Barry Kirk, VP of Loyalty Strategy, Maritz Motivation, will be one of the featured speakers during a session at the 7th Annual Loyalty Expo, presented by Loyalty360 – The Loyalty Marketer’s Association. The event will be held March 17-19, 2014, at the Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando, Florida.
Kirk, who has more than a decade of experience in digital marketing and customer retention in his role as VP of Loyalty Strategy for Maritz Motivation Solutions, participated in an engaging Q&A with Loyalty360 to discuss the Maritz “Social Intelligence” survey and how the research can impact brands and customer loyalty.
Q: What prompted Maritz to conduct this landmark “Social Intelligence” survey and how long did it take?
We know that there has been a significant shift in the loyalty space that has affected who and what has the most influence on consumer brand choice. Trust in brands, and institutions in general, has been on the decline, but trust in the voice of fellow consumers has grown exponentially. As a result, a consumer in 2014 is likely to put more weight on the opinion of a complete stranger sharing on social media than they will on the any marketing message offered by a brand. This shift has driven Maritz to put increasingly more emphasis on social intelligence–the mining of conversations occurring throughout the public social grid for insight into what consumers are saying to one another about brands and the way they engage with them.
Q: What do you see as the biggest takeaways from this survey and how can they impact brands and customer loyalty?
One of the most interesting findings from the study is the range of topics that consumers are discussing in conjunction with references to brand loyalty. Rather than being isolated conversations, when consumer are sharing brand experiences and impressions on the social grid they are connecting those comments to topics like politics, religion and world events. This says to us that brands need to realize that consumers don’t disassociate their brand interactions from all other interactions in life, and this gives us even more reason to embrace a more human-to-human conversation with our customers.
Q: What is your advice for brands who want to gain more customer insights through social media?
It’s not news that Big Data is the trending topic these days, especially for digital marketers. In the loyalty space, the question we need to ask about Big Data is, “What data sets aren’t we leveraging effectively yet?” Without a doubt, social intelligence is the one data source that has had the least exposure and application inside of loyalty programs. That’s partially due to the fact that loyalty marketers are still just trying to figure out how to meaningfully incorporate social media into their engagement strategy, beyond just saying “Please post this to Facebook.” Getting that engagement piece figured out is important, but I think even more value will come from establishing a formal social listening plan and integrating that into your overall analytics strategy–this will enable you to not only draw insights from what consumers are doing (behavioral data), and intending (market research data), but saying to one another (social data). This multi-dimensional view of the customer will be really powerful.
Q: Why are emotion and sentiment critical to understanding brand loyalty?
It is critical to understand the emotion levels around conversations because emotion is closely tied to likelihood to act. With that in mind, if we know what consumers are most emotional about, we then know what matters most to them and we can use that information to influence behavior. Furthermore, sentiment tells us if the consumers’ attitude toward what we are measuring is positive, negative, or neutral. Pairing emotion with sentiment allows us to identify how to incorporate different aspects into our strategy to achieve the desired results. For example, topics/areas that are highly emotional and positive need to be leveraged to establish a strong connection with consumers while those that are highly emotional and negative are risky and need to be managed carefully.
The Emotion Score developed by Maritz/Evolve24 is a weighted measure that calculates the emotional intensity of a discussion. This measure is based on academic principles of risk communication and behavioral psychology. The measure offers a scientific and consistent measure for determining how persuasive a message is on an audience about a given issue or entity. This provides an indicator of how an audience will react to a given situation. For example, high Emotion Scores indicate that an audience is likely to react to a given issue as they emotionally invested.
Q: What do you see as the future for brands’ use of social media to better understand their customers?
Smart loyalty program owners will begin to see that making their program more “social” is the single biggest engagement opportunity available to our industry moving forward. This is different than a social media strategy which generally involves engaging with consumers out on the social grid. What I’m recommending is that we start making program’s social experiences in and of themselves, through the use of game mechanics, more open member profiles, and opportunities for brand advocates to collaborate within brand experiences. The power in such a strategy will not only be to improve the pull of the program experience, but it will also shift many of the social conversation inside the program where they will be easier to data mine and draw insight from to improve and refine the program experience.