Creating Benefit Maps

Benefit Maps are one of the key techniques in the Customer Faithful toolbox. By identifying and coding customer benefits in this way, marketing campaigns can be tuned for improved loyalty performance, against familiar metrics such as frequency and value of purchase.

1. Map The Benefit Set

We start by asking our clients to describe the benefits that their products and services offer their customers. These can be all sorts of things - ‘lowest price’, ‘best quality’, ‘next-day delivery guaranteed’, ‘easy-to-install’. When we’ve gathered all of the benefits together, we then collect the marketing materials that our client uses to describe the benefits to their customers. These are typically adverts, flyers, store window displays, emails, sales brochures and alike. We’ll also explore any media plan for where the materials were used (i.e. what type of magazine, website it appeared in). Now we’ll have three sets of information - the benefits set, the creative materials that described them, and the media where they appeared.

2. Code The Benefits

We’ll then code each benefit into groups. These focus on how customers are able to realise the benefit. For example, ‘lowest price’ is easy for customers to quantify by shopping around, whereas ‘easy-to-install’ is less tangible, and can depend upon the expertise level of the customer. We colour-code each group of benefits, and then add the colour map to the marketing materials.

After this exercise, what at first may have looked like an impressive array of benefits may now turn into a tangle of features, claims, and promises !

3. Work With Customers

Now we’ll get together with your customers and explore how they see the benefits of your proposition. Different customer groups see different benefits, and in a B2B context, different decision-makers often have varying needs. Once we have a good picture of what customers value and how they realise and measure that benefit, we’ll also work with the client to see the profitability of those groups.

4. Re-design Benefit Maps

Now we can show the client which benefit sets should be targeted to which customer groups. This can include removing service features which are not valued by customers but expensive to offer, as well as pinpointing new benefits identified by customers that were not highlighted in marketing campaigns previously.

5. Action Planning

Finally, we can work with clients to design specific marketing campaigns, using clear benefits targeted to customer groups that are now proven to value what’s being offered. We advise on metrics and targets here too, such as lower service costs, increasing frequency of purchase or average spend.

Our approach enables clients to clearly see which of their customer types are loyal to which benefits, and guides marketing campaigns which can be targeted to drive profit across 3, 6 and 12 months.