How Staples Business Advantage Shifted from Product-Centric to Customer-Centric with Influitive
by Mary-Leslie Davis, Director of Customer Engagement and Loyalty at Staples Business Advantage
Marketing teams all over the world are beginning to realize the benefits of a customer-centric approach. But this shift from product-centric to customer-centric can be harder than it looks. See how I used Influitive to turn a “cute little marketing project” into a success that helped shape our company’s mindset.
The Problem With Product-Centric
In the early days of Staples Business Advantage (SBA) we, like most companies, were product-centric. Our focus was on what we were selling — copy paper, mops, buckets, keyboards, desks, etc. Our sales and marketing teams were organized by the category they sold, so they’d go out and champion whichever products they were in charge of. Our thought process was, How can I sell someone more (insert product here)?
If you only talk about yourself, no one’s going to listen.
However, we knew we couldn’t just go out and talk about what we wanted to sell. We needed to find out what was on our customers’ minds — what were they thinking, their issues, and pain points. We needed to listen.
So several years ago, the marketing department at Staples Business Advantage began moving away from product-centric into a customer-centric marketing approach. We started with extensive buyer persona research, in which we asked prospects and customers what happens in their day. How did they deal with things such as My boss just said to order a whole bunch of new chairs! Or, we need more coffee in the breakroom! We wanted to know how they went about fulfilling that need, what research they did, how did they select a vendor and more. The focus was on them and how they think, work and feel.
What we found out through the research was that sometimes they might think about, say, buying a new chair and printer at the same time because they had a new hire. In the product-centered approach, you’d have two different sales people out there pushing two different products with two separate marketing pieces. That’s not customer-centric.
In addition to the persona research, we had done extensive database modeling and analysis to create a lifecycle strategy. My boss at the time asked me to bring together the strategic plans for all of the different marketing groups — product marketing, field marketing, communications, database marketing, and on and on — and it was when I collated everything and put up notes on my whiteboard, by persona and lifecycle, that I had an “aha” moment.
The research had shown us definitively that customers don’t learn about products and services from ads, sales collateral and emails, but from word of mouth and peer networking. Of course, we knew that! (How did you hear about the last new restaurant you tried?!) As I stared up at all the initiatives my hard-working colleagues had proposed, I realized not one of our efforts addressed how customers actually made buying decisions — through word of mouth.
I knew this gap was huge, and my inner journalist kicked in. I researched ways we could build a strategy that would engage our customers as people and motivate them to share their good experiences with Staples Business Advantage with friends and colleagues.
This theme of connecting on a human level has been present throughout my life. From my early days as a sports journalist during an internship in high school interviewing athletes to direct marketing for Bloomingdale’s, I’ve always been interested in people — and customers are actually just human beings after all!
Shifting an Institutional Mindset
Through my research I discovered Influitive, a gamification platform that fit perfectly with what I wanted. It would give me a forum to listen to our customers, talk to them directly, and discover the how and why behind their purchasing decisions (which isn’t typically a luxury marketing departments have). And it gave me a mechanism to, quite simply, have our happy customers talk about us by giving us testimonials and sharing our content on their social networks. So we signed up, engaged our customers, and were off to the races. Easy, right? It’s never that simple…
Read the full story here.
