It is all well and good, asking businesses to consider becoming customer-centric or customer salient or pitching Customer Salience strategies that could sustainably futureproof the business. But to really drive the pitch home, to ground the concept of Customer Salience in the real world, we need to show stakeholders the proof of the pudding.
Investing into Customer Salience with projected data showing potential success might convince some people, but for those who need a little more convincing, it’s always best to show them some examples of exactly how successful the business stands to be when they trust in Customer Salience and insights.
But which examples should we use? Which businesses have smashed it so much they deserve to be put on a pedestal and lauded for their fantastic efforts? Here are a few for your consideration:
1. Specsavers
Starting strong, this iconic British brand has a tricky task of balancing the pursuit of commercial success with the purity of a healthcare organisation. This crucial balance must be hit perfectly in all their marketing, operational, and business strategies, and the right tone needs to be consistent in all communications with patient-customers. Specsavers have managed to hit this tone correctly with the help of customer insights, using their own panel of customer respondents to inform decisions on a daily basis.
Specsavers’ panel has been used to influence the creation of their eye-catching marketing campaigns, inform their main product and service functions, and drive public healthcare and sales initiatives such as their ‘don’t lose the picture’ glaucoma campaign, and their contact lens campaign. The Glaucoma initiative was designed through extensive survey research, with the best variations of the marketing collateral identified by participants and signed off by key decision makers, achieving the balance between emotional effect and clinical accuracy for the best impact.
The contact lens campaign in 2023 has also proven impactful, designed based on insights from quantitative research where “50% of the target audience found clashing the most difficult part of kissing in glasses, yet 80% felt scared to try contact lenses” according to Marketing Week. This campaign yielded a 22.9% increase in sign-ups for Specsavers contact lens services, an eight-point rise in contact lens awareness, and the 2023 Marketing Week Award for Insight and Market Research.
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| Which businesses have smashed customer centricity and salience so much they deserve to be put on a pedestal and lauded for their fantastic efforts? |
2. Lowell
While not as well-known to the public as Specsavers, this business has also harnessed the power of customer insights well to better tailor their services and communications and customer experience. Lowell is one of the largest credit management companies in the UK and works with a an estimated 25% of the UK population. With their customers only becoming customers once their debts are bought by Lowell, fostering a good relationship in such sensitive situations is paramount to the success of both the firm and the customers’ wellbeing.
Lowell’s primary goal is to ensure customers are on a sustainable repayment plan, but with debt being a prolifically taboo topic, this goal becomes a challenge unless handled with the utmost care. This is where market research comes into help. Lowell created a customer panel with a mix of quantitative and qualitative tools at their disposal, and they use this to communicate openly with customers about their debts with the intention of tearing down the negative emotions and associations with debt and Lowell itself.
Fostering trust like this also allowed Lowell’s insight team to understand their customers’ current experiences with their services, identifying painpoints and areas of improvement so that the debt repayment process goes smoother and is less stressful.
3. Octopus Energy
Octopus have said it themselves, “the best way to understand our service is to hear it from our customers themselves.” Octopus Energy’s market research efforts are focussed on understanding customer preferences, identifying opportunities for innovation, and ensuring they are providing the best possible energy solutions. While they have their own dedicated research programmes in place, it is only a part of the wider strategy to connect with customers, truly understand them and incorporate their views into the business, marketing and operational strategies.
This is a company that prides themselves on transparency, as well as understanding and looking after their customers. At the last Festival of Marketing (2024), Octopus Energy’s CEO, Greg Jackson, and CMO, Rebecca Debb-Simkin, explained how a they have a ‘hands-on’ approach to customer care, and how “staying connected to customers isn’t difficult if ‘it’s built into what you do’”. Even through all the customer data they collect, the Jackson, Debb-Simkin and the marketing team still take the time to speak to customers directly, with Jackson himself engaging with customers on social media regularly. Both senior executives used words such as ‘obsess’ and ‘extreme’ when talking about their efforts and how necessary they believe it is to engage with customers.
Jackson’s belief that “the deep understanding of customers should be defining everything you do” is certainly made clear through the firm’s every action. This level of detail and dedication to not only engage with customers directly but to better understand them and their experiences speaks for itself. After starting out in 2015 holding zero of the market share and facing a hard climb to the top of the incredibly competitive energy sector, Octopus Energy now own the largest market share, beating stalwart giants such as British Gas, EDF and OVO Energy.
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| Customer Salience is crucial, but hard to achieve for those businesses who don't know where to start - thankfully, M&S, Octopus Energy and Specsavers are here to show the way. |
4. Marks and Spencer (M&S)
Last, but certainly not least, Marks and Spencer has made a spectacular comeback after an extended period of decline, after being crowned the Brand of the Year at the Marketing Week awards 2024, as well as scooping Research Live’s Business Impact of the Year 2024 award. They are currently into their fourth year of their transformation programme, which is making great progress after increasing their brand value by a whopping 38% according to Kantar’s 2024 BrandZ report. M&S’s success is attributed to their rigorous transformation process, winning back customers and investing in initiatives that improve quality and value perceptions in the eyes of consumers.
M&S’s Clothing and Insight Team have helped improve style perception by 11% in 2 years through their new innovative view of their ‘Modern Mainstream’ customer target audience. The team have created this view through customer behaviour data, gathered from real-time customer transactional data, combined with Kantar market data, Mindshare media data and YouGov brand tracking data. The insight team now have a ‘seat at the top table’ and makes sure that data from each customer segment is considered as they implement each aspect of their five-year plan. However, their customer centricity isn’t limited to top table decisions, as the insight team have also implemented a range of communication methods to embed the accurate knowledge of their customer segments into the business.
While they have had a fantastic few years, they recognise that they still have a “way to go” as M&S Marketing Director, Anna Braithwaite, put it in the Marketing Week interview.
