Tag: customer relationship

Expressing Gratitude to Loyal Customers

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My favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, is just around the corner. This is a great time of the year for companies to send out words or gifts of appreciation to their loyal customers. The insurance company AMICA sends out artistic Thanksgiving cards to their customers every year; many real estate agents send out fresh calendars for the next year to their clients; and I once even received a BIG can of popcorns as a customer appreciation gift during this time of the year. Are such gestures beneficial for companies? How should such thank-you’s be conveyed? In this week’s post, I pull academic research on gratitude to shed some light on these questions.

Feelings of Gratitude

According to philosophy and social psychology research, gratitude is an important emotional foundation for sustained reciprocity in human relationships. When an individual feels gratitude, he or she is motivated to repay the favor by conducting an act of kindness in return. Many of us probably still remember the paying it forward story at a Starbucks in Florida a few years ago. It started with a woman offering to pay coffee for the customer behind her, who then passed on the kindness by paying for the next customer. This chain continued unbroken for a total of 378 customers. That is the power of gratitude. In a bilateral relationship between a customer and a company or brand, feelings of gratitude can provide the drive to sustain a trusted and committed relationship and increase customer loyalty.

Gratitude Needs to be Expressed

The feeling of gratitude has a unique social component that prompts it to be expressed. In an eloquent essay written by Dr. James W. Ceasar, he describes gratitude as having developed into an objective standard of behavior. In his words, “Gratitude has a social aspect and is incomplete if it does not include the act of acknowledgment”. Or in more plain words, not saying “thank you” when someone has done something nice for you is just rude. Although much of Dr. Ceasar’s arguments relate to political and social domains, they are just as relevant to customer relationships. It is not quite enough for a company to claim its commitment to its customers when it does not properly express its gratitude to customers. Continue reading “Expressing Gratitude to Loyal Customers”

Brands and Connectivity

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I just attended a talk by Debbie Millman on branding. One idea that I found very interesting from the talk was discussion on the current wave of tribal branding since 2000. Ms. Millman made the point that in this wave of branding, a brand that builds/facilitates connectivity is likely to be successful. She enlisted statistics that show 1 in 3 households in America now consists of a single person, in contrast with only 1 in 10 households as a one-person household in 1950. As traditional communion places like the household downsizes to be a single’s cave, our need for connectivity as human beings has to be channeled through other places and other objects such as brands.

This association between brand and connectivity is very interesting and is consistent with the evolution of contemporary marketing. So I’d like to elaborate on this idea a little further. The marketing discipline is witnessing two interconnected trends: an increasing emphasis on building customer relationships (i.e., relationship marketing) and a perception change of consumers as objects/targets of marketing efforts to consumers as collaborators (see Vargo and Lusch 2004). Both of these are manifestations of connectivity and how marketing may play a role in building connectivity.

So to use some concrete examples to illustrate the concept, a brand can build or contribute to connectivity in two ways: physical or infrastructural connectivity; and psychological connectivity. Brands in the former category build infrastructure for people to connect with each other, such as T-Mobile, MySpace, and Facebook. These brands derive their value not necessarily from consumers’ emotional connection with the brands per se but rather from the value of relationships that are built on these infrastructures. For example, the popularity of a social networking website such as Facebook is dependent on the people that we as users can connect to through the website and how satisfying that connection experience is. Consumer collaboration dominates in this setting as a demonstration of connectivity.

Brands in the second category aim more toward establishing actual psychological connections between consumers and the brand and between consumers and consumers. While the connection between people is still essential to the connected nature of such brands, each individual’s connection with the brand is an essential ingredient to this type of connectivity. For example, Harley Davidson or Apple owners identify among themselves because of a mutual connection with the brand. In this type of situation, rather than functioning as an underlying platform for connectivity to occur, the brand becomes an indispensable bridge in the connection process. Relationship marketing and CRM become key strategies for enhancing connectivity in such cases.

It is possible for brands to crossover between categories. An example of crossover from psychological connectivity to infrastructural connectivity is the online communities that many CPG companies have established, such as Kraft community. Consumer interaction in those communities may no longer be brand-centric and may broaden beyond the brand to other realms of life. An example of crossover in the other direction is Second Life, where devotees who have been able to build meaningful relationships in the virtual world come to love SL as their virtual country, no less than the feeling of patriotism that we feel as citizens of a country. By crossing over or occupying both realms of connectivity, these brand names build a stronger hybrid form of connectivity that is valuable to today’s single-dominant world.

A Love and Hate Relationship with Google

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In a classroom discussion of brand personalification, I asked students how they would describe Google if it were a person. The words my students came up with were all very positive, “helpful”, “efficient”, “reliable”, you name it. One student even said that if Google were a person, she would fall in love with him. Like my students, I am too in love with Google. Yet at the same time, I hate Google. Or more accurately, I hate the fact that I love Google so much. Most things I do daily — email, search, documents, news — all depend on Google. Even this blog is on Google. I cannot remember a day being online without using a Google feature at least once.

So what do I hate about Google? The fact that it knows too much about me as an individual. Imagine someone peeking into Google’s database (legally or illegally), he can find out a lot about me, what I do, and what is happening in my life. In this day and age, information is power. And having a lot of information means owning a lot of power, even if it is only potential power that has yet to be unleashed. That power makes me fearful.

Yes, I do have a choice. There is nothing coercive about Google’s services. I, as a consumer, chose to submit to it. Like many others, I started with its search engine. It produced far superior results and soon became the only search engine I would use. Then through a friend, I got into Gmail. I was instantly attracted to the way it allows you to organize information through tagging (or in its terms labeling). Every product I have tried from Google, it almost never failed to amaze me.

Yet as I added more and more Google usage into my online life, I became more and more concerned that I am becoming too reliant on the company as my online “everything” provider. Now comes the part why I hate myself for loving Google. Many a times, I wanted to disperse my activities across different websites instead. But eventually I would give up on the idea, because I could not find something else that can do what I need like Google does.

I am intrigued by the ethical implications of all this. Because there is no coercive component, theoretically it is ethical. But how do you deal with a situation like this, where a company’s product can be so superior that the company can potentially demand a lot out of consumers, and consumers will be OK with it? What if it is the choice between having crappy products/services vs. revealing your personal information and posing danger to your privacy? It is like a forbidden fruit that promises you immediate benefits but can cause potential dangers in the long term. It is only natural that most people value current gains more than future benefits. So although we can choose, in a way, we don’t have a choice.

I still want to do something about my love and hate relationship with Google. More and more, I want to stop my addiction to this potential danger. I am reading a book called “The Google Story”, which chronicles the history and development of Google. Although I have not gotten to it yet, the last chapter in the book was on how Google is experimenting with genetic science. Imagine Google also knowing my genetic codes. Now that is REALLY scary.