EVERYTHING YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT TOMA

TOMA is Top of Mind Awareness. While this is a marketing / branding tool, a lot of departments within the company contribute towards a good TOMA. For instance, Customer Service, Delightful Product Quality (meet or exceed customer expectations), Timely delivery of High Involvement Products (Logistics, product delivery team) and much more. That’s perhaps why it’s important to understand what TOMA is.

A good TOMA is when a customer looks at a particular product or service and the first name that crops to his or her head is your brand name. It has a direct impact on sales, market share, pricing, customer loyalty, and many other KPIs.

WHAT MAKES FOR A GOOD TOMA SCORE?

In a nutshell, to me the 3 key pillars for a good TOMA is as below. Sure they look like brand and marketing deliverables. But let’s break it up into the elements that contribute towards each

Brand Recognition

While brand recognition looks like a marketing or branding metric, the first step towards brand recognition doesn’t come from marketing or branding. It comes from product and customer delighting (note – I haven’t said satisfying) SOPs. A significant portion of this comes from identifying what do you want your customer to feel when they engage with your brand / product at every step. In fact a major chunk of these come even before brand awareness.

So when you are starting to develop a product – your market research may say a wide variety of things – but what ultimately you offer to your customers by way of product USPs and Service USPs determines largely what your customer determines to be your brand.

Key Pillars:

1.?????Product offering versus customer expectation

2.?????Customer experience pre-during-post sales

3.?????Communication and design adherence to target audience

Brand Recall

Remember the first time that you made the down payment for your house? Or the first car you bought? Do you remember the brand name? Brand Recognition and recall are not the same thing. While Brand Recognition is like remembering a person but recall is about remembering the person along with their name and designation and company name.

Brand Recall is about the right romance between the product, service and the customers. Brand and marketing plays a major role in brand recall….

Key Pillars:

1.?????Content Marketing

2.?????Market Research

3.?????Branding

4.?????Social Media Advertising

5.?????Marketing Campaigns

Superior Customer Experience

Think back – which brand experience do you remember the most? My bet is – the worst and the best. Ultimately in the process of making money through business, most brands forget that Customer Service should be designed to elevate the end consumers or customers consumption of the product. The results are many fold and with progression of time, the results on brand recall go up drastically. Ensuring customer delight is a simple 2 step process. 1. Do not promise the moon and the sky – promise only as much as can be delivered – be it verbally or in writing. 2. Always deliver a little extra than promised. So if you are looking at promising the moon and the sky then be prepared to deliver the galaxy as well if you want your business to have a great brand recognition and recall.

Summary

I read an article by Dominic Tortorice and it left me with 3 wonderful thoughts. You know you have your systems right when you get TOMA through:

1.?????WoM – Word of Mouth of existing customers.

2.?????Premium Share – Compared to competitors your customer is willing to pay a slight premium to acquire the same product you are selling

3.?????Search – When customers start searching for your brand name in conjunction with your product or service

While there’s a lot more to talk when talking about TOMA or SPONT, that’s a discussion for another day. Would love to hear your thoughts on what you think makes the business of TOMA happen? Leave comments or inmail me!

#Marketing #Brand #BrandRecall #BrandRecognition #TOMA #CustomerService #BrandExperience #TOMA #Leadership