Mobium Creative Group releases results of survey on how business marketers are budgeting for customer relationship communications
2003-01-03
Mobium Creative Group conducts bimonthly marketing surveys on topics that address grassroots issues of change important to business-to-business (b-to-b) branding, advertising and marketing professionals. Surveys are conducted through the Mobium website, which contains one of the industry’s largest aggregations of business marketing and branding data. You can view past surveys at:
http://www.mobium.com/community/surveys/survey_3.asp
The survey asked the questions: “What percentage of business marketers’ total communications budget for 2002 went into customer relationship communications?” And “What tactics are marketers using most in their customer relationship programs?”
Mobium received several hundred responses to this survey.
The results
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| Client side marketers: 20% | Agency side marketers (their clients): 21% |
Mobium Creative Group found that client-side marketers said they placed 20% of their communications budgets into customer relationship communications while agency-side marketers said their clients placed 21%.
When asked what tactics these marketing professionals used, they responded:
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The Mobium analysis
Marketers will spend a significant amount of their communications budget on their customers. In fact, 21% is more than we expected and may reflect the economic times more than a widescale embracing of customer hugging. Many companies may be buttressing up communications to customers to leverage their existing market shares while shifting money from acquisition efforts.
Nevertheless, the top three tactics of event marketing (17%), customized communications (16%) and interactive Web communities (12%) are being used by 45% of the business marketers who responded. Such a wide use of these activities suggests a movement toward more personalized two-way communications.
On the other hand, with all the talk and all the software systems being sold, we were frankly nonplused by the mediocre usage rate (9%) of CRM. Perhaps we’re learning, once again, that communications is more than software even when it can slice, dice and julienne databases and synthetically personalize messages up the ying yang.
The Mobium bottom line
Marketers surveyed volunteered the use of a wide variety of tactics. In fact, they volunteered some 35 additional tactics beyond the nine choices we gave them. These included face-to-face and telephone communications, personalized relationship building, cooperative partnering, tradeshow outreach programs, onsite visits and Internet portals. We call these techniques “customer huggage,” and feel that they indicate a move in the direction of personalized customer contact.
Successful customer huggage may be more about communicating with and treating customers in a special way that’s different from the way you interact with “the market” than it is about which technology or tactic you use. In fact, integrating a variety of tools that uniquely deliver that feeling of being special and that move one-time buyers to multiple purchasers to loyal customers to brand advocates may be the real issue. And that may explain the diversity of communication activities being used.
About Mobium Creative Group
Mobium Creative Group is a full-service, integrated business branding and communications firm specializing in integrated communications, branding, relationship marketing, interactive media, and information architecture. Clientele include MeadWestvaco Corporation, NEC-Mitsubishi, Motorola GTSS, CNH Global, NovaMed, Farm Progress, Tellabs, and Ondeo Nalco Company. In January of 2002, Mobium launched its new Web site which is an interactive book that helps business marketers, communicators, brand builders and change agents, as well as its own employees, better define revolutionary paradigm shifts and explore ways to take advantage of them.
www.mobium.com