ays? Retailers need to think strategically about how to maximise their piece of the Christmas pie. This means challenging the accepted marketing strategies that have become habit more than best practice and considering alternative marketing ideas. Let’s start with the four ‘P’s. Since the dawn of time, marketers and retailers have drummed on about four magical Ps: Product, Promotion, Price, and Place. While the success of this formula has been proven over the years, it’s at risk of dancing along the fine line of navel gazing. The four Ps do a wonderful job of servicing your company’s product: they take into account the price point of that product, the promotional strategies and the placement of the product. But where does your customer sit in all of this? This can be best summed up in one concept: “customer versus content”. At first glance, this might sound much like the chicken before the egg debate; however, in this case the latter is a by-product of the former. Today, marketing needs to be about customer management, not content management. On average, it’s been estimated that marketers spend over a quarter of their budgets on content marketing. That’s a lot of marketing dollars spent ensuring that content is valued as the front runner. So how do we take a step back and re-evaluate to ensure that the customer is top of mind when mapping out the marketing plan? Here are three simple steps to help marketers make informed decisions to help businesses understand their customers ahead of the busiest spending period of the year. 1. Lead with what you know about your customer or prospective customer The goal here is to lead with the customer, versus leading with the same old content assets, solely because they have worked in the past. Specialty Fashion Group (SFG), one of the largest Australia fashion retailers with 892 stores and six online stores across Australia and New Zealand, has focused on growing its online business. By leading with the customer, SFG has employed true propensity modelling to identify which customers have the greatest potential to become an online shopper. With the help of SDL’s data analysis on the behaviour of other customers, SFG is able to see which members haven’t shopped online before, but have a high propensity to. Essentially, SFG is able to lead with the customer by knowing who to target, followed by what to tell them in order to divert their shopping dollars online. 2. Focus on maximising customer data for targeted communication Customer data is meaningless until it is deciphered. Concentrating on the behaviour of individuals and allowing them to pull the content they want to interact with versus getting that content pushed to them (think channel choice) is paramount to success this year. If we consider a company the size of SFG, the needs of its 7 million membership database are going to vary from customer to customer. SFG created a single customer view to not only better understand member behaviour as individuals shop across single or multiple brands, but also to provide opportunities to drive cross-channel engagement. The emphasis on the customer will be beneficial for retailer strategies to deliver the right message at the right time through the right channel, to the right members profitably. 3. Learn to place your customer in the centre Customer versus content is not a simple two-dimensional model. Retailers need to learn to put customers in the centre of how they control their brand experience and not the other way around. Anticipating where your customer will spend their valuable dollars will likely be more profitable than pushing content where it will be lost. If we consider SFG, we know that as an omni-channel retailer, SFG’s brands know that a member who shops both online and in store is worth four times more than in store only members. In store branded content will be diluted if the customer is not placed at the centre of the strategy. By simply shifting the way your brand sees its customers and its content, there are real and measurable differences up for grabs. The Christmas pie is getting larger each year and with more retailers lining up to claim their piece, marketers need to consistently reassess the value of current models for the best return. Hana Mujadzic is marketing manager APAC at SDL, a provider of marketing analytics, campaign management, language management and services, video and written content creation, web content management, and e-commerce. Hana can be contacted on (02) 8251 005. For more information on SDL, visit www.sdl.com.