Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Insight: So Many Consumers, Too Many Obvious Analytics?

By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS

I’ve got a consumer analytics tool for restaurants: it tells you when consumers visit the washroom while on your premises, how often they do that, which percentages are men, women or kids, whether they visit before eating, in the middle of eating or after eating, what they buy after visiting the washroom and whether the washroom visit influences their dining experience rating…

This may sound stupid but so far, with third generation analytics, there is no such thing as a ‘stupid consumer’ or ‘stupid metrics’ either. It is all about what you use the data for. The analytics frontier is much more than the apparent: it is around the identification of very non-obvious insights to bring transformational growth to your business, otherwise how would you differentiate if all your competitors are using the same obvious analytics tools that were erstwhile manually captured and called research but now digitally transformed and christened ‘analytics’ and ‘metrics’.

Customer satisfaction may not necessarily improve because you have superior metrics. Just wait till your customers visit your niche competitor and retake their metrics when they return…

Consumers have become amoebic in their emotional engagement with no objective basis for evaluating their behaviour let alone predicting it. Consumers have become evolutionary in their thinking. For example, will the presence of security guards or police at your business premises make consumers feel safe or unsafe? Read your own caveat to the same consumers who parked their vehicles at your heavily guarded premises shifting your liability and putting responsibility for theft on them for being your customers at the wrong time. What if your guards are thieves in uniform? And why are they there if not to make consumers feel safer but rather more insecure? So even consumer protection here could be a bad metric?

What if some of your consumers are also armed with powerful analytics tools using them to evaluate the number of washroom visits against menu items ordered and vehicle break-ins against particular guards on duty? Your customers would now collaborate on social networks [not necessarily your business page or micro-site] or even on a mobile app [which may be harder to monitor] to find out which security guard is on duty on any day and what’s on the ‘washroom’ menu. Now determining why your customers are changing their behavior will become a lifetime test for your business life cycle.

These kinds of highly engaged influencer-consumer super-advocates will be the outcome of your own creativity. Your business will definitely score high on customer engagement and other touchpoint metrics but not on the ‘so what?.’ Your customers are better informed on your business problems than you or your business itself and how are you going to grab this missing piece of the puzzle? Getting into the pitfall of revenue analytics and their associated yield management tactics will only bring your restaurant business’ analytic proposition back into the cycle: ‘all restaurant customers are hungry’. Valid but not true.

By jumping into to murky territory of bland restaurant promotional tactics, rebranding and menu reengineering, you will only be making a case for ‘creating convolution without value’...and marketers can do it very well.

Business and consumer analytics are now on an inevitable head-on conflict with consumer behaviour unless one of the players blinks in this game of analytics ‘chicken’.

Friday, June 14, 2013

Consumer Clout, Consumer Power

By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS

There’s nothing more vexing than the continual dripping of consumer clichés from consumer rights champions hoping to inspire consumer revolutions through declamatory ranting of ‘consumer rights’ and ‘consumer power’, when the horse is actually ‘consumer clout’. Consumer clout is about ‘being influential’ in getting immediate or later redress when you are wronged without necessarily ‘threatening to use your influence’. Consumer clout is a form of soft power, consumer soft power.

By putting the cart of consumer rights and consumer power to the fore without teaching consumers how to gain influence and become the change they want through educational self-preservation-oriented consumerism, most consumers go about quoting consumer champions and threatening to report to the latter rather than citing and insisting on what they know to be their rights in the particular situation.

CASE STUDY: One fine Saturday, while playing with my little nephew Miguel Yeboah and his friends at his parents Tenth Wedding Anniversary, I got a phone call from Alex Yeboah, Restaurant Manager at Mazera Restaurant, Osu-Accra…
The problem: a consumer is threatening to report the restaurant to a Consumer Rights ‘Don’.
The reason: their Grilled Tilapia is too expensive!

Well, I personally trained this manager as a Consumer Advocate while he worked with me also as a Hospitality Expert. Now this consumer, after being reeducated on the theory and practice of Consumer Protection, and the Manager also referring him to the National Expert on Consumer Protection, could foresee his sudden fall for climbing hastily on an overused prank employed by those with good taste but impecunious. This time the trick was not going to work. Consumer power is not about whom you know and whom you believe to be powerful enough to get you undeserved redress.

Pro 18:17-18 KJV He that is first in his own cause seemeth just; but his neighbour cometh and searcheth him. (18) The lot causeth contentions to cease, and parteth between the mighty.


The customer in question, who was surely on a consumer power trip (eventually turned sour), like many revolutionized Ghanaian consumers, had a default complaints reflex: threaten in making your case and you will win because the consumer is always right! Wrong! His power trip had an unexpected denouement to his dismay. Consumer hard power is for revolutionaries, not advocates and influencers.

As I mentioned earlier, declamatory ranting does not win favours or solve consumer problems. In this age of digital consumption, collaboration=self-preservation=consumer protection.

Firstly, in a free market economy, where prices are determined by the forces of demand and supply, ‘expensive’ is not a business wrong, ‘defective’ is! This consumer seemed to reminisce the coup d’état days of Price Control Laws in Ghana during which period women were stripped naked and flogged in public by the military for hoarding, in order to profiteer from hyperinflation, locally termed ‘KALABULE’. I thought he would rather call the military! This was a typical consumer wrong, no pun intended.

Secondly, Restaurants are licenced and graded by the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), which grading will give you a fair idea of what you should expect in terms of quality and price when you resolve to test your consumer power. Fine Dining is not for hungry consumers, but rather for those seeking a fine dining experience for the right price. Street food is the other alternative for hungry consumers who are determined to lose their right to redress for the right price in their haste. At least, you will not be able to trace the seller let alone rant about your consumer rights.

Besides, complaints have got a procedure and there is an International Standard for Complaints Management for businesses developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Next time you choose to go on a consumer power trip, please test your budget first.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Teaching Consumers to Fish

By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS

Have consumers been spoonfed to their detriment that anyone would think of teaching them to fish on their own? Spoonfeeding consumers with Consumer rights and responsibilities, consumer protection laws, consumer-business arbitration, small claims courts, consumer associations, consumer organizations, consumer pressure groups, etc, seem to work on the surface but the days of formal movements and bureaucratic resolution of consumer problems are so 1990.

Advanced World Counterfeiting, Global Contamination
Recent problems of melamine contamination in milk damned China until the Netherlands popped up for fake beef products using rat and other disgusting stuff. Unethical business at the highest level requires expensive technology and, thus, the advanced world lurk as prospects with their fingers pointing to the developing world for counterfeiting. Do not the powerful pharmaceutical companies covertly sponsor the counterfeiting of their competitors’ products with the objective of undermining them? And are not consumers the world over equally affected?

Necessity, Mother of Consumer Justice
Since the days of Martin Luther King Jr and Ralph Nader, consumers have been spurred on by necessity, and their outbursts have engendered change that was not brought about by organized formal institutions that have been established by governments for the sake of civil and consumer protection. Talk about the Arab spring, London Summer, etc… Was it not a consumer problem which triggered the Arab Spring that serially dethroned despots, demagogs and democrats alike?
I call it amoebic consumer reengineering, some call it customer advocacy and even more lately, customer power. The constantly evolving consumer in the digital world has neither shape nor form.

The emergence of the buyer to consumer to customer to client has morphed into another trend all together in this digital age. Consumer Injustice eventually breeds Evolutionary Customer Advocacy, negative as it may be. Love is blind, and so is Consumer Injustice. On March 15, 2013, Consumers International (CI) themed the World Consumer Rights Day on the issue of Consumer Injustice, wherein justice could be churned directly from the injustice, if the consumer microscope is not that maladjusted.

Fishing Businesses in their Own Murky Waters
Some may call it fishing in murky waters. But if the murky waters are unethical business practices then teaching consumers to look for murky waters will almost likely yield results as there’s definitely a fish blinded by their own stirring of the waters to make it muddy for others and thereby entrapping themselves in the cloudiness for the unsophisticated consumer-angler to nip them in the bud. If in the business world, entropy rules, in the consumer world amoebic justice rules.

Digital technologies and web sites like Amazon.com and Epinions.com facilitate communication among customers enabling them to share information about their consumer experiences in purchasing and using products and services and even specialized services such as health care.
Consumers are savvier now due to infinite online information search capabilities including the capacity and tools to verify business claims and do comparative shopping.

Social Consumption, Customer Advocacy
Since consumers began to share their consumption on consumer forums and social network platforms, the scales in their eyes began to fall off. Instead of negatively tagging vociferous consumers as tyrannizing the rest, more consumers awoke to the reality of shared problems from common businesses, thereby raising eyebrows on unscrupulous business practices.

Consumer Protection Advocacy usually championed consumer education and product information in labeling as critical in guiding consumers to make well-informed choices. However, since consumers resolved to take the bull by the horns and began to seek their own form of justice through name and shame on social platforms, businesses have been forced to champion consumer-customer education to the extent of even creating platforms for consumers to do comparative shopping vis-à-vis their competitors’ products. No consumer advocate, consumer protection organization or pressure group invented this. Necessity did!

Those who can, Teach; those who can’t, Act now!