Category: Marketing

Atomic Rewards and Loyalty 2.0

Brand loyalty programs have so far been linked to money and transactions. I have proposed a new idea – Loyalty 2.0 which can be linked to time, attention and sharing personal data. Time can be thought of as a non-monetary resource. It is valuable, and is as I have argued previously, upstream of transactions. If brands can get us to spend more time with their content (solving for attention recession) and collect more data volunteered by us (solving for data poverty), they can build a better relationship with us – right messages, right time, right channel.

The problem has been there is no reason for us to spend more time with the brand other than when we are planning a purchase. In that period, we are searching and asking around. What if brands had hotlines with us so they were top-of-mind? What if brands got our 10-15 seconds daily which helped strengthen their relationship with us – a sort-of mental billboard? What if brands can nudge us to share our experiences with our network or voice our opinion publicly? Each of these actions ‘costs’ us time. If brands are ready to reward us for our money, can they consider doing the same for our time?

This is where the ideas of Atomic Rewards and Loyalty 2.0 come in. Emails can be excellent carriers for these incentives. This is what I wrote in my Email 2.0 essay (Part 9): “Atomic Rewards bring gamification to emails. They are micro-incentives to help marketers get attention, drive engagement, nudge behaviour and create habits. Think of Atomic Rewards as a loyalty program – linked with attention (time) rather than transactions (money). Atomic Rewards offer the perfect solution to Attention Recession; these rewards can be embedded in AMP-enabled emails or in Ems to reward streaks. Atomic Rewards will work best when they are offered across brands because no single brand can offer enough to make it exciting. Rewards filling the email inbox is when we will get a mindset change from “delete” to “delight”. Atomic Rewards make perfect economic sense for brands – for a small cost, they can ensure the hotline to the customers stays active because if the customer becomes inactive or churns, the cost for the same attention will be many times higher via the adtech platforms.”

I wrote about Loyalty 2.0:

The starting point needs to be at the top of the funnel in the brand-customer relationship: with a customer’s attention and data. Attention is critical for everything else that follows. In a world of too much information, individuals can be lost; messages find it hard to get through; connections cannot be easily established. To instil loyalty, brands must solve the attention problem. This means building a pipe, a hotline to their customers. This is where the loyalty app comes in – an app which, crucially, rewards them for their time and data. As I have written earlier: to get customers to pay for their attention, pay them for their attention – else the brand will end up paying Google and Facebook (Meta) 100 times more for the same customer’s attention. There is no loyalty program anywhere in the world for attention.

After attention comes data. Brands need to understand their customers better. While they can decode actions of individual customers on the website and app, the better approach is to simply ask customers and incentivise their actions (in this case, the data being provided voluntarily). How many brands ask us? How many brands offer us incentives for giving information about ourselves? In this case, the additional benefit is that we will also benefit from the personalisation in the offers that we receive. We want to be shown opportunities that interest us, that speak to us. Revealing ourselves is both an opportunity to earn points and to ensure future communications are targeted for our particular tastes.

What better mechanism to get attention and collect data than an AMP email? Gamify it with Atomic Rewards and there is the foundation for a hotline! Into this mix let’s bring in the idea of “Performance Email.”

Living Email

For too long, emails have been static and lifeless. Brands create the email, send it and it stays that way forever in the inbox. At best, there is some dynamic image that can be pulled in when the email is opened. As such, the email becomes a single-use message – never to be opened again. What if this could change? Let’s consider the possibilities of an idea I call “All in Email” – search, browse, chat, cart, rate, review – many of the verbs we associate with actions on websites or apps can now be done in emails. Instead of a customer going to the brand property (website or app), what if the property came to the customer?! That is the promise of AMP – combined with the power of our imagination.

A Living Email could have a search box embedded in it. I could then search in the email itself and see the results right there. Popular categories could be listed for me to browse inside the email itself. In both cases, even the addition to the cart could be done within the AMP email. Since an AMP email does not retain its “AMP nature” when forwarded, the checkout process too can be done right inside the email. No click throughs, no landing pages! A Living Email could lead to the initiation of a chat session from inside the email. I see a product I like in the email, and I could initiate a conversation with a chatbot or a human for resolving my queries. The context-specificity of the chat could lead to faster closures. Features like search, browse and chat could be standard components in every AMP email – so all I have to do is to go to my inbox and open any email from a brand and get started.

A Living Email can show news and stock quotes in real-time – every time I open the email, I would get the latest info. In fact, take this idea to its logical extreme, and all a media brand would need to do is to just have a single email ever in the inbox. Think WhatsApp – we have a single conversation thread with an individual or a brand. A Living Email would be the only email a media entity would need to send. When a breaking news or a daily update needs to be communicated, the email would just rise to the top of the inbox. (More on this when we discuss the Micronbox idea.)

A Living Email could have changing questions for collecting zero-party data. Depending on what the brand knows about me, it could throw up a different question each time I opened the same email. A Living Email therefore is just a placeholder in the inbox – with each side (brand or customer) having the ability to initiate a conversation.

AMP is what makes the Living Email possible. Atomic Rewards is what provides the micro-incentives needed to nudge the customer to the desired actions.

AMP and Email 2.0

AMP is one of the biggest innovations in email in recent times. The underlying tech has been proposed by Google. AMP works in Gmail and Yahoo mail clients but is not supported by Apple. So,  if one has a gmail ID but is viewing the email in Apple’s mail client, the AMP features will be lost and the standard non-AMP version of the email will be shown. Because Apple mail clients account for almost half of the consumption of email in the US, marketers and ESPs (email service providers) have largely ignored AMP. Matters have been compounded because creating AMP emails takes some effort – while AMP editors are now coming to market, it is still not as easy as drag-and-drop to create the emails. Finally, there is also the issue of capturing the data entered in the AMP email – that needs a data storage service to be integrated. For all of these reasons, AMP has been a non-starter since its introduction over 3 years ago by Google. This is what I had written in an essay on AMP a year ago: “AMP for email is new and exciting; it offers marketers many innovative ideas to strengthen the brand-customer relationship; there are still significant challenges in mass adoption; it remains a “technology for the future” (much as it was 2 years ago when it was announced).”

The situation in markets like India is very different. Gmail and Android accounts for 90% or so of the market. As such, most emails are viewed in the Gmail client and is thus AMP-ready. We at Netcore are already rolling out AMP campaigns for many of our customers and seeing big increases in email engagement. The lead time creatives is being reduced by our recently launched AMP Editor and ready templates. The underlying theme of “no landing pages and no click throughs” is too powerful a proposition for brands to ignore.

This is what I had written on AMP in my recent Email 2.0 series (part 7): “[AMP] enables the creation of microsites in emails. Think of AMP as enabling email apps. AMP is a big leap forward. It eliminates a click to the website or app for a wide range of use cases: filling a form, gathering feedback, scheduling appointments, showing live content, creating interactive games and collecting zero-party data. AMP makes email a two-way channel … AMPlets which can be easily inserted into emails are another innovative solution. In fact, brands should consider creating an AMP-based interactive footer with multiple AMPlets … Whether it is 50% or 90% of their base, brands should make use of it because the benefits in terms of attention and engagement are big.”

AMP creates what I think of as the “Living Email.”

The Chasm

Marketing budgets of brands have been focused on three categories. With the rise of digital-first customers, the bulk of the spending is for new customer acquisition via the likes of Google, Meta (Facebook) and Amazon who together account for $360 billion of the $450 billion annual digital spend, which is about 60% of the global $750 billion spend on advertising. The second spending category is on sending push messages (primarily email and SMS) to their database with the hope that these push messages get opened and acted on. And then finally, there is the spending on the martech platforms which focus on the engagement, journey orchestration and personalisation on the brand’s properties (website and app). The first is focused on new customers, while the other two categories are focused on existing customers. As I have written previously, half of the spends on new acquisition are being wasted because of reacquisition and wrong acquisition – both an outcome of not building better relationships and gathering the right data from existing customers.

There is a chasm: marketers spend to acquire new customers, and then spend on the properties where the customers transact by either spending money or time. Very little attention has been paid to bridging the chasm other than blasting out lots of messages to every email address or mobile number they have. Yes, there have been improvements in segmentation and personalisation over the years, but the limitation has come from the capabilities of the channels. The only big innovation in email in the past 20 years has been the shift from text to HTML. SMS has largely remained the same. In India, we have gone backward ever since TRAI banned 2-way SMS interactions for brands almost a decade ago. Apps have enabled push notifications but these are being increasingly blocked by consumers. WhatsApp is working to bridge the chasm with its popularity and interactivity but it can be quite expensive for sustained usage and the risk of a centralised intermediary changing the rules is ever present.

For marketers to cross this chasm means converting the 1-way broadcast relationship with their customers into a 2-way conversation. This is what has been missing in the relationship. With brands firing away their messages, customers have become trained to largely switch off leading to open rates in single digits – meaning that 9 of 10 brand messages are ignored. This is therefore the crux of the challenge: how to make brand messages 2-way, engaging, exciting and something that customers look forward to.

Until now, brands had no easy way to bring interactivity to their push messages. AMP in email changes this. With interactivity can now come incentives for actions that marketers wish to drive. Atomic Rewards via a pan-brand loyalty program focused on the customer’s time (rather than money) is the way forward. The same idea of micro-rewards can be extended to other push channels for an omnichannel hotline. In the future, a WhatsApp-like inbox exclusively for brands (what I have termed as Micronbox) can further improve the hotline experience. Taken together, AMP, Atomic Rewards, Omnichannel and Micronbox thus become the pillars for bridging the chasm and building the hotline.

History

One of the things that struck me when I went to the US for further studies in the late 1980s were toll-free numbers. The 1-800 numbers were everywhere. These toll-free numbers were the way brands interacted with customers. You could call almost any brand and speak to a human agent. The enabler for the toll-free call was the concept of the “collect call” or reverse charging. Instead of the calling party paying, it was the called party that bore the cost.

RingCentral has the early story on toll-free numbers: “The 1-800 number got its start in 1967…The idea was to cut down on collect calls, which could be labor-intensive since they often required a live operator. The early adopters of toll-free numbers were primarily hotels and car rental companies, which took lots of reservations from across the country over the phone. Because of this, the story of toll-free numbers is also the story of the modern call center.”

The 1-800 toll-free numbers were the early versions of hotlines. Companies had vanity numbers (like URLs of the Internet age) so customers could easily remember them. An example: 1-800-FLOWERS, where the letters translated to digits on the phone keypad. From BeBusinessed: “By the late 90s, most businesses had a secret formula for this that still holds true today. If customers were more likely to get the number from a business card or website, i.e., the phone number was right in front of them, memorableness is not as important. If the average customer is finding you through a billboard, TV or radio ad, it’s important for the number to stick in their memory easily, so vanity numbers work better.”

Any customer could call a brand representative and ask for assistance, report a problem or give feedback. It was only one-way: there was no way for a brand to get in touch with a customer. In fact, unless customers were part of a loyalty program, it was almost impossible for brands to have a 1:1 relationship with customers. At times, the wait times were long. I remember once waiting an hour to speak to an airline representative when my baggage did not arrive after a flight.

From a FastCompany article in 1997: “The 1-800 number, staffed by a customer-service rep who debugs your computer or orders flowers on Valentine’s Day, has become such an institution that it’s hard to believe toll-free dialing has been available only since 1967, and that toll-free service as we know it today has been in place only since 1980. Americans dialed toll-free numbers 20.6 billion times last year. That’s more than 56 million calls a day. Today 40% of all calls on AT&T’s nationwide network are toll-free. The volume has tripled in the last five years.”

With the rise of the Internet starting in the mid-1990s, email addresses and web forms started replacing the 1-800 numbers. Now we have the chat windows (at times powered by bots) that are taking over. The future is probably a hybrid – combining AI (machine intelligence) with human intelligence. Lisa Morgan writes at TechTarget: “Hybrid chatbots not only help to close the gap between human knowledge and the kinds of queries a chatbot can answer, but also help ensure that queries involving an emergency or another emotional issue are dealt with empathetically. This requires adjustments to the words the chatbot uses and a quick handoff to a human agent who understands the customer’s dilemma and the best way to address it.”

From toll-free numbers to “contact us” web pages to chatbots – businesses have always wanted the customer connect. But in the past decade or so, focus and marketing budgets have shifted from existing customers to new customers.

The Crux

In my previous essay, I wrote about how the Email 2.0 hotline is at the crux of the brand-customer relationship. In this series, I will delve deeper into how brands can build the hotline right. The four pillars that we will discuss are: AMP, Atomic Rewards, Omnichannel and Micronbox. We will also cover some interesting ideas like the Living Email and Performance Email. I will also explain how the hotline holds the key to the bottom line.

Let’s begin by summarising the key ideas from my previous essay:

What is the crux of the brand-customer relationship? Among all the challenges faced by a modern marketer, what is the gnarly problem to tackle which can unlock profitable growth? The candidates were many: optimise ROAS (return on ad spending) on Big Tech platforms for new customer acquisition, offer bigger discounts to drive more revenues from existing customers, to invest in more martech solutions for omnichannel engagement and personalisation, and so on. In fact, there are many profit killers [Parts 3 and 4 in my Extreme Retention = Profit-centric Marketing essay] in a business which can be addressed and converted into profit creators. But there had to be that one thing which could be the gamechanger – the crux faced by marketers, a challenge that was critical and solvable.

… What brands lacked was a “hotline” to their customers. When a brand spoke, a customer would respond. And of course, it had to work the other way also. The hotline was the prerequisite to bringing customers to the brand’s properties … The hotline was the crux that brands had to solve for. Get the hotline right, and you have a 2-way relationship going with the customer … More than a shiny, new feature of the website or app, what brands need to realise is that it is the hotline that is the crux for their customer relationships. If they can shift the mindset from “delete” to “delight” in their messaging, it would solve every other problem for them.

… Building the hotline with existing customers is the only way brands can get their attention and solve for data. It is one of two ways to bring customers back to the properties (app and website) – the second method being big spends on branding. The hotline is the trick marketers have missed in the two other obsessions – new customer acquisition and adding bells and whistles to the app and website.

… Email 2.0 offers interactivity in emails via AMP, daily habit-forming content via Ems, micro-incentives in the form of Mu tokens as Atomic Rewards, a new metric to track engagement intensity via Hooked Score, and a new type of product-led agency (Progency) to do it all. Email 2.0 is the best way to build the hotline – better than 2-way SMS or even WhatsApp. Everything that can be done in other push channels can be done via Email 2.0 – and at a fraction of the price.

… The combination of AMP and Atomic Rewards offers a very powerful combo to build the hotline. AMP offers an “All-in-Email” approach – Shop in Email, Search in Email, Play in Email, Browse in Email, Earn in Email, Chat in Email, and so on. There is no need to leave the email at all – no need for click-throughs and landing pages! Atomic Rewards offers the foundation for Loyalty 2.0 – incentives for marketers to nudge customer actions. Mu tokens can be used to get attention and zero-party data; they can also be used to drive referrals and reviews because every customer also has a network and voice. Think of Mu tokens as the non-monetary equivalent of loyalty points which are linked to money and transactions.

… So, the message to marketers: make the Hotline via Email 2.0 as the crux for customer relationships. It will not only improve customer experience but also drive profitable growth.

The first question to then address is: why have brands not done what seems such an obvious idea? To answer this question, we need to go back in time when customers could simply call a number and talk to a brand.

Making it Happen

Building the hotline with existing customers is the only way brands can get their attention and solve for data. It is one of two ways to bring customers back to the properties (app and website) – the second method being big spends on branding. The hotline is the trick marketers have missed in the two other obsessions – new customer acquisition and adding bells and whistles to the app and website. In hindsight, the idea of a hotline seems so obvious and yet it is ignored. Marketers seem to have resigned themselves to 80-90% of their emails and SMSes being ignored, and most of their push notifications being undelivered. This is where the opportunity for smart marketers. The coming downturn and push for self-sustainability and profitability offers an inflection point to change the foundation in the brand-customer relationship.

The good news is that there are many innovations which can support a push by marketers to build the hotline with their customers. Email 2.0 offers interactivity in emails via AMP, daily habit-forming content via Ems, micro-incentives in the form of Mu tokens as Atomic Rewards, a new metric to track engagement intensity via Hooked Score, and a new type of product-led agency (Progency) to do it all. Email 2.0 is the best way to build the hotline – better than 2-way SMS or even WhatsApp. Everything that can be done in other push channels can be done via Email 2.0 – and at a fraction of the price. The good news is that marketers are already sending out emails daily to their customers. What needs to change is the underlying tech and the mindset.

The combination of AMP and Atomic Rewards offers a very powerful combo to build the hotline. AMP offers an “All-in-Email” approach – Shop in Email, Search in Email, Play in Email, Browse in Email, Earn in Email, Chat in Email, and so on. There is no need to leave the email at all – no need for click-throughs and landing pages! Atomic Rewards offers the foundation for Loyalty 2.0 – incentives for marketers to nudge customer actions. Mu tokens can be used to get attention and zero-party data; they can also be used to drive referrals and reviews because every customer also has a network and voice. Think of Mu tokens as the non-monetary equivalent of loyalty points which are linked to money and transactions.

A hotline also means a greater frequency of communication. Ems powered by informational microcontent are a great way to keep the relationship alive. Every email doesn’t have to be just an offer to buy. Stories can drive the emotional connect and help build community. What brands are doing on the social channels can be replicated within Ems.

Over time, the same underlying themes of Email 2.0 (interactivity, in-place actions, incentives, insights) can be replicated on the other push channels – making for a true omnichannel hotline relationship with customers. Every interaction is an opportunity to collect volunteered data that enriches the customer profile – and helps increase personalisation on not just the push channels but also the brand properties. This will become even more important in a world where privacy has taken centre stage and the efficacy of using cookies is diminishing.

So, the message to marketers: make the Hotline via Email 2.0 as the crux for customer relationships. It will not only improve customer experience but also drive profitable growth. In an uncertain tomorrow, the Email 2.0 Hotline offers comfort and certainty for brands and their (Best) customers.

**

Additional Reading

• Email 2.0: Making Email Cool Again
• Loyalty 2.0: How Brands can Tokenise Customer Attention and Data
• Profit-centric Marketing: Start with Email 2.0 and Loyalty 2.0
• Extreme Retention = Profit-centric Marketing

If there was a Hotline

If Target had a hotline to me, they could have engaged me and offered a replacement “Classic Fit” pant instead of simply refunding the money. They would have realised that of the two pants I bought, I had only returned one.

If Pongal (an Indian vegetarian restaurant in New York) had a hotline to me, they would have recognised me as a visitor who came every third day – and offered me an incentive to come every second day, and thus grow their wallet share from me by 50%.

If Gap had a hotline to me, they would have recognised me as having bought a shirt from them a few years ago and offered me more of the same when I entered their store.

If Barnes & Noble had a hotline to me, they would have realised that my email ID had been incorrectly entered and would have corrected it the next time I did a purchase. And then linked my in-store book requests to offering to send me the book within 24 hours if it wasn’t available in the store.

If Macy’s had a hotline to me, they would have offered me add-ons to the Perry Ellis belt I bought – rather than telling me that their rewards program was only open to New York residents (not realising that faking a NY address is so easy.)

If Aeropostale had a hotline to me, they would have wondered why I returned a couple of clothes within an hour of purchase. (Answer: Abhishek found better and cheaper in a store next door.)

If ASIC had a hotline to me, they could have asked me how many members are in my family and which shoes they would be interested in. In this case, ASIC doesn’t even know me since I bought the shoes from Kohl’s.

If book publishers had a hotline to me, they could cross-sell me other books in a similar genre. Again, they don’t even know I have bought a book. As an example, I have recommended “The Crux” to a dozen friends in the past week, and they have no clue.

If Air India had a hotline to me (rather than the contact info of my assistant), they would have asked me how my flight was and what could be done better in the future. (I would have told them maybe they need to do an upgrade to their interiors in the non-stop US flights which have been unchanged after 15 years!)

If Amazon had a hotline to me, they would have offered me free Amazon Prime while in the US – rather than blocking my account (which was using a different email address – the only way to get 30-day free Prime) and wasting an hour of my time in trying to get it unblocked.

If Nike had a hotline to Bhavana, she would have told them how silly it was for the sales executive to refuse to offer laces so Abhishek could try on the shoes and walk around to get a proper feel. (She eventually got the laces by escalating.)

And so it goes on. Billions of customer engagements daily. And so many missed opportunities for cross-sell, upsell or future-sell. It is little wonder that many brands lose out to faceless marketplaces – they not only lose margins, but also the customer relationship. It is the hotline which is indeed the crux – the one thing marketers should look at solving for, at least with their Best customers if not for everyone.

The One Problem

I realised that the real problem is that most marketers have no way to engage with me after I have shown interest or done the first purchase or even a few transactions. While the brand’s properties are there and the focus of their martech investments, what they lack is a definitive approach to getting me back to their site. The one problem, the gnarly challenge, the crux that had to be solved was that brands did not have a “hotline” to me as a customer.

Sure, they had my email address or phone number – so they could mail, SMS or WhatsApp me. In some cases, I also had the app installed, so technically they could send me notifications (as long as I did not block them). But the reality is that most of their messages do not get to me. Many emails end up in the Gmail promotions folder rather than the primary Inbox. SMSes – at least in India – are only OTPs and spam. More than half of the consumers block most push notifications. WhatsApp is growing as a business channel but is no longer free; in India it can cost 25-50 times more than an email and 4 times that of an SMS.

I started thinking more about the “hotline” idea. I remember in the early 1990s using the word a lot. We had two offices in South Mumbai. (This was in the pre-mobile era.) Rather than dial the number each time, we had set up a “hotline” – a direct communication link between the two offices. When I picked up the phone at one end, it would automatically ring at the other end. No dialling needed! It was a time-saver.

What brands lacked was a “hotline” to their customers. When a brand spoke, a customer would respond. And of course, it had to work the other way also. The hotline was the prerequisite to bringing customers to the brand’s properties. In my previous writings, I have used the word “pipe” to describe this. But the word “hotline” is much more appropriate. A push pipe is important for sending messages – like a regular phone line is for making calls. A hotline is special – because it is always answered.

The hotline was the crux that brands had to solve for. Get the hotline right, and you have a 2-way relationship going with the customer. They could begin with their Best customers. And Best customers could in turn respond by ensuring they did not ignore the brand’s communications. It would be a win-win for both.

More than a shiny, new feature of the website or app, what brands need to realise is that it is the hotline that is the crux for their customer relationships. If they can shift the mindset from “delete” to “delight” in their messaging, it would solve every other problem for them.

Gnarly Challenges

I realised that the challenge had to be linked to the retention and engagement side of the relationship, rather than the acquisition side. Marketers had little or no control on the spends for new acquisition – there was a bidding process for attracting digital customers via the Big Tech platforms. While they could search for more esoteric keywords or sites, other brands could also do the same. It was almost as if a driver discovered a new road to get to a destination faster in traffic, and before one realises it, even that road gets congested as Google Maps re-routes others on that path.

The next possible approach could be to make it attractive for first-time app users or website visitors to transact. Brands already offered discounts for this. When Bhavana ordered shoes from ASIC’s website, they offered her a 10% discount on her first order if she signed up with her email address to receive regular updates. Brands now even offer small incentives to collect email addresses and mobile numbers in-store for new buyers. The challenge remains in converting the one-time buyer into a repeat customer. A friend I spoke to said that 80% of first-time buyers do not return for a transaction – meaning only one in five make a second purchase. Driving a second transaction could be a good candidate for a gnarly challenge marketers needed to address.

On the retention side, the problem could be to improve the omnichannel customer experience. This begins with search on the brand’s properties. As we have seen, most search results suck. The item may be in the catalog but it doesn’t show up when a prospect is searching. This could be a gnarly problem to fix. Then come the actual recommendations – how personalised and relevant they are. Another gnarly challenge. For existing customers, what is the next best product to pitch could also be a problem worth addressing.

I started thinking about some of my own experiences as a buyer. When I wanted to book a hotel room for the vacation, I would have liked to see a floor plan rather than just a list of amenities and a few pictures. Most hotel sites are still stuck in the early 2000s when providing detailed info about the rooms – which becomes especially important for long stays. I had bought two pants from Target and realised that one of them was a bit too tight – there was a “classic fit” (which was good) and a “straight fit” (which was not). So, I decided to return the latter. When I went to the store (a different one from where I had bought), could the cashier engage me with my reason for the return and the possibility of sending me the right fitting pants rather than just refunding the cash with their no-questions-asked returns policy? Could Gap have asked me for my email address and then offered to send me more suggestions for T-shirts with pockets? Could every book that I inquired about and which wasn’t in the store at Strand and Barnes & Noble triggered an email with an offer to deliver it in two days from their warehouse? Could the Hamilton play company offer me some cross-sells after the play – the book by Ron Chernow, the sound-track with the songs, and perhaps other memorabilia? In fact, since I booked via Ticketmaster, do they even know me?

As I was thinking about all these experiences and imagined wish lists of what marketers could have done differently to get more from me, I got that insight – the Aha moment – about the one gnarly problem which if solved could help address many others and unlock a better customer relationship.