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Uncovering, Understanding And Unlocking The Power Of The MVC

By Mark Harrington, Clutch 


Today, customer loyalty is widely viewed as a diminishing asset for many brands. With an onslaught of options and information, consumers are easily informed and widely empowered to change their shopping habits, resulting in frequent brand shifts along their paths to purchase. Despite this, smart brands are strategically strengthening their customer loyalty through enhanced intelligence. A major component to achieving this is identifying the brand’s MVC, or Most Valuable Customer.

The MVC is that most coveted, top-line consumer who provides tremendous value to the organization. And while most brands understand the value of finding their MVCs, many brands struggle to uncover them and often identify them based on a single dimension.

Beyond Spending

Obviously, the amount a consumer spends on a brand’s products is important and reveals a straight-line view of the relative value a customer provides. This is traditionally the approach most brands tend to use when attempting to identify their MVCs.

However, focusing on the transaction value of a consumer only delivers a narrow perspective and can easily exclude MVCs who provide tremendous value on an array of other measurable dimensions. That’s not to say that the spend value of customers should be ignored. On the contrary, it should be embraced and looked at from a variety of perspectives. However, focusing strictly on spend to identify MVCs excludes a tremendous amount who don’t fit its straight-line measurement. 

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Multidimensional Value

While tracking down an MVC is challenging in today’s complex omnichannel world, the wealth of multichannel intelligence on consumers actually makes it easier to identify and understand them for brands that opt to engage an Advanced Consumer Management solution. Outside of simplistic spend value of a customer there are several deep dimensions that can unveil valuable MVCs that can truly transform a brand’s value, among these are:

Frequency:
The frequency of “touches” a customer has with a brand can provide tremendous value, particularly in the number of engagement opportunities it delivers. By its very nature, an MVC who purchases a brand often, even with small transition amounts, is inherently loyal to that brand, making it critical for the brand to identify and understand them in order to effectively grow their value per visit.

Channel:
In a similar regard, customers who engage a brand with a multichannel approach (e.g. in-store, online, mobile, social, etc.) often have a strong frequency and also greater investment in the brand relationship. This also can result in enhanced loyalty, which can transform customers into MVCs.

Service:
The service dimension can identify MVCs who have enhanced buying experiences, often through their own research and understanding — they know what they want and that the brand delivers it. This results in lower operational costs related to returns and customer service. Those reduced costs can be instrumental in finding MVCs.

Evangelism: One of the most valuable, and often least understood dimensions, is that of evangelism. In some cases, a brand’s most valuable MVCs have less to do with their generated revenue and more to do with their ability to essentially acquire new customers for the brand through their affinity broadcasts across social or offline channels to friends and family members. Each of these dimensions provide critical views of MVCs in order to identify, understand, engage and ultimately replicate them in order to build loyalty and grow the brand’s value. 

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Identifying Your MVCs

Finding a brand’s MVCs is a multidimensional approach that is easily achieved with Advanced Consumer Management. This allows the brand to get a comprehensive cross-channel view in order to uncover each segment of an MVC based on the dimensions listed above. This holistic approach can identify tiers of MVCs that can quickly enhance the loyalty to a brand with strategic engagement and increased relevancy.

The key is having the ability to identify MVCs on an array of dimensions in order to achieve an inclusive view. This is most easily achieved through customer intelligence via Advanced Consumer Management that allows a brand to see the multidimensional value of their customers across every available channel. Once the MVCs are identified, brands can then construct a personalized strategy built around them in terms of engagement, rewards and experience with an eye on building a relationship and driving loyalty.

Understanding Your MVCs

Beyond understanding the MVC segments, brands can now also gain tremendously deep insight on the actions, tendencies and preferences of customers through their “always on” state.

These profile dimensions go way beyond mere high-level demographics and can included purchasing tendencies, social insights and shopping behaviors. This allows for enhanced understanding and personalized engagement by tailoring the timing, content, channel and ultimately relevancy of communications with MVC, delivering what the customer wants, when they want it.

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Beyond Discounts

Aside from gaining powerful understanding into what motivates customers they can also drive value and experience by incorporating currencies outside of cash, typically seen with discounts and sales. This “coupon” approach not only conditions consumers to it also decreases brand equity and unnecessarily impacts margin with MVCs who likely already see the value in your brand and aren’t looking for discounts.

Many of these “cashless” currencies that savvy brands are leveraging are already sunk costs inherent to the business and can include personal shoppers, wish list features, gift wrapping, valet parking and expedited checkouts, among many other elements. Packaging these as part of an MVC program provides an enhanced experience focused on increasing revenue rather than eroding margin.

The Bottom Line

Focusing on delivering value and experience to MVCs can significantly impact revenue. Aside from this, a properly constructed program can usher MVCs into evangelists that drive new customers and revenue streams, which many premier brands are already experiencing.

The linchpin to achieving this is to engage Consumer Management technology that facilitates the identification, segmentation and engagement of MVCs. Once you identify and understand them you can then construct a comprehensive strategy to deliver them what they want, beyond coupons and discounts. This then can create a paradigm shift with customer loyalty, moving it from a diminishing asset to a competitive advantage.

Mark Harrington is Vice President of Marketing for Clutch, the leading provider of advanced consumer management, shopper intelligence and customer loyalty solutions for many of the world’s premier brands. Mark’s experience spans publishing to payments and education to ecommerce while serving strategic marketing roles for both innovative startups like Half.com, Ecount and Infonautics and leading corporations like Citi, eBay and Pearson. You can follow Mark on Twitter @mark_harrington.

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