On June 18th, 2009, the AMA hosted speaker Jill Griffin, author of Taming The Search-And-Switch Customer, at the Cool River Cafe in Austin. With her North Carolina accent in full effect, Jill shared “oodles” of knowledge and research aimed at helping companies with customer retention.

Jill Griffin is known all over the world as an expert in the three customer-keeping competencies: customer loyalty, winning customers back, and managing the search and switch customer. Customer retention has become a trending topic at a time when buyers are more price sensitive and budgets are being drastically cut. In addition to the current economic conditions, the popularity of Google and Social Media have muddied the waters even more. Customers seem only as loyal as the lowest price they find online. Fortunately, those of us in attendance last Thursday have the benefit of Jill’s strategy for defending our customers from online competition.

For those AMA’ers who couldn’t make it, and the millions of Austin AMA blog readers around the world, here’s what all businesses need know about keeping their customers:

1. Make defending your brand, and your customers, online a priority. This one seems obvious, but I’m sure Jill mentioned it for a reason. Defending your brand is kind of like exercising. It’s good for us, we need to do it, we might even enjoy it, but we always put it off until tomorrow. Actively making this part of our strategy is half the battle.

2. You need to ace the “Worth It” test. The longer we’ve been in business, the less we know about what’s going on in the mind of our customer. We may not know what the next best buying alternative is, or maybe our front liners don’t know what sets the brand apart. Jill’s “Worth It” test shows us exactly where we need improvement in the search and switch customer department.

The “Worth it” Test:

1. Versus your next best buying alternative, my brand provides real, substantive differences that you consider important.

2. My brand provides you tangible, convincing proof of these differences.

3. You can easily articulate my brand’s differences.

4. You are served by employees who exemplify my brand’s differences through word and deed.

5. Relative to the price difference, you perceive my brand as delivering substantially more value than your next best buying alternative.

3. You have to think beyond the tactics to win. It wouldn’t have been a gathering of professionals without the mention of social media. Jill pointed out something we might miss as our excitement for Twitter grows. If we don’t have a point of difference to communicate to our customers, it doesn’t matter how big our reach is, how many mentions we have, or if Oprah is following us.

I know I might have been too busy with my steak and asparagus to catch all the best points of Jill’s presentation, so please add anything I missed in the comments below. Also, any feedback or experiences implementing the “Worth It” test would be immensely helpful to everyone.

-@joshdward

Josh Ward is the Relationship Strategist at Volacci, an Austin based SEO company. He specializes in applying essential human relations and communication techniques in the online world of conversations. His services are available for your corporate event, birthday partys, and weddings. Read Josh’s blog about life, the universe, and everything at partner.Volacci.com. Josh lives in the Austin area with his beautiful wife and their 4 kids.

One of the earliest and most visible steps in developing a strong brand is choosing the right name.  Branding veteran Mike Carr offers five great tips for selecting the right name for your brand.

Naming Tip #1: MEMORABILITY

Think about building a brand as a war.  In a war, there are many battles to be fought, some of which are OK to lose.  But, there are a few key battles you must win to win the war. The key battle when it comes to the brand name is memorability.  If the name is sticky, if it gets inside the head of your target quickly and isn’t forgotten, then you can spend your budget building preference in your brand.  If the name isn’t memorable, you often burn through your budget just trying to build awareness. You then have nothing left to build your brand.  You lose the war.

Naming Tip #2:  NO NEGATIVES

Don’t allow anyone in your naming session to say anything negative until the very end.  New names are inherently fragile.  Allowing critical comments to surface too quickly kills off some great ideas.  Also, the majority of what you’ll come up with in your naming session is garbage, anyway. So focusing on what you don’t like is distracting.

Naming Tip #3:  BE AN ADVOCATE.

Taking the negative off of the table isn’t enough.  You need to encourage everyone to advocate for their favorite names rather than be the silent skeptic.  Ask everyone to pick their favorites and share with the group what they like about them.  Or if they don’t like the whole name, ask them to talk about the part of it they do like.  Is the idea behind the name appealing to them?  Is there a root embedded in the name that they find intriguing?  Do they have any new ideas to suggest using an existing name as a starting point?  What you are after during this process is for everyone to become as engaged and as upbeat as possible.  You will find yourselves talking one another into names that you initially weren’t that excited about.

Naming Tip #4:  THINK LIKE A CUSTOMER.

Try to react to each idea as a prospective customer might react to it.  Maybe they’ll react positively to a name that connects with them emotionally, rather than a more literal or descriptive name that is easier to understand but sounds like all of the others that are already out there. Or maybe they’ll look at a number of different names before deciding what to buy. Thinking like your customers and prospects is what great naming is all about.

Naming Tip #5:  GO WITH A RISKIER NAME.

The best names are rarely the safest. They’re typically the riskiest. There is no such thing as a perfect name.  The names with the greatest potential often have the most glaring weaknesses.  So focus on the potential a name brings to a table.  Is it memorable?  Is it easy to say and spell?  Does it connect emotionally?  Is it engaging?  Does it differentiate from the competitive set?  Is it a name that generates excitement and passion.  A name people want to talk about.  An engaging, sticky name.

Mike Carr

Mike Carr, an AMA member since 1985, has over 30 years of experience in marketing and marketing research, including more than 20 years in the branding and naming business. Prior to founding NameStormers, Mike was President of The Salinon Corporation and was Sr. Vice President of Compucon, an A. C. Nielsen subsidiary where he led Communications Marketing Research for U.S. and European Nielsen clients.  Mike can be reached at mike@namestormers.com or 512-267-1814.

In our latest post Brenda Hessney recaps Mark Hammer’s presentation at the February 19th Austin AMA Power Lunch Series. This post includes an audio cast and a slide cast of his presentation, you can click on the audio cast and follow along in the slide cast.

The fight for survival begins early for a tadpole; few make it to frog. Compass Learning needed to re-brand, re-price, plus re-launch. Three years ago, as the new vice president for marketing, Mark Hammer moved quickly to change Compass Learning’s presence.

At the lunch, Mark shared that he began making those changes by reviewing Compass Learning’s website in conjunction with competitors’ websites. Mark’s talk, entitled “From Tadpole to Frog: Evolving into a Brand with Legs” began with this show of competitors’ home pages - all blue.

Compass Learning, a division of Reader’s Digest corporation, provides learning materials for specialized instruction, tailored to learner’s abilities. Five years ago, I worked for a competitor in product management, Harcourt Achieve. That company is now integrated into Houghton Mifflin. Yes, it’s website color is blue.

Mark’s group changed the website color to bright green, plus the children used in photos are singled out, expressing the A-Ha moment of learning something new. Meanwhile, the “blue” competitors continue using stock photos of kids crowded around a computer screen.

Supplemental education is a competitive space. Publishers are pushed and pulled by federal mandates. During my time at Harcourt, we were responding to the No Child Left Behind mandate. Now, the Obama administration has earmarked funding of educational initiatives in the Stimulus Plan. What does all this mean? For us marketers, it means there’s lots of noise and its corollary, the need to differentiate.

As Mark said, the first thing he did when he came to Compass Learning was pitch management for a redesign of the blue website. Austin based, Milkshake Media went to work.

Following a new corporate mission statement, product and pricing reviews were conducted by Mark and his team. Product pricing followed industry practice to charge school districts for “seats”. In other words, a per student price. This practice, I can tell you from my experience, evolved from the paper booklet, pre-computer, pre-server age.

“We price now by solutions, not seats,” Hammer said. “Plus, we used subscriptions to bring in a regular stream of revenue. The result was improved margins and simplified pricing.”

My key takeaway from Mark’s experience at Compass Learning is that e-mail response rates went down 29 percent in the second half of 2008. This field data shows me that this marketing tool has become so overused it’s delete-happy to our targets.

However, Compass Learning’s use of webinars with non-company experts, such as a Harvard professor speaking on new research into educational methods, reaches the high-level leads that can generate sales. When an entire school district adopts your supplemental materials, it’s a big win in this segment of the publishing industry. Those purchases can last years with refreshed materials, meaning more sales.

Listen to Mark Hammer’s presentation. It takes you through the ABCs of marketing management: differentiation, mission, pricing, lead generation, and effective use of marketing tools.

podcasts sponsored by The IncSlingers

Please share your thoughts on Mark’s talk, and your own experiences with evolving your company’s brand.

~ Brenda

About Brenda Hessney

Brenda Hessney

Brenda is an Austin marketing specialist with a knack for quickly analyzing, planning, and implementing effective, cost efficient sales campaigns for small to medium sized high-tech companies.