Marketing as opportunity – investing for growth

Marketing and communications professional Anne Korkiakoski is leading a program for raising the profile of marketing in Finland. Within the state of economic downturn, layoffs, budget cuts – marketing can provide a positive alternative. Marketing can be a driver for improved revenue – and even a source of growth for the whole Finnish economy. No wonder Anne has this year been a guest speaker at more than 50 events, including economic forums (not only for marketeers but for business leaders). Looking at Swedish brands success we could state that investing smart in building brands makes sense.

We are currently in a phase where every penny counts and organisations are asked to “be careful” with investments and “look for where to cut costs”. True – profitability is result of both progress of top line sales, as well as spending. However instead of general cautiousness, wouldn’t it make sense to look into where investment does make sense? What is the key business area or customer group, where we need to put our resources – sales, marketing, services, operations – to make most of the opportunities available. This is where we come back to capabilities of intelligence and analyzing the customer base, being able to draw conclusions where the company has most potential. Therefore let´s be careful with spending but let´s also invest where it is essential.

I was recently asked why we need to find out fact based return calculations and sharp KPIs for both strategic and operative marketing actions – isn’t it evident that we need to invest in marketing and that everybody understands the need for promoting our excellence. No. In the daily business cost cutting is close to a standard and strong requirements for improved profitability make every penny count. Marketing is not only striving for its existence, it is competing against other investments – such as product development, sales force, digital customer services and competence development.

Thus, it is essential to improve the commercial capabilities of the whole organization to ensure marketing is not only seen and conducted as a “function” – but marketing is an essential part of every customer interaction and that every person in the customer interface is looking into further opportunities in either serving the customer better or considering how to add more value. Marketing can have a strategic role, including wide customer focused and commercial capabilities, and therefore is a true investment opportunity for any company´s growth.

Involving employees for a great brand

Sometimes it feels organisations spend more time on internal processes, "getting organized" and clarifying the way of working rather than focusing on understanding where they are with customers. Getting organized is even done before the strategy is clear, which is odd - shouldn't one know where to focus before putting resources in place.

In a service organization it is however vital that the employees are engaged in a meaningful way in understanding their role to form a unified chain of service activities. How the customer experiences the company contributes to the brand. The brand is an image and a perception - and based on various associations the customers have with the company. All employees contribute. Thus a clear brand destination should be defined.

The book Bulkista brändiksi ("From bulk to a brand") by Kahri, Kahri, Mäkinen and Ahto, states that the employees of a service organization have a vital role in producing a customer experience. The changes in the way of working of a company have to be based on involving employees. What the employees do and how they perform has a direct impact to the brand value of the company. Management has to make sure that employees have understood the company mission, values, vision and objectives based on the strategy. All of this has to be simple enough that personnel desires and strives at acting in new ways required.

Brand brings a strong customer point of view to the organization via how the company wants to be perceived and be positioned - and gives a soul to its operations. The brand should be reflected in services, design, all customer interactions, how the employees behave and how the company communicates with its customers and stakeholders.

In order to build a strong brand, employees should be engaged to clarify:
* strategy and key focus areas - what and whom to focus on
* vision - what kind of company do we want to be in the long term
* mission - what is our role
* customer promise - what do we promise for our customers that makes us unique
* brand - how we want to be perceived by our customers and how we should behave.

Numerous lists of things may not be memorable to understand what the company stands for. Rather, examples of way of working - in good and bad - and celebrating the positive successes. A company that strives at being more open, innovative and collaborative towards new stakeholders succeeds in running an international level innovation contest, which is building excitement internally and externally. A company that focuses on safety renews its tools and processes - and decreases number of injuries. A company that desires to be faster and more flexible introduces a service promise that includes given quotation and delivery times. Performing any such activities requires that employees plan, implement and follow up to influence the service activities to customers - and the brand.

Digital customer experience... is not a channel

Working on digital customer experience does not mean looking into how the company is present at various communications channels and pushes information towards the customer. Presence in multiple social media channels does not improve the interaction with the customer more than any other channel unless it truly matches with what the customer is looking for, adds value and is available when needed.

Digitizing customer experience is a customer journey experience that happens across all stages of customer relationship - even before customer is a customer - and engages with the customer when and where needed within numerous digital platforms not limited to communications.

Products and services should generate value throughout the customer journey when provided in digital environments. Often digitizing a product or a service provides more value to the customer via better data, analysis of it and recommendations made based on the analysis.

Digital service experiences that matches customer needs should be planned from customer point of view. These could include eg online services, chat functions, mobile services, and should be available when needed and within platforms preferred by the customer.

Customer communications should take into consideration relationship building before, during and after purchase, and help in choice and decision making, guiding the customer towards final sale. Nowdays customers are more knowledgeable of products and services when they approach the service provider, which changes the focus in communications towards communicating benefits and ensuring ease of purchase.

It could be summarized that digital customer experience is building capabilities within an organization to create way of working with customer, as well as building a way of working internally.

Overall, customer experience generates a brand experience - how the customer interacts with the brand throughout everything she or he does and ultimately builds an image with impact to reputation of the service provider.

Key building blocks thus of planning a digital customer experience may consist of:
- customer understanding - from various viewpoints that guide the generation of services, offering, customer management and delivery capabilities
- interactions throughout customer journey in various digital platforms including products and services
- tools, processes, platforms that support the customer experience
- culture of customer centricity to make sure every individual and every function of the organization generate their share of the experience towards common goals
- and finally follow-up with customer whether services support her or him and in some cases providing opportunities for co-creation or more individual services.

Planning a meaningful customer experience

Organisations are today increasingly working on customer experience management in order to generate a coherent approach towards their customers. Why? Because we live in the economy where profitability is based on evaluation of every investment and growth with clear differentiating factors is a must. Customers may no longer be only looking for a product or a delivery. They are looking for what serves them best. It makes sense to focus on customer understanding, in order to know where to focus, and provide relevant processes, services, delivery approaches, communications and pricing options to support the customers requirements and needs.

Customer understanding is at the heart of meaningful customer experience.
In a service organization, the success lies on the internal capabilities and skills of the employees. Service is created or delivered by people. Thus, it is important that the organization has support, motivation and an organizational culture that enhances better customer understanding and its use. Where to get started? Customer understanding may comprise of various elements. Starting from industry understanding - what are the drivers of the industry, what impacts the companies and what are the trends and technologies driving businesses forward. Looking more inside the customer organisations, it is important to understand customer needs, customer purchase processes and customer strategies. An internal perspective is to acknowledge what is the value of the customer, and what is their supplier strategy. Regardless of the perspective, what makes a difference is how to use the customer understanding in daily operations and for longer term development. Different functions may make more sense from different models.

Lets take customer needs and purchase behaviours - which may give most input for offering development - how to package and price a product or a service. Knowing what the customer requires is the basis for meaningful offering and value proposition. Taking customer value, may be relevant for planning prioritization models and how to resource customer management.

A logical view to customers lifecycle operations is definition of customer journey. And taken it from customer point of view. Finding meaningful steps to keep focus can help identify strengths and weaknesses how the customer is faced throughout the business or relationship.

The models are many. Some companies start from one, initiate learning and gradually get additional viewpoints. Where customer understanding may be at its best when all customer viewpoints come together to form a coherent customer experience. This may mean that company chooses to focus on its most valuable and potential customers, and is able to build services and products, delivered in an optimal way to these customer groups to become win-win situation. Operations must be profitable for all parties. Therefore companies face the pain taking decisions where to focus and also what not to do.

Evolution of the Finnish library system – considerations on the impact and benefits

The mission stated by the British library towards 2020 is “Advancing the world´s knowledge”. Talking about setting the ambitions high enough in regards to public services.

Looking at the transformation of the Finnish library, a strategy towards 2016 exists similarly with set objectives and mission. From the strategy it can be learnt that the strategic goal of the library is to generate a meeting spot for people and ideas ie to energise, inspire and surprise. Overall, the strategy outline looks well thought of including the mission which I guess few people would really doubt: “To enhance equal opportunities for people towards civilization, literature and art, and develop skills for information, globalization, civil preparedness and lifelong learning. The objective is also to enhance interactive and virtual services and their cultural contents”.

Some good examples of implementing the strategy exist. Libraries have transformed from borrowing books only to open living rooms for education, entertainment and social sharing. While the library is closed, you may access the premises with your own key. “Night at the library for toys” was organized in Helsinki to help children manage the fear of being without parents for a sleep-over. The new central library to be opened in Helsinki is estimated to attract 10.000 visitors a day. That means more than one million visits per year.

All this sounds great and nobody can argue the digitalization of information as one of the key building blocks. The future age classes will be utilizing more of the virtual services and are used to accessing all information virtually.  

What is then the impact of the strategy and are Finnish citizens getting value for their tax money with the transformation? I tried to find some key statistics to support the strategy. Based on information I found, it may be too early for the evaluation.

According to Tilastokeskus, Finnish Statistics, the cost of the whole library system during 2004-2014 has increased by 32%. Also the cost per capita has increased.  During the same time period, number of physical visits has decreased significantly from 67 million to 50 million. However there seem to be big variations between locations, since some libraries are experiencing clear growth in both visitor rates and number of books lent. The number of web visits has varied somewhat but overall the level has remained the same. Also the number of borrowed books has decreased.

Where are the positive measures from the development and what is really the impact of all these changes? Based on an analysis by Heikkinen, Laitinen, Lappalainen, Parikka, Rasinkangas, Saarti, Söderholm, Suikkanen and Vainikka, there seem to be good key measures for the library including impact scores like benefits to the user, influence of the library within the society and studying efficiency. However I cannot find in the strategy documents what is the current situation and where are the improvements made so far. Is some business thinking needed?

It is clear our public service needs to evolve towards the needs of future generations for whom “digital” and access to data is what paper has been to us. One key question is what is the success factor that determines the return of investment and what to focus on. Coming back to British library and its future plans including their strategic priorities, it looks as if they have started from the right end – looking into key user needs and trends for the future. If our library system is anywhere within this path, I trust our tax money goes to right direction. However, seeing is believing, in the most positive sense, and appreciating the service I am given.