Customer Response and Consumer Behavior

For my final blog post, I wanted to talk about customer responsiveness and how a company can ensure that their customer response index is high. A “higher customer response index would have a significant impact on sales, the net marketing contribution, and the ad program’s marketing ROI” (Best, pg 355). The higher this index, the more customers will actually buy the product or service. This is an area I am particularly familiar with due to being a marketing communications and advertising major in my undergrad studies. An advertisement has to be executed with the target market in mind ALWAYS. You can have the best ad ever, but if your target customers don't see it (exposure), then you will be wasting your marketing dollars. Alternatively, you may get your entire target audience to view your ad, but if you are pushing the wrong message (comprehension), then your not going to make any sales. 

In order to get the highest customer response index, the company should consider each section of the response hierarchy shown above. In order to make each category successful, the company has to consider their target market's behaviors, emotions, lifestyles, demographics, etc. One way that I have gained the necessary information to do this in the past is through databases and helpful resources such as:

• Mosaic Consumer Lifestyle Segmentation: breaks up consumers into variety of detailed groupings
• Simmons: consumer research, can use cross tab to compare behaviors (for example how many members of a certain Mosaic group listen to Spotify or Apple Music)
• Claritas PRIZM: consumer research, offers unique feature of data by zip code

Data from all of these resources and more can help you create an effective marketing campaign with a high customer response index. The following are examples of how consumer data can help improve each area of the response hierarchy:

• Exposure: What types of media does your target market consume? TV, radio, billboards, magazines, printed mailers? If you know what kind of media your target market views and even more specifics (how often, what times, what TV channels, what magazines, etc.), you can make sure that a percentage of this target audience is it at the very least exposed to your ad. 
• Awareness: For this category, you need to make your ad memorable. This can be done through repetition. You can repeat the important messages in your ad multiple times. Additionally, the number of times the ad is viewed by each consumer can affect if they remember the ad or not. For example, someone may need to see a TV commercial 3 times in one day before they remember it. If any of you have Hulu, then you know all about this. They generally play the same commercials over and over, forcing you it into your brain whether you want to remember it or not. I think I could recite some of those commercials at this point. Additionally, content that stands out to consumers is more memorable.
• Comprehend: To unsure that your target market understands your message, you need to know them. For example, this Super Bowl commercial  has a reference to the classic movie "Dirty Dancing". If the commercial had been targeted at a younger audience that may have not seen "Dirty Dancing", they might think the commercial was funny, but they wouldn't really get it. 
• Intent to Act: If you know your consumers, you can influence them to act. For example, a classic example is grocery stores. Marketers know that people in the grocery store are busy and want to get their shopping done quickly. To these consumers shopping is just a chore. They also know that certain items are more likely to be purchased at certain times of the year. For example, in the summer, you will often see shelves at the beginning of an aisle with graham crackers, chocolate, and marshmallows. This is very convenient for consumers who are looking to purchase the ingredients for s'mores (a common summer time treat). The consumer may not even look at the price and just purchase all three items because they are all right there, saving them time. 

These are just a few examples of how consumer data and truly knowing your customer can help marketers increase customer responsiveness. This in turn will lead to increased sales and increased profits. 

What other examples can you think of where consumer data is utilized to improve the effectiveness of an ad campaign? This type of research can be directly tied to "the job". I did not discuss this in this post, but what connections do you see between "the job", consumer research, and increased customer response index?