February 7, 2006

Lifestyle Touchpoint Marketing

We talk a lot about Lifestyle Touchpoint Marketing...identifying how your target audience lives their lives and intercepting them in as many critical places as possible. So-called traditional media - like broadcast, print, and interactive - certainly represent touchpoints. But they need to be complemented by other touchpoint marketing as well.

Reading about the new campaign to strengthen Jane magazine's 20-something audience, I found it interesting to see that they intended to include coffee sleeves on college campuses, radio commercials in drug stores, and spots on plasma TV's in malls and airports.

Clever. Also clever is the magazine's refinement of its editorial product, focused now much more directly on its target audience.

The Cost of a Bad Customer Experience

I read somewhere that when the average customer has a bad experience, they share their woes with some unbelievably high number of people...and the story of their bad experience has as much as a 20-year life.

We do know that women make 80% of the purchasing decisions in this country and that they are several times more likely than men to tell their friends about their shopping experience.

So the cost of providing a bad experience is very high indeed.

A recent survey of online shoppers showed that not only did an overwhelming 82% of respondents say they would be less likely to return to a site where they had a frustrating shopping experience, but 55% said a negative online shopping experience would make them less likely to buy at that retailer's physical store.

Other interesting findings:

76% of respondents said they were more likely to buy products on a site that offers rich features, such as product zoom, 360-degree product views, and online videos of the product in context.

54% of respondents who choose to shop in a physical store vs. online do so because shopping in a store allows them to understand a product better (and women almost always want to understand a product better)

This last point is intriguing because the online environment enables you to show much more about a product than is necessarily available in a store. But you don't have the sales person to chat up, and that does make a difference.

And the Winner Is...

When it comes to Super Bowl spots, there is no clear winner. Different sources declare different ads as "best." What this says to me is that we no longer have a collective conscience. Our lifestyle and viewing interests have become so diverse that we each march to different drummers. When we are brought together under one roof (as more than 140 million of us were on Super Bowl Sunday), we may watch the same program or spots, but our response is no longer going to be collectively shared. We are a very divided nation. Not just divided into reds and blues (although that wide chasm exacerbates our divisiveness)...but we are now divided into a million little pieces. The spots haven't lost their ability to speak to us as one. We have lost our ability to listen as one.

And boy are there consequences of that!