Cohort marketing science is the study and understanding of real-time, customer-centric feedback. Knowing and understanding customers is crucial for brand marketers that want grow their brand smartly.
Cohorts are an organically occurring group of like responding consumers based on their real-time reaction to the brand, such as students, patients or employees. Cohort marketing is the fluid engagement of consumers based on customer-centric, emotion based feedback captured in real-time and delivered throughout the journey. The communication should be timely, focused and relevant to the needs of the specific cohorts interacting with the brand.
Mobile is an enabling technology in when it comes to real time engagement and cohort marketing. The raw cause and effect feedback delivered through mobile platforms produces dynamic, high confidence data to help marketers clearly and accurately speak to customers. It’s about listening and speaking to a group of like respondents in real-time. This data adds depth to legacy segmented data including demographic and lifestyle. Hypothetically, if the data represents two shades of emotional objection to price, one cohort responds with frustration, and the other confusion. The brand has an opportunity to engage each cohort with clarity.
By bringing the data retrieved from the cohorts in real-time to the brand marketers, they receive invaluable information to best determine what is working, what isn’t working, what can be improved, and so on, all hand delivered by real people (the cohorts) in real time.
Does it give CMOs the information on a silver platter? Not necessarily, but by using the science of working with cohorts, the information received is more targeted, more informative, and therefore more useful for marketers to analyze, interpret and use. With cohesive and collective actions, marketers can both understand their cohorts better and elevate brand value.
The emerging science behind real-time engagement is just coming into view. Take a moment to think of all the feedback an organization processes in order to understand its customers, suppliers and employees. As time ticks forward, we move further away from traditional data harvesting racked with delays, data smoothing and long cycle times to capture brand assessments. The future lies within mobile applications that provide an accurate channel to capture authentic reactions to brands.
Big data is providing previously unfathomable insights into the behaviors of people and organizations. Emotion-based smart data yielded through real-time customer-centric engagement is on the leading edge in understanding why consumers act the way they do.
Listening in real-time enables the creation of clear communication to groups of like respondents. Emotion based feedback from willing participants during the brand experience is illuminating. It’s a new dimension of high confidence smart data. In plain language, real time engagement delivers the cause and effect of people’s reactions that gives life to cohort marketing. Real-time engagement is inevitable. Harness it!
Lou Carricarte is founder & CEO of re.ACT.
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