SF Roundtable

Marketers at Marketing Week’s roundtable, sponsored by Salesforce, debated how brands can make the crucial adaptations required by the current pandemic, and ensure positive change is maintained afterwards.

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Helping you achieve higher revenue, happier customers and lower costs.

Part of 'Intelligent 1:1 Customer Journeys', a content series sponsored by Salesforce

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By: Morag Cuddeford-Jones

Source: SALESFORCE

The second aspect is: “From a technology point of view, [there is an opportunity] to take a customer through that journey - not just from what used to be taking an order and then a long dull silence until hopefully your shirts show up, [but] to continue to engage and activate, and even come and watch your shirts being made.” According to Zanardi-Landi, Pink finds the fusion of online and offline channels works particularly well in delivering the personalised experience it is aiming for. Supported by technology such as Salesforce, it is attempting to replicate the feeling of bespoke tailoring in its online communications, and the two have to go hand-in-hand because so much of the brand’s business comes through loyal customers reordering. Pink store staff are empowered to nurture ongoing relationships with customers using technology – for example, dictating notes about a customer’s visit, their shirt size and their preferred fit into a mobile device, which then updates their online profile using voice-driven AI. This profile information will then, in turn, be able to automate the customer’s size and fit choices next time they shop online, making the process quicker and easier. As Estebaek says: “Technology needs to be seamless. It needs to make itself forgotten. If you've given information, you don't want to repeat yourself, you actually want someone to just know you.” But there’s a flip-side to this, she adds: “Technology is amazing because it allows us to experiment and it allows us to do some really innovative stuff, and also have fun. We have a history of being a traditional shirt maker but we're a traditional shirt maker with a very modern twist.” The technology-led approach to injecting greater personalisation into the customer experience has been a central part of Pink’s rebrand. It allows the business to go back to its roots while reimagining the service it offers in a modern context. ■

2017

2018

2019

Median number of data sources used by financial services marketing organisations

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use of ai among financial service marketers

Currently use AI

49%

Plan to use AI within the next two years

+141%

Projected growth rate of AI use over the next two years

35%

Source: SALESFORCE

He argues: “It enables you to really focus on and develop these muscles. We can have a whole team that’s devoted to predictive analytics, and improving that and getting better at it, and then understanding how it can be used more broadly in the business.” Another key priority is to ensure data projects have valuable outcomes beyond just insights, he says: “Rather than doing analytics for the sake of analytics and maybe having a nice PowerPoint at the end of it, the whole idea is when you’re doing your project, is there an asset you can leave behind that can be repurposed or reused?” For example, Barclays has used its analytics capabilities to create segmentations based on where customers’ spending behaviour clusters around particular brands. This has created new insights on brand behaviour that Barclays can offer to corporate clients. Hardy explains: “We looked at our customers’ transactional behaviour and we looked at the brands that they spend on, and then we looked at the interaction between those brands – so if someone spends at brand X they are also likely to spend at brand Y. Then we performed some clustering around those brands and found which travelled together, and are better explained together than apart.”

Barclays also used anonymised card transaction data to find ways to serve its most valuable customers better in branches. The analysis showed affluent customers were more likely to be in the area around a branch later in the day, which led to the bank extending opening hours to allow them to come into the premises. A third application of analytics was to examine the catchment areas for particular stores using similar transaction data, for the benefit of clients in the retail and restaurant sectors. This has enabled those clients to work out how far consumers are willing to travel to visit a store, so they can see which existing stores have overlapping catchments and where they might be able to access a new market by opening a new store. This type of innovation around data has not been common for big, established financial services companies. Indeed, for many, the need to protect legacy business models has actively held it back. But as Aviva’s UK retail and brand director Tom Daniell told Marketing Week recently, “if customers believe we are innovating on their behalf, that’s a real driver of trust”.

The brand’s new AvivaPlus subscription product has been designed to reward loyal customers with the best price, rather than giving new customers the best deals and implicitly penalising those already with the brand. It has required a new product development model and was only possible because the company switched towards more agile working, where teams responsible for communications, data, media, proposition, product, customer experience, pricing and risk all sit together. According to Daniell: “This isn’t about putting a veneer over an existing product. This is grassroots up, absolutely a new product that fundamentally behaves economically for us in a different way but also behaves in a different way for customers.” It also means there is consistency in the customer journey, from marketing messages through to purchase and call centre service. Customer satisfaction and net promoter scores are already higher than for Aviva’s standard insurance product, following a soft launch. This is the kind of service consumers now expect – even from monolithic financial services organisations. The whole sector now needs to move just as fast as new digital entrants in order to keep up. ■

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Part of 'Intelligent 1:1 Customer Journeys', a content series sponsored by Salesforce

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By Steve Hemsley

Phased recovery Salesforce’s vice-president of strategic innovation, Toby Astor, also presented at the event, arguing brands must take a structured and phased approach because the timing of any economic recovery is so unclear. This means demonstrating a robust in-crisis response, to stabilise the business and mitigate short-term risks; devising a plan for how people return to work; and having an idea of how the organisation will grow, once things begin to return to normal. He said larger global brands must also prepare for different speeds of recovery across geographies and product sectors. “What is the right path from old normal to new normal and is your organisation ready?” asked Astor. “Are you thinking about, for example, longer-term customer trends that existed before Covid-19 and will these accelerate or not?” He warned companies not to underappreciate the pace of change pre-Covid-19 or miss the opportunity during the crisis to improve their resilience and market relevance post-pandemic. “The question is, how do brands maintain marketing budgets to grow higher share of voice? They need to look at brand portfolios and how they drive B2B and B2C relevance and loyalty.” Astor said each company’s ‘response journey’ during the crisis must address four focus areas: • Can they make decisions and gather information and data more effectively? • Can they find new ways of working and improve internal comms, to boost productivity and employee engagement? • Can they engage more effectively with customers by deepening personalisation and improving experiences? • Could they serve society better and use their business as a platform for positive change? “One thing [that is] loud and clear is that this is a human crisis and there is an opportunity for stakeholder capitalism and responsible leadership,” Astor said.

The virtual roundtable was conducted under the Chatham House rule, so the senior marketers who took part cannot be identified. However, they all agreed that these are unprecedented times, and organisations and marketing departments must adapt. One chief marketing officer at a retail bank said the first few weeks of the Covid-19 crisis were spent pulling together a comms plans and trying not to be too general when devising creative work. “You need to base the decisions you take in a crisis on what your customers are asking you,” he said. “In financial services there is a worry about fraud and people becoming victims. We are marketing a fraud refund guarantee and raising awareness of existing products and services. We are basing our creative on customer insight and laying the groundwork for 2021.” Another participant from a bank who works primarily in the B2B sector said there needs to be an integrated approach across, brand, media, marketing, public relations and public affairs to ensure a consistent message. “This is certainly an opportunity to change how we do things from a B2B perspective, which is heavy on events, content production and face to face meetings,” she said. “We are putting out existing content around cybersecurity and fraud on Twitter and LinkedIn and this is getting high levels of engagement. New content is reminding people how they can bank differently, such as using digital banking. The crisis is also making us more agile as an organisation because we have traditionally operated in silos.”

Doubling down on marketing A number of larger organisations are having to adapt to how specific product sectors are performing differently. One EMEA marketing leader for a leading consumer healthcare business said that, across Europe, some products are “flying off the shelves” and requiring 24-hour operations, with new working practices adhering to social distancing. Meanwhile, sales of many non-essential items have stalled. “Now is not the time to give up on marketing and communication, but to double down and be consistent with messaging,” he said. “The finance team do not always share the view of the marketers, so we need to speak enough sense to allow us to do what we think is the right thing for customers.” He added that a deflation in TV media pricing across Europe means its brands can still advertise and there is money to invest in the second half of 2020. “We are de-risking rather than cutting our media. We are also working on shorter contracts with our TV partners so we can scale up and down.” A marketing director for a high-street retailer said that, while store sales are obviously down for most items other than food, the crisis has meant adapting to promoting a more basic range online. “We have gone through the emergency panic phase and are now thinking about how we emerge and thrive in the new normal,” he said. “What keeps me awake at night is [failing to take] this opportunity to change and transform as much as we should do. For example, how can we accelerate our online growth, and can we reset our value proposition and wean ourselves off a reliance on some promotions?” Other senior marketers on the call agreed this was a time to keep calm, think long-term and accept that in any crisis there will be winners and losers. The key, one said, is to do something tangible and consider which consumer trends will carry on or change. It is also crucial for senior marketers to have a proper strategy conversation with their board so an advertising budget is maintained. The challenge for all brands is to ensure that the ideas for change being raised during the coronavirus pandemic are actually implemented. Marketing teams must resist the temptation to fall in to the same old habits once the challenges of the Covid-19 crisis have subsided. ■