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[MUSIC] Okay, let's continue on now to Pete's
area, which is customer assets. And, I'm just again, going to add a
couple little things here in terms of digital considerations.
And additional things we have to think about for execution.
So, as Pete told you, I'm sure very, very clearly, your key
goals are to attract, engage and retain the right kind of customers.
Some customers, as Pete told you, you actually want to get rid
of, because of the heterogeneity, one of our favorite
buzzwords here at the Wharton school, in the customer base.
Some customers are just not worth hanging on to.
So, as Pete has told you, you should never, ever pay
more to acquire a customer than you can expect to get back.
So, the customer life time value of my friend Chris, who is renting cars from
Hertz, should be higher than what Hertz had to pay to get Chris as a customer.
The second thing that's very important though is the
CLV, the customer lifetime value when executed in the digital marketing
environment needs to also consider what I call RLV.
That's referral lifetime value. So let's imagine that I have a beard,
actually don't today, but if I have a beard
and I don't shave, I probably have a low customer lifetime value to harrys.com,
the shaving company. However,
if I'm a popular guy and I tell a lot of my friends about harrys.com, I
might have a very, very high referral lifetime
value, because I'm bringing other people to the party.
So let me give you an example from data based on diapers.com, one
of our case study companies, that just shows how powerful this point is.
So a few years ago, my colleague Jong He and I got
all the data from diapers.com, and we looked at the first 100,000
customers that became customers of diapers.com.
And back in those days, if I were a customer
of diapers.com and I sent an email referral to my
friend Amy, and then Amy made a purchase at diapers.com,
I would get a $1 credit towards buying more diapers.
Also, what I could do is, I could print out physical coupons and put them
on all the cars on Walnut Street here in Philadelphia and some stranger might pick
them up and take my code and enter it, and then I will get a credit if they became a
customer. So, two thing that are very, very
interesting to us about this process. First of all, about 8,000 of those 100,000
customers engaged in this customer based promotion or word of mouth, if you
will, that's kind of interesting. About 8% of the people were motivated to
go and try and acquire other customers on behalf
of the firm. Now, of course,
the game going back to what Pete talked about, we all know about averages, some
important measures, so the average number of people
that were brought in by referring customers was
about four. So, those 8,000 people generated 32,000
new customers for diapers.com. It's a pretty powerful number, but again,
in the Internet, it's more than just the average
that's important. The Internet is the world of extremes.
There's going to be some customers out there that just love you so much they may
go completely nuts, as it were, and so it turned out, when we looked carefully at
the data, the top 100 customers were generating
about 15,000 other customers. So think about that.
About 150 each. So again when you execute, your customer
strategies, in the digital age. One of the most important things you can
do, is you can encourage your existing customers to refer other customers.
'Kay, so just let me summarize that with digital considerations.
So, non-negotiable, in the black, at the top of the slide, is that you must
still attract the right target customers Pete has
been talking about for the last few weeks. However, there are three interesting
nuances that come into play here. First of all, your interaction with
customers changes from just a monologue, you sending out messages, now
into a conversation. So, let me give you a personal example.
Recently I've been flying from Philadelphia to
San Francisco to our west coast campus. And, when possible I try and fly on ***
America. It's a great airline, I think they really
know what they're doing in terms of marketing.
And, when I get on the airline, sometimes I send a tweet, I'm
happy to be on VX 141 looking forward to the sushi and beer.
And sure enough, within a few moments later, *** will tweet back to me and
engage me in a conversation. In fact, on a recent flight, I received
a direct message from somebody at *** telling
me if I took a screenshot of my status on United Airlines, that ***
would match it. So think about the power of that medium to
change from a monologue to a conversation. So, that's going to be an important thing.
How can we use technology to engage in real conversations with our customers.
The second thing that we can do with customers,
is we can amplify activities that go on in the real world, out into the virtual
world. So, an example that I'll get more into a
little bit later on is, way back in September 2011.
warbyparker.com, another company that I'll talk about a
little bit, staged an event in the New York
public library, where their friends, went in there and
took over a whole floor, wearing, Warby Parker glasses.
This was of course picked up by the traditional press.
And then, there was an amplification, from that
real world event, pushed out through the virtual world.
And then finally, the third point is, we need to be
aware of this possibility of what I'll call the long tail leverage.
The long tail is the idea, the conceptual idea, that
there are some people who are just sort of extreme,
like those customers for diapers.com that referred 150 customers each
when the average was only four, so how do we use
technology to tap into who those people are.
Okay, one final thing I'd like to mention here, guys.
A little bit of a technical term. But it's a very, very interesting
distinction that's important for thinking about how to
execute with customers. Through things like loyalty programs and
referral programs and so on. So I want to distinguish two effects.
The first is what I'll call a selection effect.
And the second is what I'll call a treatment effect.
And both of these things are very very important to
companies who want to get customers to acquire new
customers. So let's start with the selection effect.
So imagine I'm a customer of diapers.com. And diapers.com is going to give me some
cash, or some points if I refer somebody else.
Now, I happen to refer my friend Chris, just because I
know that he recently had twins, now the CEO of diapers.com doesn't
know that, but I know that, so I'm better able to find a new customer.
Than the management of the company. That's the idea of a selection effect.
So the person who's doing the referring is deliberately picking out people who are
going to be very, very appropriate for the good or ser, for the good or service.
That's the selection effect. And my colleague here at the Wharton
School, Christophe Van den Bulte, has shown
that customers who are attracted through word
of mouth and through referral, have higher customer
lifetime values than those who are not, because of this selection effect.
The second effect is what I'll call the treatment effect.
The treatment effect says, well how did Chris come to be introduced to
diapers.com? It wasn't through Google search.
It wasn't through seeing an advertisement. But he got introduced through me, his
trusted friend, and because that was the way he
found out about something, it's more natural then
for him to engage in the same practice. So, when we looked at that
diapers.com data, remember I said on average, there
was about an 8 to 10% rate of referal. Well, if a customer was acquired because
of referral, the chance that they then referred went up to about
15 to 18%. So that's the difference between a
treatment effect and a selection effect. But both of those things are very, very
important. Okay, I'm just going to wrap up now with
the third asset. Remember we're talking about three assets
that we have as marketers to execute on. Number one is the brand, we've just
through. Number two is the customer, and then the
third one that I mentioned at the beginning
of this module is that marketing expenditure itself
also should be thought of as an asset. And, again the naieve way of thinking
about marketing is we have top line sales, minus what we spend on marketing or
advertising, is equal to our profit. Now, if we make that marketing span
equal to zero, it's not the case that our profit will go up by the same amount.
Why is the that? because the marketing of course, is
contributing to the sales and to the top line growth.
That's something that we'll be exploring in more detail as we go ahead.
the final piece of food for thought for today, is the following.
I'd just like to encourage you, as you've been doing already on your own is
to go out and look at some examples that reinforce the points that we were making.
So the first thing I'd like you to do, just
over the next few days, is to try and think about
some experience that you have buying coffee, paying for something, booking
a hotel, communicating with your friends, keeping track of your appointments.
Whatever it is, that it's just not as good as it could be, okay?
And try and think about how the status quo situation could be solved or fixed.
In the same way that Howard Shultz figured out that the coffee situation
in America, was sub optimal and he fixed it by introducing Starbucks.
The second thing I'd like you to go, is go to the web site warbyparker.com, they
arere listed on the slides. And try and think about what you've
learned from Barbara and also our additional discussion today
about how in the digital age a brand needs to be authentic,
transparent, and humanized and try and see what elements of the
execution in that website touch on those three points.
Great. Hopefully, you'll have a good time doing
that. We'll come back to those examples as we go
through. And that's the end of this particular
piece. [MUSIC]