On the consumer in the Digital age:

On the consumer experience:

Why JetBlue succeeds at the consumer-brand relationship:

JetBlue has time and time again pushed customer service and the social space further. They are constantly surprising their consumers and thinking of ways to make them feel better about traveling with JetBlue. In fact, on Monday they released SoFly preaching to travelers, ‘when you see something, share something.’ They are looking at this ‘community’ as an opportunity for travelers to trade tips and information on flying with JetBlue and the locations they are going. This type of community provides authentic user-generated information to JetBlue consumers, as well as, giving them a sense of membership for participating.

The tourism industry is rooted deep into advertising. And, we’ve seen a lot of great campaigns that succeed at driving excitement around a location. As the buzz fades, however, so does the excitement and interest. Tourism promotion must run deeper than advertising to tell a longer-lasting story of the country, state or city and its people.

For example, from a traffic point of view Queensland Tourism’s “Best Job in the World” campaign was one of the most successful tourism campaigns to date. The campaign drew 7 million visitors to the site and even won at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Awards. The campaign garnered a lot of excitement and attention, but failed to actually drive visits to the country. The number of tourists actually dropped by 8% that year. (Quirk.biz)

So, where did the Queensland Tourism campaign fall short?

It drove excitement around a job, but failed to build the story of what and who Queensland was. In the end, it was more of a noise-generator than inspiration for action.

Tourism boards have a new opportunity to use locals and tourists who have traveled to their location to create, tell and share the story. In fact, it is happening already without any motivation from tourism boards. ‘User generated content is used by 40% of online travel researchers to determine whether they visit a destination.’ (Quirk.biz) Locals and tourists share tips, photos, stories and recommendations simply just to share. With the increase in social networks and technology, tourism boards can collect and curate user-generated content to tell the story and share with new potential travelers.

Colorado is doing interesting work based on this strategy called, ‘Making Colorado.’ Governor Hickenlooper described the project as, “Colorado is really more than a pretty face,” he said. “We’ve really let our mountains speak for Colorado. But we are more than mountains. There is a lot more to us, and it is really time to bring that strong voice and our message to the world.” Which is the truth. If Colorado was described from a non-resident they would paint a picture of the Rocky Mountains. Tapping into the local population, businesses and public figures gives a deeper look and a more well-rounded view of the state.

In a less extensive campaign, Australia used locals and recent tourists to paint the picture of the Australian landscape. They run photoboards specific to a region of the country and ask their fans, “What’s your favorite thing to do in (the region) in 72 hours?.” They’ve collected thousands of fan-generated photos, but more importantly, amassed over 50,000 interactions with that content.

The story is there to be told, tourism boards need to see the opportunity and tell it.

A Hypothetical Case Study: United Airlines.

Lets put this thinking into hypothetical practice with a brand that really needs it:  United Airlines.  To be fair, United Airline’s social media team does not have an easy job.  But their difficulties are also their greatest opportunity to totally change the rules of social media – and to create social practices that drive value to all parts of the business.  Let me explain:

Tarmac is a major topic among the United Airlines Twitterverse: ”@united Soon I will have to regale the twitterverse with tales of United Airlines leaving a plane full of people on the tarmac in Cody, WY.” Any social listening tool will likely highlight Tarmac as a frequent keyword and one that is most often associated with negative sentiment. For United, the list of fighting words and angry tweets related to Tarmac is long and shameful.

To me, there are three ways to approach this problem:

1. Ignore it:  Not a good plan.
2. Respond and apologize: Definitely better, but what are social media folks in a listening command center able to do to make a real difference?
3. Leverage the advantages of social to turn ‘Tarmac’ into a conversation that would influence United Airlines’ final product and experience.

Now, it is a fact that all airlines get stuck on the Tarmac – it is not just United flights – and very little can be done about that.  Airports get busy, mechanical problems happen. But, United could take this topic and turn it into a collaborative conversation – or challenge to its customers.  They could create more focused social communities of frequent travelers or even involve all of their Facebook fans and Twitter followers and catalyze a conversation about how to make a crappy situation better for their customers.  For example, they could create a challenge like:

EXAMPLE 1: 
We all hate them, but sometimes delays happen and our flights need to hang out on the Tarmac for much longer than we or you would like. So, our question is: How could we make a bad situation better? Share your ideas, suggestions, and stories with us.

EXAMPLE 2:
Sitting on the Tarmac is not fun. What is most frustrating about it? Missing flights? Boredom? Lay it all out there for us, so we can start working on ways to make a bad situation better.

Short-term Results:

Leveraging social and collaborative tools, United could turn a constant complaint into a collaborative, community driven effort to make bad experiences better. They might just learn that the biggest frustrations are no water, boredom, and missing flight connections. It seems straightforward to then implement free TV and Wifi while delayed on the Tarmac, do more water runs up and down the aisles and automatically identify passengers with connections that will be missed and text them flight alternatives that they can select. From my own experience just keeping the cabin cooler, keeping passengers more informed and turning on a little background music would help.

The point is that United could turn a trending complaint into an actionable and pro-active conversation with their customers about how to make their experience better.  Some of the ideas may be difficult to implement, some might not be, but United would be armed with insights directly from a diverse group of customers.

Long Term Results:

The beauty of this process is that by empathizing with and involving customers you are naturally disarming some of their frustrations.  You are also generated thousands of ideas and stories that become unbeatable social content.  For example, United could create stories and videos about the customers behind the most clever and innovative ideas.  If they began implementing customer ideas they could create amazing PR and content about the process and the results.  And, maybe, just maybe United Airlines could turn this tweet:

@united Soon I will have to regale the twitterverse with tales of United Airlines leaving a plane full of people on the tarmac in Cody, WY.

Into this one:

@united Got stuck on the tarmac and was pleasantly surprised:  Free TV, Water, and they rescheduled my flight automatically! #notexpectingthat

What if recommendations for your guests could come from other like-travelers?

‘Guestsourcing’ is based on the idea of crowdsourcing information from past guests for current guests. Travel and hospitality brands have a unique opportunity to create a community around their guests and the local community of businesses. Pod39 developed a community, ‘Pod Culture,’ not only to engage their guests, but to be able to include concierge-like services while keeping a budget-friendly hotel price. Their guests can find local spots to haunt and new friends to visit with in the community.

Pod39 is not the only hotel line offering ‘social’ services to their guests. In fact, it has become quite a trend among hotel chains. Marriott has taken their ‘guestsourcing community’ to the next level. They’ve added a ‘membership’ layer making the community available only to guests in their loyalty group. With ‘Marriott Rewards Insiders’, guests loyal to the Marriott brand can research the ‘local scene’ across all of the brand’s locations. This encourages guests to feel they have a ‘local home’ wherever a Marriott hotel is located.

Private and guest-only communities are not the only way to go either. DoubleTree is using a YouTube aggregator to encourage travelers to ‘Take a DTour.’ John Greenleaf, global head at DoubleTree by Hilton, told Adweek. “Our research shows that 80 percent of travelers don’t know where they are going when they start to plan a trip. It’s a wonderful way for them to go in and take a look at a city and see what there is to do based on other travelers’ experiences, while taking a look at our unique hotels in each of those markets.”

The Fast Food industry is competitive and only growing more competitive by the day. With new trends popping up constantly creativity and innovation has been proven to be the key to success. That’s why social media has been such a great partner to the industry. However, the power in social lies within the rate at which people share and communicate with the brand.

And, the truth is, most consumers don’t care as much as we think they do.

As simple as it may seem, it takes time and thought to engage with brands on social media. Most of the time consumers only engage when they have something meaningful to share: feedback, complaints or an outstanding experience. But, think about it – how compelling is a plain cheeseburger? The key to selling more fast food and spurring more engagement is enabling hungry consumers to have a shareable experience. So – the question is: how do you take that cheeseburger and turn it into an experience?

The elusive ‘secret menu’ is not a new concept. In fact, consumers have been talking about ‘animal style’ for quite a while now. However, these secret items are just the experience consumers are looking to share. Having the knowledge of these items (and the bravery to try them) gives consumers a feeling of being an insider.

On the other hand food items do not need to be secret to be considered a great experience. We’re seeing more and more ‘unique’ menu items pop up from fast-food chains. Do you remember the ‘Double Down’ from Kentucky Fried Kitchen? Courageous foodies were clamoring to try the gastronomic treat and there not so courageous friends were right by their side to watch. And, be sure, there were photos taken and shared among friends and others. Taco Bell has added a new, strategic move to their creative menu items – partnerships. By partnering with Doritos for the Taco Loco offering they are peaking the interest of, not only their fans, but Dorito/chip lovers. Fast food brands can benefit from these partnerships and by top of mind outside of their locations.

Let’s face it – every meal we have is not share worthy making it difficult to get people to talk about the food they’re eating. The key to engagement is building the experience.

Recently I was exploring an analogy for consumer research in social media compared to traditional means to help communicate what Napkin Labs does to a friend. The resulting analogy was really thought provoking so I thought I’d share.

I’d love to hear what you think about this analogy so share some comments below.

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For context, consumer research is often seen as studying consumers under a microscope which for the purposes of this analogy we’ll call a telescope.  Social media however has made the dialogue between brands and consumers highly scalable, putting a ‘telescope’ in consumers hands as well.

Consider these two groups – company and their customers each with a telescope to study each other.  Now ponder the thought that:

• Two telescopes looking into each other allow each user to see each other exactly as they are; and

• Two telescopes looking away from each other focus on two different perspectives.

As social media has come into the picture, brands and consumers have applied the same logic and process to understanding each other in an effort to extract as much value out of each other as possible with a net neutral result.

Now let’s ponder that thought:

• Two telescopes side by side turn into binoculars which can see distant things with a great sense of depth; and

• Two telescopes stacked end on end greatly magnify a single view showing a great sense of clarity.

Social media has changed the game, created new rules and the innovators out there are seeing the power of collaborative engagement.  Leveraging social media to blur the lines between brand and customer can allow the collective to see further and with greater clarity if we properly provision a system to break down the walls between company and consumer to realize the full benefit social media can provide to both parties.

We’d have the potential to better align market/consumer need, innovate in leaps in bounds, create an unimaginable loyalty, and perhaps advocacy through earned media alone is all that is needed to recruit new users saving advertisers heaps.

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What do you think?  Utopia?  What is preventing this from happening?  How can we overcome these shortcomings in the long-term?

A few years ago, I heard marketers start using the word “assets” to describe some of the things they created. My initial reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Why shouldn’t it have been? Previously, every output from marketing spend was formalized as an expense. The idea of jumping over to the other side of the balance sheet– of moving from “the cost of doing business” to “something with future value”– was appealing.

Then reality set in. Most things marketers and their agencies create are indeed expenses– a point painfully reinforced by client procurement teams. It was a hard pill to swallow at first. We were putting our blood, sweat and tears into these experiences. Yet it was tough to deny that they had little future value. In fact, we found ourselves so ready to move on to the next thing, that we wouldn’t have been willing to put in the time to extract value from previous creations anyway. And why would we? We’d been there. We’d done that. We were creative. We were innovative. We needed something new.

The irony of the matter is that companies have a particular, highly valuable asset lying dormant. It isn’t hidden away in an attic either. It’s their customer base. The vast majority of companies view customers solely as revenue. Yet that myopic view underutilizes this audience. Take the “funnel” mentality of most organizations for example. Dated for a number of reasons, funnels are most frustrating as a metaphor to those of us who work in innovation because customers fall out of the bottom.

Why? If someone is willing to like, follow, pin, register or email with a brand, why do so many marketers fail to see them as an asset? This is an audience with incredible innovation potential. The issue is most companies aren’t built to engage this audience. They’re simply built to extract from it. As brands start to confuse metrics for objectives, they focus on tricks and tools to increase engagement. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it all feels like signage on a road to a familiar destination: a sale.

What if companies ask this group for more than a sale? Companies like Nike, Starbucks, Tesla, American Express and LEGO should be an inspiration for any brand with even a single customer willing to give them more than their money. These companies have all launched products or services in varying levels of collaboration with customers, and many have ongoing platforms through which customers know they can contribute things beyond their cash. We live in an amazing age where the tools to accomplish this are everywhere. Every brand has a media channel of some kind and is in an ongoing dialogue with their customers whether they like it or not. Tools that allow companies to actually benefit from this asset are not only available, but can readily plug into existing owned media channels.

I believe in this potential of customers to do more than just buy stuff. Groups of connected, passionate people who know a lot about a product can be useful in crafting new experiences, driving lateral innovation, or even as a real-time research lab. Marketers that don’t see customers as an asset are ignoring a very valuable resource.

Ultimately missing this asset could be a very large expense.

In part 1 we discussed how social can be leveraged to get closer to customers.  In this post, we cover how the definition of customer loyalty is broadening and how QSRs can increase brand engagement and help drive sales.

Recently QSR Magazine reported that store visits influenced by deals is on the decline.  The report outlines a changing marketplace and states that “all types of deal visits are down with younger consumers.”  This study, and others like it, suggest that as younger customers make up a larger percentage of the market, loyalty programs, deals and rewards need to be rethought and re-engineered to appeal to this group.

At the same time, many QSRs are struggling with leveraging social media as a channel to drive word of mouth and earned media that translate to store visits.

While these seem like disparate issues facing QSRs in a changing market reality, they can be closely linked if we rethink what customer loyalty can mean.

Rethinking what it means to be loyal.

Loyalty has always been defined as repeat purchases over time, but in a world of earned media, advocacy and social networks – brand loyalty is broadening.  Customers can now provide a range of “earned value” beyond just a purchase.  They can post content, refer friends, provide useful ideas or feedback – all of which can carry a quantifiable value to the brand. These actions can be connected with purchase loyalty to create a much broader picture of customers who are providing value to a brand.

By thinking about loyalty as moving beyond the purchase – new opportunities open up to create programs that incent social engagement, work to drive purchase loyalty and help lay the foundation for more innovative and targeted rewards.

Connecting the dots.

After broadening the definition of customer loyalty to include social engagement and feedback that is valuable to a given restaurant, the next step is to connect them.   Connecting loyalty and engagement has its challenges, but leaders in this space have a lot of advantages:

• They can drive higher rates of meaningful engagement if the right incentive structure is put in place.

• Stores can capture store data and social data to create an incredibly rich picture of their most important customers.

• They can leverage this data to create more targeted deals, coupons and rewards that will have greater appeal to customers.

Of course this takes a deep level of integration between existing loyalty programs and social engagement, but as digital and more advanced loyalty layers are implemented across brands – new opportunities open up to connect these systems more seamlessly.

Leverage data, context and personalization to make rewards more relevant, exciting, and most important of all – surprising.

By connecting the dots between social actions and purchasing, more relevant and real time offerings can be provided that incent a broader range of value added behaviors.  Data can be compiled around purchases and mixed with information about how a customer has interacted with a brand through Facebook.  Leveraging this information, deals can be tailored to customers and help to promote more brand interaction on social channels.  For example, if I am a Domino’s customer and I order a pizza and then share a photo of it on Facebook (that gets a certain level of engagement from my friends), I could instantly receive a deal for the type of pizza I buy most often as a surprise and delight reward.

Connecting loyalty, data and rewards to social can open infinite possibilities around more targeted offers, and helps to increase engagement (as long as rewards are provided with some measure of quality or ‘value’ of contribution).

The devil is in the details when it comes to these types of reward and loyalty systems, but thinking more holistically about loyalty can help QSRs accomplish multiple goals.  The earlier brands can begin experimenting and connecting the dots – the earlier they will be able to start creating more relevant and targeted deals that will drive more visits and appeal more to younger generations who expect to be wowed.

The Holy Grail of Engagement and Why Communities Matter broke down the levels of engagement in relation to the ‘Fogg Behavior Model.’

Rachel Happe, CMSWire blogger, writes:

“The big issue for businesses is that individuals with low motivation are not likely to be meaningful or significant to the organization because they have no motivation to do anything but the most basic engagement. Those individuals actually create a lot of noise in the organization’s ecosystem.”

There needs to be a brand-shift from focusing on creating the most noise and start focusing on driving the most meaningful interactions with those consumers with the highest motivation and best intent. The Social Engagement curve, featured in AllThingsD, examples that the most effective and useful actions lie in actions based on intent. A crowdsourcing project is successful when it results in authentic consumer-driven insights that bring the community together and push the brand further.

Crowdsourcing can drive so much more value and results for brands if it is taken beyond the surface. Brands need to go beyond ‘the next flavor’ projects to build a community working in parallel to drive innovation, problem-solving and building a brand people want to be a part of.