Customer

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 13/08/10 and is republished here with permission.

I don’t know whether the number is right or not but a while back I heard that sophisticated marketing companies such as the world’s leading brands spent about 10% of their marketing budget on research and measurement. Irrespective whether the number is accurate or not, it’s a good benchmark I think – 10% feels about right. Read more…

The mobile advertising market is growing rapidly, presenting fresh challenges for any brands wishing to get their messages in front of this important new target audience.

According to recent figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the trade body for digital marketing, the total spend on mobile phone advertising in 2009 rocketed by 32 percent year-on-year to a new high of £37.6 million – and all that despite an overall contraction in the advertising sector in 2009. Read more…

I have a friend Luke, who is a big gambler, big to me anyway as he’s happy to squander more than a month’s worth of wages over a weekend on horses, football and whatever else is happening at the time. He’s an alpha male, he’s loud, he can down a few pints and he enjoys life.

So when I think about my world of marketing, brand and user experience, I often look at him and consider that he is somewhat absolved from the matter, almost that he is not capable of being understood as an individual or won over as a customer on the grounds of such squandering. Read more…

National Complaints Day: The need for ‘honest listening’, re-inventing corporations and Club Penguin…

Today, apart from being Friday 13th, is also National Complaints Day. Research conducted by ComplaintCommunity suggests that over the course of today more than one and a half million complaints will be lodged across the UK.

Against this backdrop, I was fortunate enough to bring together a variety of people from the public sector, retail, financial services, customer experience and social media monitoring to discuss the impact of social media on complaints specifically, and customer service more generally. Read more…

At the Annual Online Bingo Summit and Awards on 8-9 June 2010, Foviance took the stage with a rather unique panel that roused the audience and gave great insight into their customers.

The Summit, now in its fifth year, is the place where operators, game developers and providers come together to learn, debate and discuss all things bingo. It’s a great event with some fantastic speakers, panel debates and networking opportunities. Read more…

The challenge of understanding how customers engage across multiple channels is the ‘Everest’ of measuring customer behaviour.

Just think for a moment how complex modern business channels have become. What we now think of as a traditional transactional business would have a single real-world store-front. A customer would come in and buy products or services, the business owner would talk to them in an attempt to understand their needs, and they would leave. Perhaps the experience next time would be slightly more tailored to their liking based on that conversation. Today a customer may still walk in to a store, but they would just as likely order online, or via a call centre. That’s three different channels without thinking too deeply about it, and as Paul mentions in his article, if we think about touch points there are hundreds. And how does that business owner now know how many of its online customers also use the call centre or the store? How many store customers checked stock online or usually prefer to use the call centre? Read more…

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 12/03/10 and is republished here with permission.

In the previous two columns I have been looking at different types of segmentation strategies, mainly dealing with what segmentation is, the different types of segmentation strategies and the role each type can play in building up a core understanding of your customers or prospective customers. So once you’ve decided what to create the segments on, the question then becomes about how to create the segments. Remember with segmentation what we are trying to do is to create groups of people who have something in common. Read more…

“Number 1 app in UK, France and Germany…”. Those who regularly browse the Apple AppStore hunting for applications (apps) will undoubtedly be familiar with this type of catch phrase.  It’s generally what users first read when they land on app description pages (as if they were all number one!). Developers and designers use this type of technique to lure candid users to download the app by making them believe it’s the best of its kind on the market. This also illustrates how the success of an app is often assumed: the higher in the ranking, the more successful it is. But as you may probably know already, this approach is entirely flawed. Read more…