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How Convergence Marketing Empowers Your Brand and Customers

Posted on Oct 31, 2022Oct 31, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

Today’s world is all about data, and bringing your data together is the heart of convergence marketing. When every department can access it, your customers stand to win through personalized and improved experiences. Let’s dive in to understand how convergence marketing benefits everyone and how to apply it successfully.

Traditionally, a business’s marketing, communications, and IT divisions are kept separate. These sections run independently of one another, interacting only when necessary.

This allows businesses to operate smoothly without having the burden of double and triple-check everything.

It’s a good approach, born from times when most management strategies were being developed. Times when keeping everyone up to speed meant sending paperwork back and forth between departments. It’s a lot of hassle, and efficiency dictated people should know only what’s needed for them to perform their jobs.

But we live in different times.

In today’s world, with technology allowing for instant communication and data sharing, this approach might seem outdated. Siloing your departments might be what’s always been done, but that doesn’t mean it’s the only way to go. That’s where a new approach comes in, called convergence marketing.

Keep reading to discover what potential it holds for your customers and company.

What does convergence marketing mean?

Convergence marketing is more of a philosophy than a strict step-by-step approach. In essence, it’s the art of merging your marketing, information, and design divisions in order to allow a unified message across all forms of marketing media you use.

The main idea of this approach is to place the customer at the center of all forms of communication, seeking to ensure that all messages they receive present a single, unified front.

This reduces the number of mixed messages the customer receives, allowing for greater brand recognition and trust to flourish.

Convergence marketing generally applies the most to digital or digital-supported forms of marketing. That’s because digital information can flow freely and seamlessly, as it’s retrieved from a database within milliseconds.

As such, attempting to converge marketing strategies that are mostly offline will be very difficult.

Convergence marketing vs. integrated marketing

A similar yet different term is integrated marketing.

Integrated marketing is all about coordinating marketing messages across different communication channels to increase brand awareness.

While this might seem identical to convergence marketing, this approach only considers the marketing department, ignoring all other aspects of the brand that might serve as touchpoints for customer communication.

It shares the same idea as convergence marketing but applies it on a smaller, more isolated scale. That being said, integrated marketing often happens naturally when you do convergence marketing, as you’ll likely factor in all communication channels.

What are the advantages of convergence marketing?

Now you may be thinking, this sounds like a lot of work, and that’s because it is.

Bringing separate departments of a business together is never easy, doubly so if you want them to be able to communicate in real-time.

If it’s that difficult to employ convergence marketing (which means it’s likely to cost a decent sum of money), why do it?

The benefits of convergence marketing tend to outweigh the costs if done correctly, as presenting a unified message on all fronts has numerous benefits. Let’s go over the most immediate ones.

Customer empowerment

By putting the customer at the center of your marketing strategy, you’ll be empowering them to act and provide feedback, giving them a voice in future decisions.

Any customer-centric marketing strategy takes in feedback, but where convergence marketing empowers customers is the linking of marketing and communications channels. Each piece of information collected by the communications team will be passed on to the marketing team and vice-versa.

This has the effect of not only increasing the customers’ voice within the organization as a whole, which allows you to tailor your marketing campaigns appropriately but increasing brand recognition overall.

While it might seem as though useful customer data is difficult to get, it’s been proven that two-thirds of consumers will willingly share their data with you if they think it will improve their overall experience.

They’re also willing to let you use first-party tracking cookies and other means of observing their online behavior if they think they’ll get something out of it.

In other words, convergence marketing is like symbiosis. Each party gives and takes, and both benefit overall.

Improved customer experience

Convergence marketing necessitates a shared database of information to which all sections of the business have access.

By creating this cross-transfer of information, various departments of your business will have access to all data collected on customers, enabling them to see previously documented interactions, and provide a better overall customer experience.

A Google report showed that up to 85% of digital customer journeys use more than one form of interaction with you. That’s a lot of data that you might miss if you’re relying only on information from one IP address.

With all available information on a particular customer, you will be able to learn what experiences they’ve had with you in the past, what approaches they respond best to, and even what might cause them to walk away satisfied.

Remember, engaging your customers is the best way to make sure they walk away happy!

Integrated communication between departments

Convergence marketing requires departments to collaborate, which means you need to have a robust communications system between them. Integrated communication isn’t so much an unintended benefit as a necessary part of convergence marketing.

Once the channels of communication are open, they can be used for more than they were designed for. Departments can share ideas and get feedback on them, ask for help from one another, etc.

Another factor is post-purchase customer service. Almost 60% of consumers would use social media to get this, but without information from the sales team on what’s been purchased, whoever is running the social media won’t be able to do their job.

Collaborations are also an option. With the traditional siloed form of organization, the different departments wouldn’t know about each other’s plans and, therefore, wouldn’t be able to offer assistance or request adjustments.

One of the greatest examples of inter-departmental collaboration in modern times can be found in Apple’s Transparency Report, designed to keep track of both government and private party data requests to Apple.

Apple’s aim here was to keep their customers reassured that their data was safe and wouldn’t be sold to third parties.

In order to achieve this massive task, Apple had to keep a record of any and all requests for data, the reason for such, and whether or not the request was granted.

This quite obviously involved their communications department. The collaboration also involved their legal team, who determined whether or not to release data in the face of law enforcement requests, and their information security team, who decided how to release the data.

They pulled all information together and released it in the form of their Transparency Report, released annually. In the above table, taken from their 2021 report, you can see that over 70% of private-party data requests were rejected. Apple is practicing what they preach, being open and honest about its responses to data requests when needed.

Apple scored a major PR win with customers who want to keep track of their data and be reassured that Apple would only release it as a last resort. It’s arguably their greatest collaboration and one that perfectly exemplifies convergence marketing.

Instant access to information

Converging your departments necessitates placing information within a shared database. It also means that your data will take a standardized form and that anyone within your organization who has access can use it.

Imagine you’re a member of the marketing team who’s had an idea about using some of the latest designs in your new marketing campaigns. Without a unified database, you’d have to:

Request the designs from the design team.
Wait for a member of the design team to read your message.
Wait for the design manager to okay sending the designs over.
Wait for the design team to actually send the designs over.

Each of the above steps takes time, whereas with a unified database, you can simply hop into the relevant folder and pull the designs out for use.

Where and how can you apply convergence marketing in your business?

Convergence marketing isn’t something that you can apply overnight. It’s a slow and steady process that brings different sections of your business together, requiring careful preparation.

The simplest, and altogether the most sensible approach, is to alter each of your departments’ approaches little by little until they’re aligned with each other.

Once the processes and guidelines that each part of your business uses are similar, you can begin the sync, allowing them to work in harmony.

Let’s go over what each department needs to do to get the convergence ball rolling.

Marketing department

Convergence marketing, as the name suggests, is focused on marketing. It should come as no surprise in that case that the marketing department will be at the center of your efforts to converge.

When implementing convergence marketing, the first step in the process is to begin documenting and recording your marketing efforts within a database. That is, if you have not already done so.

The next step is to take a look at the way you store information, including but not limited to:

Acronyms.
Filetypes.
Naming conventions.
Database layouts.
Access protocols.

These all need to be standardized into a form that the other departments involved in your efforts will be able to read and understand.

Once information is standardized it can be read by anyone who knows the syntax used, which should be provided to all other teams involved. Other teams may not necessarily use the same software as the marketing team, so you’ll need to take this into account.

You might be asking yourself, why is data standardization important? Surely anyone who needs to use the data can simply convert it into a form they can read.

The answer is two-fold.

Firstly, errors can crop up in translation. The data you end up with might not match the data you started out with, and it’s not feasible to manually check every piece that comes your way.

Secondly, your staff is only human. It’s inevitable that someone will forget to convert data, use the wrong conversion methods, etc.

If you think this is overstating the matter, please remember that NASA lost an entire Mars probe in 1999 thanks to someone forgetting to convert from inches to centimeters. Hopefully, any mistakes that crop up in your departments won’t cost $125 million and involve crashing objects into planets.

While standardized information is vital for all departments involved in the convergence efforts, it’s especially important for the marketing department.

And since marketing plays an integral part in your efforts, you should consider convergence within the department.

Internal convergence

Converging your marketing efforts can mean many things. Perhaps the most important aspect you should look at is converging your online and offline forms of marketing.

Due to their different philosophies, it’s common for businesses, especially larger ones, to silo these two forms of marketing into different teams so their operations flow smoothly.

Online marketing is a far more advanced approach, crunching big data from each particular consumer and personalizing ads and offerings based on behavior, interests, and more.

Offline marketing, on the other hand, needs to be far more general. It’s not that you can’t make offline forms of marketing more personalized; it’s that the amount of effort that it takes means it’s not always worth it.

In today’s world, attention spans are shorter than ever. It’s estimated that the average human’s attention span is just over 8 seconds, a drop of nearly 5 seconds from the year 2000. This puts the average human’s attention span at less than that of a goldfish!

This drop doesn’t come as a surprise, given how technology has sped up in the past 20+ years. With this information in mind, it’s more important than ever to grab consumers’ attention early on in your interactions.

That doesn’t mean you should ditch offline marketing efforts. Some can work brilliantly. Take the billboard below as an example.

It was created as part of a Minnesota anti-smoking campaign.

It’s a simple design, with only the website link on the billboard itself, but the pole beneath dressed up as a cigarette makes sure that we know the purpose of the advert.

The green color often associated with hospitals is the final nail in the board, subconsciously reminding the reader why they should consider getting in touch.

In short, the billboard has conveyed:

What service is offered.
How to best contact them.
Why you should do so.

Online marketing can learn a lot from offline forms. Digital designers may be tempted to make elaborate and attention-grabbing content, but paradoxically it’s best to keep things simple even when you have a theoretically unlimited amount of space.

No one wants to keep scrolling forever, after all. It’s estimated that the average website user stays on a webpage for only 50 seconds, and that’s with an engaged audience, so you want them to take in as much information as possible in that time.

This is where the convergence of online and offline marketing comes into play, with the two learning from one another and leaning on each other. In all forms of media, you have to present information in a very efficient way. It’s not enough to simply make a consumer aware of your product. You need to tell them what it is and why it’s the best option for them to purchase.

The below images taken from IKEA’s website showcase how simple designs can convey a lot of information.

This image displays a sense of aesthetics that would make the viewer see IKEA positively while not being too complex or distracting from the point.

The second section, shown below, uses extremely simple outline images to get the point across, displaying all of IKEA’s services in a readable form.

Simple, easy-to-read marketing.

Communications

Communications refer to the part of your business responsible for communicating with outside parties. That’s anything from customer service helplines to writing emails to your shareholders.

In small businesses, this department might be merged with another or simply have its responsibilities spread across several other teams. Still, the principle behind convergence marketing extends whether you have a dedicated team or not.

Your communications department greatly benefits from convergence marketing, with the most obvious advantage being access to the other departments’ data.

With access to all the data your marketing department has collected on a particular customer, you’re better able to tailor your approach to them. This can extend to:

The channel of communications.
The tone used in communications.
The complexity of the language used.

You might think that that’s all there is to it, but there are other benefits as well. Not only can the information you get improve your communications department’s operations, but collaboration with your other departments can provide benefits that neither could produce alone.

Take this creative approach from Capital One as an example.

The company was on the ball with their Capital One Cafes, a re-imagined form of banking where their branches doubled as cafes with co-working spaces and workshops.

Despite the fact that most banking is done online, there is still demand for in-person interaction when dealing with problems. Capital One saw this and decided to use its spaces as a means of connecting with the community better.

This strategy was the brainchild of combined marketing and communications thinking. Not only is the cafe a great marketing stunt, but it’s also a relaxed setting that consumers can use to communicate with the business without fear.

Going up to a teller screen can be intimidating after all, and many consumers are put off by the formality of the whole process. By removing the physical barrier between the bank workers and the customers, a more welcoming environment is created.

It’s doubtful that either department would have been given the go-ahead without collaboration. Altering your entire business strategy is extremely costly and risky, but with multiple departments backing it, the alterations went ahead.

Management

Finally, let’s talk about the management side of things, specifically the upper management. While there isn’t much to say regarding implementation, it’s easy to see the benefits, especially in terms of decision-making and cohesiveness.

It’s often said that the upper management doesn’t know nearly as much about the goings-on below them as they should. This is mostly due to how difficult it is to pass information and manage it in a centralized and standardized manner.

CEOs and COOs make the decisions, but how can they make them reliably when they aren’t getting the complete picture?

In the traditional approach, department directors report to their superiors, passing along different strategies, suggestions, and requests at once. Keeping track of all of that can prove difficult even for the most qualified managers.

By converging your marketing, there is a single, unified goal that the business wants to achieve. This means that anyone who makes these decisions can always fall back on that, rather than having to keep track of all the different strategies your business might be going after.

Convergence marketing is all about passing on information in a clear manner. Better information means better decisions, which make for better business strategies, and a more unified organization.

What tools can help enhance convergence marketing?

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably looking to apply convergence marketing to your organization. There are many ways and tools to go about it. So many that you may get overwhelmed at first.

To help make sense of all of this, we’ve prepared a list of the most useful tools and why they’re useful in tackling convergence marketing.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. It has to be on the general side of things, as each industry and context requires a different approach. So, if you think you have a better option, we encourage you to go for it.

Social media

Social media is a powerhouse of the current digital marketing age. It’s a tool that can create a lot of data for you to utilize, while also allowing for better interaction between your communications department and your customer base.

Social media communications is a tricky business, with even the most innocuous of comments being able to spark outrage or dissent among your viewers. By looping back real-time information into your marketing department, you will be able to mitigate any crises.

This is where social media monitoring comes in. Social media monitoring software can assist you in keeping track of your online statistics, flagging any urgent or suspicious data, and allowing you to give feedback and responses to questions rapidly.

The software is fairly new but has already made great strides. Some countries have even used it to monitor the accuracy of news shared on social media sites, with the aim of keeping their population informed when electing their new leaders.

In short, social media can be used as both a form of marketing and a form of communication, sometimes simultaneously.

The platform you use will depend on your market, target demographics, etc., but all share the advantage of global reach. Their downsides are also similar, with rapid responses and careful monitoring being crucial.

Mailshots

Mailshots, also called direct mail marketing, is the art of using mass production of a single advert to market to large numbers of consumers at once. Typically, the term has been used to refer to letters or leaflets you send through the post, but it is also applicable to email marketing.

The advantage of convergence marketing when using email mailshots is immense.

You can combine clicks and conversion statistics, along with other forms of data you’ve collected on customers to further personalize communications. Something you wouldn’t see in a siloed system.

And it’s a big deal, as segmentation and personalization are by far the most effective email strategies.

Consider the following scenario – a customer is after a specific brand of eyeliner, so they send an email to a store, asking if they have it in stock.

If your departments are siloed, the marketing department won’t know about this instance, and future newsletters and promotions will be less relevant for that person.

With your marketing and communications departments converged, this information will be communicated between them, allowing for it to be used in future personalized marketing efforts. The customer gets more relevant content, and you get a happier customer. Everybody wins.

To sum it up, mailshots are all about information. The more relevant you can be, the greater their chance of paying off. Keeping the flow of information open between departments means everything can be considered, not just what the marketing department has immediate access to.

Apps

When you create an engaging app for your brand, customers are more likely to use it for browsing, purchasing, and interacting with your company.

This gives you heaps of data about your customers in a simple and efficient manner. It’s especially true with apps as they’re usually linked to an individual account, leaving less margin for errors.

Another great thing about apps is they can be heavily personalized according to the data you just collected. Whether that’s to do with how the content in your app is laid out or specific times you’d like to use push notifications. There are even capabilities to change the design with AI-generated art, though these processes are still in the early stages.

All in all, apps are a sandbox for you to create your perfect customer contact point.

Cloud software databases

Market Report

To move information between the different sections of your organization, you will need a database of some kind. In essence, each division needs to know what the others are doing and why they’re doing it. This prevents your sections from conflicting or producing mixed messages.

Cloud software is a particularly efficient method to use, with many tools to choose from. The main players are SalesForce, PipeDrive, and Zoho. Your choice will mainly depend on your organization’s:

Size.
Goals.
And ability to implement technology.

Let’s go through a list of the benefits that cloud software can provide and discuss why they’re superior to other options.

Scalability

If you’ve ever used a flash drive or similar device to store your files, you know that they can very quickly become full. Data takes up space, and the amount of data you collect won’t always fit into the storage space you’ve allocated.

If you’re using traditional data storage means, you’ll need to physically go out and obtain more storage space, install it, link it to your data collection software, etc.

All that takes time, time in which valuable data will be lost. Cloud-based services offer expansion as your organization’s data storage needs grow. Perhaps more importantly, you can also decrease the capacity when you see a drop in your needs.

Cost-effectiveness

Cloud software is a far more cost-effective solution than traditional forms of information storage.

For one, you don’t have to store the data yourself in a physical location which would come with maintenance costs. You also don’t have to maintain and replace the storage drives every few years when the technology moves on, which is quite costly.

Another factor that bears mentioning is the time cost of duplicating files, emailing them to relevant people, and of those people downloading them. This might not seem like much, especially with smaller files, but when this process happens thousands of times a day, it starts to add up.

Easier collaboration

As mentioned before, the instant transfer of information between different people greatly benefits cloud software. However, the ability to collaborate goes further than that.

In traditional collaboration, one person might send a draft to a second, who suggests edits and sends it back. Then, if the first person doesn’t like some of those edits, they would suggest something else.

This takes time, causes great delays in projects, and is very inefficient overall. The key issue here is that each person cannot see what the other is doing until the edit is complete, and if they disapprove of it, that’s time and energy (and money) wasted!

With cloud software, the projects can be hosted online in a place that both participants in this hypothetical example can see. Each edit can be reacted to live as it is being done, saving time and effort in both parties’ cases.

Enhanced data security

Physical means of data storage aren’t the most secure. Once a connection is made, it’s very easy for a hacker to steal data and very difficult for you to stop them without physically severing the link to your server.

Cloud computing offers a unique opportunity in the data security world. Since your providers will necessarily have great data security measures in place (that’s their entire point), your customers can rest safe and easy knowing that their data won’t be stolen.

Cloud software is necessarily shared over multiple parties, which needs to be transmitted in real-time. This makes it an ideal candidate for blockchain security measures, which are considered almost unbreakable.

While data can be extracted from an external source, doing so requires the consent of all parties involved, so hackers would have to go the extra mile. Furthermore, a complete block in the chain cannot be altered, making most run-of-the-mill hacking methods ineffective.

Wrapping up

It’s not always easy to switch to new methods of thinking, but converged strategies are the future as customers are expecting a more personalized approach.

Convergence marketing ensures your customers will get it, as each department will be able to fetch, understand, and send data from across the company.

The next step would be to measure how customers feel about your new approach. Luckily, it’s something you can measure via advanced tools that provide sentiment analysis, providing valuable insights for your business. Read more about it here.

Customer Perception: Making Consumers See Your Brand Positively

Posted on Oct 6, 2022Nov 1, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

The concept of customer perception might seem like a simple thing, but in reality, there’s far more nuance involved than you might think. At its core, customer perception is your customers’ opinions of you and is a key factor in a consumer’s choices.

Being seen positively by consumers is a must to generate new leads while also retaining your current ones. Almost 70% of consumers say they’re more inclined to spend more money with a company they trust to treat them well, rather than go for a cheaper alternative.

And trust plays a big part in how customers perceive your brand.

But where should you start? Customer perception is a big topic, and countless factors influence it.

This guide is a good start. It will help you understand what’s behind customer perception and, most importantly, how to measure and improve to thrive in today’s market.

Let’s get started!

What is customer perception?

Customer perception refers to your customers’ awareness, opinions, and general feelings about the brand and its products or services.

It’s shaped not only by direct experience with your brand but by all surrounding interactions like news reports, advertisements, word of mouth, etc.

It’s important to remember customer perception isn’t the same across sectors. It can differ based on location and demographics.

For instance, Home Depot is very well regarded in the US, but when they tried to expand into China they didn’t consider Chinese culture’s adversity to DIY. By the end of their six-year expansion attempt, they had to shut their stores and deal with a $160 million loss.

Customer perception can be tricky to quantify. It isn’t necessarily directly connected to the overall quality of the products or services you provide but how they see you.

You must remember your customers are human, and emotions and logic mix together. It’s not enough to look at the value proposition.

That’s why you need to dig deeper to measure how customers feel about you. Good places to start are:

Analyzing customer reviews.
Looking at social media platforms.
Conducting surveys.

This NEPA global survey on food habits is a great example of how perception affects our purchasing behavior. When asked about sustainable meat alternatives, only 25% of UK consumers said they would like to see lab-grown meat on their local supermarket shelves.

What is the customer perception process?

The customer perception process is exactly what it says on the tin. It is the process by which customers sense, organize, interpret and respond to anything related to your brand – be it a particular product, the brand as a whole, or somewhere in between.

Let’s break down this process by looking at an advertisement.

First, the ad is seen by the customer.
Then, they organize the information, taking it in and understanding its meaning and the message it conveys.
The customer can then interpret the information based on the current situation and history with the brand.
Finally, the customer responds to the advertisement, forming an opinion and associating emotion with it.

This all happens within a second or so, leaving little to no room for conscious thought to be involved.

But just because this process happens quickly and automatically, it doesn’t mean we can’t predict quite well what will happen.

When running an ad campaign, you don’t just whip up a graphic and run along with it. You try and understand what your target audience will take from it and how it will affect their perception of your brand.

Later, you can collect customer perception data via the previously suggested methods. This will help you better understand your ideal customer and the effects of your latest campaign.

You can find a great example of this if you look to KFC’s 2018 ad, which issued as an apology rather than a simple advertisement.

In early 2018, KFC in the UK ran out of chicken. That’s right, a business that mainly sells chicken ran out of chicken.

Since this naturally grabbed the attention of the local press, KFC responded in a manner that resonated with the British public – posting a full-page ad in the Metro with their initials rearranged to almost form an explicit word. It’s almost as if they were going “FCK, this is embarrassing”, a phrase that struck the bullseye with the British public.

Underneath, the company apologised for it’s failure, promising to do better in the future. KFC’s ability to laugh at itself took classic British humor, owning up to their mistake, and an appropriate form of advertisement to create one of the best responses to a PR crisis in the last decade.

Why is customer perception important?

While a positive customer perception is bound to net you new customers, it can help also drive growth via repeating customers.

By forming long-term, lasting relationships with your customers, you increase loyalty and customer retention rates.

Focusing on metrics such as these is key in ecommerce, as it’s considered much cheaper to retain existing customers than attract new ones.

Customers who have already purchased from you, and have built a positive relationship with you, are far easier to convince to purchase again than those who haven’t. To attract new customers, you need to:

Convince them that their existing brands aren’t working for them.
Show them that your brand can fulfill something their current one cannot.
Overcome the human resistance to change with enough incentives.
Convince them to buy from you.

You skip the first three steps with existing customers, making it a much more efficient and cheaper affair.

The key to customer retention is to align with their values and beliefs. This will depend on your market, who your customers are, and what demographics your customers belong to.

Older generations emphasize different things than younger ones, men on different factors than women. These are all generalizations, of course, and won’t hold for every customer of that particular demographic, but it’s important to keep them in mind.

Customer perception has two particular factors which promote strong loyalty and even advocacy:

Value alignment

A customer who perceives your brand as having the same values as them will intrinsically align themselves with you. Conversely, a brand with lacking or conflicting values will see customers migrate away to greener pastures.

The same Ipsos Global Trends Report 2021 also found that consumers’ three most common expectations of brands are:

Committing to fighting climate change.
Standing up for social issues, and
Paying their taxes.

This is true worldwide, with the report looking at all six continents.

Businesses that are perceived to have outdated or harmful business practices will be met with rejection and even protest, while those who keep an eye on the values their customers hold will be embraced.

But it’s not enough to talk the talk. You also have to walk the walk, with actions speaking much louder than words. Shallow and meaningless gestures will be seen through, yet genuine commitment will be held in high esteem.

Microsoft is an interesting example of a company that shifted its value to keep up with the times. Historically, it was known as a combative and aggressive company. But with the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014, it shifted towards more collaborative tactics.

The software giant now provides support for open-source software, PaaS, and IaaS solutions and, in general, is far more open to working with other developers.

Trust

Good customer perception signals to the consumer base that you are a trustworthy brand that will not lie, misdirect or cheat customers.

To build and maintain trust, the best practice is simply to be trustworthy, to say what you mean, and to be honest and open about your business practices.

Costa Brazil, for instance, laid out their Roadmap For Change earlier this year, stating their sustainability targets and their pledge to plant new trees to replace those their products required.

Unlike similar press releases and statements from similar companies which only showed the positive, they were open and honest about the difficulties of building a sustainable brand and admitted that they weren’t experts in the field. Many other businesses switching to eco-friendly means of production haven’t been willing to admit difficulties, leaving Costa Brazil as one of the few who will publically acknowledge setbacks.

At the end of the day, customer perception is about developing positive relationships with customers, which leads to increased sales and success.

Past experiences

It’s no wonder that past experiences can determine loyalty and retention.

As we’re all conditioned by our past, our reactions and knowledge are entirely dependent upon our previous experiences. In this way, good customer perception relies on having consistent good experiences.

A well-known phenomenon is hyper focus on particularly good or bad parts of an experience with a brand, with one bad experience tainting a person’s perception of that brand as a whole.

Thus, consistency is key in building good customer perception.

How to determine & measure customer perception

We briefly talked about the ways you can measure the elusive customer perception. Now’s the time to dive deeper.

It isn’t easy to keep track of all the factors that affect customer perception, but with a little investigation, you can usually find out what customers expect of you.

Using one method of information gathering alone will usually get you part of the story, but not all of it. For example, reviews, by their nature, are only left by those who have purchased from you. Thanks to the human tendency to only leave reviews in the case of particularly strong experiences, whether positive or negative, you’ll tend to get a skewed view of things.

You need to use multiple methods of data collection if you want to get the complete picture. That means complementing review data with other methods such as surveys and social media monitoring.

Collecting feedback via surveys

Surveys are great, as they can tell you the little details that you specifically need to know. You can ask the specific questions you want answered, and those who complete your survey will give you the answers. Sounds simple enough, right?

In reality, things aren’t so simple. Consumers tend to only answer surveys when they’re particularly motivated to do so.

A popular motivational tool is a monetary incentive. While it will get people to answer your questions, some may simply tick boxes randomly to obtain the reward.

That being said, you can somewhat overcome this by placing reverse-scale questions, helping you to weed out such responders.

For example, if marking 5 means an excellent experience in most of your questions, create an item where marking 5 means a terrible one. In surveys where all items are marked with 5, you’ll know people didn’t bother reading the question, and you can disregard their answers.

Another issue with surveys is they’re usually limited to your clients. Would you look at an email from a company you have never interacted with directly and think, “I’m going to complete this survey!”?

Finally, only people interested in answering questions will complete your survey. The issue is that your sample is limited to a specific subset of people that don’t necessarily depict your entire audience.

That said, surveys are still a great tool to gauge customer perception. You just need to keep their limitations in mind.

Once you’ve opted for one, it’s important to know how to read them and what you can get out of them.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The net promoter score is a value that’s based on a specific survey question:

“On a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely), how likely is it that you would recommend us to someone else?”

Those who answered 9 or 10 are considered “promoters” of your brand, whereas 0-6 denotes a “detractor,” those who will decry you.

The relative ratios of these will give you an idea of how well your product or service is received and help quantify your overall customer perception.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Similarly, the customer effort score is based on the question:

“On a scale of 1 (extremely low effort) to 5 (extremely high effort), how difficult was it for you to find a solution to your problem with us?”

The CES measures the effort that customers feel like they have to go to in order to get what they want from you, which is a crucial component in a customer having a good experience with you and therefore having a good perception of you.

Analyzing review data

Review data is solid. It’s information on your products or services provided by those who purchased from you and therefore is a reliable data source, right?

Well, not exactly.

First, you have to consider that you’ll get a skewed perspective from reviews thanks to people’s tendency to only leave them after standout experiences.

I’m sure you’ve come across review STAR ratings online and seen a lot of 5-star and 1-star reviews, but not very many in between.

Secondly, reviews can be faked. Whether that’s by competitors, the platform you’re using to sell on, or by people who have nothing better to do than make everyone else’s life difficult, you can’t necessarily rely on review data that isn’t directly linked to a purchase.

The problem then comes that, by only taking into account verified reviews, you might leave out plenty of genuine reviews that simply didn’t bother going through the verification process.

With Revuze’s data collection engines, you can take information in brands, product lines and even individual products, analysing them from every angle in order to pull as much information as you can from that data.

We use sentiment analysis, SWOT analysis, and more to give you a full 360 degree view of your brand, market standing, and competitors.

Social media listening

With the advent of the internet, the things people talk about daily suddenly became recorded and publicly available to analyze.

Using software, you can collect millions of text pieces relevant to your brand and analyze them with sentiment analysis in order to get a clearer picture of how customers feel about you.

Like previous strategies, social media listening is not without faults.

Social media is volatile, and one negative opinion can turn into thousands when passed on, then die out. If you’re not segmenting your data by time, this can give you a much lower figure than you’d otherwise expect.

Furthermore, not everything that people post on the internet is their actual opinion. Influencers get paid to say certain things; some people look to fit in by posting opinions others might hold, and others look to stir up outrage for amusement.

The lesson here? Take everything you get from social media monitoring with a grain of salt. It’s a good indicator, but it might not be reliable.

As you can understand, all data-gathering tactics present challenges. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use any. Quite the opposite. By acknowledging these challenges and employing more than one tool, you’re bound to get as close as possible to the real picture.

And once you have that, you can start working on improving your image.

What factors influence customer perception, and how do you improve them?

Many factors affect customer perception. In fact, almost every facet of interaction between customer and brand that you can name will have an impact of some kind. These can be tangible, measurable things or more abstract ideas.

The key to positively influencing customer perception is to do these things regularly, as it not only will tell you how your actions have been perceived but can tell you if customer expectations have shifted in the time between surveys.

This might seem far-fetched, but large scandals and world-shaking events can shake up the market and shift customer priorities over just a few months.

The top factors influencing customer perception will depend on your market, target demographics, location, etc.

In the previous section of this article, we talked about value alignment, trust, and past experiences as factors that affect customer perception and loyalty. Now, let’s take a look at other common ones.

Pricing/Quality

Pricing and quality often go hand in hand, so let’s discuss them as a pair.

A product’s overall quality strongly impacts customer perception, with certain prices bringing expectations of quality standards. When the quality of your product or service meets or exceeds expectations, customer perception rises.

Prices that are too high will put customers off, and ironically, so too will prices that are too low as they give the impression that your products have some hidden defect.

Setting a price for your products when launching them is never easy, but you can look to the other similar quality products on the market and what they are charging as an indicator of what might be a reasonable price to charge.

This doesn’t mean you should blindly follow your competitors’ pricing strategies. You should always monitor the sentiment around these prices, ensuring that customers are happy to pay these prices.

For an established product, the key is to keep an eye on the sentiment around your products’ pricing, quality, and how they combine.

You can do this with the help of sentiment analysis, text mining, and other forms of social monitoring, which tell you more about the overall picture than a simple survey would.

There is also the factor of brand value: a well-established brand can charge more for its products than an unknown one, owing to the trust consumers have in you.

You should also keep in mind that prices are dynamic. What customers were willing to pay upon initial release won’t be the same as what they’re willing to pay six months afterward, for example.

Customer service

When customers have an issue with your products or services, your ability to make them feel heard, listened to, and have their feelings respected greatly impacts your customer perception.

Good customer service relies on knowing your audience, what they desire and what they expect from you. In general, you should be able to learn a few things about your customer base and what they expect by monitoring reviews, social chatter, and surveys that you put out.

You can go further by segmenting these into demographics, allowing for personalization of customer service to a particular demographic or even individual if enough data has been collected.

The processing power required to personalize customer service isn’t something a human brain can output. However, advanced AI can assist you by analyzing the data and providing recommendations for how to approach the particular customer, problem, etc., based on previous customer service interactions that were successful.

You can take this process even further with hyper-personalization, which takes the philosophy to the individual level, using data and information collected on a specific individual.

Take, for example, the following interaction:

You phone a company helpline, asking for assistance setting up your software.
The person taking your call asks you for information on your software, then redirects you to another person who is more able to help.
You then must explain everything you’ve already explained to the second person, wasting your time and theirs.

You’d feel quite annoyed at the repetition, wouldn’t you? Well, if the company had a database of information on their customers and their problems, the interaction would go more like this.

You phone a company helpline, asking for assistance setting up your software.
The person taking your call asks you for information on your software, enters it into a database, then redirects you to another person who is more able to help.
The second person now has all the information that the first person entered into the database and can take over without wasting time.

In that case, you’d feel like somebody listened to you. The company took your words, kept a record of them, and used them further down the line to help you.

Businesses can also take things a step further by noting down common issues, keeping a record of their solutions, and making them accessible to users. Why bother calling a helpline if you can find the answers on the website?

At the end of the day, speed is key in customer service. Providing a personalized customer service experience can help solve problems quickly and efficiently.

Branding

Your branding sends a clear message to customers.

Your logos, artwork, packaging, and all other visible, tangible factors specific to your brand affect customer perception.

You can think of your branding as an extension of value alignment. You need to position yourself in a way that attracts your audience and aligns with their beliefs.

Brightly colored, shiny plastic packaging will catch customers’ eyes.

However, plain, more recyclable packaging may boost your customer perception with certain audiences.

Usability

The customer’s ability to use your product significantly impacts customer perception.

Placing step-by-step instructions on your products will make use easier, including easier-to-read instructions on boxes or packaging. You can even delve further into the design process by editing the shape of your products so that their use is intuitive even to someone unfamiliar with them.

A highly specialized brand of computer parts aimed at consumers who can construct their own devices doesn’t have to be as simplistic as a brand that focuses on the general public, who aren’t expected to have the computer know-how of the aforementioned specialized customer base.

Further additions you can make include so-called “poka-yoke” or “mistake-proofing,” where your products are made so that misuse is made difficult to achieve to prevent customers from damaging your product while attempting to use it.

A good example of poka-yoke is USB cables, which can only be connected in the correct direction and will refuse to slide into ports the wrong way, preventing any potential damage that could arise to both the device and the person operating it from a backward connection.

How you deliver your advertisements, as well as the contents of them, have a massive impact on customer perception. This is especially true of the former, with different target audiences having different preferred modes of communication.

Choosing the wrong mode of communication for your target demographics will have a net zero impact at best, as customers simply either ignore or do not see your advertisements, and a negative one and worst, as they see you as out of touch.

Gen Z, for instance, rarely pick up the phone if they don’t recognize the number calling them, nor do they answer the door if they’re not expecting someone, so cold calling and door-to-door sales will misfire as communication channels.

Instead, you’ll need to utilize digital and social media to reach this demographic in an effective manner.

Don’t forget the context, though. Knowing when and where to place your advertisements so that they grab attention but don’t distract from the current situation the customer finds themselves in is the key.

You’ve probably come across pop-up ads on smartphone apps or websites, those that cover the entire screen and completely derail any process or train of thought that was taking place beforehand. It’s extremely distracting and annoying.

This is an example of bad advertising, which will hurt your reputation if you allow yourself to be placed in those positions. Picking and choosing where you want your adverts to go is crucial to maintaining a good perception.

Passive advertisement, on the other hand, doesn’t affect the usage of the website or app in question. It’s a term that covers top banners, side adverts, and any other form of online advertisement that goes out of its way to avoid disrupting the user experience.

As you can see in the example above, the Forbes website uses banner adverts across the top of its page. While these adverts catch the eye, they can simply be scrolled or looked past to access the website’s content without interacting with the ad in any way. This makes the advert less intrusive, less annoying, and less likely to be met with a negative reaction.

Furthermore, the quantity of advertisements matters also. While it might seem intuitive that more advertisement equals more customers obtained, there comes the point where this is inverted. Too many advertisements can cause irritation, which is then associated with your brand and puts potential customers off interacting with you.

Customer reviews

Almost all customers who purchase online will take the time to read product reviews before purchasing.

The reviews that have been left, their content, quality, and even their number have a big impact on purchasing decisions. It’s been shown that consumers are weary of purchasing products with few reviews, even if the product in question is newly released.

While having good reviews is important, addressing negative reviews will have a positive impact overall on your customers’ views of you. It shows you are willing to listen and consider your customers’ problems.

Social media listening tools, dedicated CX teams, and sentiment analysis all play a part in keeping up to scratch with your customer reviews.

The key here is speed, with computers doing most of the work identifying and flagging especially positive or negative reviews in order for a human to see and respond in a short amount of time.

Recommendations and advocacy

People listen to the opinions of those they hold in high regard, whether that’s influencers, well-known names in a certain sphere, or friends and family. Your ability to improve customer perception in those people’s eyes can also have a knock-on effect that leads to improved customer perception overall.

By using influencers, promotional discounts for those who recommend your products to their friends & family, and making other forms of advocacy easier, you allow your customer base to do the hard work for you.

Unfortunately, besides paying influencers to advertise your products, the mechanics of recommendation isn’t exactly straightforward to influence, as they rely on nuances and factors beyond your control.

Ultimately, the best way to get customers to recommend your products or services is simply to give them a great experience – from the moment they search for you and buy your product, up until they need your help with it.

Location & shipping services

Convenience is a big factor in choosing a brand, with a location close to your target market’s preferred area of purchase being important. Your location will depend on your target audience, with younger, more tech-savvy customers being far more likely to purchase online, for example.

If you’re already an established business, it’ll be very expensive to move to another place to perform commerce there.

Luckily, shipping networks these days can stretch all across the globe. With the right setup, you’ll be able to reach those distant markets with ease.

So, what is the right setup?

Firstly, you need a good distribution system. By this, we mean that you need to have pre-existing plans for getting goods from one place to another across all options you plan to ship to.

This can be as invested as dedicated couriers, to as simple as knowing the local post routes. It’s up to you to decide what’s necessary, based on what is feasible from a financial standpoint and also what is expected of you.

Secondly, you need to factor in time. Certain borders take longer for goods to cross than others, and some shipping lanes can be disrupted by accidents or by human interference.

Distribution centers, places where you store your goods before the sale, can be dotted about in various places. You can refill stock there as necessary by keeping an eye on what is purchased in specific locations, either directly from the manufacturers or from a central distribution center.

In this way, while the overall distance the goods travel is the same, the distance between you and the customer is much smaller, making for shorter delivery times and increased customer perception.

Wrapping Up

The key to having good customer perception is understanding that customers’ reality is not necessarily yours and that what they see & do will vary from person to person.

There are plenty of factors that can affect how customers see you, from value alignment and trust, all the way to pricing and service.

Collect and analyzing this data is crucial to driving growth. With it, you’ll be able to pinpoint what consumers think of you and how they see you

In the end, though, the best way to gain good customer perception ultimately is to provide them with an excellent customer experience. Not sure how to do that? Check out our comprehensive blog on the topic.

Customer Signals that Product Managers Need to Listen to

Posted on Feb 1, 2022 by Simone Somekh

Utilizing Customer Signals for Success

We are in the age of consumer empowerment, with the consumer, and their wants, needs, future desires, aspirations, and other factors all now squarely in the center of any contemporary commercial concern. The older days of looking at the customer as a static data point, hopefully a consistently malleable one unbeholden to such things as quality issues, social reactions, or customer satisfaction scores, and sequestering interactions with them professionally within the realm of “customer service” are long over.

Signaling and Customer Reaction

These days, it’s less that the customer is always right now, and more let’s take a real look at who our customers are, who we are as a business or enterprise or offerers of any specific service, and how we can make that entire web of connections flow harmoniously and for long periods of time. Your customers and their decisions will make or break your firm or endeavor, so listening to them and the signals they convey becomes of the utmost importance.

Customers and Feedback

To that end, one of the most important concepts and nodes of commercial data one can utilize for their business remains simply and firmly customer signals, or the messages contained in feedback from consumers, whether in direct response or any other data point that can indicate a customer or consumer’s state of mind. These signals can take place across any number of mediums or touchpoints. Responding to them thoroughly and effectively requires strategy.

What Are Customer Signals?

So what do we mean, really? What are these customer signals, and why are they so instrumental in the success of any product, service, or commercial concern in general? And following that, how can product managers identify these points of data that illuminate what consumers are thinking and feeling about their products, and their brands at large? Is it all in the sales numbers? The consumer base’s social reaction to a new and polarizing launch? How do the customers react around quality issues as they arise with any given company? Should product managers be talking directly to the consumer base, or otherwise interacting with them? Is there any simpler way to figure out just what the consumer wants?

Customer Signals: Social Reactions as Knowledge

The answer to all these questions all comes down to essentially the same thing. Should we listen and engage where possible with our customer base, and listen to what they’re explicitly saying, or otherwise signaling, if we want to stay in ongoing mutually beneficial and profitable partnership with them? The questions and answers may seem rhetorical, but they are pointing to very real changes in how we understand the classic business relationship between firm and client, business and customer, product management and consumer base. The answer we believe is firmly yes.

Customer Signals, The Pulse of Now

Customer Signals represent the present and what drives it. Beyond simply collecting static data points from customer satisfaction surveys or whichever customers can be cajoled into staying on the line with a representative, customer signals represent the much fuller picture of engagement and reality as pertains to any product or launch. This list of 6 key customer signals serves as a useful reference point for what a more holistic and arguably more meaningfully engaged system of engagement with a firm’s customer or client base should be based off of.

The Important Questions on Customer Signaling

Firstly, what are customers saying about your product? What directions are the reviews swinging? The classic data points, but they are only the start. How are they comparing your product to your competitors? Your pricing? How is reflected in sales, another major signaling point of data? Whether they rise or fall, tell a tale of quality issues or positive social reaction, each point offers useful data, is a clear signal that can be followed to future clarity and likelier successes.

Human Signals

Our current marketplace offers further and newer yet still fully established nodes of signaling, places where your product and your customers are giving you data you can use to make better products, acquire more and or better customers, such as social media. Are the influencers on your side? Do they know you exist? If they do, how are they talking about you? How do they score you? For that matter, going back to your customers, how are they scoring you?

Signal for Success

The questions seem to often start and end at the same place, but that is part of the nature of what we now understand business and engagement to be, a more human and rounded experience. If you can listen to your customer signals, you stand a far better chance of actually responding to their needs and wants, and creating products that work and succeed in every conceivable sense.

Customer Signals and Real Life

The new age of business and product marketing and selling demands that we approach relationships with the customer as we would with anyone in our life. We must listen actively and with the greatest possible engagement. We must be able to tell different stories to different audiences, even for the same product or brand. Finally, we must be willing to make tough decisions, and stick with them. As intro to college composition teachers love to point out, ethos, or one’s character and moral and intellectual being taken into a whole, must count.

Signals and the Future

Firms that are honest, that engage with their client or consumer bases with honesty, integrity, and a desire to know more so that the relationship can be improved, and that are willing to make the mature decisions that define any mature agent in any given system or transaction, those firms are responding to the business demands of the present and future.

Who’s the Boss?

We are entering an era where product design, marketing, and retailing no longer occurs in a vacuum. We no longer tell the customer what they want, offer the product, and tell them to take it or leave it. That was the past, which carried with it necessary and fatal inefficiencies across the board, but especially when it came to companies and their brand managers assuming the market’s desire. This led to them pushing forth products that, as the saying goes, worked on paper.

Successes and Failures in Customer Signals

Failures to Listen, Failure to Design

CMSwire notes the famed example of the notorious Ford Edsel, though more modern examples like Nokia’s N-Gage abound as well, with Newegg noting that it was “doomed from the first pitch meeting”, for reasons including but very much not limited to “such bad design it became part of the phone’s legacy”, including, most infamously, the requirement to take out the battery to switch out for new games. Such lurid failures, still commemorated in pop cultures decades or even half centuries later, represent the stakes for not listening to one’s customer base seriously, for ignoring reactions from new campaigns, and failing in general to take customer signals seriously.

Signal Paths to Victory

Indeed, the future can be glimpsed in both the recent responses to successful product launches like the X-Box Series S and X, two systems borne of listening to consumer sentiment. Much of the discussion around the gaming marketplace has revolved around scarcity borne of multiple factors, namely the pandemic, related supply chain shutdown issues, and increased demand borne of locked down populations and consumer bases. Finding the flagship models for the two leading brands, Microsoft or Sony, has proven a nightmare for consumers, but a clear winner emerges.

Signaling and Delivering

Unlike Sony, who put all their future platform eggs in one product basket, the nigh unattainable if well powered Playstaion 5, of which the common speculation has formed as such that you cannot get one, and it arguably might as well not exist. It is by no means a failure whatsoever, but there is a failure in Sony’s ability to meet its consumers needs, as noted by their recent stock drop as well, also borne of Microsoft maneuvers in their shared and competed for marketplace. Microsoft was able to build more consoles, get them to more customers, and, most importantly, when it came to what customers signaled they wanted, more games, better pricing and access around them, and a console to actually play them on, Microsoft was able to deliver, and create a seamless customer experience.

Good Design and Offerings from Listening to Customer Signaling

Products like Microsoft Game Pass seem almost laboratory designed as perfect examples of customer signals being heeded, with the attendant benefits and rewards. Customers made clear, via feedback on product pages and landing sites for specific games on online storefronts, what they wanted, the kinds of games and gaming experiences they wanted, and followed through with sales to back it up. Microsoft in turn knew how to properly parse and analyze these different channels of feedback.

Listening to Customer Signals Closely

Microsoft knew that not every fourteen year old commenting angrily on an ingame message board that can host feedback as well is the same as their parent who bought the console for them as they write a somewhat more sober message on Amazon or Google shopping. Such nuance is key, as Microsoft can then understand and know who when they write what will actually be buying such. Their sales numbers seem to tell a story of successful signal following and then successfully translating what those signals were saying into the products and services offered as well.

The Stakes of Signals in One Market

So much of what we are seeing from Microsoft’s successes in the latest generation of the console wars can simply be pegged to Microsoft actually appreciating what it was seeing, taking in all the signals across all channels, and gearing up their offerings accordingly. Also accordingly, it seems like much of the future of the $86B video game industry is in their hands. Such are the rewards of respecting customer signals.

Signals At Every Scale

Now, not everyone is going to have the scale or resources of a Microsoft, to say the least, or at least as much as any number of antitrust lawyers in the nineties did, but really, the lessons and imports of customer signals, and their ramifications for business, scale up or down to anyone and their concerns. Your firm or product may not have several layers of message boards, or feedback pages, or teams of trained customer service professionals to follow out on each individual client, but that does not in any way shape or form mean the intuitive and market-borne insights and truths of customer signals holds no value for one smaller or much much smaller than any home name brand.

Customer Signals, Past and Future

As we said earlier, these insights often model the contours of good human behavior and relationships, a positive inverse of when trained psychologists sought to exploit human nature and behavior for commerce during the postwar eras. Anyone, any firm can properly and sensitively listen to what their customers are telling them, in all the varieties of ways that those signals can be heard and understood. Customers make it very clear via their signals how they feel about things now, what they didn’t like about the past, and what they want and dream of for the future.

Conclusion

Customer signals tell this story, and firms that are successful read them clearly, at any scale, for any transaction. It simply requires the hallmarks of human maturity, be it engaged listening, and or simply character, the courage to not do what first appears brave but really is easy, like releasing an unfinished or poorly designed product, but to give your customers what they really want, indeed, what they have signaled to you. Meeting that challenge requires a courage all its own, and signals are the tools any firm or business will use. Successfully meeting the challenge is really just locking down the future for any given firm or product. Those that heed customer signals consistently, thoroughly, and carefully will inherit the commercial future accordingly.