerequisite needed: tactfully demonstrate that each customer is valued and then treat them as such. While it’s vitally important to invest in your top tier of customers, it’s equally important to place value on all customers.

Treat your customers like they’re made of gold, and they will return that special treatment back to you in repeat business. They’ll also be more likely to refer your business. The ultimate goal in business is to earn your customers’ trust and capture their lifelong loyalty. Here are some tips to do so:

Treat all customers equally
Value each customer, as each contributes to your bottom line
Show appreciation for all purchases, large and small
Have a formal process in place to personally thank customers for their business
Consider how your business can begin to reward loyal customers for their continued patronage.

The reason you’re in business is to grow you customer base and increase profits. Every business strives to capture more market share. Making modifications in how you treat your new and existing customers can be the most cost-effective way to increase profits. So before you initiate or enhance a customer loyalty strategy, it’s important that the organization’s entire team adopts a “golden rule” policy to treat each and every customer as they would want to be treated.

If you continue to exceed customers’ expectations, and your company has a fundamental practice of valuing each customer, you will achieve exceptional customer loyalty.

Know Your Customers

It’s surprising the high percentage of companies that do not know – or care to know – who their customers are. Many companies simply see customers as dollar signs and avoid any personal connection beyond the transaction.

One of the most basic practices of any business should be to know your customers, or you won’t have a business. You don’t need to know the name of every person who enters your stores, but you should have tools in place to be able to gain some intelligence about your customers in order to effectively service or up-sell them. Learning more about your customers will help build better relationships that lead to increased business.

Treating your customers like they’re made of gold will yield allegiance, devotion, commitment, support, promise, dedication and loyalty.

About the Author

Roger Brooks - loyalty expert and author of 'The Power of Loyalty'

Roger L. Brooks is a loyalty strategist and American author whose areas of expertise include customer loyalty and rewards programs. He has worked with such companies as GE Capital, Sam’s Club, Chase Universal MasterCard and Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) and currently serves as Vice President of Loyalty Marketing for ValueCentric Marketing Group, Inc (VCMG). Roger is a contributing author to a variety of industry trade magazines including Loyalty Management, NACS Magazine, Convenience Store News, Entrepreneur Magazine, and CSP Magazine, and is also the publisher of a weekly newsletter, Everywhere Loyalty, which counts over 10,000 business executives amongst its readers.

Source – Wikipedia

The Relentless Battle for Collaboration and Understanding Branded Manufacturers

Published on February 25, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: brand values, branded manufacturers, cpg brands, key measures of brand value, loyalty, private label.

Branded Manufacturers have historically tried to maintain shelf presence through the introduction of new products. With the evolution of Private Label, there is now a premium on product innovation and relevance for specific shopper segments. There is an increased urgency to providing unique offerings to different retailers. Because branded consumer products are designed to transcend geography, distribution channel and/or retailer, it becomes critical for them to align with retailers in providing unique offerings for shopper segments.

Loyalty , trust and relevance have been declining for many cpg brands (“The Trouble with Brands.”, John Gerzema and Ed Lebar, Strategy + Business, Sept. 2009), and getting stronger for retailers. Gerzema and Lebar saw a decline in brand values began in 2004 and continue through the recession. Three main causes are driving the decline of key measures of brand value: 1) Product proliferation has made it more difficult for shoppers to see differences in brands; 2) Lack of perceived creativity, when shoppers’ creativity quotient has increased; and 3) General loss of trust. Shoppers often have a set of acceptable brands in their repertoire for many categories, rather than a single preferred brand.

A recent study of private-label (“How to Mitigate Private-Label Success in Recessions?”, Lamey et al,. 20089, Leuven, Department of Marketing and Organisation Studies, OR0802) provides a unique long-term perspective covering 20 years (1985-2005). Private label penetration, share and popularity tend to be negatively correlated with economic conditions. In times of downturn, Private Label does well. But to at least some extent, the success of Private Label in times of economic crisis can be traced to brand manufacturer actions. The study found that advertising, innovation and promotion spending declined during economic downturns. As consumers/shoppers re-evaluate their purchase and consumption, brands have been doing less about differentiating and innovating.

Branded manufacturers’ sense of urgency stems from fears about increasing private label shares, SKU rationalizations and possible de-listings. Such outcomes have a greater impact on branded manufacturers. Because brand manufacturers’ margins are higher than private label, a 1% change in sales, market share, shelf space, etc., has a greater impact on their profitability than for a private label product.

What Can be Done?

Branded manufacturers need to be better students of retailers’ shopper segments. Align goals with retailers and begin to collaborate and co-create on solutions:

1. Develop capacity for understanding and acting on shopper insights about customers’ shoppers. Many retailers have developed shopper segmentations. Efforts should be focused on these segments.

2. Understand the goals of retail customers and align with those goals. Provide value for the retailers by helping them provide their shoppers with an exclusive offering, a particular type of solution for the segment’s needs, or a unique experience.

3. Innovation—leading a category in innovation provides relevance to both shoppers and retailers: help redefine the category, provide benefits against specific shopper segments.

4. Focus on delivering offerings that are relevant to specific retailers’ shopper segments and/or specific retail formats — typically against a specific trip mission or type.

5. Stop chasing the long tail, and proactively streamline product portfolios and assortments.

6. Develop a more collaborative, co-creative process for new product development with retail customers.
Retailers and branded manufacturers share many of the same issues and objectives. In short, brand manufacturers should be looking at new ways to collaborate with retailers to successfully address new challenges.

About The Author

Jim Lucas - Guest Blogger for Phenomena.com

As director of shopper marketing at Draftfcb, Jim Lucas helps retailers, manufacturers, and service providers tomotivate shoppers through value-added experiences. The acknowledged founder of the science of retail ecology, he is internationally recognized as an experienced marketer and leading retail expert. Jim brings more than two decades of experience to today’s changing retail landscape and is one of the industry’s foremost practitioners — and a leading authority on the science of understanding how consumers interact with brands and how they behave in retail environments.

During his more than 20 years in the marketing industry, he has served as director of strategic planning and research at Draft Chicago, director of planning and research at Frankel in Chicago, and director of analytics and modeling at Krumm & Associates LLC. His clients have included, among others, Burger King, Frito-Lay, Kellogg, Kmart, Kroger, McDonald’s, Mervyns, Procter & Gamble, Quaker Oats, Sears, Target, USPS, and Walgreens.

Jim Lucas

Director of shopper marketing at Draftfcb.

Jim.Lucas@draftfcb.com
http://www.draftfcb.com

The Relentless Battle for Collaboration and Understanding Shoppers and Retailers

Published on February 22, 2010 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments Tags: brand intermediaries, Carrefour, customer loyalty, delisting of products, growth of assortments, loyalty, new product development, NPD, planful shopping, private label products, Private Labels, product portfolio rationalizations, product portfolios, Range rationalization, shopper advocates, shopper markerts, shopper marketing, shopper marketing agency, shopping in the times of rescission, SKU, store brand solutions, Tesco, value merchants, Walmart, winner take all.

Ongoing competition between retailers’ private label product and brand manufacturers has been portrayed as a “winner take all” battle for control of the shelf. However, a collaborative approach with shared shopper, goal alignment and a renewed focus on relevance is more likely to produce success. This blog looks at why that is so, and what brand manufacturers can do about this.

The globalization of retailers and brand manufacturers, the rise of value merchants and the recent economic downturn have all contributed to the emergence of new issues. Faced with more choice than ever, shoppers are overwhelmed and are looking for ways to simplify their shopping. Retailers and brand manufacturers are trying to address economic inefficiencies that have resulted from unbridled growth of assortments and product portfolios. Range rationalization, delisting of products, product portfolio rationalizations, and evolving new product development processes are the result. To understand these trends and how to survive, we look at the shopper and the retailer.

Shopper

The recent recession served as a catalyst for shoppers to re-evaluate the way they consume and shop. Shoppers have reassessed and re-prioritized their needs, become more planful in their shopping and have altered shopping habits — consolidating shopping trips, shifting to value merchants and turning to more store brand solutions — to cope. The recession has forced consumers/shoppers to examine and change their behaviors in a way that no amount of marketing could have.

The nature of loyalty and ways in which shoppers bestow their loyalty today have changed. Product proliferation has made it more difficult for consumers to assess the differences among them. Shoppers are looking for help, looking for choice editors or advocates. With shoppers making in the range of 150 shopping trips a year, retailers are perfectly poised for such a role. Shoppers have come to rely on and trust retailers as shopper advocates, while branded manufacturers have become somewhat dis-intermediated from shoppers. Retailers are taking on the role of brand intermediaries.

Retailers

Much of retailers’ behavior can be understood by knowing that they are concerned with two key goals—efficiency in the short-term and the long-term profitability of loyal shoppers.

Efficiency— Efficiency is a problem shared by retailers and branded manufacturers. Retailers have begun to reduce the number of SKUs and prioritize categories in their stores. Despite a proliferation of products, there has been no accompanying increase in sales. By reducing the number of SKUs in their stores they have not seen a reduction in sales.

Shopper loyalty—By offering exclusive private label products with value and relevance to different shopper segments, retailers are better able to retain shoppers. Retailers have realized that they cannot rely on branded products alone to draw shoppers to the store and sustain shopper loyalty. Private Label products provide exclusivity and unique relevance to shopper segments (e.g., Tesco, Walmart and Carrefour). Private Label helps retailers prevent trade-down to value retailers and serves unique needs of their shopper segments, contributing to their perception as “shopper advocate.”

In the next article the author will speak about understanding the point of view of the Brand Manufacturers and what can be done from the Manufacturers on how to collaborate and co-create shopper marketing solutions.

About The Author

Jim Lucas - Guest Blogger for Phenomena

Jim Lucas is a director of shopper marketing at Draftfcb, Jim helps retailers, manufacturers, and service providers to motivate shoppers through value-added experiences. The acknowledged founder of the science of retail ecology, he is internationally recognized as an experienced marketer and leading retail expert.