The main message of my presentation:

Financial institutions should integrate social media approaches into their marketing and customer service processes.

As I see it, banks (and credit unions) are wrestling with — or perhaps, simply failing to address — challenges regarding social media. And you don’t even need to be a journalist to know where these challenges came from:

1. What: Banks don’t know what to say in social media.
2. When: Banks don’t know when to say it.
3. How: Banks don’t know how to say it.

There are, of course, a couple of other potential challenges, but I think that “Who to say it to” is less of a challenge, and that “Why they’re saying it” is better understood. Regarding “why”, the research that Aite Group has done on social media in banking, bears this out: Most FIs are fairly clear that engaging customers, building brand awareness, and building brand affinity are why they’re involved with social media.

Engagement may be the objective, but I’m not sure, based on what I’ve seen FIs tweet and post, that they know how to achieve that objective.

I saw one FI recently tweet:

Have a new business that needs to grow quickly? Add credit card processing to increase revenues and cash flow. #smallbiz

Here’s another from a credit union:

We are listening. We are not like the BIG Banks. Check us out!

Do people really turn to Twitter or Facebook to see shameless marketing messages, re-purposed from other marketing channels? Are these tweets effectively engaging customers/members/prospects? I don’t know. But I bet the FIs that tweeted those messages don’t know either.

Another thing that struck me reading those tweets, was thinking about why the FIs chose to tweet those messages when they did. Was some marketing person sitting around with nothing to do, and suddenly realize that ts was 30 minutes since the last tweet, so s/he might as well tweet something else? Did something trigger the need for a credit card processing tweet at that particular time? I can tell you this: The credit union’s tweet came 11 days after Bank Transfer Day, so I doubt there was some pressing need to send out that tweet when it was sent.

The tone of these tweets doesn’t sit well with me, either. How many times have you heard the phrase “join the conversation?” Look again at those tweets above — do you know anybody who talks like that in the course of a normal conversation? (If you do, I bet you don’t engage in too many conversations with that person).

This gets at a big issue that marketers (not just in financial services) have to face: They don’t know how to have (or start) a conversation with consumers. Here’s the problem:

Marketing has, to date, been driven by the need and desire to persuade consumers.

But “engagement” isn’t accomplished through persuasion. (Well, persuasion can be a part of it, but it can’t be the only part of it).

———-

So what should FIs do to address these challenges? There’s a tactical response and a strategic response.

The tactical response: Categorize and test.

A couple of months ago, Michael Pace from Constant Contact wrote an interesting blog post, advocating that Twitter users should periodically do a self-analysis of their tweets. Honestly, I thought that was a pretty self-indulgent thing for an individual to do. But at the company level, the idea has a lot of merit.

A high-level analysis of your company’s Twitter stream can help you understand how well you’re balancing various types of tweets. And the same could be done with Facebook posts. The challenge, of course, is understanding what impact those messages are having, and if shaking up the mix would improve the impact (i.e., engagement).

———-

But even if you do this, I doubt that you’ll make more than just a minor impact on your firm’s bottom line. To have a more meaningful impact, you need the strategic response: Integrate social media approaches into marketing and customer service processes.

In my presentation at the breakfast, I highlighted three ways to do this:

1. Influence preferences. I like what America First Credit Union does on its site (as does @itsjustbrent,  since he either borrowed this example from me, or I stole it from him). The CU incorporates members’ product reviews on the product pages. By doing this, the CU accomplishes:

• Customer advocacy. Not just in the net promoter sense of the word — but in the more important sense of the word: Doing what’s right for the customer and not just your own bottom line. Helping consumers make better choices — that are right for them — by enabling them to access other customers’ opinions is a demonstration of customer advocacy.
• Active engagement. I guess that, if a customer follows you on Twitter and reads your tweets, or likes you on Facebook in order to enter a contest to win a prize, you could call that engagement. But I would call it passive engagement. Customers who take the time to post a review are more actively engaged, in my book.
• Continuous market research. I doubt many firms could capture the richness of information America First is capturing through satisfaction or net promoter surveys. And I know that they can’t capture it in as timely a basis as America First does.

2. Provide collaborative support. I’ve been holding up Mint.com as an example of a firm with collaborative support, but it recently discontinued its Mint Answers page. No worries, Summit Credit Union is doing the same thing, and hopefully, they can become my poster child for this. Collaborative support is giving customers the opportunity to answer other customers’ questions. Dell has been doing it for years. Why provide collaborative support?

• Reduced call volume. I’m not going to say that you’re going to see a huge volume of deflected calls, but over time, if you market the collaborative capability, it can help.
• Expanded knowledge base. This is where the bigger value comes in. Customer service reps leverage internal knowledge bases to answer customer questions. Collaborative support helps grow that knowledge base, and helps figure out which answers and responses are more valuable than others. This expanded knowledge base will also prove valuable in training new employees.
• Active engagement. Similar to the product reviews, customers who participate in collaborative support sites are demonstrating active engagement.

3. Instill financial discipline. This is about using social concepts to get people to change the way they manage their financial lives. Take a look at the research that Peter Tufano has done regarding what motivates people to save.  There are some good examples of this in practice — see Members Credit Union’s What Are You Saving For?. I recently chatted with the CEO of Bobber Interactive, and like what they’re doing about bringing social gamification to how people manage their finances.

———-

Bottom line: Your firm can putz around with Facebook and Twitter until you’re blue in the face. For financial institutions, this is probably not going to have much of an immediate impact on the bottom line. It will likely take years of experimentation to figure out what to say, when to say it, and how to say it on social media channels.

If you want to engage customers, you have to give them a reason to engage. Mindless, idle chatter on Twitter and Facebook isn’t sustainable.

The path to making social media an important contributor to bottom line improvement — and sooner rather than later — will come from integration social media concepts and approaches into everyday marketing and customer service processes.

Well, hold on. That’s not exactly right.

It doesn’t happen “every once in a while,” it happens all the freaking time.

Keeping track of these stupid marketing comments could be a full-time job. Here are a few that wedged themselves into my field of consciousness over the past two days.

“Mobile Users Click But Don’t Convert”

According to a report from Macquarie Group, search advertisers experience higher click-through-rates (CTR) for mobile phone and tablet search campaigns than for desktop search campaigns. But  mobile conversion rates were at just 31% of the average desktop campaigns’ conversion rates. The study found that the average cost-per-click (CPC) on mobile phone search campaigns was slightly higher than for desktop search campaigns, but that tablet campaigns were slightly lower than desktop search campaign CPCs.

My take: Exactly who do you think “mobile users” are? Aren’t they pretty much the same consumers that use the online channel and tablets? Sure, there may be some consumers who use the mobile channel and don’t use the online channel or tablets, but how big could that segment be?

Not only is it mistaken to conclude that “mobile users click but don’t convert,” it’s not even helpful to point out that CTR or conversion rates differ across channels. Well, not unless you’re comparing apples to apples in terms of the types of campaigns run across channels, and the scope and scale of campaigns.

“Apple spends $5.5 billion on marketing, while Microsoft spends $17 billion. Whose brand is stronger?”

A FastCoDesign blog post claimed that: “The decreasing importance of promotions in a digital economy explains…why Apple can build the world’s leading brand in by devoting only $5.5 billion (out of its 2010 revenue of $65 billion revenue) to sales and marketing, whereas Microsoft spends more than three times as much, $17 billion out of a total revenue of $62 billion and still has a weak, unexciting brand.”

My take: Don’t ever compare what one company spends on marketing to what another company spends. Here’s why:

1) You don’t know what they’re including or excluding in their definition of marketing.

2) One company’s marketing goals and objectives may be very different from another company’s (even a competitor’s) goals and objectives. Apple is a primarily consumer-focused company, while Microsoft is heavily focused on selling to enterprises. The marketing investments necessary to achieve their differing objectives can’t be measured by looking narrowly at their “brand.”

3) At any given point of time, one firm may need to spend more even if everything else was equal. If Microsoft’s only objective was to improve its “weak, unexciting brand,”  then don’t you think they would have to outspend Apple to make up the gap? Of course it would

“Promotion is the one P whose importance is clearly diminishing.”

From the same FastCoDesign blog post, comes this claim, regarding the 4Ps of marketing. Per the blog post: “What is interesting about all these forms of promotion [WOM, SEO] is that they, compared to, say, successful TV ad campaigns from the past, are predicated on the existence of a great product. People only recommend products they feel strongly about. PR is hard without something interesting to say. And a site’s position in Google rankings is based on how many hits it gets, which is a reflection of how valuable and interesting it is. Even paid ad words are structured according to relevance and popularity. The promotions of today are nothing without a great offer to back it up.”

My take: Huh? Can somebody translate that into English for me? While Wikipedia might not be the best site to source here, according to the site, Promotion — in the context of the 4Ps of marketing — refers to “all of the communications that a marketeer may use in the marketplace. Promotion has four distinct elements: advertising, public relations, personal selling and sales promotion.”

Even if you only looked at “promotion” in a narrow sense, when you consider the number of firms using Facebook to run sweepstakes and contests, it’s hard to conclude that the importance of promotion has diminished. 

But in its broader definition, it’s hard for me to understand how anyone could believe that the importance of “all of the communications that a marketer may use in the marketplace” has diminished. With the proliferation of channels and ways to communicate — two-ways — with customers and prospects, promotion has never been more important. 

And even that’s a stupid comment. Because the idea behind the 4Ps is that they’re levers that marketers can pull to influence the demand for their product. Arguing that, in some generic sense, one P has disappeared or diminished doesn’t make any sense. The importance of any one P ebbs and flows and varies by product, company, and economic situation.

———-

If you know anybody willing to pay me to do this full-time, let me know. The number of stupid marketing comments coming down the pike is hard to keep up with.

]]> https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/stupid-marketing-comments/feed/ 1 5041 rshevlin https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/what-do-we-need-marketing-for/ https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/11/09/what-do-we-need-marketing-for/#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:40:47 +0000 http://marketingteaparty.com/?p=5027 Continue reading →]]> In my (very glamorous, high-profile) job as an industry analyst, I’m supposed to be on top of industry trends and happenings. For other analysts, that means talking to a lot of people.

Ugh. Mr. Cranky doesn’t like talking to people. 

So I’ve planted listening devices in the offices of leading financial services execs to hear what’s really going on.

The following is (as best as I can make it out, the audio quality wasn’t that good) a conversation between the CEO and CMO of JYAFCU (Just Your Average Federal Credit Union), on Monday, November 7th, the first working day after Bank Transfer Day. 

CEO: How did we do on Saturday?

CMO: (mumbling) You would know if you had bothered to show up.

CEO: What’s that? Can’t hear you. 

CMO: I said, “wouldn’t you know, we did very well.”

CEO: I read that overall, credit unions pulled in 40,000 new accounts and $80 million dollars in deposits. What did we bring in?

CMO: Well, considering we’re JUST YOUR AVERAGE credit union, we opened 6 new accounts, and added $12,000 in deposits. 

CEO: So that’s like, what? One account per hour that we were open on Saturday?

CMO: Uh, yep.

CEO: And were all branches open?

CMO: Uh, yep. 

CEO: So then, not every branch even averaged one new account per hour. 

CMO: Uh, nope.

CEO: How did we do in the month leading up to Bank Transfer Day? CUNA says credit unions opened 650,000 new accounts and brought in $4.5 billion in new deposits. 

CMO: Well, boss, seeing that we’re JUST YOUR AVERAGE credit union, we opened 91 accounts and took in $630,000 in deposits. 

CEO: Well, I’m no CFO, but something doesn’t seem right to me with those numbers.

CMO: I’m the marketing person. Maybe you better explain it to me. 

CEO: Well, on BTD we averaged $2000 in deposits per new account. As did the industry overall, for that matter. Yet, in the month leading up to BTD, we averaged nearly $7000 in deposits per new account. Why the discrepancy?

CMO: I don’t know. My people are working on it. 

CEO: OK, so let’s recap. Since the end of September, we’ve added 97 new members, did I get that right?

CMO: Sure did. 

CEO: So we currently have how many members?

CMO: That would be 12,783. We ended September with 12, 686, which, interestingly enough, is the credit union industry average. 

CEO: Well, I’m no CFO, but my trusty calculator says that’s about 0.8% growth in the month. 

CMO: That’s correct. 

CEO: Remind me again what our membership growth was from September 2010 through September 2011. 

CMO: We grew by the industry average of 1.7%.

CEO: And remind me again what our marketing budget is. 

CMO: Our marketing budget is 1% of assets, which is about the industry average, which comes out to $1.3 million. 

CEO: And remind me again what we spent to create Bank Transfer Day.

CMO: We didn’t spend anything to create Bank Transfer Day.

CEO: OK. Now remind me of one last thing: What do I need you for?

CMO: Huh? What do you mean?

CEO: Between September 2010 and September 2011, we spent $1.3 million on marketing which produced 216 new members. That means we spent about $6000 per new member. According to that Net Promoter guy from Bain, it costs 6 to 7 times more to acquire a customer than retain one, isn’t that right?

CMO: Ron Shevlin says that’s quantipulation.

CEO: When Ron Shevlin writes a bestselling management book, I’ll listen to what Ron Shevlin has to say. In the meantime,  I have to assume that the vast majority of our marketing budget is focused on member acquisition and not retention. So, even if the part of the marketing budget that went to acquisition was just $1 million, we still spent more than $4600 in the past year to acquire each new member. And what you’re telling me is that in the past month we acquired 45% of the total number of members we acquired in the previous 12 months — at absolutely no cost to us. I ask you again:

What do I need marketing for?

Actually, I doubt that it really has “gone” as I’m sure that credit unions will do everything under the sun to keep the glow of the Bank Transfer Day movement a-burning.

Ironically — and I don’t hear anybody else talking about this — credit unions might not have been the only financial institutions to have benefited from BTD. And I’m not referring to the “shedding of unprofitable customers” that some people talk about.

Anecdotally, I’ve talked to a few folks at mid-sized banks who have told me that they’ve seen pretty good growth in new customers over the past month or so.

But that’s not what this blog post is about. This one is about the Wall Street Journal.

I’m a big fan of the WSJ. Read it every day. Agree with the editorials far more often than I disagree with them. But when some press outlet screws up — whether I support it or not — regarding something related to the world of financial services, then I’m going to call them out over it.

And that’s what this blog post is about — calling the WSJ out regarding an article titled Credit Unions Poach Clients (you may need a subscription to access this article. Surprise, surprise, I have one).

Here’s are the issues I have with the article:

1. Credit unions did not poach clients. According to my handy (online) thesaurus, “poach” means infringe upon, trespass, or boil lightly. Sorry, but credit unions didn’t do anything of these things. I’m pretty sure that the new members that credit unions have signed up in the past month came over willingly. I also don’t think that credit unions went over to banks and “trespassed” in any way. And if you know of any credit unions that lightly boiled their new members, please — PLEASE — let me know.

2. Profitability of switchers is an unknown. The WSJ article claims that “people who gravitate to credit unions tend to be unprofitable for giant banks because of the small balances they keep on deposit…” Not so fast. Take a look at the report I did for BancVue. There are many credit unions — and community banks — who offer high-yield checking accounts (Rewards Checking) where the average balances are about 4x the size of free (no-interest) checking accounts, and whose profitability exceeds that of the free checking accounts. According to CUNA, 650k new accounts were opened at CUs leading up to BTD, with $4.5 billion in new deposits generated. That’s nearly $7k/account. Not exactly “small balances.”

3. CUs charge fees, too. The article says “banks try to recoup such costs [to maintain a checking account) by imposing overdraft fees and other charges.” While credit union members may — on average — pay less in fees than the average bank customer (let’s not get into the quantipulation inherent in that statistic), guess what WSJ? Credit unions charge an overdraft fee, too.

4. Banks are everywhere, man.  Johnny Cash shoulda done a song on this. The WSJ quotes a guy from NCUA (which it says is a trade group, which isn’t accurate according to @paulsworld) who says “many of the nation’s 7,200 credit unions are in rural areas where there is no other banking option.” I don’t think this is a supportable statement.

5. The housing bubble comment was a poor choice. The article states that “several large commercial credit unions…went bust after loading up on high-risk mortgages during the housing bubble.” True statement. But in comparison to the impact the housing bubble had on banks, calling out the impact on the credit union industry was pretty manipulative. 

C’mon WSJ: We expect a lot better from you.

p.s. If you want a copy of the report referenced above Financial High Coup: Why High-Yield Checking Accounts Trump Free Checking, contact BancVue.

]]> 5023 rshevlin https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/social-medias-chicken-and-egg-problem/ https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/social-medias-chicken-and-egg-problem/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 19:54:49 +0000 http://marketingteaparty.com/?p=5006 Continue reading →]]> An article titled Research: Most social media marketing initiatives fail on New Media and Marketing states:

From the book The Social Organization the author states “One of our more striking discoveries is that most social media initiatives fail. Either they don’t attract any interest or they never create business value.” Why ? Because social media is not a tactic social media starts with a social organization focused on consumers and its customers.

[I think there’s a grammatical problem with the last sentence. I think there should be a period after the word tactic, and that the rest of the sentence is a new sentence]

My take: Hold on a second here. For the past two+ years, I’ve been reading left and right that: 1) The ROI of social media far exceeds the ROI of every thing else on this planet, or 2) The ROI of social media can’t be measured in just dollars and cents.

The explanation for why so many firms allegedly fail with social media is intriguing: That firms fail at social media because they’re not a “social organization” which the author defines as:

One that strategically applies mass collaboration to address significant business challenges and opportunities. Its leaders recognize that becoming a social enterprise is not about incremental improvement. They know it demands a new way of thinking, and so they’re moving beyond tactical, one-time grassroots efforts and pushing for greater business impact through a thoughtful, planned approach to applying social media. As a result, a social organization is able to be more agile, produce better outcomes, and even develop entirely new ways of operating that are only achievable through mobilizing the collective talent, energy, ideas, and efforts of communities.

When I first read this, I had a deja vu moment. Ah yes — substitute “knowledge-based organization” from the late 90s or “digital business” from the early 200s, and you realize that we’ve heard all this before.

My deja vu aside, I’ve also read — countless times over the past few years — that firms that don’t get into social media “will be left behind.” (Don’t make me find links, you know they’re out there).

So what should we conclude from all this?

• That social media does indeed have a higher ROI, but only in a small number of instances, specifically those where the organization deploying social media has already become a social organization?
• That a company that deploys social media will most likely fail in its social media attempts until it becomes a “social organization”?
• That somehow a company should become a “social organization” BEFORE deploying social media in order to improve its odds of social media success?

If you’re a senior business executive feeling a bit confused by all this, join the club.

What this means is that — since social media is an imperative in today’s business environment (according to social media proponents), and that a firm must first become a social organization before achieving social media success (according to the author of the book) — business executives should take a leap of faith and radically change and transform their organizations before knowing if it’s the right thing for their organization.

And that is not going to happen in any well-managed, reasonably successful firm.

Social media gurus: It’s back to the drawing boards for you. And when you come back, please get your logic, rationale, and arguments straight.

The word Like took honors for Most Annoying Word in the Marketing Lexicon, while Twitter walked away with the Most Overhyped Yet Ineffective Marketing Tool award. And, to nobody’s surprise, Groupon won Bonehead Decision of the Year (for passing on a $6 billion offer from Google).

Although 2011 is only 10/12ths of the way done, we’ve pretty much seen enough (in fact, we’ve seen all we can take), and can confidently call this year’s winners in some newly ordained categories.

The New Coke Award

This year’s winner of the New Coke Award, for the company that commits the worst strategic blunder, is — hands down — Netflix. The firm’s pricing decision and  flip flop on the Qwikster thing resulted in the loss of nearly a million customers and somewhere in the order of $12 billion in market valuation. If you’re Google, that’s no big deal. But to the rest of us in the 99%, that’s a lot of money.

In the age of social media, where gathering feedback from the market and testing marketing (read: pricing) decisions can be done relatively fast and cheap, there’s simply no reason for major strategic blunders like this one.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Based on the criteria, wouldn’t Bank of America be a close contender? No. They captured a different award:

Credit Union Marketer of the Year

Bank of America, with a single move — that they didn’t even implement — has done more for the credit union industry in one month than credit unions have done for themselves in 100 years. The Great Debit Fee Fiasco of 2011 will be a case study in business schools for years to come.

The circus surrounding an announcement — wait, did they ever really announce it? — is perhaps unprecedented. The number of parties taking credit for the reversal has only just begun. Claiming that they “listened to their customers” as the reason for the reversal only begs the question: Why didn’t they ask their customers BEFORE they made the decision?

Congrats, credit unions. This is your Rocky moment.

Most Overused Word in the Marketing Lexicon

I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction: 2011’s most overused word might just repeat the honor in 2012. Whether I’m right or wrong about that, there’s no doubt in my mind that Analytics takes the crown for most overused word in the marketing vocabulary for 2011.

Did you know that when you create a spreadsheet, and populate some cells with formulas that do addition and subtraction, that that’s called Analytics? If you use an Excel function, you might get away with calling it Predictive Analytics. 

Have you ever taken a list of customers and identified those that meet a certain criteria, like under a certain age, or over a certain income level? Congratulations, you’re an Analyst performing Analytics!

Do you create reports for the management team showing them traffic on your firm’s web site? That’s called web analytics.

And there’s certainly no shortage of experts telling us that analytics is the key to competitive success. If you’re not performing predictive analytics on the social media data you’re monitoring and capturing, then you might not still be in business in 5 years.

If analytics was overhyped and overused in 2011, just wait until next year. 2012 will be the year of Big Data. We here at The Marketing Tea Party will be doing our best to make it the year of Right Data. Because what’s one more bruise on the side of our heads from beating it against a brick wall?

—————

Don’t forget to check out Snarketing 2.0:

For the print copy:      For the eBook:

@chaztoo is a great artist. Take a look at this picture he posted on his Tumblr:

Wouldn’t you pay something to have him create a custom Twitter avatar for you?

Or maybe, would you pay to have him to do this as a gift for someone else?

Maybe your company, who’s trying to create/support your brand using Twitter, could benefit by having custom avatars — that had a graphic element consistent in each of the avatars — for the people most active on the channel?

Favor, please: Leave a comment letting me know what you think of this idea. Your input will probably determine if @chaztoo does this or not. 

And many in the credit union industry seem to be licking their chops, awaiting a slew of new members, as (they hope) millions of disaffected big bank customers observe this newly-ordained “holiday.”

I challenge credit unions to make Saturday, November 5, a BAD day. 

What does BAD stand for? I thought you’d never ask. Bank ACCOUNT AVOIDANCE Day.

What I DON’T mean by “avoidance” is simply moving one’s checking account from a bank to a credit union. 

What I DO mean is getting rid of the checking account altogether.

Aite Group surveyed consumers who use “alternative” financial services products (e.g., prepaid cards, check cashing services, etc.) to manage their finances, and identified a set of consumers who don’t have a checking account (not all users of alternative financial products are un- or under-banked, FYI), and rely instead on prepaid cards. 

The most prevalent reason why prepaid card holders who don’t have a checking account don’t have one? They don’t want to pay fees. Not just fees for using a debit card. But fees for insufficient funds, fees for reordering checks, or even basic monthly fees. 

This is an interesting perspective when you consider that many of the prepaid cards that these folks are using to manage their financial lives do have a monthly fee (and other fees) associated with them. 

Are credit unions prepared to identify consumers who shouldn’t have, or could do without having, a checking account? Will they recommend to these consumers that they NOT open a checking account, and use prepaid cards instead? And do they even offer prepaid cards in the first place?

We’ll see what happens on Saturday.

]]> https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/bank-transfer-day-should-be-a-bad-day/feed/ 4 4966 rshevlin https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/quantipulation-in-action-inbound-vs-outbound-marketing/ https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/quantipulation-in-action-inbound-vs-outbound-marketing/#comments Mon, 31 Oct 2011 13:53:47 +0000 http://marketingteaparty.com/?p=4955 Continue reading →]]> Mashable (that highly reputable source of marketing theory and research) recently published an article called Inbound Marketing Vs. Outbound Marketing, which claimed:

“Thanks to the Internet, marketing has evolved over the years. Consumers no longer rely on billboards and TV spots — a.k.a. outbound marketing — to learn about new products, because the web has empowered them. It’s given them alternative methods for finding, buying and researching brands and products. The new marketing communication — inbound marketing — has become a two-way dialogue, much of which is facilitated by social media.

Another reason why inbound marketing is winning is because it costs less than traditional marketing. Why try to buy your way in when consumers aren’t even paying attention? Here are some stats from the infographic below.

–44% of direct mail is never opened. 
–84% of 25 to 34 year olds have clicked out of a website because of an “irrelevant or intrusive ad.”
–The cost per lead in outbound marketing is more than for inbound marketing.”

My take: Total garbage. This attempt on the part of people looking to differentiate the “new” marketing from “old” marketing completely misses the boat. 

Let’s look at this point by point:

“Consumers no longer rely on billboards and TV spots — a.k.a. outbound marketing — to learn about new products.” Who said that consumers relied on billboards and TV spots to learn about new products? Marketers relied on billboards and TV spots to make consumers aware of their products, to increase recall of their products, and create positive affinity. As long as people continue to drive along the highway (how’s the commute in your city? Yeah, sucks in mine, too) and watch TV, marketers will find that billboards and TV spots to be at least somewhat effective at those objectives. 

The new marketing communication — inbound marketing — has become a two-way dialogue, much of which is facilitated by social media. Got news for all the inbound marketing alarmists out there: Marketing has always been a two-way dialogue. It just wasn’t as easy to execute as it is today. Marketers have relied on various mechanisms — postcards, focus groups, toll-free phone numbers — to encourage feedback from consumers. Claiming that the “old” marketing was “one-way” is false.

44% of direct mail is never opened. First off, how do they know that? Think about how much direct mail you get. I challenge you to come up with even a reasonably accurate estimate of how much of it you open and how much you throw away before opening. Second, even if this were true, then I’d say: WOW! More than half of direct mail is opened. That’s pretty damn good in this marketing environment!

84% of 25 to 34 year olds have clicked out of a website because of an “irrelevant or intrusive ad.” What the hell is wrong with the other 16%?

The cost per lead in outbound is more than for inbound marketing. Stupidest claim I’ve heard all month. Just because there is no measurable media cost associated with this thing you call “inbound” marketing doesn’t mean there aren’t costs associated with the efforts. Somebody has to create and manage the social media site, right? Or, if the inbound marketing channel is the phone, do the costs of staffing the call center not count as part of inbound marketing efforts? And given the incredibly inexact science of attribution in the marketing world, how does anyone really determine that a generated “inbound’ lead wasn’t influenced by outbound marketing efforts?

———-

The infographic included in the Mashable goes on to claim that in the “old” way of marketing, marketers rarely sought to “entertain or educate.” Seriously? The ad industry has a RICH history of attempts at being funny and entertaining. Print ads have LONG been focused on education. 

The article also tries to differentiate “new” marketing from “old” marketing by claiming that in the new marketing, “customers come to you”, while in the old marketing, marketers sought out customers. 

Customers come to you? Really? And how do they find out about you? Simply by word-of-mouth? Good luck with that. Listen to what Groupon had t say:

“After a two-year holdout, we finally decided to run real television ads. In the past, we’ve depended mostly on word-of-mouth and limited our advertising to online search. This year, we realized that in spite of how much we’d grown, a ton of people still hadn’t heard of Groupon, so we decided to give in to our Napoleon complex and invade the rest of the world with a proper Super Bowl commercial.”

Bottom line: Trying to make inbound marketing sound like something superior and new is total BS. Marketing is a complex process. There are parts of the process that are inherently outbound and parts that are inherently inbound. There are new channels of communication that create new opportunities for both outbound and inbound communication.  Oh, and real marketers don’t take marketing advice from Mashable. 

1. Blog reading fee. Lifetime free readership will no longer be available. Per the terms of our agreement — that the end of anybody’s lifetime allows us to revoke the offer — free readership of this blog will no longer be offered. Starting December 1, you will be charged a $.25 fee for each blog post you read, whether you link directly to the site, view it in a reader, or are simply subscribed to it at the time it was posted.
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In an effort to be transparent, however, I think it’s important that I explain why I’m forced to institute these fees:

1. Higher debit card fees. Starting October 1, new debit card interchange fee regulations took effect. Even though these changes only impact banks with assets greater than $10 billion in assets, I figure that if this excuse works for Redbox, then it should work for me.

2. The Barbara Lee effect. Ms. Lee, a member of the House of Representatives, recently commented that she doesn’t use the self-checkout lanes at supermarkets because  “that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.” If there are more people like her out there — who stop using self-checkout lanes, ATMs (because they take away bank teller jobs), self-service gas stations (because they take away gas pumper jobs), or E-Z pass on the highway (because you know we can’t afford to lose any more toll taker jobs) — then the result will be higher prices for lots of things. In anticipation of this mass lunacy, I’m afraid I have to raise my prices.

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In a little more seriousness, there is a message here for marketers.

While I fully support the right of any business in this country to raise its prices, and shoot itself in its foot (or head) by doing so, firms that feel the need to raise prices WITHOUT committing PR suicide must do so with caution, transparency, honesty, and proactive communication.

Redbox’s announcement is shameful. They might have well as blamed foreign currency fluctuations in Uganda. There’s a large financial institution (who shall remain nameless lest they find out I’m blogging about them) that should’ve been a bit more sensitive about how it announced its recent price hikes. I would mention Netflix, but I have a professor/ad agency friend in the LA area who would jump all over any comment I might make about them.

Price changes are lightening rods. You might be able to mute the thunder, but people still see the sky light up. And then like to point at it and talk about it.

]]> https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/i-regret-to-inform-you-that-my-blog-fees-will-be-going-up/feed/ 15 4935 rshevlin https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/someone-should-get-fired/ https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/10/23/someone-should-get-fired/#comments Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:13:55 +0000 http://marketingteaparty.com/?p=4924 Continue reading →]]> Check out this opening paragraph to an article titled How strategic is our technology agenda? in McKinsey Quarterly:

“The CEO of a leading consumer goods company was unhappy with his CIO. An important competitor was gaining market share at a disquieting pace by using social media and data analysis to target customers more effectively. When asked about these developments, the CIO outlined some potential responses, but he didn’t follow through on them. Instead, according to the CEO, the CIO remained preoccupied with “keep the lights on” IT projects and was therefore unable to gain traction with the business leaders and others within the company who would be critical in helping to address the new competitive challenge.”

My take: Someone should get fired. I’m just not sure if it’s the CEO, the firm’s CMO, or the authors of the article. But I’m pretty sure it’s not the CIO who should get canned. 

Why should it be the…

CEO? If IT isn’t “strategic” within an organization, it’s not necessarily the CIO’s fault. I’ve worked with plenty of CIOs who have tried to make IT more strategic, but find that the processes, the org structure, and the management mentality required to make IT strategic aren’t in place to make it happen. 

In a report I published a while back called Bank Performance: Why IT Management Matters, I found that it doesn’t matter which technologies a firm uses. What matters is how a firm manages IT. The “how” of IT management is comprised of three dimensions: 1) Tolerance of IT risk; 2) Senior management support of IT; and 3) Coordination between IT and business functions.

What my researched showed was that firms (in this case, banks) that have a high tolerance for IT risk, have strong senior management for the use of technology as a business enabler and differentiator, and demonstrate tight coordination between the IT department(s) and lines of business are more profitable than other banks. 

In other words, for IT to be strategic, it takes more than just a bottom-up drive from the CIO’s organization. 

Another [big] reason why the CEO is a candidate to be shown the door: Why is going to the CIO with a problem related to social media and data analysis? 

This takes us to the second candidate to get the axe…

CMO? If a CPG firm is losing market share because it isn’t leveraging social media or successfully executing data analysis, the fault for this doesn’t lie with the IT organization, it lies with the marketing organization.  

The McKinsey article also contains the following passage:

“Vocal business unit leaders at a North American insurance company, for example, insisted that sluggish times to market for new products were an important factor behind its eroding market share. They also believed that poor IT systems—specifically, the software that supported pricing and helped adapt insurance products to local regulatory requirements—were responsible for the lagging product-development performance.”

Hogwash. I believe full well that IT systems might be a negatively influencing factor in the firm’s time-to-market for new products, but the fault in this situation lies with the inability of the lines of business to effectively make the case for investing in an makeover or overhaul of those applications. IT can help the business understand the technology implications of investments, but it is the business’ responsibility for making the business case for investments that improve its performance. 

In the case of the CPG firm referenced at the beginning of the article, the CMO would appear to be seriously derelict in his or her duties to not be included in the CEO/CIO discussion. 

Which takes us to the third candidate(s) to be fired…

Authors? I don’t want to call anybody a liar here, but I don’t believe the CEO/CIO conversation actually happened. “Leading” CPG firms (McKinsey’s adjective) are generally marketing-driven firms. I don’t believe the CEO of a “leading” CPG firm would turn first to the CIO — and not the CMO — to discuss an issue with social media or market share. 

Maybe the authors took some poetic license for the purpose of the article. If so, I’m OK cutting them slack and not firing them for this relatively minor offense. 

See? I can be a nice guy.

Bank Transfer Day is a gawdawful name. I saw one CU person’s tweet alluding to it as BTD. Ugh.

What the hell does it mean? Transfer your money from one bank account to another?

Yes, I know full well it’s about moving your money OUT OF a bank (and into a credit union).  But how is that obvious to the 99%? 

One friend (who shall remain nameless unless he tells me it’s OK to attribute this to him) suggested calling it Tell Your Bank To Shove It Day.

Now we’re talking. 

How about CU Later Banks! Day? (Or is that too obvious?)

Or maybe Break The Bank Day is better. On second thought, Durbin’s already pretty much proclaimed 2011 to be Break The Bank Year.

Spank Your Bank Day is another option. Too violent?

I don’t know what the right answer is, and it doesn’t really matter what I think since nobody is going to change the name based on what I have to say. But maybe I can get the powers to be to rethink the name.

Having said that, who are the “powers that be”?

If you know, please let me know. Because after I ask them to change the name, I’m going to suggest that they change the date. Doing this on a Saturday isn’t the best idea.

And who came up with that picture? It looks like The Joker from the Batman series and movies.

What do you think the day should be called?

The write-up on the Harvard paper included this comment:

Between 2000 and 2005, United States banks closed 30 million checking accounts of excessively overdrafting customers. It’s a significant action because people whose accounts are shuttered have to turn to costly fee-based alternatives to receive banking services—if they can get them at all.

My take: Hogwash. A load of populist crap. 

If a consumer is paying hundreds of dollars a year in overdraft fees, then why would an alternative product  like a prepaid card be considered a “costly fee-based” alternative?

As part of their marketing strategy, many prepaid card issuers target overdrafters. The challenge, however, is that Aite Group’s research found that prepaid card issuers’ overdrafter opportunities aren’t as lucrative as they might think. The majority of overdrafters pay an overdraft fee just once or twice a year, making the economics of switching their banking activity to a prepaid card less than worthwhile.

In fact, many overdrafters won’t switch to prepaid cards based simply to avoid paying overdraft fees alone. Low awareness of prepaid cards among overdrafters is a hurdle that prepaid card issuers must overcome before they can effectively market the product.

But there is a segment of banking customers that are looking to switch — or have already done so. These are the Debanked — consumers who choose to opt out of the traditional banking product structure, and opt to manage their financial lives with products that are typically considered to be “alternative” financial products.

There are two problems with the populist view of the market, so often adopted by ivory tower college professors and newspaper-selling journalists:

1. There’s a portion of the “unbanked” population that consciously chooses to be part of this population and is NOT in any way, shape, or form “victimized” by the financial services industry, and
2. Alternative financial products, many of which have fees associated with them, are not inherently evil, predatory, or economically disadvantageous to the consumers who use them.

There is a significant business opportunity for both banks and providers of alternative financial solutions (i.e., prepaid cards, check cashing services, etc.) to identify the DeBanked and potentially DeBanked consumer population and craft solutions for this market. (Sorry, can’t get into more details here–that’s what my Aite Group report is for).

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Check out Snarketing 2.0: A Humorous Look at the World of Marketing in the Age of Social Media (print or Kindle format):

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It’s an exclusively online, new model of bank that uses social, mobile and gamification technology. To create a bank focused on utility and customer engagement, Movenbank created an ecosystem called CRED, which uses a combination of mobile technology, social media and behavioral game theory to help consumers save, spend and live smarter when it comes to their finances with a built-in reward system.

Here’s how the Movenbank story is going to play out:

Act I: Start-up generates positive press and attention for promising to create new banking model. New firm takes precautions to not get overhyped (like a previous new banking startup) too far in advance of its launch. Fledgling firm signs up 100,000 potentially interested customers.

Act II: With much fanfare, Movenbank launches, but small percentage of interested prospects sign-on. Management team is undaunted as they know full well that too many customers on day one might be more detrimental than helpful. After all, on day one Federal Express flew one plane, not thousands. 

Act III: The dark and lonely times. Movenbank works diligently to acquire new customers. Slowly but steadily new customers come on board. People begin to question the firm’s business model. 

Act IV: Movenbank prospers. Customers find that they can earn their way to better rates and fees, and grow with their existing account instead of switching. More importantly, customers are profitable. While other (i.e., traditional) banks have varying degrees of success driving up account profitability, Movenbank is able to do so through a blend of interchange, merchant-funded incentives, and yes, account fees. As the new model is validated, kinks are worked out, and word of the success of a new banking model spreads, helping to drive new customer growth at a much more effective and efficient rate. 

Act V: A megabank acquires Movenbank.

Huh? What? Why would a big bank acquire Movenbank? 

It’s a classic innovator’s dilemma. Today’s banks would desperately like to reinvent their business model. But, as they say in Maine, “you can’t get there from here.”

But why will Movenbank succeed?

It’s not because it’s a mobile-dominant plastic-less approach (I predict that Movenbank will one day issue plastic cards).

Movenbank will succeed because the product offer is more appealing, simpler, more transparent, and more fair than the [checking account] product structures on the market today.

The OccupyWallStreet people might not like to believe this, but the real 99% of people in the U.S. are OK with paying fees for the products and services they receive. What this majority wants, however, is perceived value for the fees paid. THAT’S the problem with the banking model today — mismatch between between fees paid and value received– and the problem that Movenbank is trying to solve for.  

In addition, the timing helps. While it’s always the right time for some firm to introduce innovation into the market, now is a particularly good time. It’s the perfect storm of economic conditions (producing strong consumer dissatisfaction with banks in general), technology development and — most importantly — demographics. 

Ten years ago, even if the economic conditions and technology had been in place, the demographics wouldn’t have been there. Today’s Gen Yers were just too young ten years ago to make a Movenbank possible.

Which isn’t to say that Movenbank’s only customers will be Gen Yers (just ask PNC about the demographics of its Virtual Wallet customer base). But Gen Yers need more than mobile access to their accounts, or a pretty interface. They need a new product. A product that reflects the fact that their spending and credit needs are rapidly changing.

The organizational walls between debit and credit products in most established financial institutions prevent them from creating and developing new solutions like the one that Movenbank is promising to bring to market.

By Act IV, big banks will take notice of Movenbank and realize that Movenbank is:

1. The “starter” account they should have created for entry-level customers, and
2. A platform and business model upon which they can migrate their stale and tired business model.

This, by the way, is why I don’t think Bank Simple’s path is similar. Bank Simple may succeed at creating a new interface for banking customers, but the underlying structure and business model of banking products remains in place. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong here, but I see Bank Simple as simply (pun intended) putting lipstick on the pig.

With that said, I may be wrong about Movenbank, as well. There are a number of failure triggers:

1. Model failure. CRED might not work. From two angles, actually. One is that Movenbank may not be able to collect a sufficient amount of data to validate the CRED concept. The other potential failure angle is that Movenbank may not be able to recalibrate CRED over time. This is what happened with FICO. A 600 score was significantly more risky in 2009 than a 600 score was in 2002. 

2. Technology failure. Movenbank is putting a lot of faith in the mobile channel. Not that it’s misguided faith. But the mobile channel– most importantly mobile payments and mobile customer service — has yet to face its toughest performance, reliability, and risk/fraud management tests. 

3. Service failure. You know why ING Direct succeeded as a primarily online-only bank? Because savings accounts require little customer service on an ongoing basis. That’s not the path Movenbank is taking, however. Quite the contrary — it wants to be the provider of the primary spending account. And with a heavy-transaction product comes heavy-customer support needs. Will Movenbank have the customer service capabilities to support a sizable customer base? We’ll see.

There are three additional failure triggers that I can define, but won’t talk about here. If Movenbank wants to know what they are, it knows where to find me. 

Bottom line: I’m bullish on the Movenbank concept. Sadly (for the industry) there aren’t enough people thinking about how to (constructively) reinvent the banking model. Too much focus is on improving the “customer experience” without fixing the underlying cause of the experience problems. Or blowing it up completely.

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Check out Snarketing 2.0: A Humorous Look at the World of Marketing in the Age of Social Media (print or Kindle format):

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If there’s a transformative potential for social media, it lies in this: The incremental cost of communicating with customers and prospects is, for all intents and purposes, zero. 

This has, until very recently, never been the case. 

Prior to the advent of email, the cost of communicating was high. Marketers either used mass media avenues (TV, radio, print) or direct mail. The cost per message was high. 

As a result, the return on investment per message was important. Each message had to pay its way. And that’s why obsessed over response and conversion rates.

Social media brings the cost of messaging way down. As a result, marketers don’t have to obsess over the ROI of each message, allowing them to shift the nature of communication from persuasion to engagement. In a world where every message doesn’t have to have an ROI, we can actually carry on a conversation with customers and prospects. 

But most marketers are missing something important as the economics of marketing change:

Costs shift from message distribution (dissemination) to message creation.

In the old world, marketers did spend a lot of money in crafting their message (witness the size of the advertising agency business). Despite this cost, more was spent on disseminating the message than creating it. After all, the message was created ONCE. Then tested, revised, and launched. And then the bulk of the marketing cost was in getting the message OUT.

Marketers in the new world have new mechanisms for getting the message out thanks to social media tools and channels. Tools and channels that radically slash the cost of dissemination.

But what too many marketers don’t realize is that there’s a new cost in town: The cost of message creation. 

Too many marketers don’t have a clue how to have a conversation with a customer or prospect through social media. Either they tweet or post their tired old marketing messages, or they deal with customer service requests. But marketing messages designed for mass media channels are inappropriate for social media channels.

I guess I can only speak to the financial services industry here, but there’s not a single financial institution that I’ve talked to — and I talk to a lot — that consciously think about the mix of messages they disseminate through social media (i.e., the mix between marketing messages, educational content, news alerts, and other types of messages), nor do they test and refine the messages they disseminate. 

Thanks to social media, the cost of marketing is shifting from message dissemination to message creation. And that’s not a grammatically correct sentence, since it’s about messages — in the plural — today, not the message. 

Seth Godin wrote that “marketing is the story marketers tell consumers.” That’s simply not accurate. It’s “stories” in the plural (and if you want to be even more correct, it’s not about the stories marketers tell, but the stories that marketers get consumers to tell). 

It’s hard to equate a tweet or Facebook posting to a story, but this is mincing words. It’s about the message. More frequent — and more meaningful — engagement with consumers, means having more frequent and meaningful messages and things to say. 

The cost of creating those messages, and understanding which ones are most effective, is the hidden cost of social media.

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Check out Snarketing 2.0: A Humorous Look at the World of Marketing in the Age of Social Media (print or Kindle format):

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That would require everyone who qualifies as a Snarketer to purchase 2,370 copies of the book, however. So it doesn’t looks like I’ll be quitting my day job any time soon.

This is the problem with trying to get rich writing business books: There’s a limited audience. There are only so many people who are even potentially interested in the topic.

I’ve got an even bigger problem: My audience is more narrow than the typical business audience. The target audience for my book is a group of business people known as Snarketers. Are you a Snarketer?

You are if you meet three qualifications: 1) You have an interest in marketing; 2) You have an unusually high degree of intelligence; and 3) You have a warped sense of humor.

For your friends who can’t process that intellectually, show them this picture to explain to them why they don’t qualify.

I’ve done the research, so I know that there are only 10,000 Snarketers in existence. If you’re in the club, you’re part of a dying breed. Our increasingly politically correct culture is stifling warped senses of humor. And thanks to our “everyone gets a gold star” educational system, there are fewer and fewer people who meet the intelligence hurdle. On the other hand, everyone and their mother thinks they’re good at marketing.

The challenge in trying to identify Snarketers is that it’s not visually obvious — it’s not like being tall, or having blond hair. So how do you, dear Snarketer, let the world know that you’re part of this elite and prestigious club?

You buy the book, moron.

And then read it on the train on your way to work, or when you’re on a plane, sitting in first class showing off how many frequent flyer miles you’ve run up because you don’t have a real life.

If you do buy it — and post a review online (I don’t care if it’s a positive or negative review) — then I will give you the next book for free (yes, there will be another book, the subject of which will be Quantipulation).

Here’s my game plan: Real Snarketers who post reviews might convince some Snarketer-wannabes to purchase the book. If you don’t think the “find a sucker” strategy works, just look at how many banks now charge customers a fee to use a debit card. 

Where do you get the book?

If you want the print copy (you show off), go here:

For an eBook version, you can get it from one of two sources: At Lulu.com, or click on the icon below for the Kindle version.

If you buy the book, thank you. If you buy and review the book, double thank you.

UPDATE: If you order from Lulu by October 20, you can get free shipping:

Update #2: Apparently, there’s a formatting problem with the Kindle version. I’ve pulled that “off the shelf” for now (and disabled the link above).

A company’s single-valued objective should be maximizing long-term shareholder value.

Mauboussin makes his case for why this should be, and, not surprisingly, makes a strong case. But, in this particular instance, Mike is wrong. Here’s why “long-term shareholder value” doesn’t work as your firm’s single-valued objective:

1. Shareholders are too diverse — or too singular — an audience. Shareholders can be a diverse lot. Some are looking for immediate income and share price growth. Others aren’t necessarily looking for immediate returns, and would prefer to see resources allocated to produce a return over a longer timeframe. Sure, some stocks are categorized as growth or income but stock market categorization is very different than company objective setting. On the other hand, not every company is public. And “shareholders” — in the plural — may be inaccurate. I don’t know too many successful entrepreneurs who became successful by just focusing on their own long-term value.

2. There is no such thing as the “long term.” For a 75 year-old investor, “long-term” is what? Two years? To a 25 year-old, it may be 40 years. We tend to admire companies that make tough decisions that trade short-term gains for longer-term potential, but is taking a hit this year for an expected gain next year really doing something for the “long-term”? The fact of the matter is that the “long-term” is not a timeframe that can be used to make decisions.

3. It doesn’t help make trade-offs. Speaking of decisions, Mauboussin writes: “Running a business requires evaluating, and deciding about, trade-offs. And to properly judge tradeoffs, you have to have a single objective.” Mike is 100% correct. Problem is, “maximizing long-term shareholder value” doesn’t help you make those tradeoffs. Points #1 and #2 help prove him incorrect. If there are shareholders with competing investment objectives, and no clear definition of what the long-term is, then Mauboussin’s single-valued objective is of no help in making critical decisions.

4. It doesn’t inspire and motivate employees. Unless the set of employees equals the set of shareholders, Mauboussin’s objective is bound to produce conflicts. Another reality of modern-day organizational life is that people look for personal fulfillment in their jobs. We want to feel like we make a contribution, both to ouselves, as well as others. Because “shareholders” are an intangible concept for employees of public corporations, maximizing the return to shareholders is not a very motivating objective.

So, if Mauboussin’s objective is wrong, what’s the right objective?

It’s one that aligns employees, customers, and shareholders. It’s an objective that defines what the company will do for customers (and for which customers). Dare I say the right objective is a customer-centric objective? 

The reason why that type of objective works is that it motivates employees, better enables the tough tradeoffs to be made (these decisions will never be easy), and — this is important — lets shareholders decide if this is the kind of company they want to invest in. 

It’s all about cause and effect. 

We make business decisions not to produce long-term shareholder value, but to create and meet market needs — which IN TURN produce shareholder value. Value in varying degrees for the short- and longer-term. 

You can’t effectively manage a complex company if you’re simply trying to maximize long-term shareholder value. And I hope that there’s a large U.S. bank that’s listening. 

Maybe it actually WANTS customers to leave.

Crazy talk, you say? Not sure about that. After all, ING Direct has been lauded for “firing” customers. Bank Technology News wrote this a while back:

“To promote customer homogeneity and keep costs down, ING Direct won’t hesitate to fire customers who demand too much. Better to win over customers with shrewd marketing and good rates wrought by the cost efficiencies of doing business online.”

So, rather than flat out telling unprofitable — or potentially unprofitable — to close out accounts, BofA figures, “hey, we’ll slap a fee on them, and if they don’t like it, they’ll leave. And if they stay, they become more profitable.”

And wouldn’t you know it, but Durbin opens his mouth, and HELPS BofA by telling those customers to “walk with their feet.” Talk about effective word-of-mouth marketing!

So what happens if 1 million customers leave BofA?

If they’re truly the least profitable customers, BofA’s average customer profitability increases. And with less unprofitable customers to serve, the bank can more easily shrink to a more manageable size.

But you know what else happens?

Unprofitable — or potentially unprofitable — go join credit unions or open accounts at community banks. The credit union folks think this is great because it probably means the average age of members goes down. Hooray!

But oddly, the credit union’s profitability is adversely affected. Because if it’s low balance accounts  walking in the door, the income accelerator — the revenue generated on deposits beyond the spread and fees — is diminished. (This by the way, is one of the key reasons why high-yield checking accounts are more profitable than no-interest accounts. See my report on Why High-Yield Checking Accounts Trump Free Checking).

Let’s look at a  scenario: Assume you have 100 customers, equally split across 4 segments. Assume that the average profitability per customer of segment 1 is $1, segment 2 is $2, segment 3 is $3, and segment 4 is $4.

You’re making $250 in profits with average customer profitability at $2.50/customer.

If, thanks to BofA, 25 new Segment 1 customers walk in the door, profits go up to $275, but average profitability declines by 12% to $2.20/customer.

If the four segments represent the generations, it’s possible that you will lose Segment 4 customers (Seniors) over time. So let’s say 25 new Segment 1 customers come in thanks to BofA, but 10 Segment 4 customers are no longer with you. Profitability still goes up, to $255. But average profitability declines to $2.13, a 15% drop.

And if the ratio of customers in the four segments doesn’t change — that is, if segment 1 customers don’t become as profitable as segment 2, 2 as profitable as 3, and 3 as profitable as 4 — over time, then your FI is in trouble.

Oh sure, you can hold hands and sing cumbaya and hope those customers become more profitable over time. But smart firms don’t do that.

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So maybe BofA’s plan is to drive out customers it doesn’t think are — or can be — profitable, and let some other FI deal with them.

I’m sure many credit union marketers are thinking that this is great, that they would love to have those relationships, and grow with them over time.

Maybe they can. But if the BofA rejects….oops, I mean defectors….are the younger, less affluent, Gen Yers, then it may take some time for them to have a material affect on the CU’s profitability.

I’ve heard CU cheerleaders talk about being more open to extending credit to younger and less affluent consumers, and finding ways to help those consumers manage their financial lives without the high rates and fees that the big banks charge.

But there’s a reason why those consumers either don’t get credit or have to pay higher rates and fees to get credit, loans, and accounts. They’re higher credit risks, and they bring less funds to the table, resulting in less profits.

Seems to me there are a number of people in credit union land ignoring those realities.

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But, back to BofA, maybe the imposition of fees on debit cards is a smart move for the bank. I wouldn’t have advised the bank to do what it did, instead, I would have told them to levy fees on writing checks.

Heads, you go to some large industry-wide boondoggle in Las Vegas with a thousand other attendees and see Sully (oops, I mean CAPTAIN Sullenberger) in the 43rd minute of his 15 minutes of fame. Tails, you go to a smaller functionally-focused conference with 150 other attendees and see your colleagues talk about what their firms are doing (if you can stay awake through their entire presentation, that is).

If you’re lucky, however, the coin will land on its edge. And then you can decide between Finovate and the CU Water Cooler Symposium.

I wasn’t able to attend Finovate last week, but I did get to go to the CU Water Cooler conference. Even better, I got to present there.

When Tim McAlpine told me a few months ago that he was selecting me to speak, I asked him what he wanted me talk about. He said “I don’t know. I like the way you bring humor to your blog, and want you to bring that to the Symposium.” I told Tim that I don’t do stand-up comedy, so he said “Do what you want.”

I chose to speak on Quantipulation, and tried to debunk a few marketing myths. CU Times wrote that I have a “simple message for credit unions, ‘Don’t believe any numbers without question.’”

Not to make a mountain out of a molehill here, but that’s not quite accurate. Instead, I told the conference attendees not to believe any number they heard over the course of the conference without questioning the number’s assumptions.  But I’m quibbling here.

With no intended disrepect to the speakers I’m not mentioning below (I didn’t actually get to hear all of the presentations), here are the three highlights for me, in no particular order:

1. Demystifying Creativity. Someday Charlie Trotter (the one living in Foat Wuth Texas, not the restaurant owner) is going to be well known, and I’m going to get to say “yeah, I know Charlie.” It’s OK if he doesn’t admit to knowing me. Charlie talked about what creativity really is. Charlie helped me (and I hope everyone else) to better see how creativity is not synonymous with imagination. Imagination is the ability to imagine. Creativity is about DOING something. According to Charlie, you aren’t creative until you’ve actually created something. The third concept Charlie hit upon was talent. Talent + Imagination + Creativity = Success. Charlie didn’t actually say that, I’m just quantipulating.

2. Boomification of Credit Unions. Damn, that Denise Wymore is a good speaker. I truly wish that I had her ability to connect with an audience. On the other hand, I’m glad that I’m not wrong about stuff like she is. Denise’s presentation truly was excellent — engaging and compelling. Problem is, her ideas are just simply wrong. Ideas like getting rid of FICO, and judging loan applicants based on their “character.” They have a name for that, Denise: Discrimination. And it’s illegal. Or the idea that profit-driven is somehow the antithesis of people-driven. A false dichotomy, Denise. Denise’s cumbaya makes for a great presentation, but cumbaya won’t sustain a credit union, nor the credit union industry.

3. Future of Payments. As I listened to Jeff Russell, CEO of The Members Group, a little voice inside my head was screaming “ARE YOU LISTENING TO THIS, PEOPLE?!” My perhaps skewed perspective on the things I hear from credit union professionals lead me to believe that too much of the conversation is about lending. Jeff’s message, if I’m interpreting it correctly, is that payments is where the focus should be. If I’m getting him right, I couldn’t agree more. There’s no better way to help a credit union member best manage his/her financial life than to help them make smart everyday spending decisions. You simply can’t do that if their primary spending account is a checking account or credit card held at some other financial institution. On top of that, the future of cross-sell marketing for banks and credit unions will come from payments-related and payments-triggered transactions. If your credit union is a payments laggard, good luck. You’re not going to make it up on car loans.

I do wish, though, that Jeff hadn’t said two things that he did. The first being that mobile payments will be the dominant form of payments in five years. I’m willing to bet a LOT OF MONEY that that won’t be the case. In the past 15 years, I’ve NEVER been wrong underestimating the rate of technology adoption.

Second, I’d argue with Jeff regarding his view that free checking is dead. Free checking isn’t — or shouldn’t be — dead, and for two reasons. First of all, unlike Jeff said, debit interchange doesn’t fund free checking accounts. Free checking accounts have been around for a lot longer than the increase in debit card activity.

The advent of free checking was born out of the the belief that getting someone’s checking account was the steppingstone to getting more of their financial accounts. If that belief is true — and it’s certainly a discussion for argument, since so few financial institutions have done a good job of successfully cross-selling — then a cut in debit interchange shouldn’t portend the complete death of free checking.

The other reason why is free checking isn’t dead is because it never really was alive. When we say “free checking” what we’re really saying is “no monthly fee” checking. Tell the people who don’t pay a monthly fee, but pay out hundreds of dollars in overdraft, foreign ATM, and safety deposit box fees that their checking account is “free.” I hope you don’t get punched in the face.

———-

Beyond the presentations themselves, the other thing that makes this conference top-notch is the attendees.

I wonder how it felt for first-time attendees who aren’t tied in to the credit union twittersphere. I wonder if they felt like this was some party they were crashing. I certainly hope not. But the conference really is a gathering for a lot of credit union professionals who actively engage with each other on a daily basis. And of course, some of the attendees have known each other for a long time. Denise Wymore and Janine McBee told me they’ve known each other for….

Oh, hey, did I tell you that I finally met Jimmy Marks in person? I’ve never hugged a man the first time I met him. But I gave Jimmy Marks a hug when I “met” him. (It’s OK, it was one of those male “shoulder bump” hugs). Although I had never met him in person before this week, I’ve been tweeting with him for at least two years. And I “know” him better than I know a lot of my colleagues at work.

It was also a treat to see Rob Rutkowski and Jeff Hardin at the conference. For two reasons: The first, because I had met the both of them at the Forum Symposium in 2007, and hadn’t seen either of them since; and second, because the two of them make me feel like I’m not the only “old” guy at the conference (even though both of them are younger than I am).

Bottom line: Love this conference. Thanks to the CU Water Cooler editors — Carla, Matt, Kelley, William, Gene, Doug, Brent, Christopher — for their time, effort, and brainpower on doing what they do. And huge thanks from me to Tim McAlpine for giving me the opportunity to present and attend the conference.

Is the firm’s actions the right move or the wrong move?

I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what ticks me off: The number of people who blab on and on about how organizations need to innovate and reinvent themselves and make difficult decisions, and about how bigger isn’t better yada yada yada — and then turn around and blast Netflix for its recent decisions.

Isn’t Netflix doing exactly what many of these people have been advocating ever since they appointed themselves business strategy experts?

These people are nothing but Netflixocrites.

If you have canceled your Netflix subscription, I’ve good news for you: Your decision isn’t a proof point that Netflix made a bad decision.

1. Increased value for AdWords ads.
2. The power of the coupon just got better.
3. Further diversification of revenue streams.
4. Data.
5. Android and Chrome usage increases.

My take: Don’t hold your breath waiting for Google to become (or launch) a bank. It isn’t going to happen. Here’s why:

1. It’s not where the money is. The prospects for mobile payments is certainly bright. But the question that remains to be answered is: Who’s going to make money from these payments? If you, your bank, or anyone else thinks that consumers will pay a fee or a premium for the “privilege” to make a mobile payment, you (and they) are sorely mistaken. Banks’ ability to make money from transactions — mobile or not — has seen its ups and down in the past few years (up on credit cards, then down on credit cards, up on debit cards, then down on debit cards). Retail banking is simply NOT “where the money is.”

2. Nobody in their right mind wants to be regulated to the extent that banks are. For the past few years, regulatory changes have hacked away at banks’ ability to make money. The Card Act, Regulation E, Durbin’s Folly, the list goes on. From a new entrant standpoint, it’s simply too risky and unpredictable to enter the industry. Firms like BankSimple and Movenbank are getting into the industry by either leveraging other firms’ bank charters or by avoiding the need for one altogether.

3. They don’t have the support infrastructure. Google isn’t a B2C company, it’s a B2B company. It has no competency — let alone capability — to provide transactional customer support. So I hear you say,”but they’ll outsource that.” No, they won’t. Outsourcing a critical business function doesn’t absolve you of the need to know how to manage and integrate that function into your business

4. It doesn’t fit with the firm’s business model. Even if you argue my three previous points away, the most important reason why Google won’t become a bank is that it just doesn’t fit with its strategy and business model. Google’s strategy and business model is unique and ambitious: It aims to be the center of the universe in INFLUENCE.

Why did Google acquired Zagat? To influence your choice of restaurants. Why did Google launched Google Advisor? To influence your choice of banks.

Google doesn’t want to process mobile transactions, open bank accounts, and deal with your stupid little banking questions.Google wants to influence who you do business with. And not just in banking and financial services, but everywhere.

When Google is influencing all of your day to day decisions, then every provider in the world will be kissing Google’s shiny black boots looking to participate. And THAT’S how Google will make money. Not by becoming a bank.

]]> https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/why-google-wont-become-a-bank/feed/ 11 4691 rshevlin https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/improving-bank-customer-retention/ https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/improving-bank-customer-retention/#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:23:01 +0000 http://marketingteaparty.com/?p=4694 Continue reading →]]> Market research firm Yoosless Phuqing Research released the results of a study today, revealing important insights into improving bank customer retention.

According to the study, bank customers who turn right into parking spots in a bank’s parking lot have a 7% higher retention rate than left-turning customers. According to the firm’s founder and CEO, Aimso Yoosless:

“Just 18% of right-turning customers switched banks last year. In contrast, 23% of left-turning customers switched. Clearly, a quality parking experience creates greater customer retention than quality online banking or direct deposit services.”

First National Bank of Boar Tush (Alabama) has already acted on these findings by closing off left-side parking spots:

According to the banks’s SVP of Revenue, William Dumass: “By closing off half the parking lot, we expect to increase our overall retention rate by 2.5%, which translates to roughly $500,000 in annual profits. The ROI on this effort is huge.”

———-

If you’re wondering what motivated this blog post, it was an article titled Banks Ignore Customers, Waver on Mobile Engagement that reported the following:

“While only 13% of banking customers currently use mobile engagement, a recent survey of revealed that a quality mobile banking experience creates greater customer retention than quality online banking or direct deposit services. A financial services strategy consulting and research firm conducted a recent study showing that only 5% of [consumers] using mobile banking and payment services switched bands in the previous year. With no true standout bank in the mobile banking arena, the bank that drives innovation in the mobile field stands to gain a large advantage.”

[Note: The above is a cut and paste with some rearranging going on. I’ll assume the author meant “bank” and not “band.”]

It would be easy to chalk this up to a misunderstanding of causation versus correlation. But that doesn’t capture it in every case.

On the contrary, in a number of–if not many–cases, it’s a factor of the author’s desire to make a statement about innovation, technology, or maybe to be seen as a thought leader. The research simply gives the author the opportunity to reiterate something that they already believed.

Ironically, I’m  a big believer that the mobile channel will be a strong differentiator. But the business case won’t be justified by some simplistic impact on customer retention.

The retention argument has been used with every online technology that’s been introduced over the past 15 years: online banking, online bill pay, eStatements, PFM, etc.

At this point in the development of online banking technology, banks’ retention rate should be approaching 800%.

]]> https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/improving-bank-customer-retention/feed/ 2 4694 rshevlin https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/why-proponents-of-klout-are-missing-the-big-picture/ https://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/why-proponents-of-klout-are-missing-the-big-picture/#comments Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:54:30 +0000 http://marketingteaparty.com/?p=4679 Continue reading →]]> Jay Baer wrote a blog post titled Why Critics of Klout Are Missing the Big Picture in which he argues that  “influence measures help business create order from chaos.” Baer goes on to write:

“What’s important is to recognize that more and more and more and more of our behaviors occur online and often with the social media realm. And if companies are going to succeed in a chaotic, real-time environment, they need some mechanism – even a flawed one – to triage promotion and reaction. So yeah, Klout isn’t perfect. But instead of rehashing the same old “look how screwed up their formula is” argument, let’s focus instead on how advanced metrics will enable companies to deliver highly specific interactions with customers based on perceived influence.”

My take: Baer makes a good and valid point. But I think Baer and I might disagree on what the “big picture” is.

Baer’s definition of big picture  seems to be “making sense of chaos.” My notion of the big picture is “making the right decisions.”

And, using my definition, what I see are marketers making questionable business decisions based on people’s Klout score.

The best example I can give you to demonstrate this is the bank that’s reserving the best spots in its parking lots for its customers with a high Klout score.

Let me state this is no uncertain terms, and aim it directly at the bank with which I do business:

If you reserve the best spots in your parking lot for some pimply-faced 25 year old (who spends too much time on Facebook and Twitter and has somehow managed to get himself a high Klout score) instead of for me, then I’m pulling my millions out of your bank.

If you think I’m kidding, try me. And I’ll also pull my kids’ accounts (they’re Gen Yers, btw — not little kids), too.  THEN you’ll learn who has INFLUENCE. And when dear-old Mom and Dad (who turns 80 this year!), ask me to take over the day-to-day management of their finances, their money is getting pulled out of your bank, as well. THEN AGAIN you’ll learn who has INFLUENCE.

All because you made the bad decision to reward one group of customers over another.

Bottom line: The purpose of a business metric isn’t just making sense out of chaos — it’s taking action. And unless your customer base is made up of just heavy social media users, then making decisions on what to do based on Klout scores may lead to sub-optimal decisions. 

62% of adults prefer to use the online channel to do their banking — up from 36 percent in last year’s survey. And for the first time, the majority (57%) of customers 55 and older say they opt to do their banking online, a significant increase from 20% in 2010. The popularity of all other banking methods has declined since last year’s survey, with preference for branches dropping from 25% to 20% and preference for ATMs dropping from 15%to 8%. The least preferred method of banking was the mobile channel, which dropped from 3% in 2011 to 1% this year.

My take: I have three reactions to these findings:

1.  The shift is too dramatic. I’ve been doing consumer research in the financial services industry for most of the past 12 years — looking at the adoption of online banking, online bill pay, account aggregation, eStatements, PFM, etc. — and I have never seen, year over the year, the kind of change reported by the ABA. 

From 2010 to 2011, the percentage of 55+ year-old consumers that prefer to bank online nearly tripled from 20% to 57%. Why? What the hell happened between last year and this year that suddenly made Boomers wake up to the benefits of online banking?

Even the shift among all adults — from26% to 62% — is huge, but it’s hard to tell how much of that shift is being influenced by the 55+ segment (it shouldn’t be too much if the sample is representative). Did Gen Yers wake up one morning and discover online banking? And are you trying to tell me that a significant percentage of them shifted their preference from the branch and ATM? No way.  

2. We need to ask more specific questions. Whatever the reason for the tectonic shifts in preferences, the results of the study convince me that we researchers need to get a little more specific when asking about channel preferences. Specifically, we need to ask about channel preferences for specific types of interactions and transactions. Eight percent of consumers might say that they prefer to bank by ATM, but the reality is that they can’t do everything they need to (potentially) do with a bank through the ATM. 

3. The mobile number is out of whack. If asked, before I saw the results, to guess what percentage preferred the mobile channel, my guess would have been a lot higher than 1%. I would have guessed that it would have doubled from 3% to 6%. That number might seem to low to you, but keep in mind that only about 15% of US adults are using mobile banking. So 6% of 15% would mean that 4 out of 10 mobile bankers prefer the mobile channel to all others.  But the percentage didn’t double — in fact, it dropped. Very counter-intuitive.

In an article titled Mobile and social to emerge as power channels for banking, Finextra recently wrote:

“Social networking is becoming more popular, with 57% of adult Internet users [in the UK] using online social networks in 2011, up from 43% in 2010. The UK data is in line with international trends. A just-published survey of 12,000+ Canadian consumers issued by JD Power & Associates finds social media emerging as an increasingly important alternative to traditional retail banking channels. More than 60% of retail banking customers responding to the poll say they use social media. Among customers who use social media for banking purposes, 24% indicate they use it to discuss their banking experience or inform their bank of a customer service issue.”

First off, the last sentence is completely misleading. Sixty percent may be using social media, but that doesn’t mean that all use if for banking purposes. So when the last sentence says that “among those who use SM for banking purposes,” we have no idea how many that actually is.

If it’s 10% of the 60%, then 24% of that means that only 1.5% of Canadians use social media to discuss their banking experiences or for service issues. Ooooh….1.5%!

More importantly, however, is the false logic behind the claims. Just because a large percentage of people use a technology doesn’t make that technology relevant to all applications. 

Using the logic from Finextra (yes, I’m singling them out, but let’s get real — they’re hardly the only ones singing this tune), the following would be true:

McDonald’s to become “power” channel for banking!

Everyday, 27 million Americans — nearly 10% of the total population — visit a McDonald’s location. And that number is growing by 1 million every year. Over the course of the year, on average, Americans visit McDonald’s 33 times! Among Americans who visit McDonald’s, 99.9% make a payment (some just use the restroom) while they’re there. 

But wait, you say, the two examples aren’t analogous. After all, banks can’t take a customer service question at a McDonald’s.

True enough, but they can leverage McDonald’s to influence consumers’ choice of payment mechanisms (and you better believe that, as a result of the recent interchange regulations, this is going to happen a lot more frequently).  And with 27 million Americans visiting McDonald’s every day (and making a payment there every day) which channel — social media or McDonald’s — is more likely to emerge as “an increasingly important alternative to traditional [marketing] channels”?

I’m not arguing that social media isn’t important. Just trying to bring a little perspective to the situation. And trying — probably in vain — to turn down the volume a notch or two on the social media hype.

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