How does your business differentiate their product or service?
You may want to consider one more. Please consider the value-add of the human connection you provide to your customers.
Why is this so important to consider now? How could you implement more human connection?
Let's start with a few recent headlines of the contactless world.
Walmart to Offer Secure 24/7 Contactless Delivery to Florida Customers - Progressive Grocer
The headlines and announcements are a virtual ticker tape of new contactless options for consumers. They will most certainly be a hit with certain consumers and on Wall Street. However, doesn't it leave you missing something at the core of our human DNA that supports our ability to survive and thrive?
The National Institute of Health promotes as a foundation of human health and well-being a social wellness tool-klt. It does not appear to me that the pictures in this kit match up to the realities of a contactless world. A recent story for health providers entitled, "At The Height Of Digital Wellness, Are We Missing The Human Touch?" The article questions the absence of human interaction in healthcare. There's a social isolation epidemic. But it can be fixed. - The Hill This references the need for policies that support community due to isolation's direct economic and social implications to declining health.
This is where you come in.
First a side-note.
Is there something you learned in school that becomes a permanent re-play in your mind? For me, it was reading the book, "Megatrends", by author John Naisbitt. His forecasts include the one I have been consumed with since I first read it.
In his own words.
"High tech/high touch is a formula I use to describe the way we have responded to technology. What happens is that whenever it is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response - that is, high touch -- or the technology is rejected. The more high tech, the more high touch....... Our response to the high tech all around us was the evolution of a highly personal value system to compensate for the impersonal nature of technology." Naisbitt concluded "The great lesson we must learn from the principle of high tech/high touch is a modern version of the ancient Greek ideal - balance."
Certainly we can catalogue the long list of technology innovations since John Naisbitt first wrote Megatrends in 1982. It is not as easy to catalogue the counterbalances.
Ok, to back to it. And yes, that is where you come in.
Direct food marketers have adopted a solid list of why's to purchase their products. At the top of the list are family businesses, generational history of experience, transparency of product processes including quality and support for the farmer/fishermen/community businesses. The scorecard is long on why these individual businesses are having an impact on climate, health and community. We should all be grateful you do what you do. Thank you.
Yet, does the line in the sand differentiation maximize the high touch component enough? I say resoundingly. No. More can be done.
Direct marketing is a person to person relationship in a world that is far out of balance. I would surmise that psychologists and social scientists would say that the human connection has been severed more radically over the past two years, than ever before in our history. The contribution of dealing directly with a human being to provide social connection is priceless to well-being and as long as you're serving up health, shouldn't holistic health of your customers be foremost in your mind?
Consider please these options as the founder/CEO. Remember the old marketing concept of word of mouth? People telling people about good experiences or something special that happened to them? I'll tell you a secret. It still works. So does the adage about the cost of keeping a customer versus trying to obtain a new one.
Call 5 customers a week. Not a text. Not an email. Call them. Thank them for their business. Leave a message to that affect if you don't reach them.
Send them a postcard with a personal note. Do you have one with a kind saying or picture that has your logo? Something they will hold on to or show their friends that reinforces what you are selling? Good Health. Lifestyle. Community.
Convene a meeting of 10 random customers each month via zoom and ask how they are using your product. Make it personal. Take something you learn and show the group that you were listening and how you integrated what you learned into making your business stronger.
Send them a gift, such as a new product you're testing out. Ask them what they think?
Give your customers an avenue for feed-back. A survey that you read and actually take a day to follow-up with them "rewarding them" for the time they spent completing the survey.
9 times out of 10, your customers will tell you how and what they want to buy (pay money). THEY are your business. Continue to ask them in every possible way.
After all, isn't social connection your business model? In our world of optimizing health, it seems more relevant now than ever. You have the business models to support re-balancing. #grateful
Comments