Can Your Brand Answer These 3 Questions?

Posted by admin on July 9th, 2012

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Neil is a Marketing and Branding Theorist at heart, and a Marketing Communications Manager by day. His blog – interacter – is a great location to find bomb insights and musings relating to marketing, branding and advertising strategy. Here, he asks 3 fundamental questions of the marketing community.

Some companies seem to be oblivious to the fact that retention and acquisition marketing are two separate animals.

Two simple questions could smooth the dividing lines.

And a third could revolutionise the way you market.

Acquisition and retention marketing ask two different questions.

To gain a customer, the acquisition marketer needs to answer this question:

1. Prospect: What will this brand do for me? (future presumption)

To keep a customer, the retention (or loyalty) marketer needs to answer a different question:

2. Customer: What is this brand doing for me? (present perspective)

The first is future presumption. The other is present perspective.

Both are needed for a healthy bottom line. Get more customers in; keep current customers from migrating elsewhere.

Your brand needs to be able to answer both questions.

You might have acquisition and retention in different teams. You might call retention ‘loyalty’.

But you need to know both answers inside and out.

If you’re a really top-flight marketer, you’ll know the answer to a third question as well:

3. Prospect OR customer: What will this brand enable me to do?

Subtle? Yes.

Important? Definitely.

Unasked? Often.

Too much marketing stops at question one. Some loyalty marketing provides the answer for question two.

It’s a rare company which can answer question three in a meaningful way.

Question three will become increasingly important in the next two years. We’re already seeing some of the shifts into enablement over provision.

For savvy brands, it’s going to be the only way to survive.