Best Practice: Consumers

Summary
The number of customers who are prepared to complain is rising. Effective complaint handling can drive business improvement, improve internal communications and increase operational efficiency. And handling complaints well is one way of ensuring customer loyalty. However, only around 50% of complainants report a satisfactory resolution to their problem. This article looks at why complaints might be badly handled by an organisation and proposes ways to improve customer relations. Dell and Ryanair are among the brands identified as providing poor customer service while American Express and Cathay Pacific are some of the brands identified as getting it right.

Summary
CRM matters more in some organisations than in others. The industries where it is most dominant are: financial services, utilities, retail and travel and leisure. This article outlines ten things that need to be tackled, which include integration with data, process, communications, structure and metrics and improving conversation quality with individualisation, customer centricity, dynamic interaction, customer selectivity and peer-to-peer facilitation.

Summary
Advertising, buying and a low cost base are all vital in attracting shoppers, but in today's aggressive retail environment, a strong positioning on customer experience can make the difference between success or failure. Cranfield School of Management identifies six facets of great experience: responsiveness; assurance; empathy; reliability, tangibles and multichannel integration. Insight is the key to a great retail experience and the experience should be aligned with the brand promise.

Summary
A lack of extensive resources within means that charity marketers have always had to look outside of their organisations to achieve their aims. They have to be able to attract supporters to a cause and marshall volunteers to help them. They have taken this social competency into the space where they have provided many significant successes in social media marketing. In these times of budget constraints, there is much to learn from charities about how to market your brand when the financial pressure is on.

Summary
When making an offer to your customers, make sure they are worth it over the length of the offer and won't end up costing your company a lot of profit. The most powerful metric that the board can use to measure marketing effectiveness is customer profitability, in particular, potential profitability, or customer lifetime value. Many companies are alarmed to discover that some customers cost them money, not just in the current period but as far forward as they can see.

Summary
This paper discusses advertising to women and the female audience. The following points are highlighted: the position of women in society has changed profoundly in recent years, men and women have statistically different cognitive styles, and different female cohorts respond to ads in very different ways. Generally, advertisers are advised to avoid gender stereotypes in their campaign creative. The way in which women consume media and the styles of advertising most likely to attract them are discussed. The paper also includes a list of related articles and case studies available on Warc.

Summary
Brand loyalty is a commonly-used marketing term which is not precisely defined or understood. Company after company has begun to focus on retaining existing customers as much as, if not more than, on gaining new ones. Customers need something to be loyal to; something with which they can create an emotional bond. That something is the brand. There is evidence that people can become loyal to product, corporate, service and consumer brands. In this context, that means choosing the use of one brand above others, sometimes with little explicit thought about how or why. This is often an unconscious emotional choice by the customer, which is enormously profitable for the supplier. Yet there are degrees of loyalty toward a brand. They range from "brand preference" and "brand response" to "brand engagement" and "brand advocacy". Each needs to be understood and explicitly nurtured in different ways.

Summary
This paper discusses advertising to men and the male audience. The following points are highlighted: there is little published data on understanding the male market, men and women have statistically different cognitive styles, men absorb ads differently and men approach shopping in a distinctive way. The changes in men's roles is discussed with traditional role models having lost their potency, but the so-called 'new man' remains elusive. There are a limited number of products where men are the major target audience and these are diminishing. The way in which men consume media and the styles of advertising most likely to attract them are discussed. The paper includes a list of related articles and case studies available on Warc

Summary
Discusses the over-50s audience, which tend to be under-recognised as a target audience by advertisers, considering their increasing numbers (as a proportion of the consumer marketplace), their comparative affluence, and their - contrary to stereotype - lack of brand loyalty. The paper suggests that the young nature of the advertising industry has contributed towards the neglect of the over-50s, but offers advice on the type and style of ads which have proved sucessful, as well as the media in which to place them. Like all papers in the Warc Best Practice Series, it includes a list of related papers, including case studies and articles, for further reading.

Summary
Provides an overview of the complex and ever-changing youth market, including latest trends in researching the young consumer, and youth tribes. The paper also discusses putting together a creative strategy and media plan for a youth-oriented campaign, and includes several recent case studies of successful campaigns of this kind. It also includes a list of related articles and items for further reading available on Warc.