You Do Not Own the Customer Anywhere, So Serve Them Everywhere

If your channel strategy feels like a set of silos that do not talk to each other, the Maherketing Hour untangles it.

Brands love to complain that they do not own the customer on Amazon. Here is the truth: they do not own the customer anywhere.

The whole idea of owning a customer assumes people are loyal to a place, and they are simply not. A shopper grabs formula in store on the weekly grocery run, orders on Amazon when a trip out of town is two days away, and goes direct for the thing only the brand's own site carries.

I don't really think you own the customer anywhere, because I don't see people as being loyal to a specific channel. It's what makes the most sense for them. If the shopper behavior for infant formula is 90 percent in store, then yeah, eventually you need to be in store because that's where you're going to access most of your customer base. But people might stop somewhere to get something because of convenience. — Michael Maher, Chief Idea Officer, Cartology

The shopper is smarter than the marketing plan

Treating a customer as if she will not notice a cheap shortcut is the fastest way to lose her. She is researching, checking Reddit, asking her friends, and reading the reviews a brand is not allowed to delete. She has done more due diligence on a can of formula than most companies do on their own supply chain.

Just because you shop in that channel, it does not mean you are not a part of this brand. You are just as important as a part of this brand as our D2C consumers are. — Sara Ahmed Holman, Chief Commercial Officer and President of New Ventures, Bobbie

Service is the moat

When a brand cannot be the cheapest and refuses to be forgettable, service is the thing left to compete on, and almost nobody takes it seriously.

The brand's people work to remove the burden from the customer instead of piling more onto her. A problem gets fixed without a fight. A parent who cannot find formula gets help. Bobbie once Ubered cans of formula to a parent stuck at airport security. Nobody makes a brand do that. That is how committed they are to exceptional service.

What serving the customer actually looks like:

1. Make it right without making the customer prove anything first
2. Show up the same way whether she bought from you, from Target, or from Amazon
3. Treat customer service as the brand itself, not a cost center

Nobody owns a customer. The best a brand can do is be the one she chooses on purpose, in whatever aisle or app she happens to be standing in, because it has earned that choice every time before.