Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM APRIL 2023 46 S uper Bowl day has passed – friends and family joined you for three-plus hours of the biggest viewing event of the year. Famously, it's not just about sports, because it's an advertising super-event as well. Brands and ad agencies had strategized for months, hoping to create a winning playbook to capture your most precious asset: your attention. Times have changed since the old mass media days when mediocre products could be rammed down the throats of unsuspecting consumers. Now, advertising is a data-driven and media-mix game that stalks us through every minute of TV we watch and each online click. During the Super Bowl there are approximately 50 minutes of ad time. Counting the $7 million+ cost of a 30-second spot, plus agency fees, production costs, talent fees, and music rights, it's a roughly $1 billion enterprise for a single Sunday in February. No doubt the Super Bowl is the biggest viewer audience event of the broadcast year. Even so, except for this single day, we tend to ignore ads or block them, mentally or digitally. As conventional ads became less effective, businesses have turned to digital and social platforms to promote their products. In the early days of digital, eyeballs and clicks were the currency of ad spending. But clicks don't guarantee customers, let alone loyalty. Cyberstalking potential customers is just a hack for earning actual customer trust. Knowing this doesn't prevent brands from spending most of their resources chasing prospects, and comparatively little on converting and nurturing them. A study by Econsultancy found that for every $92 we spend on brand awareness of our products or services, we spend just $1 on turning them into customers. And we spend even less on nurturing them. Instead of chasing customers, get busy listening to and luring them. Some brands spend their advertising dollars on attracting customers by telling stories that speak to the customers' values. These innovative brands weave meaningful storytelling into their ads – stories that express the brand's values, which they hope will be well-aligned with ours. Value alignment between the brand and the customer creates empathy. When we empathize with the brand story in the ad, a relationship can begin. And when there's a relationship between a brand and its prospects, the brand can listen to its customers and invite them into their offering. This builds trust, which is the social and emotional currency all businesses trade in. Here are three ways your brand can create customer relationships without chasing them: 1. Engage the potential customers with values-based storytelling. Tell people (1) a meaningful, values-filled story, (2) that reinforces the value of your products. Simply said, tell your prospect "what's in it for them." 2. Empathize with your customers' needs and desires. As the saying goes, people don't care about what you know until they know that you care. When you let people know that you care about them and their needs through the types of stories you tell and how you treat them after they engage with you, you're more likely to win them over as a customer. 3. Nurture them when they buy from you. Now that you've won a customer's trust, be sure to care for them in a way that reminds them that they are essential to your company. Post-purchase customer care looks like gratitude, because it is. Instead of sending them a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey right after the purchase, send them a thank-you message! It's worth remembering that word-of-mouth marketing is the most trusted form of marketing. Here are some data: • 70% of people trust consumer reviews online. [HubSpot] • 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision. [Ogilvy Cannes] • 72% of people get news from friends and family, making word-of- mouth the most popular channel for sharing. [Pew Research Center] • According to a Nielsen report, 92% of people trust word-of-mouth or referrals from those they know, above all other advertising. People trust in our relationships when they know we care. We tend to trust people and brands where our values are aligned and there's empathy. We do things we see others doing when we're convinced that it's safe. We always have and always will. CHASING CUSTOMERS OR NURTURING CUSTOMERS? Steven Morris On Brand Steven Morris is a brand, culture and leadership advisor, author, and speaker. Over his 25+ years in business he's worked with 3,000+ business leaders at 250+ global and regional companies. Discover: https://matterco.co RO

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