Managing brand-consumer touch points
Managing brand-consumer touch points is the central challenge of the non-line marketing era. Here’s a real world example. A friend of mine just bought himself a new Hyundai Genesis Coupe. It was a three week process, and he told me the whole, convoluted story.
Let’s do a quick exercise and count all the touch points that occurred during his purchase cycle.
First, he visited a Genesis Coupe micro-site built specifically to showcase the vehicle. Then, he visited the Hyundai Canada website to build and price his own model. After that, he stopped by a local auto show to chat with a Hyundai rep about the vehicle’s performance. He went back online and visited his local dealer’s website to check opening hours and test-drive availability. He booked himself a test drive, went to the dealer, took the coupe for a spin, and spent 30 minutes talking with a sales rep about 0-to-60 times and quarter mile trap speeds. He went back home and followed @hyundainews on twitter. Finally, his mind was made up and he went back to the dealer to sign the paper work. Turns out the rep he’d chatted with so amiably quit very suddenly and he was assigned to a new guy, who closed the deal and let him drive of the lot as the proud owner of a new 306 HP pony.
Count ‘em up and that’s a total of 7 multi-channel interactions in the customer acquisition cycle! At each step of the way, my friend’s commitment level changed. He waffled, he prevaricated; he agonized, was unsure. In short, he traversed the palette of human emotions.
But it’s a bitch to coordinate and measure of all this. In a recent post, Gary Angel cites the concept of full touch-point marketing. Full touch-point marketing is about opening as many conversations as you can with your customers — from the beginning of their product interest to after they place an order — and making each of those conversations valuable and relevant to both sides. But beyond merely opening up ubiquitous conversation windows prospects, the real challenge lies in unearthing the suite of KPIs that most precisely measures a brand’s ability to push a prospect from lukewarm interest to full blown passion. Once someone figures that you, it’ll unlock a brave new world of business intelligence in the non-line marketing era.
Jonathan Levitt
