Change in CRM trend at the world’s biggest food company
The management of the Swiss food giant Nestlé have shown what that can mean in practice with a very special, future-oriented example of CRM. The background: health problems connected to food and nutrition are becoming an increasingly important global issue, with Nestlé under fire for its unhealthy, often sugar-laden products and its environmentally damaging behaviour. Now, Nestlé is surprising its customers in Japan with individually produced, healthy foods and drinks.
The ‘personalised nutrition’ is organised and supplied via the company’s own online platform ‘Nestlé Wellness Ambassadors’. If they pay for the subscription service, users can have their DNA tested there, with Nestlé delivering a home test kit at the same time. There is also the option to upload photos of all their meals, the nutritional value of which is then analysed with the help of artificial intelligence.
On the basis of the blood and DNA results and the photo analysis, Nestlé then provides individual tips for suitable nutrition and a healthy lifestyle, also putting together capsules with individually adjusted nutritional supplements. At the same time, the company gathers valuable digital health data on its users with the help of its CRM and Wellness Ambassadors.
Nestlé Japan has been operating very profitably for years and 100,000 people in Japan already use the new service. In an ageing society, they hope the personally tailored nutrition will help them have a long and healthy life.
Customisation plus emotions: marketing and CRM in the 21st century
Since its beginnings, addressing customers in a targeted way has constantly developed, as can be seen by a brief look at its past:
In the 19th century, it was the distribution of newspapers and magazines that suddenly gave companies the opportunity to publish their own adverts and make a larger group pf people aware of their products. They were able to attract the attention of many readers with just one edition. Large, colourful billboards also gained in popularity for the best possible placement of products.
In the 20th century, radio and television added completely new opportunities for marketing and customer communication. The form of address varied: different advertising campaigns now had to be developed for the newspaper and magazine market and for radio. With their moving pictures, cinema and television also needed their own advertising formats.
Having made it into the 21st century, companies are again faced with new challenges in terms of customer communications and relationships. Alongside the existing options in print media, radio and TV, the focus is now on the many addresses, portals, services and social media channels offered by the Internet. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos described in a nutshell how important good customer management and CRM are in the light of these new opportunities, when he explained that if you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends, whereas if you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.
The major aim of CRM: repeatedly surpassing customer expectations
Conversely, of course, that means that if a company manages to satisfy, excite or surprise every one of its customers, in the ideal case many thousands of friends and acquaintances will hear about it.
So the major challenge in CRM and marketing for companies is not so much informing customers about new products and offers, because product information can be found and compared all over with just a few clicks.