Generate Customer Loyalty In A Grim Economy By Stimulating Emotions

Generate Customer Loyalty In A Grim Economy By Stimulating Emotions a practical guide by arnaud huet [email_address] June 2009

“ All successful brands have a story that consumers tell themselves when they reach for the product in the store to buy it.” (Larry Huston, Procter & Gamble)

Customers’ loyalty is decreasing essentially due to the erosion of their relationship with the brand. In a downturn context, they are particularly negative when they face difficulties. So, few customers find the experience they have with companies enjoyable.

With the crisis and other factors (e.g. growth of Gen Y) raising customer expectations for enjoyable experiences, more companies will seek to match or exceed expectations as a way to engage their own customers on an emotional level.

To earn the loyalty of customers, Brands must do more than accumulate points, offer the best rates and fees.

Brands need to focus not only on utilitarian, functional, and operational characteristics, but also on emotion, style, design, and person-to-person (social) interactions in order to find, create and nurture loyal customers.

They need to connect emotionally with customers in order to lock them .

In a grim economy, customers lose their trust in Brands and in expert opinions. They believe that they can get better and more trustworthy information from social networks, friends and peers

Customers can be satisfied with their Brand but that doesn’t mean they’re loyal. Brands need to focus on emotionally loyal customers and not only on rationally satisfied customers

Catch the opportunity to engage customers and make them communicate positively about the Brand

Deliver a segmented emotional experience based on most relevant emotions per segment, moment in customer life and channel

How?

Emotion is a multidimensional process that varies in function of what happens to the customer and of the stimuli that he perceives

We can recognize in all emotions two well differentiated components:

On one hand, a qualitative component that is expressed by means of the word that we use to describe the emotion (love, friendship, fear, insecurity, etc.) determining the positiveness or negativeness of the emotional sign.

On the other hand, all emotions possess a quantitative component that is expressed by means of words of magnitude (little, quite, enough, a lot, great, some, much, etc.)

According to the situation in which emotion is aroused, we choose words such as “love”, “friendship”, “fear”, “uncertainty”, “respect”, etc., that, at the same time, show the emotional sign (positive or negative). And according to the intensity of the emotion we choose words like “nothing”, “quite”, “some”, “enough”, “very”. In this way, we say, for example, "I feel very well understood" (positive) or "I feel a little deceived" (negative).

By launching initiatives that allow customers to do what they enjoy to live (e.g. talking, being recognized, sharing feelings, experiences and opinions), Brands deliver positive emotional experiences.

To earn the loyalty of their Customers, Companies must get them to tell themselves that the Brand:

“ Makes my life easier”

“ Helps me make decisions that are right for me”

To establish emotional experiences, Brands must make evolve the way they do marketing. They must think “outside-in” instead of “inside-out” and be aware of cases already launched which take into account customer expectations and emotions

Non-exhaustive Proctor & Gamble and Intuit have gone beyond their product set to create portals that appeal to customers’ personal interests Valuation of Data collected Get accurately the qualification moment in the customer experience Understood Confident Recognized Close Acquisition Customer Loyalty Customer Data Enrichment Collect and take into account customer interests Many particularly in telecom sector Direct sales Take time to define properly the type of information and offer you can push at the touchpoints Astonished Strong Informed Additional sales Push appropriate products and information ING Direct has demonstrated best practices in customer advocacy by asking customers to grade its performance on 10 critical moments considered as key attributes (e.g. ease of opening an account) . Then ING direct has published the results on its Web site for all to see Additional Loyalty Focus on ciritical moments related to key attributes of the value proposition Recognized Respected Customer Loyalty Customer advocacy Let customers grade the brand References Revenues Best practices Emotion stimulated Business objective Case

Our approach aims at delivering a relevant and emotional customer experience in order to increase customer engagement, loyalty and value

Building profitable customer relationships is likely to improve the level of transformation: “If customers stick with you, they spend more and talk about your brand to others”

The following project framework can help to deliver a segmented customer experience led by customer emotions:

Capabilities Assess and Leverage Existing Segmentation Elaborate a Customer Experience Analysis Framework Define the expected end-to-end experience. Identify gaps with the current experience or Segment and Profile the Customer 1 2 5 6 3 Define your answers regarding expectations and emotions and identify capabilities to make evolve 7 Define the blueprint roadmap, the impacts, the KPIs and the ROI of the project Identify the current experience delivered per segment, expectations and emotions concerned 4 Per segment, identify emotions linked to expectations Segmentation Emotions Customer experience Blueprint

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