A long hard look at the brands we perhaps admire

The motivators behind choosing a brand over an independent, non-name or unknown brand can be complicated.

Memory shortcuts help with faster decision-making and brand recognition often becomes the favoured choice with distinguishable international brands satisfying demand expectations. This, it is felt, may explain international brand market dominance.

Four consumption values are cited as also driving consumer purchase behaviour – emotional, social, quality/performance and price/value for money. While local brands can create a brand value system that is more personal and cultural, more importantly, there is evidence that community support for local brands supports, stimulates and revitalises local economies as evidenced by the closure of many Australian Starbucks with Australians continuing to remain loyal to local brand Gloria Jeans.

Luxury brands are sometimes positioned in a manner associating them with snobbery, wearers or holders see possession of luxury items as elevating them above lower status professions. Yet, consumers associate luxury goods with both accomplishment and snobbery. The accomplishment was found to be more motivating in creating consumer desire.

Though luxury manifests differently in each consumer, each with their own sentiments and rationale for making the choices they make, a brand and its reputation is built on a shared understanding of what it represents and paying a premium suggests that the buyer will gain something special.

While the product itself is important, no doubt, how your business communicates and presents to customers is also important. Doing this successfully is best achieved with an intimate knowledge and understanding of the customer, their preferences and interests.

Just as your customers should trust your product and brand, your staff and your customers should also be able to trust the data that you hold. A CMDM is secure and unambiguous in relation to all other systems in your landscape and over time trust in the customer data that is held, will become a key competitive differentiator.

The way you collect and use the personal data you have of your customers will affect customers’ trust levels in your brand, whether it is a luxury brand or not.

Contact Pretectum today to learn how you can centralize, control and secure the customer data you have for your brand.

Getting Started with Customer Data

Systems that lack simple and effective data import capabilities lead to software customer frustrations and the potential of a failed renewal for the software license could be the result.

Many companies waste precious time and resources having teams format the ubiquitous spreadsheet to resolve errors, fix validation problems, and generally wrangle and munge data in pursuit of simply trying to import their data. The limitations of spreadsheets are pretty well known around the globe. this is a poor option for data prep and migration and should ideally be avoided.

Pretectum C-MDM has a solution for all of this.

Once you have defined the schema for your customer master data, the next step is populating the underlying structure(s) with data from your files or spreadsheets. In some instances, you can even connect the platform directly to a database or cloud store and import, verify and validate the data directly.

Once you have sifted through the records, found the duplicates and resolved them, you can choose to export the data with a revised structure to a number of file formats or you can connect the platform directly to your cloud application or database and push one or more records for the update.

Consumer Loyalty and Customer Master Data

53% of consumers stated that they abandoned at least one loyalty program within the last year which means businesses are putting money and energy into strategies that aren’t being successful. The main reasons vary, from a lack of reward relevance, flexibility, and value (44%) through a lack of a seamless multi-channel experience (33%) to customer service issues (17%).

Pretectum feels that one of the ways to mitigate some of the aspects of customer service and multi-channel interaction is through the convergence on a single-source-of-truth in relation to the customer master. If your sales, service, support and loyalty programs are all reading from the same song-sheet, a centralized customer master data hub, then the ability to service the same message consistently and coherently are greatly improved. This in turn leads to a greater likelihood of retention.