As QR codes are beginning to revolutionize the convergence between the web and mobile, building new ways for brands to interact with customers, adding the power of interactivity, data & information for advertising campaigns, I have always found that it is not easy for not so tech-savvy customers to appreciate & experience the power of this technology.I believe that for successful adoption of high-end or innovative technologies, simplicity is key. QR codes still are a bit complicated for wider adoption.

In fact, a few months back in India when I was a part in an internal company marketing conference,  some of the new marketing initiatives had QR codes being integrated as a part of their campaigns. Sadly, neither the channel partners nor the sales folks nor the senior management folks knew how to use or leverage it. It left me thinking about its challenges for wider adoption amongst consumers. 

Recently, I came across an interesting technology called Touchcodes which appealed a lot to me. I loved the simplicity and ease of use. It was a lot more intuitive and did not require new learning from the average consumer.

Here's how it works:

" the new technology works by embedding  a thin layer of capacitive material in printed items like business cards, tickets, magazine pages, or product packaging. When you hold the paper to a capacitive touch screen, it acts like a set of invisible fingers tapping out a complex code that’s interpreted by a Touchcode-enabled app or website."

I believe it has some lovely applications that are very intuitive and comes naturally to us in the way we  are used to doing things :

• Imagine a coupons being distributed by retail stores and can be read on the phone by placing the coupon on the touchscreen of the mobile. This can ensure instant redemption and also trackback mobile nos available against the existing member databases.
• Can be in ads in magazines and the customers can just cut the card and place it on the touchscreen of their mobiles to avail of instant trial/samples.
• Catalogs can be customized with touchcode cards for availing customized offers.
• Imagine holding your phone in a supermarket, touching the pasta box and getting instant recipes on your mobile phone!
• The data captured can be very useful for customized marketing programs

QR Codes are not going away soon but I do see Touchcodes being adopted soon for many applications across offline media, web & mobile.

The "natural interactivity" they come with is a compelling story for marketers.

The world economic forum and many futurists believe personal data is the new asset class that will emerge as a competitive advantage for many marketers. It is important that marketers start using this data  intelligently, judiciously and in a manner that benefits and engages the customer. Else, this is one area that can have a severe backlash from customers just like the occupy the wall street episode.

Personal data may be the new oil but refining and using it sparingly with relevance is becoming a very important issue for marketers to focus and address.

Who is the owner of our personal data?

However,  there is an emerging debate around the ownership of personal data as digital outposts & sites are gathering data about customers like never before. Google recently released a new privacy policy last week which  redefines how this data will be used across all Google properties that we as their customers have an account. The new Google privacy policy reads " We may use the name you provide for your Google Profile across all of the services we offer that require a Google Account.....We also use this information to offer you tailored content – like giving you more relevant search results and ads...."

Clearly, the challenge that is becoming a key part of the debate is who is the owner of this personal data  and what of it can be used and by whom.

My View

I personally believe customers should be given control of their data. Customers must give permission about which of this data can be used basis their interests and lifestyle needs to companies, advertisers and marketers. And thereby brands can deliver value to these customers.

Imagine personal data lockers being available which customers can own for a fee(much like the demat of company shares that have happened over years across different countries & markets). There will be several central agencies that hold this data and provide access to customers  - with a front-end which provides flexibility to give permissions to customers to release this data for commercial purposes. If the past few decades were the era of credit bureaus, the coming decades are the era of data bureaus.

Imagine a customer wanting to buy a car ticks the check-box on the need or expresses the need to be a part of a community of interest.Many marketers and companies then vie to build a dialog and a conversation with the customer - not spam her with emails, irrelevant ads and messages on mobiles. All the searches that customer does then become available for relevant ads to be shown to her online. Then, the sales & marketing teams of different marketers & products unlock a new engagement platform to woo this customer.

The customer experience is therefore refined, relevant and customized like never before using the data that is in control in the hands of the customer. 

Imagine the power of this data. Imagine its efficiency. Imagine its effectivness. If personal data has to remain as the new oil, the control & flexibility must be in the hands of the customer.

Sharon Drew Morgan makes very interesting points in her article where she draws attention on how marketing automation software needs to add decision facilitation technology to their offerings.

She writes, any such marketing software like Marketo, Eloqua,  just help capture some names - email addresses, telephone nos etc. which is great but there is no way to understand at what stage is the prospect in the buying process. This is the precisely where such software must add value to any company's lead management process.

I agree with her, as "stage of buying/decision process" decides in the lead's mind, the kind of information they need & plays a huge role in evaluation & purchase decision. According to me, each person, who is a lead, could be in different stages in the buying/decision process:

1. Trigger stage - where the person is just evaluating the need
2. Consider stage - where the person is considering to buy or not
3. Search stage - where the person is actively looking at all choices before making the decision
4. Choose stage - where the person is close to making the decision & is in a compare mind-set
5. Buy Stage - Where the person looking at all offers/discounts and ready to pay the cheque

Marketing automation software need to "integrate" or "tag" this decision-based thinking that goes through a prospect's mind to ensure a precise method of tagging the lead. This will certainly have downstream effects on what information is shared at each stage with the prospect by both the sales  and the marketing team that can accelerate decision making or conversion.

Capturing the name alone is not good enough. Calling it Hot/Cold/Warm may be better but not good enough too. It is important for marketing automation softwares to "tag" the leads by the the stage in the decision cycle to truly value-add to the marketing automation process.

I often have been wondering off-late how does one define success for data-driven marketing programs - the reason being tons of hours are spent in understanding data, organizing data, cleansing the data make it ready for analysis and then time taken for building insights by analysts, getting organization-wide buy-in into the insights and developing a roll-out plan, measuring them etc.

The opportunity I see with all this, is a need to clearly define how is a company benefitting with all of this is increasingly becoming critical. No amount of insights & discovery is worth its weight in gold till it becomes actionable and value is returned in dollars for them. Also, another important question is how do such programs get more investments to provide more value year after year? I also don't see this being driven from one corner or department while participation from senior management teams and other departments is critical for its success, adoption and growing investments.

Interestingly as I got thinking about it, I got something from my archives which had an interesting reference to how to define success by Pat LaPointe.

He has got a lovely definition of defining success. Here's the forumula according to him which may be worth looking at:

It is a simple summation of all experiences of transforming insights into action and the value it created divided by the number of resources consumed to get this value and this is raised to the power of perception!

From my experience, I agree with him that the hard part is transforming the insights into action in any company. Also, perception of quality plays a critical role as enterprise-wide buy-in is critical for such programs as they need collaboration from other departments like sales, customer service, IT, channels etc. So, continued success of such programs must be exponentially raised to the perception and alignment of metrics & hence the value each of them get from such initiatives.

Would love to hear any other method of measuring sucess of data-driven marketing programs.

When I talk and work with people and clients on many assignments, the challenge I find for enterprises to be customer-centric is, how to bring marketing & technology together. Increasingly, technology is getting adopted in many customer-centric channels like never before and marketing is getting more & more real time & thefore technology is becoming a nerve-centre for marketing. The future , I have always thought is the changing( or can I call it merging) role of marketing & technology folks and the need for them to work together.

I read an interesting article today, if there is a need for a CMTO ( Chief Marketing Technology Officer)! I thought this was quite interesting. Who  is a CMTO and what does he or she do?

" A chief marketing technology officer (CTMO) — use whatever label you prefer — is simply the lead marketing technologist, organizing and managing that team. He or she reports to the CMO, not the CIO. Again, this is ultimately a marketing responsibility. There should be collaboration with IT, of course, assuring that marketing fully leverages its infrastructure and complies with technical governance standards. But collaborating is better than being solely dependent."

I find this very thought provoking and I do feel this is doable. The role of the CMTO is to ensure the right technology - either already invested is leveraged across the enterprise or if to be invested is partnered and led by this role - to collaboratively ensure this is adopted enterprise-wide.

Finally, customers must see the benefit of technology in their interaction experience with any company. The role of the CMTO is to make this happen.

I was reading an interesting article by Umair Haque on the threat of open customer rebellion and how industrial age businesses are completely unprepared to change the ways they  engage, treat and manage customers.He writes:

"Yesterday's massive, sprawling organizations could pacify "consumers" by buying them off with a discount or three, an overblown celebrity promising the moon, an entirely new "brand" designed as camouflage, or adding an extra blade or five, patty or three, or cylinder or four, and calling it "innovation." But that probably won't pacify people concerned not merely with what they "get," but with what, if anything, you're really contributing to society".

He goes to quote an interesting example:

"ING customers mobilised on Twitter and other social networks to protest at bonuses paid to bosses at the bank, one of the biggest in the country. The threat of direct action raised the spectre of a partial run on ING, terrifying the Dutch establishment. Fred Polhout, union organiser at the bank, says: "People were outraged. We heard about the bloated sums being paid again in the City and in New York; but suddenly the issue exploded on our own front door."

To me this is a lovely articulation of  how unprepared many companies are. It made me think of some interesting analogy of how new information age thinking has to drive changes in industrial age-mindset companies:

1. In the industrial age, there were labor unions who acted as interest groups for community who produced goods. The customer had no power as they were fragmented across markets. The information age is creating customer unions where customers come together to rally against companies which do injustice to them, their enviroment, their community, unfair business relationship & services etc. 
2. The labor unions could take the cause of only one company, theortically speaking. But, customer unions can have members across different products/brands across geographies and pose a larger threat.
3. The customer unions are self-engaging members who pose a potential threat to companies who undermine their power.
4. The customer unions can come together within a few hours and disrupt the brand reputation built over years by companies.
5. The customer unions have the power of internet, social media to engage & collaborate for this cause and will disengage once the cause is achieved.
6. If there were union leaders who drove the labor unions, here there are customer leaders who drive the opinions and issues. Companies need to identify them as they emerge from time to time for different reasons. But address them with agility.
7. Authencity and honesty will be the hallmark of successfully handling these customer unions and companies need to find new innovative methods of handling them openly & with transparency.

It's time companies and marketing departments realize this and find new ways of truly engaging with customers and their opinions.

I recently received a mail from my favourite airline Jet Airways, that I have been downgraded! I am a member of their loyalty program for years now! And this is not the first time this has happened to me. It also happened in 2001 and 2002 too.

The letter read - "...since you have not had enough flights with us, you will be downagraded. Our Dynamic Tier Review (DTR) formula, unique to Jet Airways - DTR is an award winning, multi-period and multi-criteria-based tier review. It has no precedent anywhere in the world. With DTR, upgrade to the higher tier is quicker and tier renewal is easier. The DTR evaluates a member's tier based on Tier Points and Tier JPMiles earned....."

I was disappointed. As a customer, it did not matter to me if the DTR was award winning for Jet Airways! It surely did not work for me ( the downgrade letter was templated too with such high sound words and sentences!). 

It made me think about the structure of current loyalty programs across the world and their relevance when loyal customers like me are click away from the next best offer!

Here are some questions that came to my mind:

1. In a year of recession and tough 2 years for business, I was suprised how the DTR did not take care of this business environment. I did'nt fly so much as Jet would have wanted. So, Jet's view of my loyalty is transcational - fly more( at full price or premium prices and get rewarded more!). I too will behave the same way in the future, I presume. Question #1: Can't loyalty programs be flexible, adapt to new environment, and why reward only transactional loyalty?
2. Given the unsettling business environment that it was over the last 2 years, why would me even as a "fiercely" loyal customer, travel in Jet if the fares were not competitive. Finally, if there is no value, loyalty cannot be bought with points. Question # 2: When there is a challenge of intrinsic value in the product,  will loyalty progams deliver - No. It is better to focus on the product rather than upset customers. Companies must know, customers will move on in such circumstances!
3. I have been surprised with their loyalty program  not paying attention to customer experience, in spite of being a Citibank-Jet Platinum card member. Every time redeeming their upgrade vouchers was a pain. The little travel that I did in these 2 years, whenever I presented the voucher, I was told it was applicable only on full price tickets! Funny, not sure what world they were living in. Question # 3: Do companies that run loyalty programs pay attention to  such little details that affect customer experience? They took trouble  a few years back to invite me to their co-branded card, but forgot to look at my spends and credits to give me waivers at such tough recessionary period.The bank has no clue, whatsover.
   

Loyalty programs are still in their 1.0 version.  Imagine a product that has not changed for 25 years! They still are in an old world order - "spend with us to earn rewards". Sometimes they have to recognize the value that customers get when they are out shopping for options, may not justfiy the reward they earn everytime if they have to stay within these products/brands. They need to transform given the new environment and options in front of customers.

Customer seek value and surely are willing to pay premium for loyalty but recognition, surprises and instant gratification will need to be weaved into these programs - on the assumption value needs to be earned in the customer's mind & wallet.

Rest assured, this is not a rant but earnestly these are thoughts that I had in my mind and coming out of experiences I have had with such programs over time.  

With mobile device in the hands of customers and quick adoption of smartphones, will it redefine the shopping habits of customers? I believe it will. 

Mobile will increasingly act as research and shopping tool in their hands. Right now, I don't think it is widely used but with increasing app downloads & penetration, mobile internet adoption etc. this is certainly going to change shopping experiences - right from the way they search for products/brands/services and helping them choose & buy them too.

I believe it will  be a " check, learn, ask & walk "(CLAW) shopping model on the mobile. It will be a mix of ' text & mortar' shopping. Mobile will overtake internet shopping in my opinion and adoption of mobile in certain categories will be significant.

Which categories need to get ready for this change?  An nice study by emarketer can used as a benchmark by marketers to ensure they get ready for this shopping  habit transition. In countries like India, China & Japan where the mobile penetration & growth is high - the impact will be felt the maximum.

This mobile shopping habit will have to encompass a mix of mobile apps, call-in advisors, chats, mobile alerts, location based services, mobile coupon downloads & redemption@ the store. Marketers will have to plan for an Integrated Mobile Shopping Experience (IMSE). 

With Social Web taking shape over the last couple of years( over 500 million customers are socially networked) and showing signs of aggressive growth, customer profiles are increasingly getting accessible and I see more and more misuse of the same.

The recent one that I have experienced is in Linked-in where I get almost one request a day to join one forum or the other. The forum effectively is a method to network and conduct business without my permission. This is the starting instance of professional misuse of the network. I see this as an evolved spam in the garb networking with your peers in the industry. Similarly in the B2C arena, with google, facebook and  soon to announce google's groupon like services, our data - both demographic and behavioral, is  increasingly getting threatened to be misused. Take another services company Spokeo, they claim to be #1 reverse email company to find email addresses of customers and they are even the first ones to link your physical address with your email address! Days are not far-off when all your information will be out on the web!

In the traditional offline world, there were regulations that were brought-in like DNC lists for telecalling, Unsubscribe for email marketing etc. but these are archiac in the online social world. How do we ensure that content providers and service providers - who trade our data for advertising revenue be controlled? This are exactly the questions customers are being besieged with as there is a huge information overload which can lead to blindspots for marketing programs. 

This is where new service providers seem to be mushrooming. For example - Personal.com is an interesting model where their proposition is:

1. Where customers set the rules to share their data, not companies!
2. It helps customers manage their identify across various services that they access to.
3. Instant personalization of content, offers etc. basis their profiles and information
4. Advertisers compensate customers for having a dialog with them!

I believe the day is not far-off when customers will clamour for control of their data and seek not just commercial returns as it is widely touted but even advice, mentoring, support, customer care/service that they can get for the information they share will evolve. 

I often see a lot of digital marketing specialists treat social media data almost like traffic lights- a kind of sentiment monitor - Red, green and amber - here are the positive scores, negative scores etc. I wonder what marketing actionability does such visualization and presentation give to marketers. For the first few months, it may sound interesting to marketers, after that am 100% sure, they will get bored and start questioning the application and business impact of such data.

On the other hand, I see traditional direct marketers or database marketers or analytical professionals lost when it comes to social media. It is almost like finding their way in a maze and they often treat this as technology or a statistical problem that has no application in this medium. Also, they  have very little clue about this medium. There is  huge opportunity to apply  both powerful direct marketing principles, database marketing and analytical techniques to this social media data. In fact, digital marketing specialists too need learn from these  principles & techniques.

In fact here my view of how social media data is changing  all of this.

1. Direct marketing was always restricted because of lack of customer address, behavioural data and information - social media data changes all of that.
2. No more physical address is important. An address on the web, posts on social media sites can help identify the customer and their current behaviour, attitudes and concerns. Treat all of this as 'information for action'  rather than ' positive words or negative words of sentiment'. In fact sentiment on the web is dynamic. Action must be swift and dynamic to sentiments as they have a potential to make real-time impact.
3. Treat comments & posts data as response which can help build individual relationships and communities. This could have never been possible without social media.
4. Relationships in the past were based on only transactional data, today social media enables relationships based on individual behaviour - positive and negative emotions which can be deciphered. They need to managed as emotion-led customized campaigns with clear relationship metrics.

It was interesting see an article  by Bob Maclnnis & Sari Tamilio who also urges us to think similarly about social media data.

Do you agree? Would love to see your comments and thoughts on the same.