Category Archives: Metrics

How to measure awareness advertising

Posted on October 20, 2012 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

If customers don’t know you exist your chances of attracting them are the same as trying to teach an elephant to tap dance.

This is the first rule in marketing – make sure your potential customers are aware of who you are, what you stand for and how you can help solve their problems.

However it is much easier said than done. These days the media choices can be overwhelming, check out the image below that identifies the different social media options alone!

Social Media Map from Brian Solis and JESS3

Source: Brian Solis and JESS3 http://www.theconversationprism.com/

Add to this social media mix, the traditional media – TV, print, radio and billboards and you have some difficult decisions to make.

Where should I invest to generate maximum awareness for minimum cost? and How will I know whether these investments are paying off?

Deciphering the impact of advertising is notoriously difficult, there is a classic saying in advertising circles attributed to the father of advertising, John Wanamaker who said:

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Awareness advertising is designed to widen the pool of potential customers and remind them of how you can help them. The goal is to position a company’s brand favorably and regularly in the customer’s mind.

The measurement challenge comes from the fact that it is not necessarily designed to elicit an immediate response. Regardless there are a few ways you can get a handle on the impact of this type of advertising:

1. Prospect Surveys Before and After Comparisons

This technique involves establishing a baseline and then comparing results against that baseline over time.

For example, a simple survey may highlight that 10% of prospects have heard of your brand and 15% may consider you as a potential supplier of the product. The consideration metric is an important one to include as we are not interested in awareness alone. We really want to know whether we are in the “evoked set” – the top 2 or 3 brands customers have as top of mind for any particular product category.

Asking these questions again in 3 months may reveal that now 25% of prospects have heard of your brand and 30% of them would consider you as a potential provider.

You can reasonably conclude that your advertising activities were a significant driver responsible for the increase.

2. Asking Customers at their Point of Inquiry

Many companies will ask a new customer how they heard of the company or product. This is a great technique for companies that get a lot of inbound calls, a quick question can be asked at the end of the call to which most customers are happy to respond.

To go a little deeper a survey can be conducted asking customers which specific media they remember seeing. Their answers won’t tell you whether the activity influenced their purchase, but it will tell you which of your awareness advertising activities are being noticed.

To understand the advertising’s influence, we can design questions to elicit feedback on the messages sent.

For example “which of the following ads have you seen?, which haven’t you seen?, rank each on a scale of 1 to 5 on whether it appealed to you or not.

Next total up the answers from all survey takers to give you a clear picture of how people perceive your advertising.

NOTE: Where ever possible please do some of this in pre-testing to make sure you are eliciting the response you want!

3 ways to secure senior management buy-in and use it to establish a customer-centric culture

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 1 comment

Image from John Kotter's Great Book on the Subject of Buy-in

One of the greatest challenges for customer experience executives is gaining buy-in for investments in improving the customer experience.

Customer experience can seem like a never ending intangible problem that is too hard to deal with given the necessity to focus on driving quarterly numbers.

Unfortunately the result is like driving a car as fast as you can until its empty, at some point the car runs out of fuel and it is crisis time. For a business this means losing customers and losing the ability to attract them back to the business without significant price concession leading to lower profitability.

Creating a customer centric culture is a capability building process for the organization; it is the ongoing improvement and refinement of value for its customers.

So what does this mean for gaining buy-in? Ultimately the leadership needs to buy-in to the idea that shaping the culture in a way that is customer centric is the only way to ensure a legacy for themselves and the company. In short executives with a short-term view will never prioritize culture change as they are already thinking about their next role. Why train for a marathon when you are only running a 5k?

For those executives with a longer-term view, here are 3 ways to get buy-in

1. Link the Customer Experience Strategy to Corporate Strategy and the bottom line

The executive team and the CEO are ultimately responsible for driving profitable growth and return for investors. The corporate strategy for most firms involves growth. Where does that growth come from? Customers.

A customer experience strategy that results in customers staying with the company for longer, buying more and newer products, becoming advocates and reducing the cost to serve will drive growth. If customer experience professionals can show how the customer experience strategy will drive these things they will get executive buy-in.

2. Define the Cost of Quality

What is the impact to the organization of poor customer experience and quality?

Customers leave or churn
Customer have to call more often to have the needs met
Employees leave
Brand/image
Customer complaints increase demonstrating weakness in organizational performance

3. Data-Data-Data!

Calculate the lifetime value of customers, see how Chris Zane implements this concept to drive customer focus in his super successful cycling business.
Conduct research on customer perceptions of the company and how these correlate with customer retention and acquisition metrics

Determine the propensity to switch, which customers are at risk of leaving and what would it cost if they did?
Measure your company’s level of customer centricity and benchmark best in class companies.

1 Comment

Posted in Chief Customer Officers, Customer Centric Culture, Customer Centric Leadership, Customer Experience, customer focus, Customer Obsession, Marketing ROI, Metrics, ROMI

Tagged customer centricity; customer focus; lifetime value;

Measuring your company’s Market-Driven Culture: There’s an app for that!

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Dr Chris L. Brown | Leave a comment

The MRI Circumplex - shows a company's customer culture

With all the talk these days about customer experience and increasing customer focus etc… it always amazes me that there is no internal measure of customer focus.

The only way for businesses to thrive in the turbulence and increasing complexity of today’s marketplace is to have deep ongoing customer insight.

What gets measures gets done and without good metrics there is no way to track progress or really understand what success will look like.

This was the major driving force behind the creation of the Market Responsiveness Index (MRI).

If you are a leader that really wants to drive customer focused change in your organization there is no other leadership tool available!

The only metric that matters to customer focused businesses – Lifetime Value

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Dr Chris L. Brown | 3 comments

I was recently asked by a client, “if you could only have one measure to manage your business, what would it be?”. I quickly thought about the range of metrics available to executives today: profit per customer, market share, revenue growth, customer satisfaction, new product success, share price… the list goes on.

However the one metric that always comes to mind is one that not many businesses use, lifetime value of customers, and yet it is the most powerful.

This metric provides a long term customer centered view of your business. What is the value, in profit terms, of an average customer over the potential life of your business relationship?

This is not a static number but an active one that can be used to value your business and identify opportunities to grow that number.

It’s real power however is in galvanizing everyone in a company around the importance and value of customer relationships. It proves the tangible logic for why every interaction matters and connects everyone with the ultimate customer.

Below is a video interview with one of the great practitioners of Lifetime Value, Chris Zane of Zane’s Cycles