The true North Star of growth is customer equity.
To achieve customer equity, brands need to evolve. What is customer equity? It represents the value that current and future potential customers will provide to a company during the entire lifespan of their relationship. It creates real dollar value for companies.
In the customer-centric maturity model, it is critical to set the North Star and the compass to focus on Listening, Learning, Leading, and Lifetime (value) to grow.
Let’s look at the points of the compass individually…
Listening – Optimizing the customer journey. Do you have the right tools in place to capture and analyze data from all your channels? More importantly, are you using that data? The voice of the customer is powerful.
Learning – Perfecting the direct-to-consumer model. Do you have processes in place to translate the findings of your data into action items to enhance the customer journey? It is crucial that your action plan includes a philosophical change from quantity to quality marketing.
Leading – Scaling the brand story through content creation. How you tell your story is just as important as the story itself and the message must be consistent across channels and permeate through all levels of your organization. Your leadership team must align on metrics that align with strategy and be willing to measure performance against them regularly.
Lifetime (value) – Monetize loyalty by following your customer.
Let’s look at the similarities and differences between brand equity and customer equity.
Similarities:
Both brand equity and customer equity place the focus on customer loyalty and its significance. Both show that having many customers who would pay the highest possible price is what determines a brand’s value.
Differences:
Brand equity looks at the strategic issues around managing a brand. Customer equity’s main concern is the financial value that the brand gets from its customers.
Customer equity is a much broader alternative, as it can often ignore a brand’s optional value. On a much larger scale, it affects revenue and costs, and not just within the marketing environment.
These two terms are not interdependent. One can exist without the other. A customer may love both Domino’s and Little Caesar’s but prefer to order pizza only from Domino’s.
So, there it is… brands are nothing without their consumers and vice versa.
Let me help you maximize the lifetime value of your customers.