McDonalds give
away toys with Happy Meal; an attempt to keep their young customers engaged. Chocolate
maker Ferrero India, packs toys as a
surprise inside its Kinder Joy chocolate egg. These are small examples of a
fast growing trend. An increasing number of businesses are embracing the
customer activated enterprise model. As per an IBM study, leaders in organizations
that outperform their peers are not just managing customer experiences; they
are reorienting their organizations, strategies and investments to cultivate
contemporary relationships across all manner of customer interactions.
Progressive
ones are transitioning from selling products and services to being an active
partner with customers’ interest group. In short, more and more organizations
can be seen fervently attempting to create an ecosystem around customers’ sweet
spot. According to David
Aaker, a sweet spot reflects customers’ “thinking and doing” time, beliefs
and values, activities and passions, possessions or places they treasure.
Ideally, it would be a part of, if not central to, their self-identity and
lifestyle and reflect a higher-order value proposition, much beyond the
benefits provided by the offering.
Aaker
illustrates this with the example of Pampers. The brand went beyond diapers by
creating the Pampers Village community
that provides a “go to” place for all issues relating to babies and child care.
Its five sections – pregnancy, newborn, baby, toddler, and preschooler – all
have a menu of topics. Its online community allows moms and soon-to-be moms to
connect with each other to share their common experiences, issues and thoughts
about how to raise a healthy, happy child. The program demonstrates that
Pampers understands mothers, and works to establish a relationship between the
brand and the mother that will potentially continue throughout the mother’s
Pampers buying life.
What
is surprising is that this marketing ploy isn’t restricted to B2C businesses. Technology
giant IBM recently announced ‘IBM
Cloud Marketplace,’ one place where clients and partners can discover, try,
and buy cloud-based capabilities. The IBM Marketplace has mobile apps,
software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, and
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings - all in one spot - where they are easy to locate, easy to
understand, easy to order, easy to try out, and easy to purchase. That’s not
all. The company also launched a BlueMix
Garage development center in San Francisco, where
it plans to work hand-in-hand with entrepreneurs and startups on
next-generation, cloud-based agile applications.
Aaker
says that connecting with a shared-interest area provides avenues to a
relationship much richer than that of an offering-based relationship that, for
most brands, is driven by a functional benefit and is relatively shallow and
vulnerable.
Views are personal
