Page 48 - MYM 2015

WOW Marketing:
Rede ning Brand Loyalty in a Connected World
Philip Kotler PhD Hermawan Kartajaya Iwan Setiawan
IHow Marketers Got It Wrong
n our years of experience in the marketing eld, we often see marketers in various industries battling
it out to get to top-of-mind brand awareness, only to falter in driving customers to purchase, and, ultimately, advocacy. They spend a huge amount of
money to build that early advantage of popularity and later rely on the ‘natural progression’ of customers in their path to purchase, without really having necessary intervention.
Awareness is indeed important and brand managers realize this. They regularly conduct research to track how good the market actually recalls and recognizes their brands. Spontaneous, especially top-of-mind, recall is the goal. Some even believe that share of top-of-mind recall is a good predictor of market share, especially in consumer packaged goods.
In another room across the hall, the service managers are tracking customer satisfaction and loyalty. Bigger numbers of delighted customers
are reflected in higher loyalty index. And since a decade ago, loyalty has been redefined as customer willingness to recommend a particular brand (Reichheld, 2006). Thus, the ultimate goal, on this end, is to get a higher number of customers who are willing to advocate their brands.
Abstract: Customers interact with too much of everything: product features, brand promises, and sales talk. It is increasingly challenging for companies to meaningfully connect with them. A new framework is designed to help marketers manage what really matters: customer impression toward brands across their path. The goal is to compete for customer expression of WOW, which ultimately links to loyalty, pro tability and growth.
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Unfortunately for companies, brand manager and service manager do not necessarily talk to each other when conducting the research. Hence, companies fail to see correlation between awareness and advocacy. They miss the important insight of how good they are in converting people who have known them in the market into loyal advocates.
The challenge does not stop there. Even if companies manage to measure ‘conversion rate’ from awareness to advocacy, the question remains: how do you intervene and increase the rate? Metrics such as awareness and advocacy focus more on the outcome rather than the process to get there. Hence, it is challenging to understand how to influence the end result with marketing actions efficiently and effectively.
Every bit of interaction between customers and brands between awareness and advocacy may have a hidden potential to uncover. Somewhere along the customer path from awareness to advocacy lies the decisive touch point which drives customers to advocate a particular brand. This is what every marketer should know.
Which touch point that matters the most to customers, and thus for companies, is largely different by industry.