Measuring customer engagement
from iMediaConnection
The new S-curve is based on the new concept of customer engagement. Engagement is a dialog conducted via a multiplicity of contact points, selected by the customer. Engagement is built around two key changes in the operating environment:
1) First, the addressable consumer or customer. Increasingly, we are able to reach our customer individually as an electronic address as that consumer moves between a desktop computer attached to the internet, a laptop on the go, a web-enabled mobile hand held communications device or an iPod. They might be using email, instant messenger, blogging, knowledge management tools, collaborative business software or shopping. We can reach them at most times and follow them around the web to analyze behavior that reveals their needs.
2) Second, customer control over the content they choose to receive. Advertising -- or indeed anything that we might typically have thought of as "marketing communications" that simply interrupts them before they have put their hands up to say "please tell me something" -- is anathema.
Engagement is customer controlled. To engage with a customer, we must understand their needs and preferences pretty much as individuals, or at least in very, very finely segmented groups, and communicate with them when they choose, rather than when the brand owner chooses. Engagement requires personal, individual meaning, and therefore it requires personal, individual understanding.
In order to become a standard for marketing, the first requirement of customer engagement as a marketing tool is that we have measures of engagement. At ad:tech, we introduced the concepts of :
* Customer Engagement Points
* Share of Customer Engagement
* Engagement Conversion Rate
These are the cornerstones of the new engagement measurement system. They generate derivative measures like cost per engagement point and cost per share point of engagement.
It's a complete new paradigm, and it unleashes the new marketing S-Curve. Its key points are:
* It embraces all contacts with the consumer from the web to word of mouth to conventional communications. The customer tells us what qualifies as a contact.
* Every contact has a value, weighted by combining cognitive value (information generating a rational shift in favor of the brand), affective value (generating a positive feeling about the brand) and persuasive value (generating a shift in behavior towards the brand).
* All the values roll up to a total brand engagement score. This is a global currency. A brand engagement point in Berlin can be compared to a brand engagement point in Beijing, or Buffalo or Buenos Aries.
