Tamara Gillan, Founder and CEO of Cherry London, will be a featured speaker at Loyalty Expo Europe, which will be held Oct. 7-8, 2013 at The Tower Hotel, St. Katherine’s Way, London. Gillan participated in a Q&A with Loyalty 360 and offered insights connected to her featured session titled, “Driving Loyalty and Differentiation Through Innovative Partnerships.”
Loyalty Expo Europe 2013 will provide the knowledge necessary to guide your customers on the path to loyalty. Presented by Loyalty 360 - The Loyalty Marketer's Association, Loyalty Expo has earned the reputation of being one of the industry's premiere events, and we are extremely pleased to be able to continue to provide a forum to meet and discuss the challenges facing brands today.
The two-day event will be jam-packed with learning and networking opportunities including: interactive sessions, marketer-only peer-to-peer roundtables, networking receptions and exhibit hall. The roundtables have been quite popular at our past events as participants take advantage of this opportunity to share experiences and discuss challenges and solutions.
Q: What is the state of marketing today?
There is an overwhelming and seismic shift in every aspect of marketing. Consumers are demanding as hell, the pace of change is immense, and it’s hard to keep abreast let alone ahead, and budgets have to work harder. This is change in consumer behaviours, and expectations are being driven by exponential technological growth and innovation.
Consumers are so demanding that Coca Cola created the sharing happiness campaign and Cokes with people’s names on them.
Over half of British teenagers have a smartphone, and mobile web browsing is set to surpass desktop browsing this year. There’s now even CUSTOWNERS, people who not only want to passively consume a product, but want to fund and invest in the brands they not buy from but those that are aligned to their personal values.
Many brands are overwhelmed by the speed of change, the challenge and opportunity offered by Big Data, and the technology and channel choices. Those that are getting it right are staying true to the need to start with the brand objective and the customer opportunity, then create a big compelling idea, then executing it in the right way, at the right place, at the right time through the appropriate marketing channel – be that a ‘traditional’ channel or a ‘new’ channel. What is exciting is that all this new technology gives us the opportunity to connect to people, our customers, in new, exciting and more relevant ways than ever before.
O2 Priority is a great example of how to stay ahead in a competitive and fast paced market, and to how to make use of the best tools we currently have available to us. The U.K. Telco market is one of the toughest markets, but O2’s churn rate is less than 1% - half of its competitors. That’s because O2 has invested in its customers, and created something unique that their customers can’t get anywhere else. And they’re delivered it in the most relevant way using the power of insight, the latest technology and fuelled by the innovative brand partnerships.
Q: What will be the biggest opportunity for marketers in the next 3-5 years?
A big opportunity, and threat if ignored, is the continued shift from push to pull marketing, where consumers are in control of when and how they interact with content due to the exponential growth in the sophistication of devices and personalisation technologies. Marketers will need to create content that’s so good and available across multiple platforms that consumers are prepared to seek it out and share it. ASOS have continued to innovate in this area, and position themselves as much as a modern fashion authority as an online retailer, with the prolific creation of new and different content across a range of formats from Google+ hangouts, to shopable music videos and Pinterest to Twitter and beyond. And because of this, they’re keeping their millions of customers glued and are reporting record sales every quarter.
And generally, in this time of change, there are greater opportunities for new market entrants and for challenger brands to innovate and seize new ground. New categories will be created, that we cannot even imagine, and categories and market leaders that we thought would always be there, will continue to disappear.
Q: What will be the biggest challenge for marketing in the next 3-5 years?
The biggest challenge for marketers is the reverse of the above – either to get it wrong, or missing out altogether.
I recently spoke at the Dialog conference in Sweden and I’m reading a book that one of the other delegates wrote “SIRFs-Up – Catching the Next Wave in Marketing”, which has extensive research about how to stay ahead using ROI-based planning. An interview with Peter Frend (Marketing Evolution’s President and COO) best sums it up by saying if everyone is going to start to get it right – “you don’t want to be last on the train.” Innovate, and take advantage of the new tools available to us or your will be left behind, and worse still you could become extinct.
Q: Give us a high level overview of your customer philosophy and share how this perspective helps drive more effective engagement and therefore better marketing outcomes?
You have to give customers more of what they want and less of what they don’t. And more than that, you have to inspire and motivate them with something new that they can’t get anywhere else, and you have to understand how to do all of this in a way that most positively impacts your business.
O2 is an excellent illustration of this customer-centric philosophy in action:
Their customers are their priority in every sense. We ask them what they want, when they want it and how they want it. We then track what happens and learn and improve what we do based on their behaviour and the feedback they give us across channels.
We have done this from the inception of priority, and we will continue to do so, using new technologies to improve our customer of our customers and then give them what they want and need.
Q: The “cauldron call” for today’s marketing strategist is engagement. How do you define engagement? What key step can best drive audience engagement today?
Traditional definitions of engagement looked mainly at a meaningful impact on a consumer – with the ultimate aim of either driving a behavioural result (ie. Getting them to do something) or an attitudinal result (getting them to think or feel something – usually focused on a rational decision or attitude). This is changing because true engagement is about all 3 of those – doing something, thinking something and feeling something – not necessarily in that order.
O2 understands that feeling something is very important, and the key driver of real customer engagement. They understand this and we act accordingly – bringing on board brand partners exclusively to offer treat moments and create emotional connections with our priority users:
We gave away over 100,000 Percy Pigs as a treat, and caused a positive social media flurry.
We have just introduced a competition mechanic to priority to give our customers the chance to win once in a lifetime prizes. We have seen the highest participation rates ever.
And we are also looking at the measures we use. ‘Do something’ is no longer defined as view or redeem the offer. We are also at recommendation and social commentary to get a broader understanding of how engaged our customers really are.
The key step is to really ‘get’ your customers – to understand them, understand that they are not rational creatures making linear decisions but real people with complex relationships and needs. Understand your role in their life and then enhance it.
Q: With the advent of social, mobile and other emerging technologies, how do brands effectively improve the customer experience and engage their audience in this challenging and very dynamic marketing environment?
You have to understand the customer opportunity, get the big idea right and then communicate it at the right time, in the right place, in the right way using all the tools and technologies you now have available to you.
You have to stay on top of the new and emerging technologies and then determine if they are appropriate. The challenge of marketing is the same; it’s just exciting that we have so many new ways to connect with customers, and new ones emerge every day.
Mobilize has just launched in the U.K., which provides a mobile locator which can find specific stores or products based on your current location, driven from pretty much any communication, including print using QR codes, NFC, Facebook, Twitter, and online.
Apple’s impending iOS7 (currently in beta) includes a new Bluetooth feature that identifies a user’s location within retail environments, triggering relevant alerts as they move around stores. It’s a more sophisticated way of bringing the concept of location-triggered audio guides for galleries into the world of shopping. Imagine browsing wine aisles and receiving relevant tasting tips, or advice on building the perfect outfit when rifling through racks of Topshop. iOS7 unlocks a crucial opportunity to connect branded digital initiatives to real world physical environments. For now, I need to locate a glass of very good Otago, Pinot Noir to quiet my busy mind, buzzing with all the possibilities now and in the future.
Q: We believe in a process of expectation matching; the understanding that the consumer’s expectation change based on their engagement with a brand and the stage of the customer lifecycle. Brands struggle with this dynamic and this idea; yet want to see it put in practice? Advice to marketers?
I agree with the understanding that consumers’ expectations change based on their engagement with a brand and the stage of a customer lifecycle. Though our work with O2, we live and breathe this and they continuously invest to better understand their customers and how their expectations and engagement level changes as their relationship with O2 progresses. We invest to understand that lifecycle and then behave accordingly e.g. The key role our thank-yous play in priority.
My advice to fellow marketers is to invest in understanding your customer’s lifecycle and expectations and then show them that you really get them, by changing your behaviour accordingly. And it isn’t just about matching expectations, it’s about constantly innovating and delighting customers to exceed their expectations. Come on, be a bit more like O2 and a bit More Dog and do something exceptional to exceed your customer’s expectations and keep them for longer.