In my article last week, I set-out the Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation. This piece looks in-depth at the sin of intimidation.
Perhaps the ‘holy grail’ for most brands is achieving the marketing buzzword ‘evangelism.’ Evangelism, in the business sense, is evolving the casual customer into a loyal fanatic of a product or brand so they preach its benefits and entice others to try it. The conversion of an evangelist is largely accomplished by delivering exceptional experiences and fantastic engagements which increasingly elevates customer loyalty. However, very few brands achieve this level of customer motivation consistently. This is largely because many brands commit some level of one of the following Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Motivation.
1. Intimidation – Allowing the sheer complexity of data to hinder the organization
2. Ignorance – The lack of visibility of all the internal and external datasets
3. Fragmentation – A failure to bring these dispersed datasets together
4. Assumption – Ignoring the precise insight of the data in lieu of assumptions
5. Improvisation – Developing ‘wing it’ strategies that boil down to ‘one-size-fits-all’
6. Impersonalisation – The failure to deliver tailored experiences and engagements
7. Procrastination – Delaying these steps to fully understand and motivate the customer
These ‘sins’ are further exacerbated by the ‘Age of COVID.’ This has increased the complexity of customer decisions, behaviours, engagements and preferences. Therefore, avoiding these ‘sins’ is more critical to gaining holistic customer understanding to engage and motivate them, while focusing on evolving their loyalty into evangelism. With a sound plan, strong partner and proven platform, businesses can incorporate intelligence solutions that help them connect with customers and increase revenue.
Let’s take a closer look at the sin of intimidation and how it hinders championing customers.
The sin of intimidation
Intimidation is a freezing force to progress. Such is the case when it comes to brands that are trying to figure out how to reign in their disparate data and transform it into a competitive advantage. Many companies simply allow data’s sheer complexity to hinder their ability to get a basic handle on this essential intelligence. It’s understandable that this can be a daunting task. Especially as a Market Pulse survey revealed businesses typically deal with 400+ different data sources.
According to Shirley Ng, Research Principal at General Motors China:
“Often we find that Marketing tends to be more intimidated by the data that’s introduced into their creative process. General Motors has worked to address this by making data reports accessible and searchable by terms, years, regions, vehicles and even projects. Aside from making the data accessible, leadership is often the key to driving data-based decisions. This is often an essential component for a company to overcome the intimidation of data. It’s critical to overcome the intimidation of data, so we really work to try to build a comfort level and acceptance of it across our teams.”
Many of these can and should be feeding organization’s data analytics, customer insights and business intelligence. Unfortunately, the sheer size and scope of this operation can be so intimidating that businesses don’t know where to begin. However, committing this sin leads to a sort of blind paralysis of the organisation, often leading to further sins. Worse still, some organisations then narrowly focus on a single data source which can be unrepresentative or totally meaningless without context of the wider sources.
Absolving the sin of intimidation
The key to absolving the sin of intimidation is developing a commitment to adopting a data-driven methodology for customer understanding. This requires a company-wide approach, focused on identifying, integrating, informing and innovating with their fragmented datasets.
As Claire Rainey, Head of Insight for Telefónica UK explained:
“The growing volume and variety of data across Telefónica is an evolving challenge, but getting a handle on it all and being able to glean insights from it is incredibly valuable. It provides not only a guide in decisions and strategy, but also a sustainable competitive advantage to the business. This is recognised within the business and understood as an essential dimension to Telefónica’s success.”
Beyond a company-wide commitment, reigning in and taming the disparate data sources requires a commitment to adopting the technological innovation needed to transform it into multilayered windows into customers’ behaviours, attitudes and tendencies. This quickly delivers a competitive advantage. This takes a dedication of resources and a commitment to customer intelligence technology that can help identify, inventory, ingest and integrate fragmented data into a single-source of evidence.
“The most successful companies we encounter are the ones who realize the complexity of data isn’t going to stop,” according to Mark Langsfeld, CEO of mTab. “They see that committing to customer centricity is rooted in understanding how the customer engages and reacts and how this evolves on an ongoing basis. This requires tapping into the intelligence capital established in the organization. This should be viewed as one the most valuable assets of the company, right up there with its people and innovations.”
The bottom line is that your business is already dealing in massive data flows. Therefore, the sooner you inventory, organize and empower your company with it, the sooner you can enhance your decision making, optimize your strategies and elevate your innovation. Beyond all of this, it’ll serve as a catapult in making your entire organisation customer-centric .
