Culture Points: A New Parameter in Customer Intimacy
Two months ago, I was a 30-something educated Indian male living in Lincoln Park, working in marketing, with subscriptions to Esquire and Cargo, on the Giorgio Armani mailing list, who received the Hold Everything and Red Envelope catalogs.
Two months later, the majority of my demographics remain the same, as do my subscriptions and other attitudinal measures.
However, I’ll be damned if you could now sell me 10% of the things I would have used my disposable income for without a second thought, back in April.
Know what changed? I got married.
As marketers, we’re not unfamiliar with the concept of using life events to trigger marketing campaigns or offers. We have successfully used graduations, weddings and births as surfboards for new products and services. But in the context of true relationship marketing, I don’t think we have really considered how much really changes in an individual’s life around these life stages. We don’t use them as ongoing platforms—instead, we typically use them as peaks for our own messaging. In fact, if your relationship marketing engine monitors these life stages and makes attitudinal adjustments in the calculation of LTV and other CRM measures, I want to know about it—it would be the first time I’ve encountered such a practice.
So how have things really changed? Let’s dig a bit deeper.
Two months ago, these are the things I would have done that I absolutely would not (or am not allowed to) do now:
- Buy a $2,000 Giorgio Armani Black label suit.
- Take a weekend gambling trip to Vegas with the boys at a moment’s notice.
- Spend $180 on a Steven Alan cotton shirt to wear around the house, thinking it was cool just because Apartment Number 9 sells it.
- Decide on what condiment must be best in the grocery aisle based on how expensive it is.
- Buy new underwear because I hadn’t done enough laundry.
- Eat out just about every night.
- Add randomly to my TV show DVD collection by buying large quantities at a time, and sometimes ending up with doubles.
- Buy the “locker and laundry” option at my gym so that my clothes were fresh every time I went back.
Now, here’s the important bit: These changes I’ve listed aren’t happening just because I’m now married. True, my demographics have altered because there’s a check-box against the “married” question now. And its also true that marital status is an important demographic differentiator. But the real reason these changes are happening because I’m married to a specific woman with specific values, specific demographics and attitudinal factors. The list above might be completely different were I married to someone else. Meaning, lifestage triggers and resulting CRM value calculations can’t be made on a single customer record just based on a change in his or her specific lifestage; every individual’s information within the relationship equation must be considered. In my case, my wife’s attitudes and psychographic information plays a huge role in my ongoing consumer habits. As, by the way, does my cultural background.
Hang on, you might say. Cultural background? That sounds a bit hokey.
See, being Indian, there are very specific values we ascribe to a marital relationship. Those dynamics would be completely different were we two busy New York attorneys who grew up in Manhattan and the Hamptons. As they would be different if we were high school sweethearts from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Our cultural idiosyncrasies surface most when we go through a life change that triggers a deep-seated value. Don’t believe me? Think about the Indian kids you see in your kids’ schools. Think about their parents. Think about how they behave, and what they seem to hold dear. Compare that to another culture, perhaps your own. Don’t you see a difference? Obviously, this is not a right or wrong, goor or bad comparison. But as marketers, we have to start considering what these changes actually signify, and how our customers’ lives will be different as a result of them.
For example, here’s what I would now do that I wouldn’t have even considered two months ago:
- Buy organizing furniture from Target.
- Buy vacation airline tickets two months in advance.
- Buy groceries for $1,000 every month.
- Look for a florist that was on my drive home from work.
- Buy things because they “smell nice.”
- Send birthday cards to everyone I know.
- Keep a watch on every major store sale, both online and offline.
So, this is my hypothesis: I believe that every consumer goes through what I’m going to call “Culture Points.” Culture Points are events in a consumer’s life that drastically change their buying attitudes and purchase propensities. Culture Point value calculations and measurements will require a new analytical methodology that merges multiple customers’ attitudinal and demographic data along with cultural parameters that are unique to the consumers involved. To start with, Culture Points could be integrated very easily into marketing data by proactive pop-up surveys on Web sites, or by simple survey questions at the end of a catalog purchase call. Eventually, I’d like to see Culture Points as standard marketing tools that are used to adjust personalized offers and more importantly, customer LTVs within a CRM environment.