Voices: the CMB Blog

When the 820 consecutive home game sell-out streak ended on April 10^th at Fenway Park (just two games into the 2013 season), the Boston Red Sox found themselves in a unique situation…Red Sox brand loyalty was no longer just a guaranteed thing.Since the Red Sox won the World Series in ’04 and again in ‘07, brand loyalty has come easy to the team – the fans were just there, happy to support their world champions.  But after a rocky end to the 2011 season and a weak 2012, loyalty has waned and the organization actually needs to re-build that loyalty again.

So where do they start?  Obviously on the field actions play tremendously into brand loyalty of any professional sports team. If the team is winning, fans will come to cheer them on and if the Red Sox continue their already hot start to the 2013 season that may help to re-build the loyalty all in itself.  But besides just winning games and acquiring new and exciting players to drive fans into the ballpark - what have the Sox done to keep Red Sox Nation committed and coming back to the brand?

• Commitment to the brand’s heaviest users:  A new loyalty program has been put in place for the brand’s repeat purchasers (i.e., the devoted season ticket holders who come to game after game). Enrolled into a tiered loyalty program, they can earn points towards rewards (such as throwing out the first pitch at a game) every time they scan their loyalty card at the ball park or make a purchase at a concession stand. By committing to their heaviest users and brand advocates, the Red Sox are aiming to keep their best customers happy. 

• In-Game Promotions:  To show fans they are valued and appreciated, the Red Sox put promotions in place at food stands around the ballpark for the start of the season, including Kids Eat Free and $5 Beers. Even with high ticket prices, these promotions might drive both new and old fans into the ballpark and provide them with a great customer experience once they are in the door of friendly Fenway Park.

• Rebuilding brand trust:  Maybe most importantly, the Red Sox have campaigned to bring trust back to its fans. The Red Sox have always had brand loyalty— even in the 86 year stretch without a World Series win – but trust kept those fans believing that soon their suffering would be over. After the 2012 season, many fans were left feeling that the team had quit on them and weren’t committed to winning.  To combat this mentality in 2013, commercial, print advertisements and billboards showcase players with the message that “What’s Broken Can Be Fixed” and “162 Ways to Restore the Faith.” New manager John Farrell has also promised to do everything he can to help the team win.  However, while this assurance and transparency with the fans is reassuring off the field, the team now must follow through with this commitment on the field to truly gain back the trust.  

Professional sport teams are a unique brand; sometimes no matter how much loyalty the Red Sox organization might try to create – advertising, loyalty programs, promotions, none of it will matter without a competitive team on the field.  However, it’s times like this when the Red Sox can show their dedicated fans they really are valued. They must maintain their brand advocates and deliver on their promise of a committed ball club in order to keep Red Sox Nation faithful even when the League Standings on the Green Monster might show the Red Sox slipping a few games behind the dreaded Yankees. 

Jen Golden is a Senior Associate Researcher at CMB. She’ll never forget the first time her Dad took her to her first Sox game and she saw the Green Monster for the first time – her brand loyalty for the team has never wavered since.

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Late last month, the Boston Celtics were struggling along in the middle of the NBA standings. They weren’t great and they weren’t awful, but they were predictable—predictably middle of the pack. But star point guard Rajon Rondo was having another terrific year, racking up triple-doubles (achieving double digits in scoring, rebounds and assists) at twice the rate of his closest rivals. He was the Celtics top performer and the key to what limited success they were having. So when Rondo went down with a season ending knee injury on January 25th die-hard Celtics fans went from disappointment to outright depression.Then something surprising happened.   

Prior to Rondo’s injury the Celtics had looked tired; they suffered from low energy and lack of enthusiasm for moving beyond their very ordinary performance.  After the injury they looked like a bunch of kids bursting through the door on the last day of school.  What happened? They were playing the same game, but had changed (out of necessity) the way they were playing it.  Skills that had been lying dormant suddenly came to the fore.  They were energized, they were playing much better defense and they were moving the ball much more effectively on the offensive end of the floor.  The Celtics went on a tear, winning 8 out of 9 games over the next 3 weeks, and potentially changing the entire trajectory of their season. 

So what does this have to do with research?  Maybe a lot.  Ongoing tracking programs like customer experience and brand health tracking are especially susceptible to becoming “tired” – continuously delivering the same things over and over, with diminishing returns.  One of the biggest challenges facing Celtics Coach Doc Rivers was figuring out how to pull his team out of the middling rut they’d gotten comfortable in.  In his case, the team was forced to change due to their star player’s injury.  Fortunately, customer insights folks don’t need such a dramatic trigger.   

Here are three things you can do to breathe new life into tired tracking programs, and “up your game”:

Introduce “Deep Dives”  Incorporating “deep dives” into your program is a great way to get more and more useful insights into critical issues, without the time and cost of a separate project.  A few examples of potential deep dive topics:

• Product enhancements
• Customer decision drivers
• Competitive comparisons
• Internal performance comparisons

Integrate your tracking data with data from other sources:  Tracking measurement alone (no matter how well designed) isn’t capable of informing all of the insights your internal clients need.  “Connecting the dots” between the measurement and other business data can help you deliver new, more useful insights.  I’m not talking about a “millions of dollars and thousands of lives” IT initiative here. You’ll be surprised how much useful insight you can get by focusing on a specific business issue with data sets that you can readily get your hands on.

Put insights directly into users’ hands in a way that helps them act:  If your internal customers are using dashboards or portals to view tracking results, do those tools really help them take action, or are they really just data dashboards.  A dashboard needs to tell the end-user 4 things, customized to their roles and responsibilities: they need to know where they stand; what will have the highest impact on key business goals; they also need the need the tools to prioritize and plan actions, and show whether the actions taken are really working.

So, has your customer experience or brand health tracking program grown “tired?”  If so, what will you do to up your “game?”

T.J. is CMB's Chief Strategy Officer and General Manager of our Tech Solutions Team. His twin boys are enjoying a re-energized Celtics above.

If you live in Eastern New England, I am willing to bet you’ve seen a Jordan’s Furniture ad. Like Giant Glass (1-800-54-Giant!) and Bernie and Phyll's (quality, comfort and price—that’s nice!), it’s a brand we New Englanders recognize instantly. For those of you outside the Northeast, Jordan’s is a 5 store chain in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.  And while they are known for their creative ads, the store's core message is always the same:

• We have a wide variety of products at low prices

• We’re local and we serve the locals

• We offer “shopper-tainment”—an experience above and beyond a typical store

Our work with brands at CMB tells us that defining the brand promise and how it matches up with a customer’s experience is more effective than measuring satisfaction in a vacuum. And when CMB works with clients to measure and understand customer experience we take the components of the brand’s value proposition and measure them for all the possible ways customers experience the brand—from how customers research products, to the promotions, to the in-store shopping experience. 

A recent trip to Jordan’s with my husband and 2 year-old, had me thinking about the multiple elements that make up the customer experience. I hadn’t been to Jordan’s in years, but I remembered a lot of activity, including a trapeze.  Back then, I walked right by and did what I needed to do.  But this time the “activity,” which was a bit distracting the first time around, was a welcome addition for entertaining my daughter. There’s an enormous Wally the Green Monster, mini-cars for the kids to drive, ice cream, and a ton of other fun stuff that allowed me to shop – dare I say—leisurely.  

My trip to Jordan’s highlighted how the different elements of shopping have changed for me over the past few years—I’ve gone from single girl to married with a 2 year old and another baby due any minute. Long gone are the days of casual shopping.  But now the experience is a greater consideration for where I will shop, and the shopping experience is something Jordan’s has mastered.

I can’t ignore the big question, did I buy anything? Not this time, but let’s just say that Jordan’s is high on my list the next time I need to shop for furniture. Would this type of experience deter the singletons who could do without the trapeze and fountain show? Maybe, but, Jordan’s knows their market, how to speak to them, and how to deliver. They kept their brand promise and have increased my likelihood to return. Well done.

Tara Lasker is Director of Project Operations at CMB, she welcomed a brand new baby boy on Monday, and will no doubt have many more opportunities for buying furniture in the future.

It’s not the size of the venue; it’s the quality of the content. That was the case for a local conference I attended last week at Babson College. Using Social Media to Redefine the Customer Value Proposition, was held by the Retail Supply Chain Institute in partnership with the Babson Alumni and Friends Network, and had an impressive lineup of speakers including executives from Google, Hubspot, Staples, Radian6, GaggleAMP, and EMC. The event was an opportunity for companies to share how they are leveraging advances in social media, mobile, and other online technologies to engage customers and increase loyalty. Here are a few of the highlights:

Dhruv Grewal, Toyota Chair of Commerce & Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing at Babson College, moderated and kicked off the event with an overview of how social media helps companies redefine their customer value proposition, moving it from a static proposition to a dynamic value proposition that is able to respond quickly to market changes. According to Professor Grewal, companies need to utilize the 4 E’s of social media to:

• Excite customers with interesting offerings to align their needs with your company’s offerings

• Educate them with information about your product offerings to increase share-of-wallet

• Engage in a dialogue with them and their network to help differentiate your products from competitors’offerings

• Help them Experience how your company’s goods/services are better aligned with their needs

Mike Gottfried, Head of Industry, Retail at Google gave a great overview of the company’s vision for the future and debunked the idea that Google+ was developed to be in direct competition with Facebook. He talked about Google’s approach to mobile (predicting that soon more people will own smartphones than computers) and their commitment to launching new products and innovations, first on mobile and then on traditional platforms. He suggested that we not think of Google+ as a channel, but rather as a “common thread” for their product and services. Their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.  According to Google, currently 1 in 5 desktop searches and 1 in 2 mobile searches are related to location. Information must be discoverable (meaning fast and relevant), local, mobile, social, and personal.

Mike Ewing, Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant, at Hubspot gave an overview of inbound commerce and how it is driven by three components: content, search, and social media. According to Mike, it starts with responding to how customers make decisions—when they show interest and a readiness to buy. He suggested that it is optimal for a company blog to be updated 2-3 times a week and create effective content by starting with the questions your customers are asking.

Kevin Biondi, Director of Digital and Technology Marketing, at Staples reviewed some of the elements of Staples’ successful approach to digital marketing. Specifically, Kevin discussed the tremendous growth and impact of daily deals. In an effort to optimize their deals, Staples continually uses experimentation. Kevin suggested that while most companies tend to be risk averse, when it comes to social media, experimentation is the key to success. 

Keith Paul, Chief Listener, at EMC, spoke about how they structure social media listening.   EMC has a “spoke wheel” structure—and he heads up a social media center of excellence and provides guidance to several internal groups that use social media data.  He spoke about ECN, a network that EMC created to connect 250k+ customers with product help. On the ECN site and YouTube, EMC has successfully utilized video to communicate their corporate social media policies in a highly engaging way. Another example Keith gave was EMC One, an internal network they use for collaboration. Keith shared that product launches are now announced online via social media and they “listen” to the market’s response and increasing interest.

Thanks to one of our methodologists, Scott Motyka, who served on the conference planning committee and kindly invited me to attend.

Click here to read about more of our upcoming conferences, webinars and events

Posted by Cathy Harrison, Cathy is CMB’s social media research maven. Follow her on Twitter at @VirtualMR

After spending the last few days at Loyalty Expo in Orlando I heard no shortage of different points of view on the future of loyalty and loyalty programs.  From conversations around NPS scores and measures to a great panel discussion on the Socialization of Loyalty run by CMB’s Judy Melanson (@Judy_LC), there’s never been a more exciting time to tap into this topic, and never been more opportunities to create stronger and deeper connections between your brand and your customers.

For me one thing remains clear, points and rewards, while very important, are about transactional marketing, where as true loyalty runs much deeper and is harder to come by.  It takes a different approach to create this kind of connection and penetration into your customer’s rituals. It is a deeper commitment to the brand regardless of what one gets in return.

Think of brands you go out of your way for or even pay more for.  I think of Dunkin' Donuts; I am a Dunkin’ fan through and through, as is my husband. When he travels the first thing he does is go online to see where the closest Dunkin' Donuts is. He even picks his hotel based on the proximity to a Dunkin' Donuts. Why? We run on Dunkin'. It is part of our morning ritual, it has become habit. That kind of loyalty runs deep, and it’s driven by behavior and brand preference rather that points and rewards.

One of my favorite presentations from Loyalty Expo talked a lot about creating this kind of connection.  It was from Michael Grasso of TXU Energy (@TXUEnergy) and Zain Raj (@Zain_raj) of Hyper Marketing. They presented a great case study on TXU Energy’s use of behavioral marketing to create that deeper connection and brand ritual in a very competitive commoditized market.  Hey-if an electric company can do this so can you! In their presentation they outlined these four steps to create a Brand Ritual:

1. Getting the first transaction: Everyone has to start somewhere. The first step is to understand the value equation has changed. Zain says the new value equation is:

  Product features + Customer Service+ Added Value
_____________________________________________

Competitive Price

2. Invite customers into your brand: I think a great example of this is personalized gift cards. Putting a picture on a gift card makes it much harder to throw away and increases the likelihood of reloading the card.

3. Building connections with relevant experiences and innovations: TXU created online and mobile tools to educate their customers about not only how much electricity they used, but ways they can save money on their bill. This move led to the last key to building Brand Ritual for TXU.

4. Align with key values: TXU understands the values that are close to the hearts and wallets of their customers. They created a feeling of partnership by aligning themselves with their customers' values.

As marketers and researchers there has never been a better time to tap into the behavior of our customers, align with their values, and connect with their emotions to create a deeper, richer and more meaningful connection and become a ritual.  

Posted by Kristen Garvey. Kristen is CMB's VP of Marketing, a mom of two, and the top three brands that have won her heart and wallet are Dunkin’ Donuts, Jet Blue, and Apple. Follow her on Twitter: @KristenGarvey