Over the last decade, digital marketers have allowed (and directly enabled) the digital behemoths to become the dominant point of access for consumers to connect to their brands.  During the COVID crisis, this power has only intensified, as consumers now rely almost exclusively on these points of access and delivery to define nearly all of their shopping and buying behavior.  This leads brand marketers to ponder the ultimate nightmare:

 

Will the direct relationship between their brand and their consumers be another COVID casualty?

 

At Rosemark, we believe the answer must be an emphatic no!

The most powerful tools in marketers’ arsenals have always been those related to discovering deeper insights as to why consumers buy and translating that insight into more personally relevant products, messages and promotional offers. That’s why we at Rosemark have built a scalable method to segment consumers based on how their underlying motivations and preferences drive their brand choice and usage behaviors.  We call this method, Quantitative PersonasSM (QP).  We are leveraging this Intellectual Property as the centerpiece for the group of interrelated loyalty, e-commerce and analytics companies we are in the process of acquiring, in service of placing the control of the consumer relationship back in the hands of brand marketers.

 

An example of the power of Quantitative Personas is the dining category (quick serve restaurants, fast casual and casual dining), for which we recently completed building out a QP model.  This category has gone through a seismic shift as their front doors are closed and they must now serve all their customers through drive-up, curbside pickup and third-party delivery services. We identified the 2 QPs who represent 27% of consumers and 65% of the digital ordering volume before the COVID crisis.  These Personas have meaningfully different motivations to order out, preferences in loyalty programs and the role social media plays in their brand choice and decision to share positive experiences with their friends.  We believe the restaurant brands which convert these types of insights into personalized electronic ordering and loyalty programs will win a disproportionate share of these 2 dining QPs and in so doing will not only survive the COVID crisis but will thrive on the other side of it.