Understanding Event Based Marketing

One of the new dimensions of CRM based marketing is event based marketing, where a software flags off an event in a customer’s life that could lead to a marketing opportunity. Successful event-based marketing uses software-based rules and triggers that detect, analyze and interpret customer events, transactions and interactions. This is said to offer timely and personalized attention to customers who may be in decision mode when considering a product or service. Here’s a Google cache on articles related to EBM.

Banks Editing Wikipedia

Wikiscanner is an interesting online tool that tells you who edits content on Wikipedia. So we put our curiosity to test to see if companies, particularly banks were tooling around their entries on this online encyclopedia. You can search under two heads, keyword and location. When we looked up Citibank, for instance we found edits done from their Singapore and German offices. Searching under Citibank + United States no edits turned up. At Bankwatch Colin ran a search with the keyword Bank and organisations like Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Bank of Canada etc had the most number of edits showing up. This results wouldn’t show banks like HSBC who don’t have the word bank in the name. Here are the results for HSBC. We also looked up some Indian banks. Here are the results for ICICI Bank (yes there are a few) and HDFC Bank (none). Also of interest is an earlier story in the newsletter Banks and Wikipedia.

Switching Channels

The annual survey by American Banking Association shows strong generational differences in consumer preferences. While banking at a local branch was the clear favourite of nearly half of those over the age of 55, only a quarter of under-34s used the branch on a regular basis. In fact, younger customers preferred the anonymity of online banking and ranked branches behind internet banking (30%), while older customers rated the branch (47%) and ATM (17%) far ahead of banking by PC (13%). Across the pond, another survey reveals another statistic. UK payments body Apacs in their study of telephone, Internet banking and e-commerce figures for 2006, revealed that in the past five years the greatest proportion of new Internet banking users are in the over-55 age group. Sandra Quinn, director of communications at Apacs, comments: “While younger people continue to make up the majority of online banking users, the greatest proportion of new Internet bankers are the over 55s. As a group they have come to embrace the ease and efficiency that online banking offers.” More at Finextra.

India Could Lead the Mobile Banking Charge

A recent Asia Pacific survey by Sybase 365 has found that 81% of Indian respondents are aware they can check bank balance on a mobile phone, while 49% have used the services in the last three months – the highest amongst the five countries surveyed in the region. The survey consisted of 1,818 interviews covering India, Singapore, Taiwan, China and Australia and was conducted in May 2007. It found an average awareness of mobile account balance checking and payments of 11%, and penetration of 8%. Of those that have used mobile banking services across the five countries, 50% are satisfied or highly satisfied with the service, and 12% are unsatisfied. Interestingly the survey found that security concerns a key barrier to mobile banking. The Internet is still perceived as a safer platform for carrying out financial transactions, with security concerns for mobile banking at 36% compared to 8% for Internet banking. Read the whole story. Also of interest mobile payments set to takeoff in developing world.

Cumulative Advantage. With Culture Nobody Ever Knows What Will Work.

Why are professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. How could it be that industry executives rejected, passed over, or even disparaged smash hits like Star Wars, Harry Potter and the Beatles, even as many of their most confident bets turned out to be flops? Because with culture no one knows what works. According to New York Times, recent research, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know. The common-sense view makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing. The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. It’s a brilliant article, this, specially for those of us who are into research, trying what the next big thing could be. The message, don’t even try.

Marketing A Mistake

Most marketers think that their products have to be picture perfect and only then will consumers be willing to buy them. Steve Woodruff at Sticky Figure discovered otherwise. With Belly Flops a variant of the popular Jelly Belly jelly beans that are less than perfect. These “defective” jelly beans are packed and sold in 2-lb bags called Belly Flops. They even have an online store, from where you can order your Belly Flops. Steve writes “Some companies seem absolutely embarrassed by anything less than perfect – and, of course, this approach wouldn’t work for many products (”Come on down to our Ford Flops outlet!”). But I like the posture these folks have taken, having some fun with the inevitable imperfections of product manufacturing. This shows a company that is secure enough in their brand identity to poke a little fun at their own expense.”

Luxury Myths

Luxury Institute, yes there is a Luxury Institute. An independent and objective research institution that focuses solely on the top 10 percent of America’s wealthy. Now they have a report that debunks many myths that people may have about the rich. The Brand Strategy Blog has a compilation on the top 10 myths about luxury. The wealthy made their money easily and spend their money easily. Wrong! The wealthy are conspicuous consumption machines living in another reality, wrong again! The wealthy can’t really define luxury. Not true, the report says that the ability of wealthy consumers to define true luxury, individually, and as a group, is laser-accurate. Others myths include: Luxury goods are a far larger industry than luxury services. The wealthy don’t
participate in consumer satisfaction surveys. The wealthy don’t go online. The wealthy don’t use ratings and reviews to make purchasing decisions. Luxury marketers should be targeting only the wealthiest clients. Wealthy clients do not give referrals. Wealthy consumers are not very loyal since they can go anywhere Read the complete article here.

The Psychology Of Price

Sure a price tag is more than just what someone pays for a product or service. “Pricing tells a story,” says Per Sjofors, managing partner at Atenga, a consulting firm in California, that specializes in pricing. Go too low, and buyers looking for quality may turn elsewhere. Indeed, there are cases in which the best way to attract new clients is to push prices higher. In one interesting study Harvard University Professor John Gourville tested the possibility of using pricing to get customers to keep customers returning. He and his team tested factors such as how, when, where, and in what form all contribute to what we call the psychology of price. You can take the very same physical price and break it up into parts, bundle it with other items, ask for payment early, or ask for payment late, and change consumers’ perceptions of that price in the process. One of the interesting things that the team observed was that people are more likely to go to a ball game when they have purchased tickets to a single game than when they purchased tickets to multiple games. The research has some interesting pricing experiments like how a dollar a day payment is seen as lower by consumers than a lump sum of $365. Or how consumers don’t mind paying smaller EMIs longer. Here’s the link to the Harvard Study. Another story on low pricing in INC Magazine.

Understanding The Credit Crises

It all started pretty innocuously, with banks lending money to each other to help cover their daily operations. Many have asked, in the past, if such financial innovations are really necessary. But here we are, staring at a crises that shouldn’t have been. The gravest and most immediate threat, the Economist writes, is to the banking system. For the time being, banks no longer trust other banks enough to lend them money except on onerous terms; equally worryingly, they lack confidence that other banks will trust them if they want to borrow. Here is a round up of what the papers have to say. Wikipedia, The Economist, from The Australian, from Rediff, Forbes Magazine, The BBC, CNN Money.

Money Wasters Inc

Bankrate has a roundup of the top 10 money wasters. Small as they may seem, these are the habits that make us waste a lot of money, when you put them all together at the end of a certain time. So what’s on the Bankrate list? Coffee, Cigarettes, Alcohol Bottled water, Manicures, Car washes, Weekday lunches out, Vending machines snacks, Interest charges on credit cards, Unused memberships. While the list is relevant to the US and other Western markets, the point is that things like interest rates on your credit card, which you rarely ever worry about, could end up costing you a packet after a point. Read the whole post.