A Passion for Customer Satisfaction

IBM Study Reveals Challenges Midmarket CMOs Face to Sustain Brand Loyalty with Today's Social Consumer

IBM Press Release:

ARMONK, N.Y. - 16 Nov 2011: A new global IBM (NYSE: IBM) study of Midmarket Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) revealed that building and sustaining brand loyalty is the top concern for today's midmarket CMOs, yet 72 percent do not feel sufficiently prepared to effectively build this loyalty.  Additionally, 70 percent of midmarket CMOs are concerned about data explosion, as they are tasked with making sense of highly complex information generated constantly from a variety of sources such as consumer blogs, tweets, mobile texts and videos.

 

Today's CMOs need to be prepared to deal with an empowered consumer who is impacting brands instantly on Twitter, Facebook and other social channels. Mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016, yet 62 percent of midmarket CMOs report being underprepared to deal with the proliferation of channels and devices.  This increase in the mobile shopping trend further increases marketing challenges, complicates data collection and analysis, and threatens both customer service and customer retention.

 

Aside from current economic conditions, there's an even bigger factor impacting brand loyalty. Innovations in technology and the spread of social networking have provided buyers with new tools for discovering, comparing, evaluating, choosing and experiencing brands.  With the growth of social networks and a need for transparency, trust and personal exchanges between the consumer and the marketplace are now forming the cornerstone of small and midsize marketing efforts. The key is predicting what consumers will want and then adapting marketing strategies to give them the right product when, where, and at what price they want it.

Lee Jeans

Lee Jeans, one of the most recognizable apparel brands in the world faced the challenge of capturing and analyzing the huge volume of information being generated by a variety of sources before any merchandising decisions could be made on its website, Lee.com.  By adopting analytics technology, Lee employees now have the capability to quickly make informed decisions that will improve the consumer's shopping experience.

Now, all the information that merchandisers need such as how well items sell, what is currently in stock and what consumers are saying through social media channels is organized into simple visuals that are shown over product thumbnail images on the Lee website.  With this visual layout that mirrors Lee.com, the merchandisers can easily move products around based on popularity and availability.  Merchandisers are able to see which products are being viewed most often and most importantly, which ones are being purchased most often.  This ultimately allows the Lee team to display the site in a way that provides the best shopping experience for consumers.

Lee is now also able to obtain all product view data, online sales, abandonment rates and conversion rates to give Lee merchandisers a quick snapshot of product performance.  Lee is also capturing consumer sentiment data generated from social media channels such as Facebook and brand rating website Bazaarvoice.  Facebook 'Likes' and Bazaarvoice ratings are also included in the tool at the product level and these insights are used to help with marketing and merchandising decisions.  Using social media and analytics Lee can now make faster and more informed merchandising decisions targeted at its customers with a simple click of the mouse.

Find out more about how our Smart Merchandiser Solution turned inventory, analytics, and social sentiment data into actionable insights for Lee Jeans.