GoodBuzz Blog

Play Marketing – Advertising that Respects People

Jun
8

By

We need You. We Want YOU to Lead US.

Category: Business Strategy, Conversation, customer relationship, leadership, Linkcrafter, Winner Choice Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

When we’ve started Linkcrafter we’ve asked ourselves  “Why 90% of the Internet traffic goes to ONLY 5% of websites”. We’ve discovered that:

  • 7 of the top 10 web properties are search engines
  • 22 of the top 50 web properties are search engines and web directories.

Browse and search have become the most time-consuming and frustrating activity for consumers.

People are looking for trustful and relevant information to reach the best services, companies and products that could satisfy their needs. 90% of the traffic goes to these websites because they are trying hard to help people solve this problem.

What will happen if you become a resources center or a knowledgeable friend for your customers?

You become a Traffic magnet.You are a knowledgeable professional. You Know a lot and Now  We need You. We Want YOU to Lead US.

According to a 2004 Forum Corporation study on cross selling, 88 percent of customers with spending power welcomed product and service suggestions that help them. The same is true in the B2B world—clients prize sales professionals who empathetically understand their business and make suggestions on how to improve it.

Linkcrafter helps companies and businesses to become solution providers for their customers through real-time interaction and involvement in their customer’s solution-hunting process.

Instead of giving Planners, calendars, T-shirts, Mugs, Foie Gras,  coupons, or other material or monetary gifts to customers as incentive to build relationship – most of these incentives fail to build loyalty - Linkcrafter solution helps you provide Information as a gift ™ to your customers.

What is information as a Gift ™?

“Information as a gift ™” means to pay attention to your customers’ and contacts needs and interests for products and services other than your own, and give them relevant and trustful information to help them reach good services providers.

Since one company alone can no longer autonomously create consumer experience, Linkcrafter members pay attention to their customers’ and contacts needs and interests for products and services other than their own, and send their customers to other business for Free as a powerful way to build loyalty and Growth.

You become known as a powerful resource for others—and when you have the reputation for being a strong resource, people start turning to you for suggestions, ideas, names of other people, connections, etc. This keeps you visible and your business top-of-mind when people need your products and services. This, in turn, will greatly increase the number of referrals your customers will send to your business.

You don’t need Money to start. Information, Recommendation are intangible things you can give again, again and again without being left broke.

“Information as a gift ™” has a tremendous power to induce positive emotional connections to customers and contacts. The positive emotional connections in turn has the power to turn customers and contacts into voluntary advocates for your organization, generating a consistent word-of-mouth referrals and a Nonstop Viral Buzz for your business.

How it works?

“Simply go to that address book and list out the 20 percent of your contacts who matter most. Do you know their interests? Their biggest dreams and goals (professional and personal)? If you don’t then that is a place to begin. Once you do, mark down next to each name what specific actions you can take that will help that person realize those goals. What connections can you make for them? What knowledge can you transfer to them? Call them up. No agenda. No ‘asking for the business.’ Just deliver value relevant to them and keep doing it.”

Howard Mann

Is Your Company Still in the Dark Ages?

Most companies aren’t prepared for this new approach to marketing. Companies who co-create customers experiences with other qualified companies will keep themselves far ahead of the competition.

How do you accomplish all of this? We’re not going to lie. It takes a change in mindset.

Business people become super-connectors, people who know a lot of people, and know their interests, skills, and needs of everyone in their social or business circle and connect them together.

Jun
5

By

Send Your Customers to Other Businesses for FREE to Build Loyalty.

Category: Business Strategy, Conversation, customer relationship, Linkcrafter, Winner Choice Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

“What you Say? Send My Customers to Other Businesses for Free as a way to Build Loyalty and grow my business!?”
It sounds like complete folly.
Why would I send my customers away?
It’s very unconventional, but terribly powerful.
And, It’s in this way that Linkcrafter is transforming the marketing landscape, changing the lives of small business owners, freeing millions of entrepreneurs from marketing stress and uncertainty.

Here we go, Instead of giving Planners, calendars, T-shirts, Mugs, coupons, or other material or monetary gifts to customers to build relationship, what in most cases fail to build loyalty, Linkcrafter helps you send your customers safely and securely to other businesses as a powerful way to build Loyalty and grow your business.

Yes, It’s about Sending your Customers to other businesses for FREE as a way to build Loyalty and Growth. And It works.

The old era of egocentric sales pitches never entertained the idea of sending customers to other companies, for any reason. They held on to their customers tooth and nail, even if they didn’t have anything the customer needed at the time.

Companies wanted customers to pay attention to their company, and no one else.

Apparently, no one ever mentioned to those companies that no business is an island.

Customers need more than one company to satisfy their everyday needs and desires. “No company owns enough resources – or can possibly own enough – to furnish unique experiences for every customer,” said C.K.Pralahad in The New Age of Innovation. “Companies must organize a constantly shifting global web of suppliers and partners to do the job.”

A customer experience includes satisfaction in all the customer’s needs for their everyday life. It isn’t enough to sell your customer the microwave oven that person needs. The customer also needs clothes, baby food, music, a good carpet cleaner, a certified massage therapist, and an antique hood ornament.

No company in the world could possibly give a customer every single thing he or she desires.

In short: it takes a village to create a customer experience.

You’ll be recommending companies to your customers that you personally have selected as the best for their needs. You won’t be giving them referrals to professional service and product providers simply because you’ve agreed to – you’ll be giving them the companies that you sincerely believe are the most qualified professionals to meet your customers’ needs.

And your customers will love you for it.

That reputation will buy you customer loyalty and enthusiasm that is impossible to get through any other means.

Linkcrafter marketing solution often sounds too idealistic to companies who have been in the era of the sales pitch too long. Many companies will be thinking, “Spending extra time and resources to help customers with their problems without any request for a sale, without any pitch at all? What’s in it for me?”

The more successful your company is at recommending other companies’ products and services that are relevant to its customer’s lifestyle and needs, the more likely it is that customers will extol the virtues of your company.

Your company gets a reputation for caring about people through this free exchange of information. When a person benefits from information you give them, they become an advocate for you. And the next time they hear someone looking for a service that your company provides, they’ll recommend you – in glowing phrases.

You can’t buy that kind of advertising.

Linkcrafter web based relationship management solution helps you to engage with other qualified companies to co-create customer experiences. You’ll work within a network of partners, all of whom can provide your customers with products and services that are outside of your area of expertise but that are essential to making sure the customer is completely satisfied.

Learn to Co-Create

Through Linkcrafter, you’ll be able to co-create complete experiences for your customers with other companies. You’ll collaborate with these companies to understand exactly what your customers need and how to get it to them.

Your customers will look to you as a resource, a guide, and a trusted ally.

Is Your Company Still in the Dark Ages?

Most companies aren’t prepared for this new approach to marketing. Companies who co-create customers experiences with other qualified companies will keep themselves far ahead of the competition.

How do you accomplish all of this? We’re not going to lie. It takes a change in mindset.

Business people become super-connectors, people who know a lot of people, and know their interests, skills, and needs of everyone in their social or business circle and connect them together.

May
29

By

How Graphic Designer James Dean Use "IRaaS" to Attract Clients.

Category: Business Strategy, Conversation, customer relationship, Linkcrafter, Winner Choice Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

IRaaS is helping Thousands of web-workers (designers, programmers, copywriters, publishers) and freelancers to build a continual referral stream around there business without spending a single Dollar in advertising or wasting precious time in networking websites and events.

James Dean is a graphic designer in Los Angeles. He loves his job and clients. He knows deep down that when a client comes to him for a graphic work it’s because he has a much bigger project. James knows well how difficult is it sometime to find good services providers. So, He is always trying to help, asking his clients about their needs for services other than what he could provide  directly to them. He asks about their business purposes and challenges. In this way, he collects precious information and send his customers to a network of trusted providers.

James send his customers who need website search engine optimization to SEO experts, his customers who need content edition to copywriters, etc.

    The system works the same way for the Seo experts who send his customers to copywriters, copywriters who send their clients to graphic designer and so on.

    When James doesn’t know a contact to refer directly to, he posts his customers needs to the community on Linkcrafter who send him proposals that he reviews and rates before sending them to his customers.

    James uses Linkcrafter as  an utility to build customers relationship, and create bonds that make his customers talk positively about him and his business.

    Besides, James gains reputation inside his business community. James sends his customers to other businesses for Free. He NEVER ASK anything back. The Power of Linkcrafter is in this very simple sentence:  James sends his customers to other businesses for Free, He NEVER ASK anything back.

    Each befriended  customer by “Information as a Gift” becomes James advocate, infecting the world with the narration of his positive experience.

    The more successful your company is at recommending other companies’ products and services that are relevant to your customer’s lifestyle and needs, the more likely it is that your customers will extol the virtues of your company.

    They’ll reward you for it, too.

    Your company gets a reputation for caring about people through this free exchange of information. When a person benefits from information you give them, they become an advocate for you. And the next time they hear someone looking for a service that your company provides, they’ll recommend you – in glowing phrases.

    “Information as a gift ™” has a tremendous power to induce positive emotional connections to customers and contacts. The positive emotional connections in turn has the power to turn customers and contacts into voluntary advocates for your organization, generating a consistent word-of-mouth referrals and a Nonstop Viral Buzz for your business.

    May
    15

    By

    Who are Your Company's Evangelists on Social Medias? And Why?

    Category: Business Strategy, Conversation, customer relationship, Winner Choice Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

    Two kind of people are actively talking about you on the social medias (blogs, twitter, social networks, consumers forums, buyers forums, etc.): Your detractors and Your Promoters.

    There is in fact a third kind of people who are just spectators: your passive satisfied customers. They won’t move their fingers to defend you or write a testimonial about you.

    Social medias are the conversation engine of  today. Most consumers take their buying decision based on the opinion of your Promoters and your Detractors. You need to care about this, because The new economy is based on advocacy. For example, a Mckinsey marketing study found that 2/3 of US economy is now based on advocacy:  Friends telling friends what is hot and what is not.

    Only 14% of people trust advertising, 69% are interested in advertising blocking technologies, and 78% of consumers trust one to one recommendation from friends.

    That’s the reason why the Law of the few in marketing states that 90% of your present customers are brought to you by 10% of your contacts (customers, prospects, friends or strangers) who like you. These people are your  Natural advocates. They are your Friends, your Evangelists.

    Your Detractors and Promoters have one thing in common: they are emotionally engaged in, express appreciation based on personal experience. Ones say “I love them”, Others say “I hate them”.

    Your Promoters are customers, prospects and even strangers who like you and your business. They can’t help but singing to the world nice songs about how great, how magnificent, how terrific you are. They are your advocates.

    Your business flourishes when more than 10% of your customers become advocates; You thrive when 30% turn advocates and you become irresistible when like Apple 78% of customers are your fans, and go beyond advocacy to create Ads for your brand with their own money and resources.

    Frederick F. Reichheld and Thomas Teal found that an increase of 5% of your promoters will yield your profits 25 to 95%.

    You detractors are customers who don’t like you and your business. Contrary to a popular belief, Your detractors are not customers who are not satisfied with your product or service. Marketing research revealed that 68% of customers who defect and become your detractors do because of the way they have been treated by your employees during a transaction or customer service operation.

    They are unhappy because of they way you’ve treated them, and they want the whole world to know how bad you are with your customers.

    You business is stagnant because your Promoters are less than 10% of your customers base. Your business suffers from mixed image and faces marketing struggle because the percentage of your detractors are over the percentage of  your promoters.

    All businesses have detractors, but you need to be careful, and actively take action to limit their number and address their complaints.

    I strongly recommend the following two articles for reading:

    1. The One Number You Need to Grow
    2. Customer Satisfaction and the Success of Your Organization

    May
    13

    By

    The Only 5 Words that matter in Marketing Vocabulary.

    Category: Business Strategy, Conversation, customer relationship, leadership Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

    1. Steal consumers: We live in a “world no longer marked by a shortage of goods but by a shortage of customers”. To have new customers for your product you have to steal them from your direct competition, or you take the money they would have spend with other businesses (indirect competition for the household available money).

    We use steal, because you need to use some advertising tricks or marketing persuasion to induce new customers to switch from competition to you, or to alter their spending habits to include a new product in their portfolio.

    Anytime you’ve attracted a new customer, you’ve taken it from competition. It should not be called “stealing”, but it’s hard for the competition.

    2. Rent consumers: There are 3 ways to rent customers:

    • Huge discount to alter consumers reaction  or Trial products, or trial period,
    • Over promising advertising to motivate new unsavvy customers to try
    • New and short lived products: it’s a customers-rent-based-business strategy that thrive on introducing intentionally short lived products and play on the attractiveness of new product to make small or huge profit.

    Rent-customers-marketing strategy is usually motivated by quick earnings scenarios. Many businesses use it to push their products in order to close some financial gap in their business plan.

    Not all your rent customers will become loyal nor will be satisfied with your product or service, but rent customers is a marketing  strategy worth consideration, for example when you have to go out of business and close the shop.


    3. Keep consumers: it’s the most critical function of marketing in the new economy. It’s not easy. To keep customers you need to keep in touch with them in a meaningful way. It’s this “meaningful way” that’s the most difficult for marketers.

    Most companies don’t know what to do with their customers once the transaction is done. The only thing they know to keep in touch with their customers  is to spam them with selfish advertising, new offers, sales, etc. These are not meaningful ways to keep in contact with your customers. Linkcrafter relationship marketing solutions are dedicated to helping you build long lasting customers loyalty.

    4. Befriend customers: 5% increase in the number of your business friends or advocates will increase 25% to 95% your profits.  And, the Law of the few in marketing states that 90% of your present customers are brought to you by 10% of your contacts (customers, prospects, friends or strangers) who like you. These people are your  Natural advocates. They are your Friends.

    Befriending customers and strangers is the only competitive advantage you could build over competition in the new economy, because the new economy is based on advocacy.

    For example, a Mckinsey marketing study found that 2/3 of US economy is now based on advocacy: Friends telling friends what is hot and what is not. Only 14% of people trust advertising, 69% are interesting in advertising blocking technologies, and 78% of consumers trust one to one recommendation from friends.


    5. Loose consumers: On March 1996, Frederick F. Reichheld and Thomas Teal found that on average, U. S. corporations now lose half their customers in five years. With the powerful emergence of Internet these last 12 years, we can say with confidence that today, most companies lose half their customers in less than 2 years. Not because they don’t innovate, not because they don’t have great product or service, not because they didn’t try to keep their customers with sophisticated CRM systems or loyalty programs.

    In most cases, Customers defection is not related to your company product or service quality. A company with a good product or service could see his customers defect in drove. Customers don’t defect because they are not satisfied with your service or product. So, Don’t take customers defection personally, because it is not related to you, but to the overwhelming fact that, today 98% of businesses are commodity businesses. There is not so much in product  characteristics or service innovation that really distinguish them from each other. They are all exchangeable without any loss in value proposition or value for money.

    Business success or failure in the new economy Shoud be considered as a “relative success” or a “relative failure”.  You just need to try again.

    May
    7

    By

    Customers Satisfaction and Loyalty are not Enough Anymore.

    Category: Business Strategy, customer relationship, Winner Choice Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

    Most of satisfied customers won’t become loyal customers, simply because these customers could find hundreds of other companies or products that could equally or better satisfy their need.

    Most of loyal customers won’t recommend your business, simply because they won’t bother their friends recommending a company they think it’s a personal choice between hundreds of equally good choices around. They respect their friends choice, because they know that there are equally good choices outside there.

    In most cases, Customers defection is not related to your company product or service quality. A company with a good product or service could see his customers defect in drove. Customers don’t defect because they are not satisfied with your service or product.

    So, Don’t take customers defection personally, because it is not related to you, but to the overwhelming fact that, today 98% of businesses are commodity businesses. There is not so much in product  characteristics or service innovation that really distinguish them from each other. They are all exchangeable without any loss in value proposition or value for money.

    These reasons explain why even a business with a great product or service could fail to attract enough customers to succeed, or found itself in the situation of loosing customers.

    On March 1996, Frederick F. Reichheld and Thomas Teal found that on average, U. S. corporations now lose half their customers in five years. With the powerful emergence of Internet these last 12 years, we can say with confidence that today, most companies lose half their customers in less than 2 years. Not because they don’t innovate, not because they don’t have great product or service, not because they didn’t try to keep their customers with sophisticated CRM systems or loyalty programs.

    Customers Satisfaction and Customers Loyalty are not Enough anymore.

    All marketing departments around the world know that 5% increase in customers retention will yield 25% to 100% increase in profits. That’s why Modern marketing is basically about retaining customers and building loyalty, not Looking for new customers.

    So, how to improve customer loyalty in a business environment ruled mostly by commodity businesses?

    It’s about Perception, not Products
    How do your customers perceive you? As a product seller, or an experience seller?

    In the experience economy, your product or service is the customer experience. The experience economy is about orchestrating memorable experiences for the customer; and it’s the memory of these unique experiences that becomes the product or service you are selling. In the experience economy,

    Customer is the product. Of critical importance is the takeaway feeling your customer has about you or your product. The memory of this feeling creates you and your business at the same time it creates the Customer.

    Remember, in the experience economy, people are not buying a product…they are buying an experience, an experience they won’t forget. Once you get in the mind of your customer, your loyalty program goes on autopilot.

    “Those businesses that relegate themselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be rendered irrelevant.” Jeneanne Rae

    Apr
    28

    By

    The Best incentive system since the Caveman

    Category: Business Strategy, customer relationship, leadership, Winner Choice Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a Comment

    So you want more loyal clients to empower your business, and you think that the best way to make them happy and to motivate them to come back to you again and again is to give them some things for free. A little bribing : free product or service, discount, fidelity card, etc.

    The truth is that most loyalty programs are ignored, failed or have a very short lived impact.

    How many fidelity cards can you keep in your purse?

    As Anne Bologna put it “Forget Loyalty Programs; Touch hearts instead”

    As a species, we humans are a pretty narcissistic group.  For the most part, our goals and outlooks are very specific and very personal.  Which is why marketing methods which choose to ignore this fact and create collective incentive programs are doomed for failure.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that any incentive program that doesn’t first focus on the individual just won’t fly in today’s society.

    While some may see our self-absorbed tendencies as a minus, IRaaS saw them as an opportunity to develop a system that would help people achieve their individual goals.

    Then what is the most powerful gift ever?
    Information and connection. It doesn’t cost a penny. It’s something you’ll give away without being left broke. And, you can give it away again, again and again.

    As we know, one of the most painful, stressful, and time-consuming activities for consumers today is finding timely, trustworthy information, connections, and recommendations to fulfill personal or business needs.  IRaaS allows companies and businesses to become solution providers for their customers through real-time interaction and involvement in the customer’s solution-hunting process.

    According to a 2004 Forum Corporation study on cross selling, 88 percent of customers with spending power welcomed product and service suggestions that help them. The same is true in the B2B world—clients prize sales professionals who empathetically understand their business and make suggestions on how to improve it.

    IRaaS works very simply by asking companies to send their customers to other businesses for free, providing them with information and recommendations based on their individual needs and interests in other companies’ products and services.

    IRaaS technology (by Linkcrafter) is today the Best “Personalized Information Distribution System” (PIDS) in the world.

    The motto is simple : send your customers to other businesses for Free and see your business flourish instantly.

    We call it Information as a Gift. It’s very unconventional, but terribly powerful.

    Switch to IRaaS, because Monetary incentives don’t work
    The fact that monetary incentives don’t usually have any long-term effect is further born out by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in their best-selling book, Freakonomics.  Levitt states that the practice of doling out monetary incentives to reward behavior creates a system where people scheme to earn money, and doesn’t necessarily change behavior in a positive manner.  One specific example he gives is how people who were financially rewarded for donating blood actually donated less blood than those donating blood out of altruism.

    Most incentive plan have a limited shelf life
    All other incentive plans for word-of-mouth, referral or customer loyalty systems have a limited shelf life, and must be regularly reviewed and refreshed in order to remain relevant and value producing. On the other hand, IRaaS is timeless, helping you supply real-time information and recommendations to your customers.

    The future will look like this:
    The more successful a company is at recommending other companies’ products and services that are relevant to its customer’s lifestyle and needs, the more likely it is that customers will begin to think of it as a resources center—thereby solidifying its reputation for being a company that cares about its customers. IRaaS companies use giving information and recommendations away to customers as a means to change customers and strangers into friends, and friends into advocates.

    For customers, IRaaS is a life improvement tool.  A huge network of professionals and companies are willing to give customers FREE information, connections, and assistance that save them time and effort.   As a sophisticated system of personalized content, IRaaS is a customer-friendly marketing tool that relieves customers from digital fatigue and the “hell of choice.”

    For companies    , IRaaS is a huge change in marketing tactics. At a time when, as branding guru Jonathan Baskin reveals, modern consumers are harder to find, more difficult to convince, and near impossible to retain, IRaaS brings productivity to marketing, cuts out the waste, and sets up the best and biggest human-powered information processing facility ever. IRaaS companies follow a Single Action Marketing plan that puts their efforts on autopilot while generating a continuous flow of referrals.  In any language, that translates to better sales.

    At the end of the day, as simple as that sounds, IRaaS requires skills in spotting customers needs – like listening and asking question, solving problems, and working with people outside of organization. It is a fundamentally different mindset.

    Apr
    27

    By

    How Stupid Incentives Systems are? Part I

    Category: Business Strategy, Conversation, leadership, Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

    Wikipedia defines an incentive as “any factor (financial or non-financial) that enables or motivates a particular course of action, or counts as a reason for preferring one choice to the alternatives. It is an expectation that encourages people to behave in a certain way.”

    Basically, marketing and advertising consist of giving some kind of incentives  and expecting people to behave in a certain way that benefits the advertiser or the marketer.

    To be a successful marketer or advertiser you need to understand fully how incentives works, how people react to incentives, and what makes some incentives more powerful than others.

    Never be in hurry to start an incentive program. First you need to know How Stupid incentives are. They rarely will produce the results you intend for.

    Incentives systems with animals are quite basic and work well all the time, but with human beings it’s another story, it could be very very complicated, even catastrophic. With humans, incentives systems mostly produce unintended results. We’ve collected the following examples to illustrate how humans creativity goes with incentives systems to produce very funny results:

    1. In Hanoi, under French colonial rule, a program paying people a bounty for each rat pelt handed in was intended to exterminate rats. Instead it led to the farming of rats.
    2. 19th century palaeontologists traveling to China used to pay peasants for each fragment of dinosaur bone (dinosaur fossils) that they produced. They later discovered that peasants dug up the bones and then smashed them into multiple pieces to maximise their payments.
    3. In the 1990s, when Sears instituted a production quota for its auto repair staff, mechanics began performing unnecessary and costly maintenance.
    4. In the medical profession, physicians feel forced to exaggerate symptoms of managed-care patients, since otherwise their insurers would deny coverage.
    5. People who are financially rewarded for donating blood actually donate less blood than those donating blood for Free.
    6. Measuring productivity of computer programmers by the amount of code written may reward inefficient programming practices. Programmers write more lines of code to please the boss and reap rewards, but the softwares are buggy and insecure.
    7. Paying the executives of corporations proportionately to the size of their corporation is intended to encourage them to grow their companies. However, it may cause them to pursue mergers to enlarge their companies, to the detriment of their shareholders’ interest.
    8. Funding fire departments by the number of fire calls made is intended to reward the fire departments that do the most work. However, it may discourage them from fire-prevention activities, which reduce the number of fires.
    9. In Chile, most professional workers are still required to work a fixed amount of hours each week instead of being asked to meet productivity expectations. This has lead to an increase on in-office leisure time, colloquially termed “sacar la vuelta”.
    10. Paying architects and engineers according to what is spent on a project leads to excessively costly projects.
    11. Where libraries, universities, and similar institutions charge a higher fee for copying than for printing, users may print multiple copies of a document, which could cost the institution more than free copying would.
    12. Pressed to bill as much time as possible, ambitious young lawyers often overcharge clients. Overbilling, often to the extent of criminality, is highly common within the legal profession.

    All these examples only prove one thing, you need to be careful about incentives, gifts and rewards systems, because 97% of incentives programs fail. Most loyalty program too are failed or had short lived results, then have become a cost center for companies. They no longer have the power to differentiate your business, as they don’t bring a lot of value to customers.

    The situation is not desperate however. There are incentives systems that work consistently, that are not short lived or cost you lot of money, and always result to the behaviors the sponsors are looking for. We will talk about these incentives systems in Part II.

    Apr
    1

    By

    Forget about Loyalty program, switch to the Best incentive system since the Caveman

    Category: Business Strategy, customer relationship, leadership, Winner Choice Tags: , , , Leave a Comment

    So you want more loyal clients to empower your business, and you think that the best way to make them happy and to motivate them to come back to you again and again is to give them some things for free.
    A little bribing : free product or service, discount, fidelity card, etc.

    The truth is that most loyalty programs are ignored    .
    How many fidelity cards can you keep in your purse?

    Most of the traditional mass loyalty programs are failed, and have become a cost center for companies. They no longer have the power to differentiate your business, as these old-fashioned incentives don’t bring a lot of value to customer.

    As Anne Bologna put it “Forget Loyalty Programs; Touch hearts instead”

    Traditional mass loyalty programs are failed
    As a species, we humans are a pretty narcissistic group.  For the most part, our goals and outlooks are very specific and very personal.  Which is why marketing methods which choose to ignore this fact and create collective incentive programs are doomed for failure.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that any incentive program that doesn’t first focus on the individual just won’t fly in today’s society.

    While some may see our self-absorbed tendencies as a minus, IRaaS saw them as an opportunity to develop a system that would help people achieve their individual goals.

    Then what is the most powerful gift ever?
    Information and connection. It doesn’t cost a penny. It’s something you’ll give away without being left broke.

    Why information and connection?

    As we know, one of the most painful, stressful, and time-consuming activities for consumers today is finding timely, trustworthy information, connections, and recommendations to fulfill personal or business needs.  IRaaS allows companies and businesses to become solution providers for their customers through real-time interaction and involvement in the customer’s solution-hunting process.

    Information as a powerful incentive plan

    According to a 2004 Forum Corporation study on cross selling, 88 percent of customers with spending power welcomed product and service suggestions that help them. The same is true in the B2B world—clients prize sales professionals who empathetically understand their business and make suggestions on how to improve it.

    What’s more, three of the seven services customers most value from suppliers are those that 1) make their life simpler, 2) help them solve their issues, and 3) help them reach their goals.

    Monetary incentives don’t work
    The fact that monetary incentives don’t usually have any long-term effect is further born out by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in their best-selling book, Freakonomics.  Levitt states that the practice of doling out monetary incentives to reward behavior creates a system where people scheme to earn money, and doesn’t necessarily change behavior in a positive manner.  One specific example he gives is how people who were financially rewarded for donating blood actually donated less blood than those donating blood out of altruism.

    Most incentive plan have a limited shelf life
    All other incentive plans for word-of-mouth, referral or customer loyalty systems have a limited shelf life, and must be regularly reviewed and refreshed in order to remain relevant and value producing. On the other hand, IRaaS is timeless, helping you supply real-time information and recommendations to your customers.

    The most influential people in your life
    Think for a moment about the most influential people in your life.  What was it about them that made an impression on you?  Chances are good that it was because they shared knowledge with you, and connected you the to the right information and people.   In return, you gave them your respect, and you may even have called them “friend.”  Without a doubt you remembered them.

    The most powerful positive conversation starters
    From the caveman to the metro-sexual man living in New-York city, one of the most powerful positive conversation starters is the feeling of having been cared for altruistically by a stranger—the surprising effect of an unexpected gift or unsought-after attention. We are back to the basic way of touching people’s hearts, the “gift economy”: the more you give with authenticity, the more social capital you gain.  This social capital can be more powerful than money, or any other resource. It creates emotional bondings that are close to unbreakable.