Okay, let's continue on now to Pete's area, which is customer assets.
And, I'm just again, going to add a
couple little things here in terms of digital considerations.
And additional things we have to think about for execution.
So, as Pete told you, I'm sure very, very clearly, your key
goals are to attract, engage and retain the right kind of customers.
Some customers, as Pete told you, you actually want to get rid
of, because of the heterogeneity, one of our favorite
buzzwords here at the Wharton school, in the customer base.
Some customers are just not worth hanging on to.
So, as Pete has told you, you should never, ever pay
more to acquire a customer than you can expect to get back.
So, the customer life time value of my friend Chris, who is renting cars from
Hertz, should be higher than what Hertz had to pay to get Chris as a customer.
The second
thing that's very important though is the CLV, the customer lifetime value when
executed in the digital marketing environment needs
to also consider what I call RLV.
That's referral lifetime value.
So let's imagine that I have a beard,
actually don't today, but if I have a beard
and I don't shave, I probably have a
low customer lifetime value to harrys.com, the shaving company.
However,
if I'm a popular guy and I tell a lot of my friends about harrys.com, I
might have a very, very high referral lifetime
value, because I'm bringing other people to the party.
So let me give you an example from data based on diapers.com, one
of our case study companies, that just shows how powerful this point is.
So a few years ago, my colleague Jong He and I got
all the data from diapers.com, and we looked at the first 100,000
customers that became customers of diapers.com.
And back in those days, if I were a customer
of diapers.com and I sent an email referral to my
friend Amy, and then Amy made a purchase at diapers.com,
I would get a $1 credit towards buying more diapers.
Also, what I could do is, I could print out physical coupons and put them
on all the cars on Walnut Street here in Philadelphia and some stranger might pick
them up and take my code and enter it, and
then I will get a credit if they became a customer.
So, two thing that are very, very interesting to us about this process.
First of all, about 8,000 of those 100,000 customers engaged in this customer
based promotion or word of mouth, if you will, that's kind of interesting.
About 8% of the people were motivated to go and
try and acquire other customers on behalf of the firm.
Now, of course,
the game going back to what Pete talked
about, we all know about averages, some important
measures, so the average number of people that
were brought in by referring customers was about four.
So, those 8,000 people generated 32,000 new customers for diapers.com.
It's a pretty powerful number, but again, in the
Internet, it's more than just the average that's important.
The Internet is the world of extremes. There's going to be some customers out
there that just love you so much they may go completely nuts, as it were, and so it
turned out, when we looked carefully at the data,
the top 100 customers were generating about 15,000 other customers.
So think about that.
About 150 each.
So again when you execute, your customer strategies, in the digital age.
One of the most important things you can do, is you can encourage your existing
customers to refer other customers.
'Kay, so just let me summarize that with digital considerations.
So, non-negotiable, in the black, at the top of the slide, is that you must
still attract the right target customers Pete has
been talking about for the last few weeks.
However, there are three interesting nuances that come into play here.
First of all, your interaction with customers changes from just
a monologue, you sending out messages, now into a conversation.
So, let me give you a personal example.
Recently I've been flying from Philadelphia to
San Francisco to our west coast campus.
And, when possible I try and fly on Virgin America.
It's a great airline, I think they really
know what they're doing in terms of marketing.
And, when I get on the airline, sometimes I send a tweet, I'm
happy to be on VX 141 looking forward to the sushi and beer.
And sure enough, within a few moments later, Virgin will tweet back to me and
engage me in a conversation.
In fact, on a recent flight, I received
a direct message from somebody at Virgin telling
me if I took a screenshot of my
status on United Airlines, that Virgin would match it.
So think about the power of that medium to change from a monologue to a conversation.
So, that's going to be an important thing.
How can we use technology to engage in real conversations with our customers.
The second thing that we can do with customers,
is we can amplify activities that go on
in the real world, out into the virtual world.
So, an example that I'll get more into a
little bit later on is, way back in September 2011.
warbyparker.com, another company that I'll talk about a
little bit, staged an event in the New York
public library, where their friends, went in there and
took over a whole floor, wearing, Warby Parker glasses.
This was of course picked up by the traditional press.
And then, there was an amplification, from that
real world event, pushed out through the virtual world.
And then finally, the third point is, we need to be
aware of this possibility of what I'll call the long tail leverage.
The long tail is the idea, the conceptual idea, that
there are some people who are just sort of extreme,
like those customers for diapers.com that referred 150 customers each
when the average was only four, so how do we use
technology to tap into who those people are.
Okay, one final thing I'd like to mention here, guys.
A little bit of a technical term.
But it's a very, very interesting distinction that's
important for thinking about how to execute with customers.
Through things like loyalty programs and referral programs and so on.
So I want to distinguish two effects.
The first is what I'll call a selection effect.
And the second is what I'll call a treatment effect.
And both of these
things are very very important to companies who
want to get customers to acquire new customers.
So let's start with the selection effect.
So imagine I'm a customer of diapers.com.
And diapers.com is going to give me some cash,
or some points if I refer somebody else.
Now, I happen to refer my friend Chris, just because I
know that he recently had twins, now the CEO of diapers.com doesn't
know that, but I know that, so I'm better able to find a new customer.
Than the management of the company.
That's the idea of a selection effect.
So the person who's doing the referring is deliberately picking out people who are
going to be very, very appropriate for the good or ser, for the good or service.
That's the selection effect.
And my colleague here at the Wharton
School, Christophe Van den Bulte, has shown
that customers who are attracted through word
of mouth and through referral, have higher customer
lifetime values than those who are not, because of this selection effect.
The second effect is what I'll call the treatment effect.
The treatment effect says, well how did
Chris come to be introduced to diapers.com?
It wasn't through Google search.
It wasn't through seeing an advertisement.
But he got introduced through me, his trusted
friend, and because that was the way he
found out about something, it's more natural then
for him to engage in the same practice.
So, when we looked at that
diapers.com data, remember I said on average, there
was about an 8 to 10% rate of referal.
Well, if a customer was acquired because of referral, the chance
that they then referred went up to about 15 to 18%.
So that's the difference between a treatment effect and a selection effect.
But both of those things are very, very important.
Okay, I'm just going to wrap up now with the third asset.
Remember we're talking about three assets
that we have as marketers to execute on.
Number one is the brand, we've just through.
Number two is the customer, and then the
third one that I mentioned at the beginning
of this module is that marketing expenditure itself
also should be thought of as an asset.
And, again the naieve way of thinking about marketing is we have top line
sales, minus what we spend on marketing or advertising, is equal to our profit.
Now, if we make that marketing span
equal to zero, it's not the case that our profit will go up by the same amount.
Why is the that?
because the marketing of course, is contributing to
the sales and to the top line growth.