Creating Loyal Brands : Themes Of The Week...

So much content, so little time...

A weekly round-up of the themes and posts I found particularly interesting or useful.

This week provided some, good practical advice on a number of fronts, as well as conversations around how to add value to products, and the need to take a company-wide approach.

Learning to count...
Several posts this week offered some good, no-nonsense advice, in the form of a list.

5 Loyalty Themes to Remember highlighted themes from a major survey, which any marketer running a loyalty program would do well to heed.
3 Super-Cheap Marketing Tactics made the point that no bootstrapped company should treat marketing as an afterthought any longer, given the availability of simple, ultra-cheap digital marketing tools.
4 Ways to Keep Online Shoppers Coming Back for More offered some simple guidance on how to use rewards to rise above the noise.
While How to Avoid the Seven Sins of Customer Experience highlighted the key missteps that make organizations stumble when interacting with customers.

Creating more value...
With grocery shelves seemingly full of multiple versions of the same thing, several posts explored how to add more value to products.

Where Do You Come From? Tips For Creating A Powerful Provenance For Your Brand suggested ways to use where a brand to comes from, to create a stronger appeal to customers.
How to Mass-Customize Your Product urged marketers to consider all aspects of a product or service that could be customized, to better meet the needs of individual customers.
You're Going To Need More Than New Packaging To Call It Innovation argued that teams need to be challenged to add other types of innovation on top of product performance and design.
While How Google Wins Over Users By Giving Them Less used the example of Google to show how adding value does not necessarily mean adding features.

Show me the money...
Several posts explored in different ways how success today goes beyond the traditional boundaries of marketing.

'Culture of Purpose" Is Key To Success According To New Research From Deloitte highlighted the strong link between organizations that develop a strong sense of purpose, and long-term success.
Get Ready for a Journey: Customer Experience is Changing showed how improving the entire customer journey rather than individual touchpoints can result in lowering costs, reducing customer churn, and increasing cross-selling success.
Getting Back to Basics: Why Brands are Getting it Wrong in Social Media urged marketers to connect clearly social media strategies to business goals and customer expectations, rather than seeing it as an end in itself.
While The Secret Of Disruptive Innovations pointed out that disruptions should be viewed in terms of their impact on people's behavior rather than on the industry.

Finally, with all the disruption to the traditional practices of marketing, Less guff, more puff provided a useful perspective.

Enjoy...