4 Marketing 4.0 in the Digital Economy (When Online Meets Offline, Style Meets Substance and Machine-to-Machine Meets Human-to-Human)
1. Moving from Traditional to Digital
The first step in going digital is to segment your market for a more targeted audience, this is where we take into consideration the segmentation based on geographic locations, demographic, behavioral profiles and the psyche of the brand persona. Segmentation is a brand strategy to shape positioning in the market. More often than not segmentation is made without the consent of the customers. As marketers, we decide on what areas to cover in your market segmentation, how we analyse the market, its core aspirations and behavior. In this day and age, communities are the newest segments, this may be in a form of online organizations or FB groups. The down side is they are prone to spamming but there are administrators to maintain the page’s exclusivity.
Brand Positioning and Differentiation to Brand Clarification of Character and codes
Traditionally, brand positioning can be characterized by a brand name, logo and tagline to distinguish the brand from its competition. The brand equity as the overall perception of the brand may help in creating a strategy to reach the market. Moreover it may be linked to brand positioning which aims to make the brand the top of mind product or service to its consumers. Brand positioning makes that promise and it needs to be fulfilled by the brand to keep customer loyalty.
In digital, customers are empowered to affect brand equity and brand positioning. Social media has its share of influencing the target market. These days everything is so transparent that the effect of a certain brand can be posted online straight from the consumer’s mouth. Exaggeration of ads and false advertisements are now a thing of the past.
In conclusion, traditional marketing is no longer enough. With so much things happening on the internet and how things are disrupted by technology, a brand need to innovate and adapt to the changing trend in the market and go digital as well. Logo’s and taglines are not enough, there has to be a solid brand character, voice and preposition that you need to project to the public for your image to be more distinct to be able to compete in the digital space.
From Selling the 4 P’s to Commercializing the 4 C’s
The traditional 4 P’s or product positioning, placing, promotion and price has evolved to 4 C’s which now takes into consideration the co-creation, currency, communal activation and conversation about a brand.
Co creation is the new age of product development strategy where customers are involved in the formulation of ideas and concepts because they have the opportunity to personalize products and services. Currency is the new pricing scheme. Analytics plays an important role of understating the spending pattern of consumer then customizes the price based on historical purchase pattern, proximity to store to be able to convert more customers. Communal activation is the placing and distribution in the old 4 P’s method. Products are now made available in a peer to peer concept maximizing technologies like 3D and online portals where customers can access products anytime and it can be delivered to your doorstep unlike the conventional shopping. Promotion is the old Conversation in the 4C’s. In today’s generation, the evolution is from TV promotion to reviews or word of mouth in any social media platform. Traditional customers are passive objects of selling techniques while in digital, it is commercial value plus engaged customers.
From Customer Service Processes to Collaborative Customer Care
Far from the usual approach if treating customers as kings after they have purchased a product, companies now view customers as equals after shifting to the customer care approach. Serving the customer after the sale is no longer enough. At this digital age, the brand needs to listen, interact, react and take action to customer insights, comments, suggestion, feedback and violent reaction about their brands.
2. Integrating Traditional and Digital
Traditional and digital should co-exist. Traditional marketing has the main focus on creating awareness and interest while digital’s role is to drive action and advocacy. Digital is more result driven as you can easily track and measure the effect of digital efforts as compared to traditional. It is not just cheaper but it is also a much reliable tool to understand the target consumer better since customer interact with brand.
3. Summary: Redefining Marketing in the Digital Economy
Building advocacy and engagement is what we need in our time in order to have a successful business. We have to leverage in meeting the standards of the guests, customers and consumers. This can be made possible by understanding the 4C’s and how it should be applied in our businesses. Marketing 4.0 is a combination of online and offline marketing, putting style adding brand voice and character to be used in keeping in touch with your customer base. It should maximize the benefits of internet of things, machine to machine connectivity, human to human connectivity to improve engagement that leads to a higher conversion rate and achieving its goal to acquire brand advocates.
A. How can your brand develop a powerful differential based on human-to-human touch in the digital world.
The brand can maximize human interaction by building a solid customer loyalty program, every after group outing our reservations officer are tasked to contact the guests and as on how did their outing go. The resort asks for feedback and pictures of their best shots. Aside from acknowledging their visit, we feature then in our FB wall. The team makes sure that there are after sale service and we talk to the guest directly via FB messenger and email. Their pictures are also added to the website gallery, not just to have fresh content but to make them feel that they are a part of the family and how thankful we are for having them at the resort. The resort monitors tweets, Instagram posts and answers all mobile inquiries. Our team is ready to respond via text to assist to their needs. Mobile and Facebook has served as a front desk support as well. It is not used only to close deals but to monitor the guests during the day of their outing, assisting them when they get lost along the way and checking up on them after the experience. The company would not go below 95% response rate on answering FB messages. Speend and urgency are qualities that we leverage to give exceptional customer service.
B. How can your business transition from the traditional 4Ps to the digital 4Cs by adopting co-creation, taking advantage of currency-like pricing, engaging in communal activation and driving conversation.
The resort let the customers customize their products and outing packages that makes them co-creators to personalize their needs and wants. They are co-creators because they start to suggest things for improvement and we take this seriously by improving our facilities to the extent of providing the suggested team building props for company outings.
On currency, we suggest a package to our guests and they can freely add or remove some items to fit their budget and preference. Based on our record since 2014 we were able to analyse the trends of the peak season and lean season based on the sales report and this serves a tool for marketing promotion on high season and lowering package rates on lean months. Data on page views are also available to see how much web traffic is there and is the visitor conversion ratio is high enough. We also use benchmarking and porters 5 analysis of new entrants to justify pricing and improve on value proposition.
Communal activation is the placing and distribution in the old 4 P’s method. We maximize the use of google maps and waze, these apps and technologies makes it easier for the guest to locate the resort. Maps are also uploaded in the website and should also be downloadable.
Promotion is the old Conversation in the 4C’s. The resort uses digital channels like, website position for the right key terms, Facebook messenger, Viber for engagement and human interaction, email marketing for contacting old guests and informing them of their loyalty guest privileges and discounts after the first visit. Instagram contest, online community website to increase environmental advocacy, Google paid ads to further increase awareness in a more targeted audience, and the most powerful media earned media by motivating guests to create their own vbolgs by setting a good storyboard that is uploaded in the resorts YouTube channel.
Offline strategies are still being kept, road signs, calling cards, and feedback survey sheet to ask the most important question, “Will you recommend us to others? Why and why not?” This will show love, empathy, focus and care for the guests.
C. What are the fundamental changes required in your customer-service strategy to embrace collaborative customer care?
Our collaborative customer care strategies is leaving no comments, questions and reactions unanswered. The resort makes sure that “No one is left behind” We guide and address the needs of the guests may it be on site or in our reservations office. We take action on customer ratings on Tripadvisor, Fb and Google. The resort also email guests with negative reviews, we try to reach them in whatever way possible, not just to build a good online reputation but to maintain a good guest relation service. Customer is king but the broader scale of customer care is treating the employees or the person beside you as the customer as well, in this way the team will be able to have a unified culture valuing teamwork and positive mind-set that will define the brand purpose, mission and its vision.