An article in The Wise Marketer, (free registration required), Top ten factors that make or break consumer trust, discusses research that was recently conducted in the UK by Corporate Culture. Here is a summary of the research findings:
Gender bias
Women in particular believe trust is an essential quality in the companies they buy from (56% of women cited this as important, compared to 47% of men).
Most trusted & untrusted
The most and least trusted business sectors are:
Rank Most Trusted Least Trusted
1 Entertainment and leisure Tobacco
2 Food companies; Supermarkets; Technology Fast food
3 Pharmaceutical Petrochemicals
4 Cosmetic/toiletries Gas/electricity; Construction
Source: Corporate Culture Customer Trust Index
Top ten trust/distrust factors
The index also identified the top ten factors that make customers trust or distrust a company:
Rank Most Trusted Least Trusted
1 Keeps promises (76%) Doesn't correct mistakes (80%)
2 Customer service (70%) Fails to protect privacy (77%)
3 Consistently high quality (64%) Doesn't do what it says (74%)
4 Deals effectively with complaints (64%) Inaccurate billing (70%)
5 Value for money (64%) Too many sales calls (65%)
6 Honest/admit mistakes (59%) Inconsistent quality (63%)
7 Product safety (59%) Ingredients may damage health (60%)
8 Meets individual needs (52%) Doesn't inform price/product changes (50%)
9 Listens to customers (51%) Outsources call centers/operations (55%)
10 Clear pricing (49%) Unclear pricing (52%)
Source: Corporate Culture Customer Trust Index
The research also noted that trust drives sales. If a company loses the trust of consumers, three out of four (76%) say they will simply stop buying from the company. Conversely, if a company earns consumer trust, 42% will buy more products, and over half (54%) will recommend the product to others.
Four keys to building trust
Corporate Culture has identified four steps to help companies to earn consumer trust:
1. Ensure your product or service meets the expectations of your customers;
2. Remember that you are only as good as your last personal contact with the customer;
3. Show consumers the difference your product makes in their life;
4. Be seen to act responsibly in everything you do.
According to John Drummond, chief executive for Corporate Culture, "There has been a massive increase in the amount of marketing money companies are spending to win customer trust. This can only make sense if it is based on a genuine understanding of why customers trust companies and what the most powerful form of communication is for them. One of the key points of this research is that the future of marketing is about belief in business. It suggests that what people believe is a more powerful influence on buying behaviour than price, quality or reputation. What people believe is also more powerful than the facts about your company or your product."
Joseph Jaffe is one person who does a great job of building collaborative projects. After his successful book Life after the 30 Sec Spot, he has started to write a new book - Join the conversation and has invited people to contribute. I have tried to contribute my thoughts in Chapter 10 - Why are you so afraid of conversation? Here's my take:
It is a good idea to trace this to the history and growth of organizations in the industrial age. This was the age where efficiency was the focus. Organizations were built around driving productivity. People were trained to do things over and over again - faster and quicker. For over a century, people worked in an era of mass production. Hence, they forgot the ability to develop conversations. They worked in large organizations that told them what to do rather than get them to explore what to do.
We therefore moved from
- an era of 'inventory of goods' to an era of 'inventory of ideas'.
- an era of 'scarcity' to an era of ' insatiable choices'
- an era of ' information poverty' to an era of 'information overload'
Imagine the kind of shift they would have to make for this new eco-system. They had to express, share and collaborate to get prepared for such an environment. This is a new work culture altogether for them. Also, one-size-fits-all product strategy became irrelevant.
Conversation at the end of the day is two-way. Conversations require
- A capability to accept reality as it were because that's how consumers talk amongst themselves
- Ability to listen and respond in an unbiased manner
- Skills to experiment,learn and develop
- Ability to change the course of one's action swiftly, even if the decision was wrong
Hence, they were not ready for a conversation era. An environment where one has to express, empathize, engage, enable and empower. The mindset a marketer must have is not to 'inform at any cost' but 'spread at no cost'. This is a new marketing paradigm that demands new thinking, new rules and new ideas.
Styling itself the 'World's Biggest Creative Department', OpenAd is a relatively minor Slovenian-owned internet business with just thirty-nine staff worldwide. Yet some see it as the shape of things to come - maybe, even, the writing on the wall for traditional ad agencies.
However, OpenAd MD Katarina Skoberne stresses the venture isn't competing with agencies. She insists it simply supplements the use by clients of freelance creatives. "We are not an online ad agency, we are merely a resource of creative material," she says.
Although registered in Switzerland, OpenAd's sales and marketing arm operates out of London while the global support centre is based in Slovenia.
Membership of the exchange is free to the 5,000-plus creatives on OpenAd's register. Explains Skoberne: "Anyone who has registered as a creative supplier - and anyone can - is free to answer the brief, or not, as they choose. Clients pay an initial set membership fee to join OpenAd, then a licence fee for the ideas they use."
"This allows them to post briefs on the site and view existing ideas, paying somewhere between $3000 and $100,000 depending upon the number of pitches they want to hold, the number of categories they want to access and the number of [client] staff who have access."
Among those who have used OpenAd is UK-based charity Comic Relief. Enthuses Amanda Horton-Mastin, new media director: "Make Poverty History was a global campaign and the thing about OpenAd is that it opens the window to global ideas, even for very small clients. It was quick, it was cheap, and the idea we chose was excellent."
Another client is Emap's men's magazine FHM which has used OpenAd three times in the past two years. "We started off with one-off tactical promotions and recently asked for a full-blown branding campaign," says marketing manager Ben Cordle.
"The creative response was fantastic. It gave us access to heavyweight creative talent and saved us thousands or even tens of thousands of pounds on agency overheads."
Thro' WARC
Procter & Gamble is making its first foray into consumer-generated content with two new Web sites.
The company's P&G Productions unit said Monday that it has launched Capessa.yahoo.com. an "online community" where women can share information, practical advice and inspirational stories.
P&G Productions also said Monday that it will launch the People's Choice Community, an online forum that will feature voting for the People's Choice Awards, as well as blogging and chatting.
The site will go live Tuesday night, at www.pcavote.com, with programming and online activities to continue year-round.
Faith Popcorn a leading future-focused consultancy has some interesting predictions for 2007 on how they see consumers and brands evolve in the next few years. They are talking of a new identity called The New Networked Self. Take a look:
Technology has enabled us to experiment with different personalities, leading to a much more fluid sense of who we are. Having tasted the nectar of virtual liberation, we're beginning to reject the singularly defined roles we're expected to play in society.
The Future: Gender-neutrality goes mainstream. People list skills on their business cards rather than title, and dress up in various costumes depending on who they feel like being that day.
Today's consumers are capricious and non-committal. Brands will have to become more liquid to keep up with their constantly moving targets.
The Future: Chameleon-like brands focus less on communicating a static message and more on being the right thing for the right persona at the right time. Constantly morphing retailers carry products until they sell out and never restock.
Consumers globally are creating fully fleshed out existences in the virtual world-dressing up their avatars, making friends, having affairs and buying property for their pixilated alter-egos. And now that people have multiple lives, who says you can't live forever?
The Future: While some let their avatars drift away to online purgatory, many more leave behind specific instructions on how their virtual selves should proceed. Services offering avatar surrogates flourish, and we bequeath avatars to friends and family in our wills.
Like the movement to combat environmental pollution, the next consumer-led reaction will be against the mental pollution caused by marketers. With every corner of the world both real and virtual becoming plastered with marketing messages, bombarded consumers are starting to say they've had enough. The current attack against marketing to kids is just the beginning.
The Future: Companies are expected to reduce the amount of damage they are doing to our minds. Savvy companies sponsor marketing-free white spaces in lieu of polluting the environment with models and logos.
In the globally networked age, consumers are much more concerned about the consequences of consumption. Is my garbage poisoning someone in a developing country? How much fuel was burned in order to get these strawberries to my local supermarket?
The Future: Enviro-biographies are attached to just about everything, letting consumers know the entire life story of a product: where the materials were harvested, where it was constructed, how far it traveled, and where it ended up after being thrown away or recycled.
The government has let us down when it comes to providing the social services we had once expected from it. Brands are stepping in to take over where the government left off. Companies are already finding there's profit to be made from providing affordable healthcare to the masses.
The Future: Socially responsible brands make a buck while providing desperately needed services. Communities are revived by Target daycare, Starbucks learning centers, and Avis transportation services for the elderly.
In today's increasingly philanthropic climate, expect conspicuous self- indulgence to go straight to the social guillotine. The globally conscious consumer regards altruistic activities as a necessary part of self- improvement.
The Future: A person's net worth is no longer measured by dollars earned, but by improvements made. Families compete with each other on how many people they fed while on vacation, and the most envied house on the block is not the biggest, but the most sustainable.
Our culture is suffering from an experience deficit. With the availability of online knowledge, we're claiming expertise based only on secondary experience. Now that everyone's a web-educated know-it-all, we're secretly longing for authority figures to guide and assure us with indispensable nuggets of wisdom that could only come from having actually accumulated life experience.
The Future: Respect for elders makes a comeback in the form of Ask Your Grandma hotlines and the proliferation of online video clips by seniors showing us how to tie knots and concoct home remedies.
Walmart has come-up with an innovative worker shift system. Shifts will be based on customer flows and employees will know it 3 weeks before!
I think this is an interesting evolution where shoppers, customer service and optimization of costs are at the central focus of this decision. As we move from a "mass manufacturing" era to "mass customization" era, new management principles and methods have to be invented for the companies of the future. We are yet to see some innovations in this area. If Alfred Sloan changed the auto manufacturing thinking for GM or if Henry Ford brought-in the mass manufacturing methods during early 1920s, the new service economy will have to dump the old economy rules and transition to new ones. Because, 24x7 businesses need to find innovative ways of developing superior customer service while balancing it with fair HR policies.
MSNBC reports:
Wal-Mart said the new system ensures that stores are fully staffed at peak shopping times and it takes into account the hours employees prefer to work.
“It is much friendlier and more predictable than the previous system in that it actually asks for our associates preferences of when they prefer to work,” Clark said.
She said under the old system, store managers drew up schedules based on the level of sales in a store. Now, increased staffing will coincide with times when customer traffic surges, she said.
Seattle times has a great article on how some libraries have adapted to changing consumer lifestyles and technology innovations that have been happening around them. The web has literally changed the way information has become available and shared by consumers. Some libraries have therefore morphed to become
- Community Hubs
- A place for new experiences - study rooms, a place to meet & socialize, little eating area etc.
- A place for multimedia experiences - check emails, watch videos, DVDs & CD entertainment
The article reports:
Those who can't afford the Internet at home come to the Bellevue Library to use one of the 108 computers available. "In a society where we're worried about the digital divide, libraries can level the playing field," Eisenberg said. "There's a shift from academics to the library being a form of entertainment," said Barbra Barkus, who has worked at the Bellevue Library for more than 27 years.
There are some great lessons here for brands and marketers!
Toyota has come with an interesting design concept to stop drunken driving.According to news reports:
Toyota Motor Corp. is developing a fail-safe system for cars that detects drunken drivers and automatically shuts the vehicle down if sensors pick up signs of excessive alcohol consumption.
Cars fitted with the detection system will not start if sweat sensors in the driving wheel detect high levels of alcohol in the driver's bloodstream, according to a report carried by the mass-circulation daily, Asahi Shimbun.
The system could also kick in if the sensors detect abnormal steering, or if a special camera shows that the driver's pupils are not in focus. The car is then slowed to a halt, the report said.
The world's No. 2 automaker hopes to fit cars with the system by the end of 2009, according to the report.
Imagine a day when 120 million Indians( and expected to reach 400 million in 2010) can have their own personal TVs on their mobile. The day does not seem to be far off.
Modeo has launched a beta of their version of mobile TV in the US. Services like Modeo can be soon expected to be launched in India.
Modeo is a digital television broadcast live to the one device you're never without—your mobile phone. Modeo is transparently high-tech, making mobile TV as familiar as the coffee table clicker. Modeo's content is provided by most distinguished entertainment brands in the business, airing today's hits and TV classics. One can watch top-rated sitcoms, dramas, news and sports. Also one can tune-in to music and talk radio. You could also download video podcasts, bite-sized episodes of your favorite shows and exclusive made-for-mobile content.
No wonder, London School of Economics has written that the future of TV is personal.
MobileTV has the potential to unleash a new revolution in the country. The telecom revolution has created a new wave of growth in India and if TV goes mobile, it can just mutiply the benefits of telecom revolution.
New marketing opportunities will surface:
- 5-sec TV Spots
- Interactive programming - Voting, Personalized programs, Channesl etc.
- User generated content
- May be one can start trading entertainment time with air time!
- M-wallets
- Product purchase requests from mobile etc.
It can also create new development opportunities like:
- e-learning can just become easy to implement
- The rural-urban information divide can be bridged very quickly
I can't wait to see TV go personal!
Alex Iskold has a great post on Read/Write web on how search needs to get a lot more customer-focussed. The key take-out for me from the post is :
- The 'simplicity of thinking' one needs to have when developing products or services.
- It's about analysing 'customer interactions' and customer behaviour' first and then applying them to products or technologies.
- It's the easy usability of the product or service that will determine acceptance and adoption.
Alex writes:
What is perfect search?
It is interesting to ask: What do we expect when we enter a term into a search box? Ideally, we'd like to get the perfect answer right away. Often, we have an idea what that perfect answer should be, and when computer does not get it for us we are disappointed. But are we being reasonable? Can we expect the "perfect" answer all the time?
Consider for example, our interactions with an Information clerk at the mall. When we ask for a location of a store, she may or may not give us the "perfect" answer. She might not know where this store is, she might not understand us or we may not understand what she said. So for many reasons we may not get the "perfect" answer right away.
What is qualitatively different between our experience with the Information clerk vs. a search engine is that with the clerk we have a dialog. When she does not understand what we asked, she has a chance, to say Excuse me, what do you mean?. Google does not do that, it just gives us the results. If we do not like the answer we have to start from scratch.
The problem is that human interactions are fundamentally iterative, while our interactions with computers are mostly stateless. Perhaps we could get to the perfect search results if we could have a dialog with the computer? Clustering technologies, particularly the one offered by Clusty, give computer a chance to clarify: Excuse me, when you searched for Alex Iskold, did you mean to look for Read/Write Web or AdaptiveBlue or perhaps you where looking for static analysis tools that Alex worked on while at IBM?.