neil woodcock’s marketing blog

As social media is all about customers, here’s our definition put in customer terms. SCRM is how we…

Listen to what you and others have to say about our brands and service

Help you engage with us, whenever you need to, wherever you are, in ways that are convenient to you

Provide you with the personal experience you [...]

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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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Leaders in large organisations are influenced both by the actual business performance of their organisations and how they think investors will react to strategies.  They tend to like change projects with high or quick returns – preferably both. They particularly like those that reduce costs and increase efficiencies.  They like projects that will increase customer [...]

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Now is the time to take behavioural economics more seriously. Surely the recent financial market collapse is another nail in the coffin of traditional economics, where rational self interest is the primary motivation that is considered. Behavioural economics, the combination of economics, sociology and psychology will prove much more capable of explaining and predicting economic [...]

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It’s more than just customer numbers, churn rates and satisfaction
Following on from my previous blog about ‘The case for Customer Management has never been stronger’, I’ve been asked to provide details on the comment I made about headline customer metrics being misleading. Here goes: Suppose you were going to invest $100,000 in a company. Would [...]

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Short-term earnings vs. long term sustainability

CEOs know there is an uncomfortable relationship between the need for short-term returns, to appease the demands of shareholders, and the requirement for long-term investment and sustainability. When we first wrote about this in 2002, we learned from the Enron, Worldcom and Equitable Life scandals that the balance sheet can [...]

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Are there any positives emanating from the turmoil and uncertainty in the financial markets at the moment?  Well one thing is certain; like it or not low growth and downward pressure on prices and margins will be the norm for the next 6-18 months! But there is a positive in this  – the environment provides [...]

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