J&J Worldwide Director of Digital Strategy Answers 4 Questions for Marketing Innovators

Article by Ernan Roman Featured on CMO.com

Jeremy Dalnes is worldwide director of digital strategy and platforms for Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices, where he is responsible for shaping global digital strategy, enhancing and extending digital platforms, and delivering digital activation programs to drive customer engagement and loyalty.

Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson/DePuy Synthes Companies, Dalnes served as vice president of e-business and mobile commerce for Zeo Inc., where he was responsible for customer acquisition, driving revenue through direct sales, and building strategic partnerships to expand Zeo's product and service offerings. Before that, he was VP of e-business for Panasonic North America, where he was responsible for all online sales and marketing for Consumer Electronics North America.

Dalnes recently participated in our "4 Questions for Marketing Innovators" series.

1. What is one marketing topic that is most important to you as an innovator?
Deep listening, which I define as understanding customer/prospect sentiment and automatically integrating that data with your existing analytics. In practical terms, it's understanding how a select visitor or group of visitors feels about an experience and then digging deep on how that same group behaves [Tweet this]. It involves asking very simple sentiment-based questions, like “Did this content inspire you?” “Do you believe in the solution we are offering?”—answers to which cannot be derived by standard analytics—and then using those responses to refract and understand online behavior through that lens. Some great examples of this in use by Facebook and others were recently highlighted in a New York Times article.

2. Why is this so important?
It's always a challenge to tease out of your big data the small data that really matters. With deep listening, we use microsurvey responses as a “trail head” into the big data that we’re constantly capturing but never know quite what to do with. Only then can we truly begin to understand the unmet needs of our customers/prospects, walk in their shoes, and deliver value back to them. One example of this at J&J is DePuy Synthes Advantage, where we are leveraging this tactic to calibrate and align our messaging hierarchy on the value-added services we offer to the needs of the health-care professional and provider (i.e., hospital) audience.

3. How will the customer experience be improved by this?
We can finally create value for the end user in exchange for giving us their feedback. Imagine if you could personalize every subsequent page view of your site/app based on your knowledge that a particular person feels that price/reputation/user reviews/brand/etc. is most important to them? Alternatively, what if you knew a particular user was extremely skeptical about your product/service? How might you approach your CRM, content strategy, and information hierarchy differently? It¹s hard to understate the application of responding in real time or almost real time to customer-expressed need.

4. How will this improve the effectiveness of marketing?
The current state-of-the-art in programmatic media buying and optimization relies on conversion events that are typically transaction-oriented: Did you buy something? Download something? Install an app? The algorithms that optimize against these events eventually reach a point of diminishing return where they simply can’t buy more of that super-high-performing traunch of media without breaking the cost-per-acquisition ceiling. However, if you could ask a simple question that would help you identify a prospect that’s just about ready’ to transact but hasn’t yet, you can enhance your optimization algorithm with that survey response answer, rather than a transaction event. This allows you to widen the net of your media buy to include those prospects and increase the size of the acquisition pie, not just optimize it.

Bonus: Favorite activity outside of work?
Playing electric cello in a few projects in and around the Boston area. I am a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, so I try to stay connected to cello in one way or another. Lately it’s been watching my kids begin to explore and play a 1/4-size cello.

How Brand Ambassadors make social...more social

People are social beings. So why is it that most corporate social postings are both irrelevant and anonymous? Tweet this Putting a personal, social component into your social marketing is imperative to engaging 2-way communication.

Here are some thoughts to consider from a consumer perspective:

• According to Forrester, “Social ads aren't social; they're just ads….." If you can't get a message to your audience, you can't very well market to them…. just 15% of consumers trust social posts by companies or brands.
• Over half (57%) of consumers are actively taking steps to avoid brands that bombard them with poorly targeted communications, according to research from the Aimia Institute… To combat this, 69% have unfollowed brands on social channels.
• According to Cognizant, inbound user engagement with brands on social networks is growing nine times faster than social networks themselves.

Here is the all too often reality for consumers when interacting with companies on social media:

• 33% of consumers who contact brands on social media with a customer service question never get a response, according to The Northridge Group.
• From the Cognizant study, just three percent of consumers cited social media as the fastest channel for issue resolution.

From my recent article, Your Brand, Your Employees and the Voice of Your Customer I noted:

• One of the keys to developing a strong brand is to develop a culture of brand trust….Realize that improved Customer Experience strengthens trust. And, trust is the foundation that builds brand, communication and good experiences.
• Developing a strong brand is a continual circle of interaction with your brand, what it stands for, how it is conveyed by employees and the experience it delivers.

Nokia Turns Employees into Social Brand Ambassadors
Nokia empowers employees to engage in social conversations for feedback, promotion of new products/services, and to just be available throughout social networks as real brand ambassadors. Nokia's talent stories are credible because they're from Nokia employees. Additionally, all the videos and photography on the Nokia sites and social media platforms feature Nokia employees.

Here are some tips from Becky Gloyne, Social Media Manager and Global Marketing Talent Acquisition Manager at Nokia:

• “Use social media in a very effective way, create your own content (photography, video etc.), and be as creative and original as possible. This brings the “human element” into the picture and it puts a face to the brand, which is what people want to see.”
• “Have a focus, a target, use social media effectively, and understand your audience.”
• “We regularly communicate with our employees to make sure they all understand what is going on within our brand.”

Adobe's Social Shift
Realizing that social has shifted, Adobe has implemented what it calls, its “Social Shift” program to better connect with consumers. The program helps to educate the company's employees on the company's social media guidelines, shares best practices for social sharing and ultimately helps them to become brand ambassadors.

Here are some tips from the Adobe “Social Shift” program:

• The Adobe blog, “Adobe Life” posts, pictures, videos, and perspective. The content is also syndicated to other parts of the business for further social optimization.
• According to Natalie Kessler, Head of Employment Branding at Adobe, they make social posting fun for employees with contests, visual #AdobeLife reminders throughout offices, and acknowledgement for posting activities.
• Develop a brand ambassador program in your organization.

In closing, here a few takeaways from Brian Fanzo, Chief Digital Strategist at Broadsuite from an IBM Center for Applied Insights' Talking Insights Podcast:

• “… Companies are afraid of employee advocacy …. I think the true sign of a great culture is not what's on a website or not what a CEO says in the presentation, but it's on the faces of their employees and that can be a scary element for a lot of leaders…”
• Employees are a company's greatest social tool. Therefore, brands must embrace employee advocacy to have a truly authentic social presence.
• “A lot of business is done on social… it bridges that gap when we can create that same relationship that we would on the golf course, we would at a happy hour, via these social tools.”

Improved Customer Experience via interpersonal social interaction strengthens brand trust. Via a personal interaction with employee brand ambassadors a continual circle of interaction can become a key differentiator for both BroB and BtoC consumers.

The Damage Brands Suffer From Breaking Promises

Article by Ernan Roman Featured on Forbes.com

According to a recent report by Gallup, a brand promise represents everything a company stands for, it is the unique statement of what the company offers, what separates it from its rivals and what makes it worthy of customers’ consideration.

Yet Gallup finds that "only half of customers believe that the companies they do business with always deliver on what they promise." When asked, only 27% of employees strongly agree that they always deliver on the promises they make to their customers.

Across the board, brand promise turns up as a major differentiating factor. Consider the following:

A Harris Poll EquiTrend study on the top 10 most-trusted packaged goods brands reported that the brands that men and women trust are those with a long history of consistently delivering on their brand promise.

In a MediaPost study that analyzed 10,000-plus consumer conversations across a broad cross-section of social media platforms, brand promise is the most important benefit category for luxury brands, with 42% of conversations on this topic.

In 1906 Harvey W. Wiley, an American chemist whose bureau was part of the Good Housekeeping Institute’s laboratory, began a legacy of brand promise that’s still going strong today. So why are consumers still avid believers in this brand promise? Trust. Consumers know that the seal has delivered on its promise. Additionally brands need to earn the seal—not buy it.Because of this there is authenticity in what the brand promise represents.

Trust is one of the key factors cited again and again when it comes to consumers buying into a brand’s promise. This was confirmed recently in VoC Relationship Research conducted by our firm, which determined that trust has to be earned by going through specific steps which comprise a Pyramid of Trust.

Here are a few of the steps:

• Trust is the foundation and prerequisite for obtaining deeper engagement with customers.
• Consumers want brands to do what they promise, and actually deliver on the fundamental brand promise, consistently, over time.
• Improve my experiences: Use my stated preferences and aversions, to significantly improve my experiences.
• Protect my information: Explain the reasons for the opt-in information requests and assure me of the privacy and safety of my data.

The Reader’s Digest US Trusted Brands survey, meanwhile, revealed that 79% of participants said they opt for a "trusted" brand when choosing between items of equal quality and price.

But on the flip side, a report by Credit Suisse regarding falling trust in our food supply cited that the largest 25 companies saw their control slip from a combined 49.4% share in 2009 to 45.1% share in 2014. Campbell Soup Co. CEO Denise Morrison, noted, "We are well aware of the mounting distrust of Big Food…. We understand that increasing numbers of consumers are seeking authentic, genuine food experiences and we know that they are skeptical of the ability of large, long-established food companies to deliver them."

Edelman’s Managing Director of Corporate and Public Affairs Ron Guirguis summed it up well regarding brand promises: "People don’t just buy products anymore, they buy the companies that make products, the values they represent and what they stand for."

So here are some takeaways:

Trust in brand promise is universally a top priority for consumers in determining whether to do business with a company. But trust cannot be assumed or bought. It needs to earned through actions.

Delivering on promises such as "FREE" wins trust. But when FREE becomes FREE* the small print under the asterisk undermines brand trust.

Consistency is a key factor in gaining and keeping consumer’s trust in a brand promise. It is not about fulfilling the promise once and moving on to the next campaign. It is a sustained building of trust that nurtures brand loyalty.

Marketers need to rethink their brand strategy to ensure that they deliver on brand promises. Promises that are kept strengthen. Broken promises diminish and set the stage for a long and possibly impossible win back.