I’m thankful to Kenneth Weiss for sharing a chapter from his book Slightware - The Next Great Threat to Brands through a brand strategy forum on LinkedIn.  I took a quick read through the chapter and was intrigued enough to do some follow-up reading on Kenneth’s site.  His book serves to not only put a name and face on the challenges (and misuse) brands face in a digital world, but also to remind marketers about fundamentals in customer engagement.  Slightware is best defined in the following excerpt:

Brand building is fundamentally changing from a one-way transmission through media and marketing to a two-way transaction powered by software.  Once again, the initial step of brands into this new era of technology will not go well. Brand and software will not be entwined gracefully. Done poorly, digital experiences will be slightly “off brand.” Done very badly, the brand will be slighted. This is the age of Slightware.

We’ve blogged about and done client work around the area of online brand engagement.  There’s so much to be said about this area and yet there are so many examples of major brands stumbling their way through it.  At its heart, it comes down to whether marketers are thinking of (and executing) their online presence as a campaign or a conversation.  Weiss does a great job summarizing this point in the visualization below:

So, as marketers in a new era of customer engagement (and customer power), we need to at times honestly evaluate our efforts and ask the question of whether we’re talking at, to, or with our customers.  Often, that simple exercise helps assess the need to switch tactics or re-allocate resources.

I encourage you to check out Weiss’s work and examples of Slightware.  Really good food for thought.  Do any of his examples seem familiar to you…either as a marketer or as a customer??

It seems there are still weekly if not daily reminders of government bailouts and interventions, which isn’t helping several industries including retail financial services. This has unfortunately further embittered customers as well as eroded their confidence and their trust in financial institutions such as banks, brokerages and insurance companies.

But if you review the latest JD Powers retail banking survey, it appears that banks in particular face the most arduous uphill challenge in mending customer relationships. The results show that just over a third of banking customers are committed to their current banking institution, and what’s worse is that it’s dropped 6 points over the past three years.

In a paper CMG Partners recently published, we make the case that retail financial services should shift their resources to excel at customer intimacy rather than products or operations in order to succeed within this seemingly new paradigm.

But to pursue customer intimacy strategy requires addressing four areas:

1) Shift focus and power from product lines to customer relationships
Too often product groups or sales dictate decisions that affect customers, misguiding firms to emphasize internal benefits such as cost savings that customers may not value. Customer intimacy is about placing customer needs before those of the organization.

2) Make customer insights a primary driver
The best way to become more customer centric is by developing mechanisms that make customer insights a key input for all business areas. More importantly, it’s critical to find ways to activate customer centricity; for example find ways to eliminate red tape and empower customer-facing employees to respond to issues on the fly.

3) Focus on holistic customer-centric messaging
Move towards tailored messaging in order to deliver greater relevancy through marketing communications. A critical component that needs to accompany messaging is an effective customer segmentation scheme such as a lifestage model, but be sure that your bank, especially branch offices can effectively execute against the scheme.

4) Build a seamless differentiated customer experience
Focusing on customer intimacy and ultimately customer loyalty requires a customer experience to support this relationship. This means adjusting and aligning touchpoints to work in accordance with the messaging and segmentation strategies you’ve developed.

The most recent issue of Perspectives, our e-newsletter is now available online and includes several articles:

• How Solid is Your Foundation?  Addressing CMO Tenure
• The Case for Customer Intimacy: Transforming Retail Financial Services
• Rewriting the Rules of PR

You can also read Sparking Transformation within your Organization, recently published by CMO Council in its monthly e-journal, Marketing Magnified.