Invitation Marketing: Using Customer Preferences to Overcome Ad Avoidance
Do-not-disturb call lists, fast-forwarded and time-shifted television - these are examples of the ever-changing tools and techniques that consumers use to block and avoid advertising. As a result, advertisers must also continuously adapt their techniques to ensure that they are providing entertaining, informative, and relevant advertising that consumers choose not to miss.
All of this is why Accenture researchers and customer relationship management experts are collaborating with industry thought leaders to explore how emerging customer analytics and digital media delivery can be used to respond to emerging advertising-avoidance challenges.
Today, digital set-top boxes, in-store sensors, and global positioning systems allow companies to capture customer preferences and behavioral data in real time. Advances in customer analytics and digital media delivery make it possible to create immediate messages and offers that literally anticipate and respond to consumer needs or interests virtually anywhere. For companies that advertise directly to consumers, Accenture believes these technologies will enable intensely personalized and highly effective marketing that will revolutionize customer interactions.
Getting to Know You, Right Now
Customer insight can help marketers interact with customers profitably, if they consider the right questions, such as:
- What are the consumer's interests and preferences?
- What message will most likely engage the consumer in a dialogue?
- When is the consumer most receptive to engaging in a dialogue?
- Where should the dialogue take place?
While these questions are not new for marketers, it was previously impossible to systematically determine the answers in real time and create a customized marketing message that could be instantaneously delivered directly to the customer via television or in-store digital displays.
Both new and existing customer relationships can benefit from this kind of interaction. More tailored, timely, interactive messages should decrease the amount of marketing needed to convert a prospect, resulting in lower costs per new customer and higher response rates. Even more importantly, innovative companies that build a timely, relevant, anticipatory dialogue with existing customers should be better positioned to capture a greater share of the wallet, improve loyalty, and increase the customer's lifetime value.
Envisioning Innovative Customer Interactions
To help companies envision and evaluate conversational marketing innovations, Accenture Technology Labs researchers have developed a number of scenarios and prototypes. This work builds upon existing customer relationship management tools such as data warehousing, customer analytics, and campaign management. Specifically, Accenture researchers are looking at how new technologies could augment existing systems by providing companies with cost-effective methods to get closer to customers in real time, with relevant messages, at the time and place of the customer's choosing, while respecting the customer's privacy.
Combining TV and Online Experiences
Instant messaging (IM) is an example of a popular technology that could be used to elicit information from customers who might make their activities and interests known in exchange for value-added services. The Accenture Reality Instant Messaging prototype takes advantage of an emerging trend: chatting online while watching TV. The basic concept involves real-time syncing of IM with television programming.
Here is how this innovation might work: As a viewer watches a reality TV show, the TV network might offer viewers the opportunity to join in a chat with an automated IM buddy designed specifically for that television show. The viewer can see which of her "real" IM buddies are also in the chat room and watching the show, thereby enhancing the social aspect of IM. ("I hope Melissa gets voted off tonight.") The automated buddy would offer incentives to participate in contests and provide trivia nuggets to keep the chat entertaining, as well as extend targeted offers. ("Did you know that the celebrity judge is wearing a dress designed by ?") In addition, advertisers could benefit by gathering real-time insights into customers' interests and reactions, as well as by promoting their brand and extending promotional offers through this new, popular electronic channel.
To illustrate another example of how advertisers can harness online consumer behavior, Accenture researchers developed the Accenture Peer-to-Peer Advertising prototype, which builds on the viral-marketing concept of forwarded email messages.
For instance, an innovative marketing campaign could start with an entertaining TV commercial, which is also made available on a Web site or personal video recorder. Viewers could be invited to personalize a specific portion of the ad with a photo or message (software could prohibit inserting words or images that might tarnish the brand), and then pass the message on to a friend. The friend would be more likely to pay attention to the ad because a peer personalized the message and passed it along by "word of mouse." Advertisers could track the ad's journey and build more detailed customer profiles, and companies could more accurately measure the effectiveness of the ad campaign.
Personalized TV Ads
Much attention was initially focused on the ability of a personal video recorder to fast-forward through television commercials. However, the same technology that allows consumers to fast-forward also allows them to pause, rewind, and record. Accenture researchers are collaborating with thought leaders in the advertising and television programming industry to explore new ways to engage consumers in a dialogue via the television.1 Some examples of these emerging dialogues are enabled by consumers' ability to vote with their remote. Emerging digital media delivery allows the personalization of the television content to a specific television within individual households.
A New Kind of Retail Environment
Studies show consumers spend less time shopping and are making more buying decisions at the point of sale.2 Accenture believes that shopper loyalty cards hold great potential for enabling innovative point-of-sale marketing applications. For example, they could be used to deliver tailored in-store pitches by putting customers in control, as demonstrated by the Accenture Personalized Video Display prototype.
Upon entering a store, customers would "ask" for personalized ads by swiping their loyalty card in front of a digital signage promotional display, or by just walking up to it, in the case of a radio frequency identification-enabled card. Customers could use handheld devices, kiosks, or large-screen displays to retrieve information they may have saved while surfing the Web, such as product comparisons or shopping lists. In addition to tailoring offers to individuals, sensors could help retailers track the traffic in front of dynamic promotions. The format and content of the product messages and the videos on these displays could be changed in real time as individuals linger and appear receptive to receiving more information.
Companies that use new technologies to create relevant, real-time consumer dialogues will likely be better positioned to keep up with their demanding and elusive customers, will outpace the competition, and will improve profitably in the years to come.
About Accenture Technology Labs
Accenture Technology Labs, the technology research and development organization within Accenture, has a 16-year track record of turning technology innovation into business results. The Labs create a vision of how technology will shape the future and invent the next wave of cutting-edge business solutions. Working closely with Accenture's global network of specialists, Accenture Technology Labs helps clients innovate for competitive advantage. Labs are located in Chicago; Palo Alto, California; and Sophia Antipolis, France.
