Move Over, Customer Satisfaction; enter emotional 'Touchpoints'

“Emotion Marketing”
Scott Robinette and Claire Brand
McGraw-Hill, 2001


You stride into a bookstore looking for a greeting card. You don’t look for just any card – you have a Hallmark or a Unicef card in mind. You want to discuss business over a cup of coffee, you instinctively tell your associate to meet you at Café Figaro or Starbucks, ruling out all other options. Your friend asks you to switch to another t-shirt brand, cheaper but of the same quality, but you resist any and all enticements and say: “No, I will stick to Polo or Lacoste.”

Are you a case of a satisfied customer, intelligent buyer or brand loyalist? Customer satisfaction does not explain insistence on a product any time and any place. Intelligent buying cannot comprehend near blind attachment to a brand, glossing over such rational product attributes as price and quality. And brand loyalty is so one-sidedly focused on the brand that it fails to see the strong emotional relationship between seller and buyer – where even the lines between them vanish.

There must be a way to interpret this bond between product and customer beyond the confining concepts and jargon of marketing – where points of view have to shift: Are we product- or customer-oriented? The book, “Emotion Marketing,” provides the answer: A company or product can actually establish an “emotional connection” with customers – which the book calls “touchpoints.”

We have actually gone a long long way in our search for the best strategy to build loyalty among our customers. First, we were content with achieving customer satisfaction. Then, we improved on it and we said, we should “exceed customer satisfaction.”

Thenceforth came along the concept of the firm being “customer-driven” where even complaints are not only welcome but are sought as a matter of policy. Then, the brand gurus insisted that it is all about “brands.” From “brand awareness,” the marketing objective deepened to “brand loyalty”. And, from that level, it further acquired depth and breadth in “brand equity” – a concept where the brand has pre-eminence over all other brands and prior claim to the customer’s mindset.

And here comes Emotion Marketing, a phrase that actually does not capture the concept of “connecting emotionally” with one’s customers, where the line between company and customer blurs and where a business relationship rises to the level of a long-term friendship, for lack of any better term – to describe the “caring” by one and “loyalty” by the other.

Hallmark, the main focus of this book – but occasionally shared by Harley Davidson, Carlton Hotel, Hertz Rent-a-Car – conducted a study how four variables can help predict customer loyalty. The four variables are: Caring, Trust, Length of Patronage and Overall Satisfaction. The study’s findings: Caring is twice as important as any of the other three variables.

These words do not seem to describe a business partnership, but it does for Hallmark: “The more a company shows it cares, the more loyal customers appear to be. Just as in friendships, consistent demonstrations of caring build trust, encourage comfort, and eliminate the need for defenses, allowing a relationship to take place.”

“Genuine caring produces the deep, fertile ground that allows a relationship to put down roots,” the authors point out, seemingly speaking of something deeper than business. And then, back to business, they theorize: “Caring is that bridge between satisfaction and loyalty.”

The authors explain the firm’s Emotion Marketing with “The Hallmark Value Star” – which is made up of five elements: the rational side – Product (quality) and Money (price); and the emotional side – Equity (trust), Experience (relationship) and Energy (convenience). All five elements delve deeper into how Hallmark builds loyalty and, chances are, our companies in the Philippines have been using such elements in varying degrees.

One interesting discussion is the element of Energy in Hallmark’s Value Star which is summed up thus: “Conserving people’s energy also sends the message that a company values its customers. Wasting their time, on the other hand, says a company does not care.”

The book illustrates this point on how Hertz’s Gold Program has made it easy on car renters to pick up and return their cars – not only saving their time but, as a result of processing speed, leave the customers more time for what they love to do: hit the road. This should be instructive to businesses here which seem to be wasting people’s time waiting in long queues to buy a merchandise, to retrieve an equipment for repair, or even to get an update on your credit card balance! So much emotional energy is spent when tempers rise, you know.
This book introduces a concept that has worked for Hallmark whose Gold Crown Card Program is the largest loyalty program the world over: 12 million active members! You may adopt other slogans, but if you are somewhere near believing – “When you care enough to send the very best” – you will be another success story. Hallmark that.