Tech Tows Consumer Companies in Engaging Customers

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

Is Facebook’s Acquisition of WhatsApp a Threat to Telcos

A cousin of mine, aged 22, can always be seen tapping fervently on his mobile. For someone sporadically glancing at this exercise, it might seem as a new generation rhythm. For others who are forcefully but passively involved in this so called music, it is a mobile-centric social paranoia that is seizing especially the young ones. The culprit is the ever increasing mobile messaging apps.

The recent announcement by social media firm Facebook about the acquisition of WhatsApp will only trigger the obsession towards real-time content sharing. It is soon turning into an emotional activity. And, such emotional activities are what marketers are increasingly trying to tap. It is also a great handle for customer engagement. Consider this; the 22-year old spends more time on his mobile than chatting with his family members staying with him. He is just one among the 70% of WhatsApp users that use its services every day. Facebook comparatively has only 61% hooked onto it every day. 

      

It is clear that social media gorillas are transitioning to the traditional mainstream industries ousting well entrenched and seemingly unshakable giants. Consider the case of telcos. The goings on hitherto indicates that they completely missed the social media phenomenon. Grappling with continued operating challenges, telcos’ rhetoric of continued innovation to create new revenue streams from analyzing user behavior is increasingly seen as yielding no outcomes. Communication tools like WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber to name a few are in fact overtaking telcos initiatives towards meaningful customer engagement.

The recent announcement by WhatsApp CEO is further damaging to telcos already waning significance in the communication ecosystem. Beginning Q2 2014, WhatsApp will enable voice within its app. And, like how the communication tools previously chipped away the once prominent SMS from telcos, there is likelihood of a threat on telcos’ voice revenues.