Metrics – do we need it?
Chapter 6 review and COSLA - Purchase Action Ration (PAR) and Brand Advocacy Ratio (BAR)
It was explained in the book that Brand Awareness is the gate to the customer path. Marketers sometimes need to conduct surveys to confirm if there is indeed brand recall of your product. What they don’t realize is that awareness is only the beginning of their job.
How well is our brand converted into sales? Sometime this is the dilemma I see in my former job where each department would be working independently.
Having 2 new metrics: Purchase Action Ratio (PAR) and Brand Advocacy Ratio (BAR) is very critical in determining the return of marketing investments. (ROMI). We really need both ratios to make this work.
I have to agree based on the formulas made , brand awareness can be a proxy for marketing investment. Return is split into two, “purchase action” which is directly translated into sales while “advocacy” which indirectly translates to sales growth.
PURCHASE ACTION RATIO (PAR) = MARKET SHARE / BRAND AWARENESS or simply Customers buying Brand X over Customers aware of Brand X.
The main agenda of PAR is how to improve the ratio between ACT and AWARE.
BRAND AWARENESS RATION (BAR) = Advocate / Awareness
Marketing must create programs to drive productivity at minimal cost. They just need to focus on the certain touchpoints across the customer path from awareness to advocacy.
This can be summarized below.
Increase Attraction
Find ways to humanize the brand that will make it most appealing
Lifestyle movements – perfect driving experience
Find that differentiation to create that appeal (authentic differentiation)
Optimize Curiosity (Provide customers with appealing knowledge without giving too much away)
Focus on content Marketing
Content ideation and creation process (THEMES – written or graphic)
Distribution and amplification (Facebook, website)
Community Marketing - Must be shareable and “shareable”
Increase Commitment
Channel Management – availability in many touchpoint options to create seamless experience
Sales force needs to place themselves in the customer’s shoes
Market and Product specialists to activity specialists
Define the role of each channel so as to drive customers into making the commitment to purchase
Increase Affinity
Rewarding relationship
Post purchase experience – usage and after sales service
Emotional and Human to machine interaction
Gamification – game mechanics to increase engagement (status symbol)
Petron Value card
Starbuck planner - rewards
In summary, we must work on the 5A’s customer’s path. Properly use the PAR and BAR to drive Awareness to Action and finally to advocacy.
This will help measure the productivity of their various marketing activities. Go Petron Go the XTRA MILE!
Here is my COSLA presentation to support my reaction post
REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
How can your business adopt the new metrics of PAR and BAR to measure marketing productivity?
Our marketing can tend to get lazy since our product is a utility product. It will still sell even though there is no marketing. The challenge for our marketing group is how to localize this awareness to the grassroots levels? There must be programs that would influence the youth the and the drivers themselves in advocating our Petron brand. Our loyalty program must be further expanded to include more appealing products that are related to the driving experience.
How can your business trigger favorable customer conversations in order to drive awareness without increasing the marketing budget significantly?
Facebook and online driving forums are one of the best means of increasing awareness. A lot of focus must be to the bloggers and communities as they have an indirect way of promoting your product to a much wider group without much expense. Word of mouth spreads easily like wildfire. Whether is it the latest internet MEME or show, customers are very quick to spread news.