Customer World

Here's a snapshot of Walker information's Wireless loyalty report:

• Only 41 percent of enterprise customers are truly loyal to their wireless service providers.  Truly loyal customers not only have positive attitudes toward their providers but also intend to keep buying or increase their purchases from current providers.

Satisfaction vs. Loyalty
Satisfaction does not ensure loyalty. In fact, satisfaction is a much lower hurdle and indicates little about a customer's intentions and future behavior. In the wireless service sector, 79 percent of customers are satisfied, but only 41 percent are truly loyal.

Loyalty Leader
Verizon Wireless is the top-performing company in the wireless service sector and the only one to qualify as a Loyalty Leader.

Industry Financial Impact
Companies experience loyalty in tangible ways that impact significantly on financial results and other key performance metrics.

1. The average annual revenue growth rate of Loyalty Leaders over a three-year period exceeds the comparable rate of Loyalty Laggards by 20 percentage points.
2. The three-year average operating margin of Loyalty Leaders is 22 percentage points higher than the comparable financial result for Loyalty Laggards.
3. The percentage of change in stock price over five years is 34 points higher for Loyalty Leaders as compared to Loyalty Laggards.

Other findings

• Quality, value, and cost are the key drivers of loyalty in terms of how enterprise customers measure the performance of their wireless service providers.
• Truly loyal customers expect their wireless service provider to be customer-focused, to be a brand leader, and to have a strong reputation.
• The customer experiences that impact loyalty the most are network service, customer service, and the sales process.

thro' William Cusick

John Hagel writes:

Companies today realize that push approaches to marketing are less and less effective. As I have written about elsewhere, we are entering the era of reverse markets.  Ask business executives to define a market and they will likely say that it is a place where vendors can find customers and sell them more and more stuff.  Instead, we need to view markets through the reverse lens of customers who are trying to find appropriate vendors at relevant times and get the most value they can out of the their vendor. Powerful forces are re-shaping markets to make this reverse market lens much more helpful in determining how to create value.

So I hesitate to say it – Ambient Findability is a great new book about an increasingly important aspect of information architecture.

If businesses are going to succeed in the future, they need to master pull approaches to marketing – how do you get potential customers to seek you out and how do you pull complementary resources together to become ever more helpful to customers?

At the very least, it will put squarely on the table some key questions:

• How findable are your products and services?
• How findable is your business?
• How findable are you personally?
• What can you do to improve your findability for those who matter?

MarketingVox writes Google may try to sell TV ads, as a part of extending its advertising program.  Read more.

What does this mean to brands and customers?

The era of selling "advertising time" like 45 sec spots, 30 sec spots or sponsorships etc. will be long over. Google will offer "immersion time" rates across media. What does this mean?  Google, I think, will offer PPE - Pay per Engagement model to advertisers. I believe Google's "immersion sell" model, will be the killer-app, that network television will find difficult to ignore. 

What will google do?

• First they will buy advertising time "wholesale"  from TV networks
• Bundle it with accountable clicks to advertiser's websites
• Throw-in targeted advertising based on key words when the customer searches on specific products/brands of the advertiser on the web
• Offer pay per download for TVCs on iPods and to broadband subscribers as and when the customer clicks
• Integrate this with google mobile and have a push and pull application for the customer to interact with mobiles
• Use google talk to provide information. Hence, melding, telecom time with it too!
• Imagine paying a differential rate for sponsorships based on number of customers who engage with a brand!
• Get advertising time paid for, based on accountability, effectiveness and efficiency
• At this point advertising dollars will be bought not at "negotiated rates"  but at "engagement rates" from TV networks
• It will breakdown the conversation gap between brands and customers, that network television has created for several decades.

Imagine, why will a brand not pay for about 'an hour of engaged conversation' with a customer? Engagement will be the new metric. For the customer, it will be relatively less interruption marketing and more permission marketing.

Will google become the wholesale re-seller of owning, selling and retailing customer time?