Does your client have a "Genius Bar"?

David Asker's latest blog highlights the success of the Apple Genius Bar and what has made it such a big hit with visitors to the Apple Store.

As a quick reminder, the Genius Bar provides technical support within Apple stores to customers having problems with the product or application. The Genius Bar has been hailed by many retail consultants as a key element in the most successful retail concept of recent times and a builder of the Apple brand and relationship.

As Aaker points out in his post, "the Apple store's financial performance and impact on the Apple brand is amazing. The sales per square foot for its 380 or stores is more than $5,000, which is six to ten times other successful retailers, and the average store pulls in 18,000 visitors a week. Perhaps more important, the stores provide a way to express the Apple brand and showcase its products."

Aaker lists these seven reasons for its success:

1. Apple owns the brand and the concept. No other firm can have a Genius Bar because Apple owns the brand. Any other firm will at best be an imitator. 
2. The brand has a distinctive personality — humorous and understated yet competent and reassuring.
3. It is staffed by people that are both knowledgeable and disciples of the products and philosophy.  
4. Their training is disciplined following the APPLE dictum of Approach customers with a personalized warm welcome, Probe to understand the problem, Present a solution, Listen for issues, and End with an invitation to return. That means consistency no matter which store you are visiting.
   
5. Apple makes both the hardware and software and, thus, has a unique ability to create and staff a Genius Bar. 
6. It enhances the customer relationship with its person-to-person approach. 
7. It can transform a disgruntled, disappointed customer with the potential to have a distasteful retail experience and become a negative voice in the marketplace into a satisfied if not enthusiastic supporter of the Apple store. 

What about your clients? Is there a "Genius Bar" in their story? If you can find one for them, you can be their hero!

Are your clients thinking about how technology is affecting consumer behavior?

Mickey Alam Khan, editor in chief of Mobile Marketer and Mobile Commerce Daily, has written an excellent post on Consumer 2.0: How brands and retailers must anticipate the shopper behavioral shift in five years.

His point is that so much dialogue has been focused on new technologies, that too many marketers are forgetting to discuss the "sea-change in consumer behavior expected in the next three to five years".  I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Khan.

The traditional sales funnel has been displaced by a new brand decision model that continues in many cases right up to the point of sale.  And with the continuing impact of peer-to-peer influence and the advent of mobile shopping tools, marketers cannot afford to keep their planning focus solely on which is the best technology to use.

He goes on to say that "smartphones and smart televisions and smart cars and smart clothes and smart food will shape consumer behavior in the next three to five years where most marketing fundamentals developed even a decade ago will be rendered obsolete".

I was particularly intrigued with his identification of four growing consumer behavior trends that will greatly influence how customers interact with brands and retailers over the next few years.

Customer impatience will doom many potential sales.  With so many options, consumers will have no tolerance for anything that delays their purchase, online or in-store.  Every element of the customer service response, from page uploads to physical or online/mobile checkout will be scrutinized and only deemed acceptable if there are no delays. It is not seconds, but milliseconds that will matter here.
A frictionless shopping experience will be the goal. The entire searching, shopping, browsing or buying experience has to be devoid of hurdles or pain points. Smooth transactions will be the minimum expectation, and intuitive response to customer overtures will be the norm.
The lowest price will be the deciding factor for most purchases.   We can only blame ourselves for this expectation. We have trained most consumers to shop by price – except in the case of brands that maintained their mystique and value to customers.  Consumers will not always expect cheap, but they do expect affordable.
Brands will need to be connected 24/7. Consumers do not expect brands to have a downtime in any area – be it shopping hours, product delivery, returns, customer-service calls or email or text responses. They expect to access the marketer or retailer on their own terms – always on, always there, always helpful, always friendly, always obliging.

We've all got to keep up with technology changes, but we can't forget how those technologies are impacting the buying decision process.The launch of new devices every year – new tablets, new smartphones, new smart TVs, new applications, new smart appliances, etc. – is forcing consumers to change their ideas about how to buy, when to buy and what to buy.  Are your clients ready for this sea-change?

Don't let your branding strategy get lost in the digital shuffle.

What's happened to branding in the digital marketing era?

It seems like 99 out of 100 posts/articles/reports these days are focused on social media or some other tactical tool that is the next big thing in the world of digital communications.

Recently, I've been seeing more (or maybe it's just my noticing more) on branding.  And that's a good thing.

In his latest book, Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant, David Aaker analyzes case studies on dozens of successful brands to offer guidance on how to create or dominate new categories or subcategories and thus make competitors irrelevant.  He stresses the importance of identifying and building new categories and subcategories that contain innovations that customers "must have" and that competitors cannot or don't offer.  He also points our that these customer "must haves" can involve brand characteristics that are beyond attributes or benefits, such as brand personality, organizational values, social programs or self-expressive benefits.

In a recent Marketing News article, he reiterated the importance of establishing brand relevance in a competitive world of me-too products, and  the need to become an "exemplar" of the new category or subcategory in order to stave off competition.  By positioning  your brand as the innovator and quality standard, your brand can define others as imitators and inferior.

The 2012 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index (CLEI), now in its 16th year, was just released, and concludes that emotional engagement factors are driven by the brand’s “values” and the consumer’s brand “experience.” In a post published by MediaPost, Brand Experience, Values Increasingly Drive Loyalty, Robert Passikoff, Brand Keys founder and president,stated that “across most of the 83 product categories studied, we found that consumers’ loyalty now hinges more than ever before on the degree to which a brand has established a clear core value proposition -- a differentiator that goes beyond the basic utility of a product or service.”  H went on to say, “Today, delivering on the ‘rational’ reasons to buy a brand -- good or superior quality and value for the price -- is just the ‘door-opener.’ If that’s all a brand is doing, it’s in grave danger of being commoditized. In fact, it’s not a brand; it’s a category placeholder.”

It's good to see that some folks have not lost sight of the basics.  As we are looking for ways to succeed  in today's digital marketing era, don't lose sight of the importance of a solid brand as the underpinning for your social media and other marketing communication strategies.  The best tools are meaningless unless they are in the right hands!