At Cequity, we believe Analytical Marketing will be the biggest competitive advantage enterprises will have in the next decade or two. Successful enterprises of tomorrow will be the ones who can organize and leverage customer information at speed ,to optimize their marketing performance, increase accountability, improve profit and deliver growth. Cequity insights will bring to you trends and insights in this area and it's our way of sharing best practices so as to help you accelerate this culture and thinking in your organization. We call this kind of an approach Analytical Marketing and we will constantly bring in "best practices" for improving your capabilities in Analytical Marketing.

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When you think about the marketing strategy of any of the large Packaged consumer goods companies , you are likely to think about Mass marketing! An interesting variation to this is Coke with its My Coke Rewards.
In fact, Coca-Cola often thinks instead in terms of large niche markets driven by lifestyle or life stage, according to Michael La Kier, director of My Coke Rewards for Coca-Cola North America.One place the company focuses in on its niche-market consumers is online via mycokerewards.com. The site offers personalized home pages based on consumers’ preferences (e.g., preferred brands, activities, etc.). In the course of 24 hours the website gets more than 285,000 visits, during which the average length of stay on the site is 9.5 minutes, and about 13,000 new members join. The program currently has more than 9 million members who have logged in more than 100 million times and have redeemed about 5 million rewards in total.

Ginger Conlon has this interesting article on Coke’s strategies.
http://blog.cequitysolutions.com/


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Really want Customer loyalty, improve the Customer experience first!
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Nov 30, 2008
Email Article digg it reddit del.icio.us StumbleUpon Customer loyalty is such an overused term today. Every brand wants it and the common thinking seems to be to just launch a card based loyalty program to buy customer loyalty. In fact recent reports from Forrester find an increasing emphasis on customer experience and a payoff in terms of customer retention. It is of course much harder to truly create a strong customer experience. Inadvertently companies make it more difficult for customers to engage and do business with them. How often in a bank, the relationship manager does not have a single view of all your financial investments with the same bank!! But make no mistake about it, building a superior customer experience is a difficult task and often “silo” based organization structures come in the way. Here is an interesting article on this by Christopher Musico
http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=47309
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Counting efficiency at the Cash till
Posted by Ajay Kelkar on Sun, Nov 30, 2008
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An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal discusses how the Meijer grocery chain along with other retailers are starting to use production techniques to monitor the throughput of employees.
In hard times every little bit of efficiency needs to be squeezed through. But how much is “too much”. Measuring the time that a cashier at a retail store takes to help you pay and move on is an important efficiency measure that stores use. But using data analytics indiscriminately may do more damage than good. A lot of “impulse sell” also happens at cash points along with the “happy conversation” that makes up a good customer experience. By all means measure your business and watch the numbers very closely but ensure you allow the “human element” to com through,that’s what “great” retail is all about.
Check out this article in the Wall Street Journal and we would love to have your comments on this!!
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122651745876821483.html
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Love your data, set it free!
Posted by S Swaminathan on Sun, Nov 30, 2008
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Data services are freeing corporate data from the silos, allowing for its use on demand while providing security to the data's custodians. The demand for more data more quickly is driving IT departments to rethink their entire systems architectures.
At Cequity, we have been helping clients work within the constraints of multiple -source systems while making data accessible for marketing when they need it. Our philosophy has been to make data more flexible and easy to access so that enterprises can take advantage of huge amounts of data that they accumulate today.
Dana Gardner writes on how important it is to get rid of data silos for better customer management:
In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events, and transactions.
The move is in the ownership of data value to the very people who really need it, who help define its analysis, and who can best use it for business and consumption advantage. Analysis and productivity values rule the future of data as services. The [new] model is of keeping the data where it belongs and yet making it available to the rest of the world. Our data is trapped in these silos, where each department owns the data and there is a manual paper process to request a report.
According to Brad Svee, "Requesting a customer report takes a long time, and what we have been able to do is try to expose that data through Web services using mashup-type UI (user interface) technology and data services to keep the data in the place that it belongs, without having a flat file flying between FTP servers, as you talked about, and start to show people data that they haven't seen before in an instant, consumable way."
Read more on how to use your data for better customer management
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Customer-centric lead scoring
Posted by S Swaminathan on Sat, Nov 29, 2008
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We have always seen that companies struggle to manage the leads that they generate. Either they are not followed-up effectively or there is a conflict of what is defined as a hot/warm lead by sales and marketing or there is no defined process of managing unconverted leads to extract more value out of the marketing investments made.
Tim Wilson has an interesting perspective on how better customer management can lead to significant increase in return on marketing investment:
Old school lead-generating efforts often fail because Marketing and Sales initiatives are dependent on each other but disconnected. The image often associated with this relationship is a funnel. At the top of the funnel is Marketing, which finds and lures leads that are then pushed down to the lower portion of the funnel, which is Sales.
This funnel image is fundamentally flawed because it suggests a linear process. Rather, to succeed, the process must be ongoing and circular, like cogs that continue to rotate and engage each other. One cog is Marketing (tactics), and this must be in alignment with a Sales cog (engagement), both of which are driven by a third cog: the continuous process of lead marketing optimization.
Complaints from the Sales department often occur because Marketing prematurely hands over leads to Sales, which creates efficiency problems. First, some of the information that needs to be gathered could have been gathered automatically through a Marketing dialogue. Second, the lack of that information results in lead handoffs that have little or no near-term potential. Over time, these inefficiencies cause Sales representatives to lose trust in the value the Marketing department is providing. In the worst case, it results in the salesperson starting to cold call himself, which makes the level of inefficiency even greater. According to Anders Grondstedt:
"Non customer centric thinking organizations are organized to efficiently produce and distribute goods. They relegate customer management and brand building to marketing and communication departments and agencies that sequester themselves in separate offices, isolated both from each other and from the customer, churning out advertising and other communications material to an information overloaded world. They make a virtue of outspending and outshouting the competition. Run more ads. Maximize the numbers of impressions. Get more ‘ink.' They are frittering away millions of dollars in "marketing."

Read more to learn why successful companies must move towards Customer-Centricity
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Are banks ready to shift gears to attract and retain Gen X and Gen Y?
Posted by S Swaminathan on Sat, Nov 22, 2008
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According to a loyalty programme survey by Maritz Research, Younger Generation of Customers are less loyal to Banks.
At Cequity, we agree this is a challenge for banks and we do recommend banks must change the way they service this generation. They need a whole host of new services which makes it convenient for the young generation to bank with them. Also, there is a need to understand their financial needs and configure products that can fit into their life. Take a look at what the research revealed:
"For the most part, the current customer experience model at banks caters to the Silent Generation and Boomers, who more frequently bank in-person at branches. But, younger generation customers are much more mobile and rely more heavily on online interactions," says Thad Peterson, division vice president, sector strategy and solutions for Maritz' financial services sector.
37 percent of Gen Y and 36 percent of Gen X believe they would get better customer service at a different bank, compared with only 24 percent of Boomer and 16 percent of Silent Generation respondents.
22 percent of Gen Y and 21 percent of Gen X reported being upset in the past year about high fees, whereas only 14 percent of Boomer and six percent of the Silent Generation respondents reported the same.
18 percent of Gen Y and 17 percent of Gen X reported being upset about a lack of ATM locations, compared with only 11 percent of Boomer and three percent of Silent Generation respondents.
Washington Mutual is one institution that successfully caters to the needs of younger customers. WaMu no longer requires a signature to open a checking account. The bank simply uses the first signed check as the authorization signature -- incenting new customers to do business with the bank by simplifying the process and eliminating a trip to the bank. It appeals to the Gen X and Y customer desire to just "get it done,"
Read to find out more about banking loyalty solutions.
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