Paying Attention Should Be Part of Your Brand Strategy

Good things happen when brands pay attention to their customers. This has always been true, but as our world spins faster down the tech-driven rabbit hole, so many things pull our attention away from each other. We like to think we’re good at multi-tasking, but that’s just not paying attention to any one thing. And there’s always the latest shiny object to pull our attention away even further. That’s as true for brands as it is for the people who run them. But paying attention is not only good manners, it’s a good brand strategy.

Turning attention into opportunity

When the social media revolution took place, everyone was excited that you could now listen to and have conversations with your brand’s supporters, prospects and customers. Now that social media is on its way to becoming just another paid media channel, listening has gone by the wayside for so many brands. But others, like Kit Kat, have continued to listen and turn what they find into golden opportunities.

I recently saw an article where a tweet had gone viral. It showed that a girl’s boyfriend had obviously never eaten a Kit Kat before or paid attention to their jingle, because he just bit into the whole thing without breaking it apart. Kit Kat was paying attention and turned that fun tweet gone viral into a huge marketing opportunity, not to mention a way to really connect with their audience. They sent the boyfriend a Kit Kat care package around the theme of “giving him a break” for all the flak he took. And they even created a special Kit Kat he could embed his engagement ring in when he later proposed to his girlfriend.  Kit Kat got a lot of attention, just because they were paying attention.

You don’t have to be a huge brand, however, to make this a part of your brand strategy. For example, if you are a local pizza chain and you’re paying attention to what people say on social about pizza. Perhaps you see someone  complaining they ordered pizza a long time ago and still haven’t gotten it. Or they got it and it was wrong or terrible. If you’re paying attention, you can offer to fix their problem by immediately sending over a pizza from your chain, free of charge. Not only will you have created a good story about your brand, you may have converted a customer.

Making customers happy

If you can figure out what makes your potential customer happy near the beginning of their customer journey, you have a good chance of turning them from potential customer into customer. And if you pay attention to what makes them happy and deliver on a consistent basis, you can turn a customer into a loyal customer with a great lifetime value. This is nothing new, but it’s something a lot of brands seem to forget these days.

One of our retail clients has always been a strong proponent of truly listening to their customers and working hard to deliver the kind of products and experiences the customer wants. I’ve always known this about them, but lately I’ve seen how strongly they have made it a part of their culture. In the course of interviewing different people in their organization for their blog – I have heard it over and over again. Each of them telling me, “I just listen to the customer, get a feel for what’s going on in their lives and what they want – and then I help them find what best fits their needs.”  It not only helps them make the sale at the time, but it makes the customer happy, willing to share their story with others and more likely to come back again.

Whether it’s in-person, online or on social – it’s important for brands to make the type of human connections that can only be made, if you are truly paying attention to what the customer is trying to tell you. Giving people what they want and making them happy isn’t just a good brand strategy – it’s good for your business and your bottom line.

Mike McClure – I’m listening