neil woodcock’s marketing blog

Much has been written about social media and its rising importance in engaging customers. A consumer’s engagement with a brand can be measured along a continuum – from no awareness, through to early engagement and maybe, if you’re lucky (and clever), onto advocacy. Like any relationship, the strength of feeling will develop and vary over [...]

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How refreshing to have a leader leading from the front and setting the vision for his brand team. In an interview with Advertising Age in April 2010, P&G Chairman-CEO Bob McDonald said that what made P&G successful in the past will not make them successful in the future. He wants to avoid the trap of [...]

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Marketers are working in exciting times.  Never before have we been able to get so close to our customers and engage with them in such a timely and relevant manner.  Harnessed with customer relationship management (CRM), Social Media can deliver financial benefits to companies no matter what sector.  The benefits are centred around increasing ‘customer [...]

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Research shows the relationship between consumer engagement and value to the brand is fundamental to understanding brand health. It shows that for almost all brands, leadership is achieved by winning emotional commitment (adorers) from a small % of the brand community, the high value consumers (HVCs). Small changes in the way these HVCs are managed [...]

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I was shown a very clever website by a colleague the other day which takes a section of text (or an RSS feed) and converts it into what the site calls a “word cloud” with the words appearing the most in the text being the largest in the cloud . I tried this on this blog [...]

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The moment you have attracted new interest from a potential customer, their journey with you has begun.  Have you thought carefully enough about what you would like customers to feel and do at each stage of their journey with you? For instance, what have you, and other functions, got to do and what way do [...]

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For by far the majority of brands, the unequivocal answer to this question is…NO. At least, not yet.

Results of recent campaigns, some of which are public knowledge and some of which are not, are clear. On-line advertising on social media networks, in terms of product sales, does not return revenues of any significance to large [...]

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The * Pret A Manger * feedback prompt (below) works for me!  Why? Because it’s all the things that a feedback prompt should be; personal, easy, fun, clear, quick to use (and implement, which is vital)  – and it seems sincere. Only problem, I’d like to see a phone number on there for those people [...]

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Does the public sector need engaged or committed Customers?
In the private sector, this question is easy to answer. Committed customers stay ‘loyal’ to your brand, preferring to seek out and buy your products rather than those from your competitors. Also, they may trust your brand enough to be tempted into buying products from you in [...]

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