Give your prospects new insights on their business to grow your business.

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Now, more than ever, clients are looking for help. Many are confused about how to build and maintain customer loyalty.

They are unsure of how to use all of the new digital marketing tools now available to them and many are simply overwhelmed by the enormity of the marketing task ahead of them.

CMO’s know they have a limited life span, so they are desperate for an agency that can do something to help them grow the company’s business and make them a hero to their management. And the best way to do that is with new ideas and new insights about their customer or their category.

In a 2011 study published by RSW/US titled A Client's Look Ahead at Agencies, 77% of respondents cited "understanding of your market", 63% “understanding your company direction”, and 60% “offering something fresh & new” as critical factors in their agency selection. The quality of the creative product is still important (72%), but if you don't understand the client's business and offer new insights, then the greatest creative in the world won't win the account.

A few years ago, I spoke with Stan Richards, founder of The Richards Group, on what he considered the key ingredient in a new business pitch. Without hesitation, he replied that the ability to give the prospective client a new insight on their company or category was the key factor in winning new business. His business development team worked hard to find that insight, and then spent the majority of their presentation supporting that insight and its potential to grow the client's business.

In today's challenging marketplace, I would add the ability to help a client expand their marketing efforts into new digital frontiers is also a key factor in choosing one agency over another.

Clients are not saying to their agencies, "How can you help us make ads or a new web site?" They're saying, "how much do you understand about our business in order to help us build a bridge between our brand and our customers."

A New Perspective on Building Brand Loyalty

One of my must-read blogs each week is Aaker on Brands, and this week's post offers some interesting new thoughts on building brand loyalty. The post is titled "Does Brand Love Really Exist", and recounts a recent study exploring what a person means by loving a brand or other object and a quantitative study to identity its underlying dimensions and the output or value.

The qualitative studies found that subjects identified these ten characteristics for brands they loved:

1. The brand is the best in every way from value, to key attributes, to experience. 
2. The brand connects to something deeper than its functional benefits. (e.g. Apple represents creativity and self-actualization.).
3. The brand creates emotional benefits like being happy (e.g. “Pinkberry frozen yogurt makes me smile.”).
4. The brand provides self-expressive benefits and high levels of word-of-mouth buzz.
5. The brand generates affection and warm-hearted feelings. 
6. There is a natural fit and harmony between the user and the brand they love.
7. The brand stimulates a desire to maintain proximity to the brand and even feeling “separation distress.” 
8. The brand engenders a willingness to invest time, energy and money into loved brands
9. The brand is somehow involved in frequent, interactive contact with the consumer.
10. There is a long-standing relationship history.

These findings were from a qualitative study, but a separate quantitative study by the same researchers found that the brands people profess to love predict loyalty, word-of-mouth communication and resistance to negative information.  As David concludes in his post "This, to me, is an impressive validation and elaboration of what had been basically a common sense analogy. Each of the 10 characteristics has implications about the creation, maintenance and measurement of loyalty."

So what does this mean for you and your clients, and the marketing programs you develop?  
Well, it is certainly a validation of the need to understand and communicate the emotional benefits, not just the attributes of your brand. But more than that, I think it says that brands should be treated as a  living, breathing extension of their users if they want to be "loved".

And if they want to have a loyal user base.

Latest Pew study shows 59% of smartphone users access social networking sites, and 55% using mobile or geo-location services

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The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project - 2011 Spring Tracking Survey confirms that smartphones continue to capture our imagination and our usage.

And if your company isn’t learning all you can about how to use mobile for marketing, you will be left behind.

In their study of over 2,270 adults (18+), more than a quarter of all American adults—28%—use mobile or social location-based services of some kind.


While the majority of smartphone usage is for texting (92% of users), photos (92%) and email (76%), these statistics stand out as it relates to mobile marketing:

• 59% of smartphone owners use their phone to access social networking sites, and 15% use their phone to access Twitter.
• 55% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location—that works out to 23% of all adults.
• A much smaller number (5% of cell owners, equaling 4% of all adults) use their phones to check in to locations using geo-social services such as Foursquare or Gowalla. Smartphone owners are especially likely to use these services on their phones.
• 9% of internet users set up social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so that their location is automatically included in their posts on those services. That works out to 7% of all adults. 
  

In total, 28% of U.S. adults do at least one of these activities either online or using their mobile phones—and many users do several of them. This is the Pew Internet Project’s most expansive study of location services to date. As smartphone usage continues to grow, I expect we will see these numbers continue to climb.

It’s time to get on board the mobile train (or at least get prepared to help your clients determine their needs and strategies), or be left at the station.

For a complete look at the Pew study, click here.