• Half of your loyal buyers this year will not be loyal to you next year (Catalina Marketing’s analysis of tens of millions of shoppers).
• The 20% of buyers who account for 80% of sales includes super-heavy category users who might even prefer another brand and purchase that brand more.
• On average, 30% of loyal buyers do not have attitudes about your brand that support their loyalty and are the ones who are most likely to defect.
• For most brands, only a single-digit fraction of your customers connect to you via social media.

So despite so much emphasis on developing loyalty programs and the hype surrounding social media’s influence on consumer behavior, the facts suggest brand marketers are struggling against a tide they cannot overcome.  The article also raises interesting statistical research showing that successful brands connect not only with frequent, loyal customers, but all potential consumers:

“…you must find more people to become loyal, but you also must increase your share of purchases among those who buy your brand less than half the time.”

To achieve this, the author suggest marketers focus on “activating” their brands with consumers, which entails “imaginative shopper marketing, visibility, packaging (which is your ‘ad’ that every buyer sees), the right configuration of features, the right price, findability as people search and pre-shop digitally, and buying ads in special-interest magazines… just to mention a few ideas.”

I suggest that marketers identifying with these challenges look to mobile marketing tactics such as interactive text message promotions and sweepstakes that can pull consumers into perpetual dialogs with brands.  Promoting such programs at and around the point of sale is one approach brand marketers can use to influence less loyal consumers to consume their products.

The statistics and statements like the following suggest it’s imperative for marketers to look for ways of engaging as many consumers as possible with their brands.

“The marketing approach that calls for building brand engagement isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete.  It doesn’t help you figure out how to grow the half of your sales that comes from less-loyal buyers who find multiple competing brands are acceptable.”

Given the reach offered by text message-enabled consumers and proven response rates in the 20-30 percent range, mobile promotions are a logical solution to this challenge.  Engagement platforms such as that offered by Interactive Mediums provide marketers a multitude of approaches to suit any promotional requirement.

Brand marketing has thus focused on panel or other research and development of product attributes to be communicated en masse to an audience as targeted as media allows. What’s fascinating about the mobile channel, among many things, is how it can help brand marketers move closer to their customers than ever before, develop relationships with them, learn about their behavior and use this insight to drive increased consumption of the brand’s product.

This Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capability enjoyed by B2B marketers almost exclusively to date can now be extended to Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers. Unlike media that relies on consumers to observe advertisements on billboards or flyers, or even digital media like email and web which requires access to a computer, mobile media allows brand marketers to initiate contact with and develop an ongoing dialog with their customers directly.

The “on the go” consumer, with their mobile device or phone turned on and ready to submit and receive messages or other content, has been shown responsive to incentives and messages designed to drive interaction with brands. The first step, ironically, is for the marketer to utilize traditional media to communicate a short code and keyword that enables consumers to opt into receiving communications from the brand. Thus begins a relationship which creates a data asset that builds over time, providing previously impossible actionable insight into a brand’s customers.