How do your customers define “value”?

As importantly, how do you? Every day, most companies lose profits, customers and market share as they fall through the gap in this fundamental understanding.

This gets at the core of two basic business questions that many companies either don’t ask, or – if they do ask – don’t share effectively across silos and groups internally.

Who is our customer? And what is she worth
to us?

After all, if you don’t know your customers, how can you deliver the experiences they desire? And if you don’t know what they’re worth to you on a customer-by-customer basis, how will you know where to best focus your limited resources?

In the era of the super-smart customer, these answers are more important than ever. So start asking…the future, as they say, is now.

Best,

Michael Hinshaw
Managing Director
MCorp Consulting

In brief, this is (and will
continue to be) an
evolutionary process.
For now, we’re looking at
a combination of:

- Clicks
- Mentions
- RTs (retweets)
- Reach (of a tweet)

Our baseline (0) is a
Tweet that has reached
only my approximately
3000 followers, and
opened (read) only an
average number of
times.

Insights and Influence in 140 Characters or Less…

1.) Reading: "Consumers don’t want to engage with brands on Facebook and Twitter" http://ow.ly/45TMC
In spite of its “well duh” title, this article has some real meat (midway down I encountered an excellent, if somewhat obscure alternative, "It's almost real enough to matter…"). Also see the thought-provoking diagram on the new face of customer lifetime value. A few more dots could use connecting, but it’s satisfying food for thought. (Tweet Score: 54)

2.) Great - you have integrity. What does that mean? And how does that make you different? http://ow.ly/3UhlE
Ah the integrity-as-core-value issue. As a brander and documenter of brands, I’ve wrestled with this dilemma: Leave the word “integrity” out of the branding equation because, after all, shouldn’t it be a given? Or keep it in precisely because it is a given? By its very absence, are we reflecting negatively on an organization? I’ve usually opted to leave it in, but then work very hard to ensure it’s executed in very specific and meaningful ways. (Tweet Score: 52)

3.) “...if your attempts to delight customers aren’t tied to their specific needs they might not even notice...” http://ow.ly/3PHj3
Beautiful. Customer Satisfaction is to being happy as Customer Experience is to solving a need. While happy is good, useful is a whole lot more…useful. Love her doctor’s office analogy; pass the donuts! (Tweet Score: 50)

4.) Reading: “Ask Customers to Use Less of Your Product: The Big Heresy” http://ow.ly/3U4Bl
If Xerox is going out of its way to help clients drastically reduce copier and printer use (including purchase of equipment), what kind of paradigm shift can your organization embrace? In this time of (love it or hate it) tea-party activism, whether you’re a risk-taker or just trying to keep up, what business sacred cow can you rethink, revamp or retire, to create a new model or profit stream? (Tweet Score: 49)

5.) A designer and a marketer walk into a bar... http://ow.ly/3UOKW
Amen Megan, your subtitle, “Kumbaya, people!” says it all. The age-old tension between design and marketing (and this can be extended to the friction between sales and marketing, too) is ridiculous, when we’re all swimming together in the same pot trying to make a delicious Customer Experience and Interaction Design stew. It’s as if the left and right hands started disdaining one another, instead of working in concert to achieve great things. What’s the sound of one hand clapping……? (Tweet Score: 49)

6.) National Australia Bank’s Break-up Campaign http://ow.ly/3Yqs4
Whether this is effective in the long run or not, it’s a damn funny campaign (though the live staging sample recorded for YouTube made me cringe). Differentiation and decommodification are traditional brand issues for banks, but pile onto that their more recent role as the evil geniuses behind the global economic crisis and, well, let’s just say a little “Dear John” humor can go a long way. (Tweet Score: 45)

7.) Brands leverage retro marketing to strongly engage newly affluent consumers in China. http://ow.ly/3Yow8
Nothing says cutting-edge marketing like Adidas tracksuits, Transformers and Billie Jean. Whereas in the U.S., snap bracelets and safety pin couture is kitsch, in China it’s a resonant Touchpoint that evokes childhood nostalgia. Think of the crises past generations of Chinese underwent every 7-10 years (think Cultural Revolution), versus the relative lack of upheaval today’s young Chinese have lived through. In that context…. (Tweet Score: 39)

8.) Poor customer service often stems from a failure to communicate. Hard to get around with only 140 characters. http://ow.ly/3Yoql
Most overused brand value behind “integrity”? “Excellent customer service.” Like a well-stocked tool-chest, it’s fine to add Twitter to your customer-care arsenal. But trying to solve complex issues with customers tapping out 140 characters at a time on smart-phones is like cutting through steel with sandpaper. Virgin America gets it, monitoring twittering passengers and alerting cabin staff to issues en aire, in real time. But that’s a bit different from, say, tweeting instructions on plane maintenance to their mechanics on the tarmac. (Tweet Score: 39)

9.) Reading: "The Future of Marketplaces" http://ow.ly/420UH
“In the old days of podcasting and videoblogging”? Just shoot me now. But not til you’ve read Chris Brogan’s thoughts on the distributed, mobile marketplaces of the future. We’ve featured stories on Square (mobile phone payments) and Groupon (national / local) recently, two great examples of what Brogan illustrates here. And if podcasting is passé? Vending machines are the wave of the future; you heard it here first. (Tweet Score: 38)

10.) Happiest Employees --> Happiest Customers --> Happiest Shareholders http://ow.ly/4214v
And to round out our Frequently Bogus Brand Values trifecta, “We value our employees.” Yeah right, say the jaded (all of us?). But a few companies really do, not just because they’re nice, but also because they see the correlation between employee commitment > customer loyalty / experience > shareholder value. The lesson here? If you’re not going to do it for the love, then do it for the bottom line. (Tweet Score: 38)