Today everyone’s all about ‘experiences‘. It all starts when they have an idea or inspiration from cooking all time favourites for Mother’s day to booking the next Easter holiday. After a brief Google search for the best prices, we are frantically looking to make that purchase because the day never waits for none! Then the actual journey begins with disastrous moments of chopping your fingers instead of the vegetables or the famous ‘we-will-miss-our-flight‘ anxiety that kicks in looking at the long security queues. Finally experience meets reality as the curry tastes weird without salt, both at home and away, but we do our best to make Instragam-able moments out of it.

Unfortunately, for the brands spending millions in creating personalized experiences this journey might only blipped once on their radar only to be followed by a discount email on the next purchase. In the best interest to not disappoint their mothers, the email is ignored or deleted right away !

So how do we solve this problem? Well is this even a relevant problem for you, dear reader? If you interact with customers differently than others, why should you follow the same tactics?

Defining the brand – customer relationship is an important yet very less known & executed step in understanding the customer and designing marketing initiatives around them. Here’s a view about how these relationships might look like based on the transactions customers have with your brand.

Fundamentally, brands can have contractual or noncontractual relationships with their customers. Simply said contractual relationships are where customers have a binding contract to engage & transact with the brand such post paid mobile phone usage, credit card subscriptions etc. The key challenge of noncontractual settings is how to differentiate those customers who have ended their relationship with the firm (without informing the firm) from those who are simply in the midst of a long hiatus between transactions.

Now all customer transactions have a time factor associated as well, since there’s never a customer who transacts with your brand 24 x7. There are some transactions that can happen only at specific times such as a credit card has an expiry date so cannot use the same after a certain date. On the other hand there are transactions that have no constraints as to when the customer can purchase that new clothing or switch to the competitor at a better price ! Lets call them discrete & continuous type of transactions

Dear reader, I would implore you to define your customer relationship and place them on the below grid before you start any further analysis or define personalization initiatives or develop AI/ML models to predict future opportunities. For your easy reference, I have added some examples as well !