Linking Your Empowered Customer into Your Store Brand Management Process

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November 23, 2010

By Steven C. Howell

In the competitive marketplace of fast moving consumer goods, loyalty to retailer store brands is everything. In order to create a strong market presence, retailers have to build out an identifiable store brand experience. If retailers don't stand out from the competition, they will have no way of drawing in new business or retaining existing customers. Retailers today need strategies, processes and capabilities that can accomplish one thing –– deliver a store brands experience enticing enough to persuade consumers to open their pocketbooks.

The formula for success in this challenging marketplace is to take a holistic store brands management approach by collaborating with customers to maximize store brands potential. There are numerous benefits of taking collaborative partnership approach of linking retailer “brand fans” into the store brand management process. Retailers will be able to:

• Deliver products that are consistent and sustainable quality (both product and package graphics);
• Develop and innovation platform to evaluate new concepts and ideas;
• Manage risk and improve new product launch success
• Provide significant and sustainable improvements in store brand revenue, customer acceptance, cost controls, time to market and resource management.

The key to this formula is building organizational capabilities that strengthen loyalty and capture trust in a retailers store brands by linking the voice of the customer into the retailer’s product development and management processes.

Customer Collaboration
So, how do you give your best and get the most out of your customers? Every retailer strives to give their customers the very best store brands experience, but how do you do that if they are not an “active participant” in the process? Something obvious and so simple –– getting real customer data and feedback –– is very often ignored in the store brand product development process. It is ignored for many reasons, but most often because it is not always easy to get customer feedback in a cost effective way and in a form that is truly useful and timely.

Consumers are empowered in new ways, thanks to advancements in mobile technologies, and acceptance and adoption of social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to name a few). Customers have the ability to connect with virtual social networks and exchanges with several taps on the keyboard or text pad. This exchange may include discussion about your brands and the customer’s experience. But retailers may not have knowledge of these conversations unless they’re connecting with them in this new social media.

Retailers are also presented with the challenge of how to best managing customer relationships in the new social media environment, and struggle understanding how it will affect their store brands program:

• The social web has changed the scope of customer relationships;
• Consumers wield increasing power and influence over brands;
• A flawless customer experience is crucial for customer satisfaction; and
• Complaints on the social web can turn into public relations problems in a matter of hours.

There are two techniques retailers you can focus on and develop to create a successful customer collaboration strategy:

• Establish call centers as a customer connection tool; and
• Integrate social media into their store brand customer connection toolbox.

800 Numbers on Product Packaging. Customer interaction is a key component to delivering responsive and efficient customer service. Making your customer happy creates “brand fans.” Linking to customers through a customer call center creates a platform to leverage customer feedback and establishes a channel for customer experience intelligence (identify usage patterns, emerging trends, potential problems and feedback on new product launches), customer experience management (up sell or cross selling opportunities) and supplier/resolution management.

Integrating Social Marketing. Social media provides a means by which retailers can tap into a wealth of new data to guide decisions and actions on store brands management. Social media enables organizations to engage communities in real time creating a new social marketing opportunity.  Social marketing creates a new channel that allows retailers to identify mass influencers, empowers them with mobile information about your brands, and lets you broadcast your “brand fan” activity.

Linking the two becomes a powerful tool in creating a superior customer experience and will give you a competitive edge in converting users to “brand fans”. Another example is adding Twitter account addresses to your packages, which gives retailers the ability to answer customer questions in real time.

Consider this scenario. I’m a customer of your store and I want to purchase a storebBrand, but have a question on a certain ingredient. I send a tweet to the Twitter address on the package. In less than a minute, I get a response. That’s empowerment. The key to success is to empower your call center with the right information. If executed correctly, they will send the right answer when the customer needs it, delighting your customer and cultivating “brand fans.”

Collaborating with your empowered customers is all about change ––changing from product focus to customer focus, changing age-old processes, changing enterprise mindsets, and changing how your organization relates to customers. Building an identifiable store brand experience will give your organization a competitive edge, not only against your retail competitors, but a real and sustainable point of difference from competing national brands.

Steven C. Howell is managing director of the Austin Clark Group. Howell spent the majority of his career in the U.S. food Industry holding key leadership positions with major multi-channel U.S. retailers and global CPG firms. He specializes in building key business and organizational capabilities to strengthen brand loyalty and trust, change-management and process improvements, and translating needs into process designs, requirements and solutions.

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