Whitepaper: Sustainability centric brand equity; by Sourajit Ghosh

Contents

1.?????Sustainability centric brand equity overview

2.?????Defining customer-centric sustainability

3.?????Customer preference understanding

a.?????Implicit & explicit sustainable preferences

b.?????Customer identify, access, consent & compliance management

4.?????Personalized sustainability experiences

a.?????Sustainability centric customer data model

b.?????Customer-centric sustainability insights & analytics

c.??????Sustainability centric loyal customer segments

d.?????Personalized green engagement increasing your brand equity

5.?????Sustainability customer value chain

a.?????Value fulfilment strategy

b.?????Key functionality to consider for customer-centric sustainable value chain

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????i.?????Carbon footprint in products

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????ii.?????Returns Management

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????iii.?????Re-commerce

??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????iv.?????Carbon Neutral Orders

6.?????Organization Structure design to enable Sustainable Brand Equity

Sustainability centric brand equity

As most organizations have customers who care for sustainability, it’s imperative that every organization starts blending in sustainability into their brand equity. This whitepaper provides you an approach on how to do the same using these 3 strategic themes:

1.?????Customer preference understanding

2.?????Personalized sustainability experiences

3.?????Sustainability customer value chain

Defining customer-centric sustainability

Sustainability as a topic can be extremely broad. In context to this whitepaper, my definition of a customer-centric sustainability is a customer who is conscious about these aspects of sustainability:

1.?????How active, positive and comprehensive is the organization’s ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) performance

2.?????The products of the organization: are they eco-friendly?

3.?????Does the organization systematically reduce waste?

4.?????Is there a focus on material re-use?

5.?????Does the organization invest in upliftment of the quality of local infrastructure?

6.?????Are the brands raw materials sourced via responsible sourcing vendors?

7.?????How much less is the carbon footprint of the products manufactured?

8.?????Do the brands work closely with other NGOs and invests in sustainability projects?

9.?????How green is the returns and recycling process connected to the products?

Thus, building your sustainability centric brand equity would entail:

1.?????How do you start understanding which customer is wanting what from you when it comes to sustainability?

2.?????How you ensure you consistently provide them that experience across their entire customer lifecycle across all digital and human touchpoints

3.?????And how do you provide and end-to-end sustainable experience across the whole value chain

Customer preference understanding

They are 2 aspects of understanding customer preferences:

1.?????Implicit & explicit customer sustainable preferences

2.?????Customer identify, access, consent & compliance management

Implicit & explicit sustainable preferences

Start listening. Listen with intent and purpose in context to sustainability. Listen omnichannel across all customer touchpoints like standalone surveys, embedded surveys in all customer digital experiences, social media sentiments, clickstream data, call center queries, product preferences, sales engagements, etc.

The customer is leaving traces of their intent and passion for sustainability anywhere and everywhere. You have to set-up digital listening connected platform to capture that structured and unstructured data across all touchpoints.

Here are some examples:

1.?????Collect feedback from customer in context to what experience they are having and ask them in that moment their relevant preference for sustainability

2.?????Ask them to rate your products and services in context to sustainability

3.?????The various initiatives you are taking as an organization connected to sustainability, let you customers know about it – and collect their feedback on the same and ask them to prioritize and rank on how they feel about it

4.?????Gather insights from customers on what more they expect from your company on sustainability initiatives

5.?????Mine social media data to understand customer insights and sentiments on what they think related to sustainability data

6.?????Blend in the data from DSPs (Demand Side Platforms) and DMPs (Demand Management Platform)

7.?????Leverage your analytics platform to understand trends from your product portfolio to see if there are any signals coming out based on the customer’s preferences on what they bought in the past

8.?????Which newsletters of sustainability the customer is subscribing to

9.?????What marketing events connected to sustainability have they responded to

10.?Did they sign up on carbon offsetting e-commerce option at the time of cart checkout?

The above are some examples. It’s imperative that you set-up your engagement systems across the customer lifecycle to keep listening to the implicit and explicit customer preferences when it comes to sustainability and green choices.

Customer identify, access, consent & compliance management

Consider privacy as a coin. There are thus two sides of this coin. One is the customer identity & access management (CIAM). The other is customer consent. The two together is essential to work together.

Imagine a scenario. You have a consumer who is upset about a customer experience and calls up your call center to complain about something. Few minutes later that customer gets 2 emails. One is from the customer service asking for feedback. And somehow, they also land up getting an email from your marketing automated campaigns on an upcoming promotion. Not the perfect time to sell something to someone if they are upset. Your customer service CRM system must thus be connected to your Marketing system in this case – to identify that customer has the same. Your CIAM system thus must be connected to all systems where customer data resides to uniquely identify and provide relevant access to that customer data.

Now let’s consider customer consent. On one hand you are driven legal customer data regulations of your respective country and region when it comes to customer data privacy. On the other hand, you must also respect the preferences and consent of the customer themselves for better customer experience.

And thus, omnichannel customer personalized engagement driven by your MarTech has to have both CIAM and Consent tightly locked with your tech-stack and marketing execution.

Personalized sustainability experiences

Now that you have started getting deep insights into individual customer preferences into sustainability and their green choices; the next step would be to convert those insights to action. The desired outcome is to provide personalized experiences to your customers based on their sustainability preferences.

Sustainability centric customer data model

You would need to firstly have a cloud platform wherein you can design the data model of your customer. On one hand you will need a data schema. The data schema will comprise golden profile – however will also have to blend in privacy and customer identification in that profile. Then the data schema will have to support customer segmentation – slicing & dicing & grouping the data in all possible ways. You would need customer activities also blended inside the data schema and allow the data schema to calculate indicators connected to the golden profile and customer activities.

The data schema will have to start modeling customer insights into the questions posed above in this whitepaper. Example of customer data model elements:

1.?????Feedback preference for sustainability

2.?????Rating of products and services in context to sustainability

3.?????Feedback on organization to sustainability

4.?????Expectations from your company on sustainability initiatives

5.?????Social media insights – unstructured data

6.?????Subscriptions

7.?????Marketing insights

Traditional database designs won’t suffice here. The one thing we have learnt in the world of MarTech is data is always flowing – changing, reacting, and engaging in real-time experiences of the customer every moment. The data flow will have to imbibe all the events being triggered from various applications where customer data resides and then various processes where the customer data flows.

With that data flow and data schema – both the unified & contextual customer profile will have to created in the data model. The unified customer profile is the master data centric view of the customer – the identity, unique id, merging of 1st-2nd-3rd party data, merging of data coming from various apps like ERP, CRM, social media, etc. Contextual profile is the customer experience centric view of that master data; for example, when the customer is complaining while calling the customer care – that’s not the right time to send an email to the customer from a disjointed marketing channel for an upcoming promotion to buy more products. So, understanding the customer data in context of their present moment (phase) of customer journey and experience creates the need for the contextual profile.

The unified & contextual customer data profile will need continuous enrichment of data and incorporate the machine learning techniques to have a repeat loop of continuous learning.

Customer-centric sustainability insights & analytics

Your organization would have been already investing on an enterprise analytics platform. That is critical. You would need the strong foundation of data warehouse, business intelligence, reporting & dashboards. The new age will technology evolution will also need to bring in a good data science platform too in the mix. As making sense of big data, creating & leveraging machine learning algorithms, driving actions via artificial intelligence is something which all leading organizations are investing now.

In context to your MarTech you have to then take the above existing investments in enterprise analytics & data science and target it towards customer experience. You must use a mix of enterprise analytics, big data intelligence & data science to start calculating customer scores & KPIs.

The customer scores & KPIs created using your analytics, data science & data management platform will then be leveraged in your MarTech design to drive actions using audience segments.

Sustainability centric loyal customer segments

You can begin with creating audience segments using the above KPIs & scores. It will also be prudent to consider creating audience segments to map the customer journey and based on moments of events along that customer journey set-up triggers of actions. With the vast volume of data, having a good data catalog is also advisable. A good data catalog is not just an inventory of your data assets enriched via meta data; it is also an extremely critical way for the business users in marketing to get access to the customer experience data in easily comprehensible manner. A data catalog will help in data governance and data access to various stakeholders like the campaign manager, marketing leads, marketing analyst, digital analyst, data science team.

Segmentation as a concept is rooted in the oldest traditions of marketing and is still relevant even today. A good segmentation business strategy equipped with a powerful MarTech platform can help you target and position your brand effectively and efficiently to the right segments. Segmentation today also must be driven towards on which channel will be the engagement experience. It must have the ability to bring in omnichannel data from diverse data sources, model the segments in a myriad possible way and then create meaningful segments driven by all kind of marketing attributes like transactional information, behavioral data, demographic insights, psychographic profiling, predictive scores, etc.

Personalized green engagement increasing your brand equity

This is where the rubber hits the road. Personalized engagement is where your entire investment behind the scenes in your MarTech gets real and interfaces with the front-end actual customer experience.

You are creating activations connected to customer experience by controlling the customer journey flows and embedding the flows with real-time actions. These actions will have to automatically get triggered across any customer experience connected applications e-commerce, social media, CRM, websites, mobile apps, emails, online community, call center, sales interaction, etc. These omnichannel triggers will be driven by dynamic automation??a combination of heuristics and machine learning algorithms driving real-time personalization.

MarTech makes marketing to one real. You can drive personalized predictive recommendations for each customer and then scale it to your entire segment and customer base. You can use artificial intelligence tools to drive smart experience in context real-time across the whole customer lifecycle from clickstream nurturing to customer for life loyalty program to customer advocacy and retention.

Consistent personalized green engagement across the entire customer journey will enhance your brand equity connected to sustainability.

Sustainability customer value chain

True value creation is not just catering to your critical customer needs. It’s about doing this consistently and repeatably and scaling this in a sustainable, efficient manner. It’s not about just wowing the customer the first time but being the customer’s trusted friend across their whole journey. To significantly add to your brand equity, you must excel in sustainability customer value chain.

Value fulfilment strategy

1.?????Seamlessly integrating your customer-facing front-office applications with relevant fulfillment back-end applications like ERP, supply chain and logistics, master data management, and analytics.

2.?????Streamlining your order management across its whole lifecycle – from generating interest to driving purchase behavior; from order processing and fulfillment to completing downstream processes like logistics, finance, and service. A perfectly orchestrated order-management system is essential to master your value fulfillment strategy.

3.?????Achieve cross-division collaboration between various divisions like e-commerce, key account sales, channel partner management teams, marketing, customer insights, IT, etc. Collaboration entails bringing people and process together across these horizontal processes to achieve the vertical uplift towards value fulfillment.

Key functionality to consider for customer-centric sustainable value chain

Carbon footprint in products

1.?????Carbon footprint data modeling

2.?????Sustainability centric data acquisition

3.?????Emissions factors mngt

4.?????Carbon Footprint calculation

5.?????Carbon Footprints analytics

6.?????Sustainability centric integration to relevant enterprise solutions

Returns Management

1.?????Returns recommendation

2.?????End to end returns visibility

3.?????Collaborative service support for return processing

4.?????Dispositioning at warehouse

5.?????Returns analytics

6.?????Limit value leakage

7.?????Automated intelligent guided returns

8.?????Optimize returns

Re-commerce

1.?????Product trade-in

2.?????Re-commerce product data

3.?????Pricing evaluation

4.?????Warehouse/3PL item processing

5.?????Inventory tracking/mngt

6.?????Cleaning & repairs

7.?????Grading & authentication

Carbon Neutral Orders

1.?????Rethink business processes for the circular economy

2.?????Encourage checkout and boost loyalty by offering an educational & transparent carbon neutral order option?

Organization Structure Design to enable Sustainable Brand Equity

The 3 offices above in your organization can set-up a special taskforce of a matrix organization; so that you have a task force with the following skills:

1.?????Sustainability – rules & regulations, financial implications, sustainability best practices

2.?????IT organization – relevant tools and technologies to automate, scale and enable the best practices

3.??????Marketing – making the sustainability best practices centric to customer experience to enhance brand equity and customer loyalty?

Personal Disclaimer

The content expressed in this publication is purely the personal opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of organization the author works for.?