The social media rise has launched a new era in customer satisfaction measurement; twitter, Facebook and the like have allowed marketers to collect more primary data to evaluate whether clients were satisfied or not. Yet the multiplicity of sources makes it difficult (not to say impossible) to properly analyze this data. Before even being able to analyze anything one has to select the relevant data. This selection process is a challenge in itself.
The Clic and Walk solution …
Click and walk is a French startup that tries to bring a solution by focusing on more relevant data. The business idea consists in building a “community” of people who are willing to evaluate products and service and help discover malfunctions (be it in products or services). This solution presents also the advantage to give new tools to marketers for the evaluation of offline products and services.
… for offline problems
While brands struggle to have their products presented the best way in brick-and-mortar stores, they have no control on the distributor who can take discretionary decisions. Click and Walk enables brands to leverage on a community of people scattered on a whole country to check how products are actually presented. Moreover the Clic and Walk service allows to gather structured data and perform afterwards interesting statistical analysis. For instance members of the community can get assignments that have to be carried out on a certain day of the week or during a certain period of time. This can be crucial to isolate the effects of decisions taken at a more global level.
Advice for your marketing strategy
Although Clic and Walk positions itself (and claims) a new approach to survey and measure customer satisfaction, what I find much more appealing in their innovation is the possibility to, on the one side, control an offline environment and, on the other side, to collect structured data from the beginning.
Being a scientist by nature I’m very much obsessed by the methodology and the quality of the data collected. The “Big Data” hype has certainly eluded the importance of the data quality, letting people believe that it was technically possible to search a mess and eventually find what is relevant. Although technically feasible I wonder why people don’t go the easy way and just design experiments that allow them to collect, from the very beginning the best data possible.
I had a recent meeting with the Belgian Direct Marketing Association (BDMA) which organizes an annual congress on Direct Marketing. This year’s topic is “Direct Marketing: Science or Art” and I proposed them a business case showing, how a design of experiment (DOE) approach applied to marketing can help uncover unusual and unexpected results.
Marketing is definitely not an Art. It’s a Science and it’s time that people reflect upon how to measure the effects of marketing decisions and which methodologies to use to guarantee the collection of unbiased data.
Posted in Marketing.
