The Social Customer: Chuck Berry
Ed. note: This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from The Social Customer, the new guide to social customer acquisition, monetization, and retention by Adam Metz. For the first entry, go here.
In this installment, Adam starts a discussion about lifestyle marketing, brand awareness, and the two main shapes of CRM strategy. This excerpt is entitled "Chuck Berry" because it refers to the formative days of Social CRM.
In 2009, I spoke with Lorelei (some names have been changed throughout the book), a senior-level Hawaiian hotel executive. She was unsure about whether deploying a social Web strategy for one of her properties would be a good idea.
“From everything I’ve heard,” she said, “the travel industry and hotels in particular are still having challenges monetizing social media. I can completely understand how important it is to manage customer feedback on [travel review] sites like TripAdvisor, but I’m having a very difficult time figuring out how I could sell my company on spending money on a social media strategy when I have no data to prove that it will work.”
Well, it’s a tough question, but it’s one that I’m going to answer in this book, with case studies and examples that actually contain value assessments like sales figures, profit metrics, and market-share stats.
There are two types of social customer management strategy I’ll address in The Social Customer: structural and tactical. The structural strategy is more goal-oriented, and it dictates when certain initiatives will be phased in, how certain metrics will be achieved, and how key performance indicators will be measured. Tactical strategy shows you how to build the humans-and-technology infrastructure that supports the structural strategy.
The notions of lifestyle marketing, branding, and behavioral targeting are still new to many consumer brands and have not been addressed thoroughly in previous books about the social Web. Here’s how lifestyle marketing comes into play: when the average consumer thinks of a consumer brand, 90 percent of the time they’re thinking of a lifestyle brand (Victoria’s Secret, Nike, Abercombie and Fitch). These are brands that symbolize the dreams and aspirations of the groups to whom they belong. The reason they succeed is because they convince their potential customers that the identity they dreamed they would have will become a reality, if they continually purchase this product.
Lifestyle marketing was all the rage around 2003, and there was even a good book written on the subject. But with the rise of the social Web, the basic tenets of lifestyle marketing have fallen by the wayside for many consumer brands. The big idea with lifestyle marketing was that brands had to learn to go beyond examining their consumers in demographic segments and break them up into segments according to what we can now call “light” behavioral segments such as Singles, Teenagers, College Students, or Seniors. The rationale for this type of customer view is that gender roles have drastically changed since women entered the workforce two generations ago, and that typical gender-based purchasing roles (“the man buys the car, the woman buys the flatware”) are long dead.
Although the researchers behind lifestyle marketing didn’t tell us how to engage the social customer, their research serves as the crucial missing link between the demographic-driven customer “conversations” of the ’80s and ’90s (if you can call them that, as they were particularly one-way), and the full-blown social customer conversations of today. To put a rock ’n’ roll metaphor on it, if demographic marketing was the Blues, lifestyle marketing was late ’40s and early ’50s Rhythm and Blues. That would make early social media and social customer management sort of like Bill Haley or Chuck Berry—the sign that something new had hit the scene, changing the environment, permanently.
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