Between an ongoing pandemic and a chaotic political season, it is fair to say that relationships have been tested these past few months, not just among family and friends but also between brands and consumers. Building and sustaining purposeful relationships is marketing’s #1 priority. It takes a lot of work and vigilance: once you find lucrative customers you need to woo, serve and feed them with timely engagements that reinforce the love. Of course, that means knowing the state of the relationship which usually requires a lot of time and money to do right.
Most companies use some sort of tracker to keep tabs on their brand health. Originally designed to assess marketing and media spending effectiveness, it does a fine job of telling you things like awareness, consideration or conversion rates within the purchase funnel. But it is a blunt instrument in an era when a brand’s fortunes can change on a dime, especially when more and more is out of marketing’s direct control (think peer-to-peer reviews, user-generated content and the like). Plus, it only tells you what’s happening, so you need to follow up with multiple qualitative and quantitative studies to get to the why, with whom and how elements.
Despite all this you might still miss out by limiting the scope of the customers you engage. For instance, you may have found out how to reward the most devoted customers but missed insight into elevating high-potential transactional ones. Maybe you got at beliefs but missed out on the behaviors that will strengthen bonds or resolve dissonance. Growing today and tomorrow means having insight into the sources, ways and means to tap new revenue streams. But every time you have to go back into the field you’re wasting time and missing opportunity. No wonder more and more of our clients are asking us, “Am I looking at this right?”
That’s why we created the S+R Relationship Monitor™, a proprietary quantitative study that in a matter of weeks can tell you where you stand and what you can do about it. The framework is rooted in a fundamental idea underpinning bonded relationships: they are formed over a period of time when a brand delivers consistently on the expectations it sets better than any other alternative. The deeper the bond the more loyal & frequent the usage, the greater the forgiveness and the more impenetrable the defenses from rival suitors (for more detail click this link to Zain Raj’s best-selling book, “Brand Rituals”).
There are two key ingredients at the heart of our approach; 1) an actionable structure that classifies relationship grades across a transactional to bonded spectrum and 2) the critical drivers that underpin each relationship type. Those foundations serve as the staging ground for deeper analysis, such as multi-dimensional customer profiling within each relationship (e.g., demographics, psychographics, lifestyle traits, brand usage, etc.), looking deep at the behaviors and beliefs that we need to feed or fight, and contrasting relationship sub-segments versus each other and/or the population as a whole.
In effect, the S+R Relationship Monitor™ is a dynamic, robust data set that in one fell swoop gives you everything you need to…
Understand the current status of your brand’s relationship health
Pinpoint the direction you need to take to improve its standing
Highlight the high-priority relationships you must defend, and how
Define a roadmap to expanding opportunities with less committed customers
Reveal diagnostics that can clarify patterns in other data sets
We’ve conducted dozens and dozens of studies, most recently for an iconic CPG brand. After losing a popular channel partner, the big question was, “Is their relationship strong enough that customers would literally go the extra mile to get them?” In a few weeks we had both the broad answer and a roadmap to solutions, from the priority target customer to the strategic pivot that would up the odds of success.
The S+R Relationship Monitor™ is the Swiss Army knife of brand studies. It’s one we are particularly proud of so we’d love to tell you more and give you a demonstration of how it can help your business. Please let us know when and where and we’ll get it all set up.
Shapiro+Raj
S+R is a research and strategy firm that uses social and behavioral sciences to solve the toughest business and marketing challenges. Our next-gen methods dig deep to unlock market-ready insights. Then our brand planners turn these into strategic marketplace actions that create brand evolution and innovation; customer experiences and loyalty; and new platforms for growth.
