It is imperative to craft an engaging, impactful and resonant story upon which to base your customer experience and brand. Today, the brand and audience are entwined, with the audience acting as consumer, medium and creator. The story lives through them. This presentation outlines how to determine your ‘why?’, define the problem that you’re solving for, develop a value proposition, and devise a content strategy to express your story in the new “age of context”.
Many tools and models for implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are highly technical and often tied to a specific software package or solution. Often the fundamentals are overlooked, lacking understanding of the end user’s considerations and needs as they migrate through the product experience. The VAULT Model provides a simple conceptual CRM framework that enables the Marketer to align strategies and tactics to users based on their level of product engagement and ‘relationship’ at any given point.
The model puts forward five specific ‘stages’ in a users progression as they encounter and experience a product. At each stage, it is critical to have a comprensive understanding of the customer: their behaviours, beliefs, motivations, and fundamentally their attitudes towards the product and brand. Based on this, the Marketer (and company) can define strategies and tactics to either re-engage the customer, or to further develop their relationship. Continue Reading…
Jonathan Ive joined Apple in 1992. He has gone on to be the inspiration, catalyst and driver behind products that have revolutionized technology, industry sectors and consumers’ lives across the world. He was the innovator and obsessive problem-solver to the visionary perfectionist that was Steve Jobs. This symbiosis re-built and re-defined Apple to become the world’s second largest company within 40 years, establishing a phenomenon in business, design and creativity worshiped by millions.
A hallmark of Ive’s success is his aversion to publicity and self-promotion; he let’s Apple’s products speak for themselves. He rarely gives interviews, and when he does he tends to extoll the principles of the design process, rather than providing insights into himself, Apple or Jobs. What you are able to glean, however, are a clear set of behaviours and guiding principles which, as applied by Ive, his Design Team, and Apple as a business, sets them apart:
For generations in marketing and business we’ve used the SWOT model to provide an initial analysis and classification of the issues facing a business as it starts to evaluate it’s position and devise strategy. It has served us well since its inception in the 1960s with it’s simplicity, functionality and intuitiveness; remaining un-changed and un-equivocal for over 40 years. It provides a useful tool for segmenting internal and external factors into positives and negatives, yet in doing so it can be limiting in it’s scope to introduce wider factors which could or should come into play when developing our plans. Most executives merely use the SWOT as a method of grouping factors into the 4 buckets, with limited conscious effort to align internal Strengths to specific external Opportunities, or to understand Weaknesses in regard to mitigating Threats. In this respect, the SWOT doesn’t provide a progression in it’s strategic development. I’d therefore like to put forward the SCOPE planning model for consideration as a SWOT alternative – please try it on your brand or business and let me know your experience and thoughts.
“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” Abraham Lincoln
The Marketing Funnel, Sales Funnel or Adoption Funnel, as the concept is commonly referred to, is one of the core marketing models used by companies and consultants to outline the progression of potential customers from first contact with a product or brand through ultimately to purchase. It provides a picture of how customers can be segmented into different stages as they move along a journey, directed by marketing, product messaging / triggers, and sales engagement to create the desired action, i.e. making a transaction. However, product adoption can be extended further through consumption and appreciation, to a point where the customer actually ‘markets’ on the brand’s behalf; i.e. they become advocates or evangelists who proactively spread Marketing’s most valuable asset of all: word-of-mouth endorsement. The traditional ‘funnel’ therefore doesn’t illustrate the complete journey of a customer. A ‘Marketing Hourglass’ model would be more appropriate; where the action of purchase / sign-up is merely the central point, and the progression of the customer extends beyond the funnel through additional stages of engagement with the product to ultimately become advocates / evangelists.
I support startups and early-stage businesses with marketing thinking, strategies, models, tools, tactics, tips and tricks that will enable them to attain Product-Market Fit, gain market traction, and scale to achieve real, sustainable customer and revenue growth.
