Your Business Is Irrelevant And IT Wants To Help
Written by Todd L. MichaudMarch 25th, 2010
About 98 percent of all retailers are irrelevant. In the world of Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud, it's about restaurants. And in today's over-marketed hyper-competitive environment, it all comes down to the "moment of truth"--when the thought "I'm hungry, where should I go to lunch?" enters a consumer's mind. If your brand is not relevant at that very instant, then you will not get the sale.
Long before the term customer relationship management was bastardized to secretly mean salesforce automation, many companies had the vision of an IT system that would help them manage and maximize the relationship they have with their customers. The idea of being relevant is a complex equation that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Because no one really knows the secret formula to being relevant, Michaud's goal as an IT leader is to create systems that will help his business partners answer questions they don't yet know to ask.
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2 Comments | Read Your Business Is Irrelevant And IT Wants To Help
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-Christine
March 25th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
One way to increase the chance that a buyer thinks of your brand in that brief in-market moment is to build a connection in the buyer’s mind between your brand and the buyer’s friends. In other words — any chance you get, point out to a customer which of their friends shop your brand, and when that customer is ready to buy, they’ll think of you first. You’re already trying to associate your brand with other things that motivate the buyer; beauty, health, a good time, efficiency… “Your friends buy this brand” may be the most powerful association you can create of all.
March 26th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
I am a big fan of social media and have spent a lot of time walking storefronts and brands in an effort to bring them, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century.
Just kidding.
Many initiatives you describe seem relatively straightforward, but as always, the devil is in the details.
For example, how do you define “light” users on Twitter? Do you eliminate people that are “obviously” spammy? Do you include people that have just started? And which Twitter account are you talking about – the corporate account, or the accounts for individual locations? The answers to these questions are significant, echoing hygiene and maintenance issues that have bedeviled smaller organizations for years.
The challenge isn’t tweeting a deal – the challenge is how to use the technology so it works in a sustainable fashion. Many of us senior managers started working when email was still new. Instead of fulfilling the promise of “less effort than normal correspondence”, instead it has become a drudgery that occupies hours of time on an ongoing basis.
Do we want to repeat this same type of workload for every social media platform we adopt? For many organizations, the answer is clearly ‘no’. The benefits are clearly there – but it is up to corporate intrapreneurs to do a better job of demonstrating how this unfolds.
(BTW, so you know I’m not just a dour curmudgeon, I’ve been helping Altimeter strategist Jeremiah Owyang manage a list of corporate social media strategists.)