Coupons or Experiences?

I like a good deal as much as the next guy, but stopping into a big box discount retailer the other day had me thinking about the dilution of the customer experience. Walking into a cluttered shopping experience where the in-store offer doesn’t match what I found online (or on their mobile site, because I’m definitely consulting that while I’m in the store) is an all-too-common occurrence in retail – and using discounts to defend a poor customer experience just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Continue Reading »

Improving the Expanding Channel Experience

We’ve all done it: on the train, in the waiting area, enjoying a cup of coffee and browsing our phones. Then we go back to our desktop (or laptop) to make a purchase. According to the Accenture Seamless Retail Study, we’re not alone: 91% of shoppers find the experience of shopping in a physical store to be “easy or very easy” while only 32% of consumers shopping via mobile feel the same way. So why the disconnect?

Continue Reading »

Interruption, Irrelevance and Other Habits to Avoid in Mobile

Mobile marketing is like the game Operation. If you’re spot-on, you make a vital connection with your consumer. If you miss, even by a little, the buzzer goes off, your customer lights up and you lose, not only for this transaction, but maybe for the life of the consumer.

Continue Reading »

Easing Pain in the Consumer Journey

My local gym is always running some kind of crazy discount for enrollment. And I can always look at this month’s (or week’s) promotion and blow it off, knowing another deal is coming. It’s hard to know, from a price-conscious standpoint, the best time to make a long-term commitment because they’re constantly repackaging the same discount, or even out-bidding themselves for my business. In a similar instance, I bought concert tickets with a loyalty-based “early bird” discount, only to find out that a deeper discount was advertised to the general public just a month later. Really? Are we expecting consumers not to notice or react to our marketing misgivings? And are we brands really expected to keep up?

Continue Reading »

Don’t You Know Who I Am?

In today's Facebook and Google Ad Sense generation, where many a content experience is dictated by what you like, search for and click on, brands that aren't completely optimized at every touchpoint are now in perilous danger of becoming the dumb bouncer in a movie, blocking a consumer from a desired experience.

Continue Reading »

Marketing Needs the 5th P

Why Payment Now Belongs with Product, Price, Place and Promotion as a Key Decision Lever
Since the 1960s, - the smartest of marketers have developed an offer taxonomy based on the 4 Ps—product, price, place and promotion. For years these 4 Ps have helped us marketers measure, classify and optimize different offers against one another based largely on these trigger points, allowing for an organized and optimized marketing mix that drives revenue with the most efficiency. And that taxonomy-- or process of determining how all the offers from brands should be broken down into distinguishable pieces, has held its grip on the marketing industry.

Continue Reading »

Stick a Google-Shaped Fork in Barnes & Noble

Everyone hailed the Nook as smart business. Now, thanks to the very same company that powers the Nook, it’s going the way of disco -- fun while it lasted, but an impractical long term way to groove.
The hype around Google’s new Nexus 7 tablet is mostly surrounding its threat to Amazon, and while there may be merit there, the striking first casualty is Barnes & Noble. With brick and mortar bookstores and physical reading of books declining in favor of e-readers, Barnes & Noble announced plans earlier this year to this one from Peter Svenson of the Huffington Post, I am convinced that the Nexus 7 will provide me a far better experience than my Nook or a continued relationship with Barnes & Noble would. Here are my top 3 reasons as follows:

Continue Reading »

Over, Under, Missing Completely and “The Simple Truth”

3 Most Common Communication Failures Preventing Loyalty Program Success You have heard this from your significant other. It’s the different between the playoffs and the title, a good education, and a raise. Yet marketers somehow forget it. I am speaking of course, about proper communications. They are the centerpiece of your personal relationships, and the vortex of any good loyalty program. And no matter how good you think you are at it, there is always room for improvement.
In a recent post, I delved into gamification of loyalty and in the midst of illustrating how real-time, location based, rewards platforms are often better suited than traditional loyalty programs, I only gave proper communications passing reference- even though effective communications is and will always be the driving subtext of any loyalty program.

Continue Reading »

Loyalty is Not a Game, or Is It?

With all the new entrants and a different playing field, loyalty marketers are not ruing as they did in the good old days when they had the consumer gaming dynamic all to themselves. Quite the contrary -- there is palpable excitement surrounding what the growing shift in consumer behavior means for their programs. Armed with a seemingly endless choice of game mechanics, technology platforms and social networks to enable new programs and a new set of consumer experiences, the loyalty sector is now more relevant than ever.

Continue Reading »

About this blog

At Pluris, we believe that we all can do a better, more efficient job at marketing to our most important customers. On this blog, we'll discuss how strategy, database management, offer optimization and analytics can help us all be better marketers. Sometimes, we may just talk about sports.

Subscribe to Email Updates

New Call-to-action