It is hardly news that The North Face partnered with IBM to include Watson in the shopping experience. You get asked a simple, but yet very powerful question:
Where and when will you be using this jacket?
I have read about the collaboration, but just recently I have been reminded of this topic – by a personal experience – I spoke at the ADMA Global Forum and ran into Ian Dewar (Senior Manager Consumer Lifecycles at The North Face), who gave a very inspiring presentation.
In 2012 he and his team realised a very simple issue: customers did not come back to buy more. They were simply happy with the quality of the products they bought. The North Face products simply lasted too long. In order to add a personal note to this statement, Ian simply brought his 20 year old yellow jacket to the event and put it on a mannequin on the IBM stand. Very similar to the experience and advertisement of one of the North Face’s main competitors – Patagonia – who I had a personal look at here.
“Customers would buy one item of a single category and we wouldn’t see them again for years,” according to Ian.
So they came up with a solution: create a loyalty program. VIPeak was born. The North Face applies a simple, but very powerful concept: EXPLORATION REWARDED. From listening to speakers, partaking in events to being flown around the world to climb Mount Everest – you can turn your passion for adventure into real rewards. Making customers part of the brand experience to gain customer loyalty – genius and still so simple.
Anyone fancy a CANADIAN ROCKIES HELI-HIKING trip for $4,195?
To me, Ian proofs that embracing new technology is only a part of the factors for success that marketers can strive for. You need to add a personal touch to it. Something that resonates with your customers. “Be your brand,” he calls it. You can easily imagine that the team behind VIPeak simply put their love for adventure into their daily job. I would bet that Ian probably is hiking right now.
When was the last time you got personal with your brand? When was the last time you experienced the marketing efforts of your own making?
7 of Ian’s key findings for success:
- Switching the loyalty emphasis from dollars to engagement
- Finding correlations within transactional data
- Identifying wider activity behaviours
- Adopting increasingly sophisticated segmentation
- Shifting the emphasis from marketing to customer engagement
- Shaking up the marketing mix
- Using data to change internal thinking
If I may, I would add an 8th point. An additional point that easily summarises to me what Ian has done: get a lot more personal.
In a study with Econsultancy in 2015, IBM found that the vast majority of respondents (88%) agree that their organisation’s growth ultimately depends on personalisation and better customer knowledge. So there definitely is a lot of awareness out there that personalisation is on top of everyone’s mind.
I talk about personalisation in my daily job almost all the time. The reason for that is quite simple: everybody needs to evolve into this space. IBM technology may be a part of that journey, but a more integral part of it is saying good buy to the existing mentality of campaign based marketing and moving into a space where you ask yourself key questions along a customer journey, such as:
1. Who am I talking to (and how much do I know about him?)
2. What gets personalised?
3. Where is the conversation happening (and how connected is it to other conversations)?
4. When are the personalisation decisions made?
5. How is the personalised message selected?
6. What else can I talk about in context?
One of of my key customers calls this: “Smarter Conversations”.
Fast forward to September 2016. At the IBM Customer Engagement Forum I will try to talk about how I believe it is possible to “outthink ordinary” and how you can make things a lot more personal. Cognitive capabilities will again play a role, but it all starts with “being your brand”.
You can still register for the event here and have a look at the agenda. Feel yourself invited.
And me? Well – I got inspired by the message. So you can find me hiking this weekend.
https://youtu.be/p4myaDVk-Po
