Saturday, 13 June 2020

Blessed Paul has dropped Wema Wako music video


Kenyan gospel sensation Blessed Paul has dropped his first music video to the single "Wema Wako" featuring the most sort after producer and artist in Africa, DON SANTO the Badman Killa. Wema wako is a thank you song to God for his blessings and gifts.
Shot in Nairobi, the simple but powerful video was produced and directed by producer Blame It On Don.



"African Lion" is roaring across the globe with Kalpop Reggae vybes!


DON SANTO the Badman Killa has released his much anticipated Kalpop Reggae EP dubbed "African Lion" In the 5-track EP, Santo has deliver a unique, fresh and quality sound never heard before in the entire universe.

The Klassik Nation president and producer (Blame It On Don) has live up-to his promise of redefining the game. 

Tuesday, 12 September 2017

Don Santo’s Speech Delivered For Kenya’s Election 2017

“Honour”

Hello folks,

A great nation is one that is built off of high standards of achievement, not only in the area of economy or democracy, but in character and leadership. In the way in which we present ourselves to the world, and the way in which we intend the world to see us.

I this day, wanna talk about honour defined as “high respect, esteem, the adherence to what is right.” But that begs the question, what defines what is right and what is wrong? How does one determine, within the complexity of our world today, the small, sometimes minute elements of an action that define it as “the right thing to do” when presented with a difficult situation? We overcome all these challenges and forge on as a nation.


However, there is a point in our journey that we stepped in a pool of mud that has since refused to leave the sole of our most valuable shoe: Corruption and tribalism. I guess this atmosphere filled with an air mixture of mediocrity and varied degrees of backwardness has created a humid weather fertile for ensuring the mud does not dry out. Remember it is mud with a permanence that cannot be altered. So we believe.

Remember that instinct, that intuition that helps make critical decisions in the blink of an eye… that helps make that choice between action and inaction… that is something that must come from within. 

Whether you believe it or not, Kenya looks up to you now. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your children and children children. Walk around and you’ll meet great people who do not speak your mother tongue and never knew they existed.

We exist in a society today where the act of helping one another seems to have become increasingly infrequent. The media portrays the world as a pretty horrible place. Leaders have been found killed and nothing done about it. How many unknown Kenyans face the same fate in the hands of gangstas and after a few PR stunts by authorities, we see them walk freely on the streets for luck of evidence. Hahaha. Indeed it is luck of honour.

Now those facts… they were easy to find. All you have to do is open up any news website on the internet, or tune into to any news channel on the television to be inundated with the information that our world is inherently bad, that the actions of human beings are atrocious, and that violence is too much a part of culture, hatred is too much a part of our existence, to ever be eradicated.

What they don’t tell us, however, what’s harder to find, is what people do for one another each and every day that is good. What about the Beyond Zero Campaign. What about Lupitah Nyong’o and the many Kenyans doing great at home and beyond.  What about that gentleman who found a bag with Ksh. 100,000 lying on the side of the road and went to great lengths to find its rightful owner rather than keeping it for himself? Now some of you are probably laughing right now. What an idiot, who would give up Ksh. 100,000? Finders keepers, losers weepers, right? But the fact is that you are Kenyans. And that changes things.

Good is all around us, but sometimes we get confused. What about that man who comes in late because they were helping a friend clean up the cafeteria. But now here’s the inherent problem, and we see it within our own nation, just as sure as we see it anywhere else. What happens to that man when they start picking up after their friends? What happens to that man when they offer to help someone? I know, because oftentimes I am that man. And you know what happens? They get laughed at. Laughed at for extending a helping hand, laughed at for offering to make somebody’s life just that much easier.

My prayer is we rejoice in doing good things. The small things you do everyday… those are things that will define the Society after my generation leaves, and those are the things that will define you as individuals. It is expected of each and every one of us, that we are the ones who rise above the petty laughter and immaturity, that we are the ones willing to go to the extra lengths to ensure that the cafeteria is kept clean, or that somebody in need is assisted. And I hope and trust that you will live up to those expectations.

Let me tell you now that while there may be some people who will complain and say that what we do is unimportant, there’s a far greater amount who recognize the significance of what we do, and a far greater number of people who need us.

I pass the torch to a new generation of members of a society that lives for honour. All of you here, are leaders. Whether you are leaders because of your academic achievement, leaders in arts, sports or in business, you represent the part of the Kenya that we as a community are most proud of. You represent that difference between right and wrong. That choice between action and inaction.

I trust that each and every one of you will strive to live up to the expectations of your community, country, but most importantly, yourselves.

Finally, this election is not about taking sides, its about doing right for you and your children. This can only happen if our preferred criteria enables us get the crème de la crème of our day.

Asanteni,

Don $anto
EAMAward Winner,
Leader At The Klassik Clan
#iAmKlassik
#DonSanto4President



Friday, 14 July 2017

How To Avoid Mistakes Every Beginner Producer Makes


In many ways, the trajectory for a DJ is simple: master technical fundamentals, get great at selecting music, and try and develop a unique style that’s all your own. While the trajectory for production is in some ways very similar, modern DAWs provide such a myriad of options that make it easy to fall into one of many pitfalls, especially when just starting out! Today we’re looking at 5 of the most common mistakes almost every beginner producer makes, and how to avoid them.

Beginner Producer Mistakes
1. LESS IS ALWAYS MORE

When starting out, the impulse of the vast majority of producers is to grab at every extra plug-in and piece of tech they can get their hands on, and why not? Each product invariably markets itself as the be-all, end-all product that will immediately inject your tracks with fresh energy and life.

While it’s true that there are a lot of pieces of gear and plugins out there that (when used properly) are godsends, grabbing a handful of them and throwing them into your newest track won’t do anything but throw in a bunch of processing that’s too complex for you to handle.

It might be difficult, but instead of trying to use a million different tools to achieve the same effect, try becoming an expert in using a few: mastering one synth and one compressor will do far more for your workflow than half-understanding the functions of ten synths and twenty compressors, a mantra that’s been repeated by the likes of Skrillex, who made his entire Scary Monsters album with only Ableton’s onboard processors.

2. LOUDER DOESN’T MAKE IT BETTER

There’s perhaps nothing more infuriating in the world of production than lovingly mixing down a track, spending hours tweaking every knob, every parameter, automating down to the second, and then referencing it to a professional club track and watching your smile sink slowly as your track is absolutely pummeled by the thump of its professional counterpart. For a lot of producers, this is a massive source of frustration, and rightfully so, as it can feel like there’s absolutely nothing one can do to compete on the level of these thumping mixes.

The solution that a lot of beginning producers jump to is the notorious “brickwall” limiter, which is basically akin to using a butcher knife where you should use a scalpel. The reasoning often cited for this practice is usually something along the lines of  “Mastering techs use limiters, and they make loud tracks, so I should too.” Unfortunately this results in all kinds of negative and unanticipated effects, like pumping sounds, dynamics loss, and distortion. Ultimately, it’s better to take some time to learn a bit about the mastering process, or to save up to pay a mastering engineer, than to take the easy route and absolutely squash your tracks.
 
3. DON’T FEAR THE PRESETS

It seems increasingly that the production world is divided into those who view presets as the ultimate cheat, and those who view them as the only way to produce. While their ultimate purpose likely lies somewhere between those two opinions, it’s incredibly important to have a reasonable approach to presets (and by extension, samples and sample packs).

Many producers might cringe at the sound of a Nexus piano preset, it’s important to remember that the end goal of a producer should be satisfaction artistically with themselves and with the audience, which may or may not be comprised of people who can recognize presets. This isn’t necessarily license to go and write something like “KNAS,” but you should always keep an open mind to both samples and presets, if only as tools to compliment your sound and radically increase your efficiency.

An easy way to use presets and samples without losing the integrity of a track is to mix genres that traditionally aren’t related: for example, try using hip-hop synth samples in a techno track; you’ll find that the jarring presence of a sound from an entirely different sonic universe can produce some exciting and novel results.

4.  I SOUND LIKE [FAVORITE PRODUCER], AM I FAMOUS YET?

Far too many producers confuse learning the ins and outs of a system with learning how to make a specific product. When starting out, the drive is somewhat clearly to make a track reminiscent of the track that got you into production in the first place, or at very least, the track you love at the moment. In a recent interview with DJTT, Lucky Date recommended emulating the sounds of a favorite artist as a great starting place for new producers.

There isn’t anything inherently wrong with having a fondness for a sound or style, but producing with a constant eye towards making one type of sound will stunt one’s growth as a producer and as a musician. Tutorial-hunting and remake attempts will only teach you the sound that is the end result of a process invisible to everyone but the original producer.

Instead, spend time reading and learning about general techniques of compression, EQing, and sound design; the end result will be a much richer production experience and a wealth of knowledge that’s applicable to a wide variety of production styles and changing tastes.

5.  OBSESS OVER THE ART, NOT THE CRAFT

This is a simple thing to remember, but it’s lost on tons of producers starting out: there will be a point at which you are fairly comfortable with your production skills. Whenever that point may be, it’s crucial to remember that a production skillset isn’t the end goal, writing music is!

It’s fantastic to have a well-mixed track with plenty of perfectly synthesized sounds, but if it’s a boring track, no amount of clean mixdown will ever make it interesting. Think of the core principles of sound design as guidelines, not hard and fast rules. Once you’re relatively comfortable with understanding each of the features of your chosen DAW, try doing something unconventional or even technically “dumb,” like using a limiter on a single track, or heavy reverb on a bassline, or using a really wide imager on a synth line. These adjustments might not make your track better technically, but this sort of experimentation is almost always guaranteed to make your track more interesting.

Monday, 20 March 2017

BEST FOR LESS

Hi Klassik People,

You can now have your song produced for a better price. Call us todays for a life changing mission.

#iAmKlassik

Wednesday, 31 August 2016

10 Essential Good Business Practices For Your Business

Providing excellent services or making superior quality products are essential ingredients in a successful business. However, these alone do not guarantee success; they must be coupled with good business practices.

Here are The Top 10 business practices:

1. Assess yourself:  Undertake a personal audit or self-assessment to identify your strengths and weaknesses. Work to your strengths and address your weaknesses – there is a great deal of help and assistance out there if you look. Recognise your reasons for becoming self-employed and be very clear about your objectives and goals.

2. Surround yourself with a good team: When you become self-employed, you become responsible for designing, producing, selling, customer care, financing, collecting bad debts, book-keeping, etc. But it is not essential that you undertake all of these tasks unaided. It may be more cost-effective to allow professional and experienced people in particular sectors to assume some ‘chores’ with which you are not comfortable and thus allow you the time to undertake those with which you are,  paying for their work from the increased turnover you are now capable of earning.

3. Assess your product: Are you confident that your product is of a high quality in design and production? Are you confident that there is a market for it? Are you confident that your potential customers will pay the price you calculate necessary to meet your costs?
 
4. Know your market and competitors: It is essential that you know your market, as without this knowledge you cannot plan your route to market or the means of promotion you will use to inform your customers of your existence. It is also essential that you have a comprehensive knowledge of your competitors, as this knowledge will allow you to distinguish what the market will stand plus identify the gaps in the market.
 
5. The ability to recognise opportunities: Are you truly an entrepreneur? An entrepreneur will be studying the market and trends etc at all times and may go out on a limb (armed with good information) to seize an opportunity. All decisions should be taken based on information; knowledge is the greatest asset of any business.
 
6. Costing and pricing: This is one of the most difficult tasks you need to address. It is imperative that you know your break-even point: the number of units sold that will cover the costs of your raw materials, your overheads and your production time. Only when you know this figure (plus that of your competitors) will you be comfortable in the knowledge of how high or low your price may go.
 
7. Good terms of trade and paperwork: Everything leaving your ‘studio’ should be of a quality to promote you in a very positive manner. Your product should have good packaging, branding and promotional materials. Your invoices etc. should be clear and accurate and show concisely your terms of trade – how and when you expect to be paid; carriage – who pays it; breakages – who is responsible; reservation of title, etc.
 
8. Keep clear records: There is no mystery to book-keeping. It is nothing more than a filing system of the day-to-day transactions of your business. If you do not record and understand the transactions, your business will control you rather than you controlling it.
 
9. Be tax-compliant: It is a legal obligation to register for tax with the Revenue Commissioners when you commence self-employment. Registering for tax does not necessarily mean paying tax in the early stages of your business. It may actually result in a repayment – should a number of circumstances be in play – for example, you may be paying PAYE on your employment while making a loss due to the investment in your craft business. Being able to claim the Artists’ Exemption on certain products also may be a benefit to registration.
 
10. Planning: The key to a successful business is planning your project from day one. Planning is about making choices which should only be made on the basis of good information.

Tips

You are a link in the chain of the business; form good relationships with other links.
Be professional. You are the main asset of the business.
Indecisiveness wastes time. Gain knowledge and make informed decisions.
Getting finance is not easy. Acquire it wisely. Spend it wisely.
You may have an excellent product but, if you are not getting adequately paid for it, you are not in business.
Undertake market research. Know your competitors.
Do what you say and say what you do.
 
#iAmKlassik

Friday, 21 August 2015

The Klassik Message at the Klassik Moment

Promotional messages don’t work if customers aren’t receptive to them. To boost the odds of being greeted by eager eyes and hungry ears, marketers ask questions that target their audiences. Who should receive the message? What should the content of the message be? How should we deliver the message?

The one question they rarely ask is, when should we deliver the message? Yet in marketing, timing is arguably the most important variable of all. Promotions are like weather reports and news bulletins—people need them when they need them. Too early and they are forgotten. Too late and they are ignored. 

Most people don’t want to hear from most companies most of the time, and in an era of marketing overload—characterized by irrelevance as well as volume—unsolicited communication can provoke apathy or worse, resentment. The business press has lately described a “chaos scenario” in which traditional media (television, print) and established formats (the 30-second spot) are in decline but new, more effective media and formats are still evolving. In the messy interim, advertisers find their messages are not being absorbed or even noticed, let alone acted on.

However, there are moments in a customer’s relationship with a business when she truly wants—even needs—to communicate with that business. Her life has changed. Her desires have changed. Her perception of the business has changed. If companies contact her with the right message in the right format at just that moment, their chances of a warm reception rise. But few companies sync communications to milestones or transitions in their customer relationships. Even fewer respond to events in their customers’ lives.

Consider the airlines. No slouches when it comes to peddling seats, they send an expensive package of promotions to their most valuable customers with each and every loyalty-program statement. But what happens when a customer suddenly stops using an airline he once flew frequently? That customer’s apparent defection is a fundamental change in behavior that requires intervention by the airline if it wants to keep his business. Unfortunately, airlines and other organizations cannot afford to manually track and respond to a customer’s every act, or failure to act. Such vigilance simply does not scale.

The question “when?”—like most marketing questions—can be answered by technology: specifically, by a new computer-based model called “dialogue marketing.” Dialogue marketing is, to date, the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder that ascends from database marketing to relationship marketing to one-to-one marketing. Its principle advantages over those older approaches are that it is completely interactive, exploits many communication channels, and is “relationship aware” : that is, it continuously tracks every nuance of the customer’s interaction with the business. Consequently, dialogue marketing responds to each transition in that relationship as it occurs—at the moment the customer requires a particular type of attention.

 Dialogue marketing is, to date, the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder that ascends from database marketing to relationship marketing to one-to-one marketing.

Dialogue marketing is getting good results in several industries, including retail, hospitality, travel, financial services, media, packaged goods, and telecommunications. As it proliferates, it may provide the firm new footing that Madison Avenue seeks. The following article lays out dialogue marketing’s fundamentals and briefly describes the technologies required to make it work. (Editor’s Note: A number of vendors, including the coauthor’s company, offer systems that perform the functions of dialogue marketing. Corporate IT departments can also develop their own.)

It’s Time to Talk

Modern marketing doctrine is founded on the primacy of databases, which allow companies to segment customers into demographic and psychographic clusters. In basic database marketing—still alive and kicking—analysts query databases at marketers’ behest and produce lists of customers in various subgroups. The marketers then use batch communications to send members of those subgroups nearly identical messages at infrequent intervals, according to the company’s schedule. Most of those messages are designed to sell products. 

In the 1980s, database marketing spawned relationship marketing, which shifted the emphasis to retaining and nurturing clients. Data segmentation grew more sophisticated as marketers studied differences in customers’ profitability and calculated their lifetime value. A decade later, one-to-one marketing sought to exploit the Web’s powerful assertion, “I know who you are,” by creating personalized messages for individual customers. But one-to-one marketing rarely strays beyond the borders of the Internet. And while it addresses the question, “What should the content of this message be?” that is a necessary—not a sufficient—improvement.

The dialogue model is also a product of database technology and personalization philosophy marching forward in tandem. Yet while dialogue marketing has the body of a software system, it possesses the soul of a salesperson. Great salespeople understand that customer relationships are built, maintained, and expanded through dialogues, which take place one after another over time. A dialogue is, very simply, a series of outreaches and responses between a company and a customer ideally leading to some action on the part of the customer. The person or software conducting a dialogue “listens” to the customer’s needs and chooses the content and channel of communication based on what the customer says and does.

So, for example, a dialogue might begin when a company’s system sends an e-mail inviting the customer to visit a Web site for information. When a week passes without the customer clicking on the embedded links, his silence triggers the next step in the dialogue—an alert to a salesperson to make a call. The system waits another week after that human contact and then shoots the customer a reminder e-mail. This time, the customer clicks through to the site, and his choices there automatically queue new interactions.

That step-by-step, wait-and-respond approach distinguishes dialogue marketing from its forebears. But the model’s most distinctive characteristic may be its attention to the temporal dimension of customer relationships. Time, literally, is its essence. Dialogue-marketing systems are very sensitive to the interval between purchases, movement along loyalty curves, and increasing and decreasing frequency of physical and online visits. Such data registers in these systems as transitions or events, and each time one occurs, the software automatically commences an appropriate dialogue with the customer. Transitions may be positive (indicating an increase in business or loyalty) or negative (indicating a decrease in business or loyalty). All transitions present opportunities to engage the customer anew.

Transitions are a more meaningful lens than transactions for viewing the customer relationship because they focus on the relationship’s evolution. In effect, transactions show you a series of frames; transitions play you a movie. Consider the common practice among retailers of collecting raw transactional data and transforming that information into recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) value scores. These scores, which have been in use since the early days of database marketing, record when customers last made certain transactions, how often they made those transactions, and the monetary value of those transactions. Companies often break down RFM scores by segment, brand, or product category. So a retailer might track:

  • the recency of transactions in the shoe department;
  • the frequency of transactions in the shoe department;
  • the average monetary value of transactions in the shoe department;
  • the recency of transactions involving a particular brand of shoes;
  • the frequency of transactions involving a particular brand of shoes;
  • the average monetary value of transactions involving a particular brand of shoes.
Traditionally, the retailer would collect such data over time. Then, at intervals, it would send out a batch communication to customers who have spent, say, more than $1,000 on a particular brand during the course of a year.

With dialogue marketing, by contrast, the retailer monitors changes in individual customers’ RFM scores as they happen and sets the system to launch a dialogue when it detects a meaningful transition. The system responds immediately to individual rather than aggregate data, so the retailer can reach out to the customer while she is fresh in the throes of new-sandal fever or has gone an unprecedented six months without buying a pair of pumps. And dialogues don’t just follow up transitions; they follow through—to another transaction, a deeper engagement, or simply a larger wedge of customer attention.

The Nature of Changes

No two companies collect identical data, and so each will define the specific transitions that trigger customer dialogues. In general, transitions reflect a change either in the customer’s life or in his relationship with the business. They are particularly valuable in the creation and operation of complex loyalty programs. A company might set dialogues to launch when a customer

  • makes a purchase in a new category (first suit, first time in our new shoe department);
  • buys a brand so frequently that he qualifies as a zealot;
  • exceeds a certain monetary value in a year and thus qualifies as a VIP;
  • crosses a threshold in a loyalty program;
  • requests a change of address, indicating a household move;
  • purchases an item that indicates a major life change such as an infant car seat, or a large project such as a sink or cabinets. (Dialogue systems can also incorporate data from third-party vendors that track the issuance of new mortgages, openings of college savings accounts, and other commercially available data.)
Once a transition triggers a dialogue, that dialogue often moves the customer to another transition, at which point a new dialogue with a different goal kicks in. For example, a major regional grocery chain identified a tipping point: People who ordered from its Web site more than four times were very likely to become regular customers. The company’s technology staff programmed its dialogue-marketing system to respond to new customers via e-mail, using steep store-financed discounts to push them aggressively through those first four purchases. After purchase number four, the system automatically begins generating less expensive treatments, for example, offering only trade promotions financed by consumer goods manufacturers. 

Other transitions represent not an opportunity but rather a threat—usually, that a customer will defect. Recall for a moment the airline with its high-value customer gone AWOL. Now imagine the company practices dialogue marketing. The system detects the customer’s failure to book a flight for several months and sends a message to a service representative asking him to call and try to rectify the problem. If the customer complains of poor service, the representative logs the details into the system, triggering the creation of a written apology signed by an executive and including an incentive to return—automatic upgrades or frequent-flier miles, for example. If her account remains inactive, then the next month the system sends her another note with a reminder about the incentive. If yet another month passes, she gets a call from a senior customer-service manager. When she finally buys a ticket, the system launches a dialogue for special treatment of “saved” customers.

As this example illustrates, dialogue marketing considers not just when to communicate but also how to communicate: Dialogues play out across multiple channels depending on the content of the message and the urgency of the situation. Some customer actions will trigger the system to respond immediately, with a personalized e-mail, a personalized piece of direct mail, or an alert to a salesperson to make a call. Other responses will lay the groundwork for future interactions. The system might store a personalized message at the point of sale to be delivered when the customer next visits, or send the message to a call center representative to be used when the customer phones. Or it might place customer-specific content on a Web site in preparation for a virtual visit.

Customer value is another major consideration in channel choice. Before launching its resource-intensive retention dialogue, the airline’s system would establish that the customer in question is top tier, based on her previous and predicted purchasing. If the customer qualified as only medium value, the system might mail her a message, either electronically or by placing her contact information on a direct mail list together with personalized content for the message. A low-value customer might receive an e-mail, or nothing at all if he is not profitable or not online. This portfolio of approaches is another way in which dialogue marketing improves on most one-to-one initiatives.

The Data Rich and the Data Poor

Not surprisingly, companies that collect masses of data and cut that information every which way have emerged as dialogue marketing’s virtuoso early adopters. Harrah’s Casinos, for example, which is known for its sophisticated use of database-marketing technology, runs an elaborate set of dialogues that consider every permutation of the casino-vacationer relationship (see Gary Loveman’s article “Diamonds in the Data Mine,” HBR May 2003). Harrah’s system defines customers in these ways:
  • Decliners: number and recency of visits are dropping
  • Incliners: number and recency of visits are rising
  • Inactive: no visits for a long period of time
  • New Business: only one recent visit
  • Past Due: no visits for a designated period of time, but not yet considered decliners
  • Due Now: not yet considered decliners but need a tickler to bring them in now
  • Ad Hoc: everyone else
The company uses dialogues to take customers from negative states (such as decliners) to positive states (such as incliners), chiefly by alerting live “player hosts” to intervene at the first sign of a transition. Since Harrah’s began using dialogue marketing in 2003, it has raised revenue by 30% to 69%, depending on the customer segment; increased by 20% to 25% the contacts that produce return visits; and boosted the number of VIP customers overall.

Not all companies, however, are equally awash in data. Some businesses are built on infrequent transactions with individual customers (you buy a cup of coffee once a day, a house once a decade). And while luxury brands may excite occasional purchasers to stay connected to the business, many companies find it difficult to hold customers’ attention beyond the sale.

One company with a relative paucity of data is Logitech, a designer and manufacturer of personal peripherals for computers, mobile phones, and MP3 players. Despite its customers’ low purchasing frequency, Logitech has managed to create a new loyalty program based on dialogue marketing. The system is nourished by a database of registered customers who trade demographic information for timely notification of software upgrades and new products. Logitech has collected this information over several years from customers buying online or seeking help from support staff.

Because Logitech doesn’t gather enough data from customers to effectively detect individual transitions, it sets its clock according to aggregate historical information in the registration database. For example, a principal goal of the loyalty program is to induce first-time or single-item buyers to purchase another product; so the system decides when to start a follow-up dialogue based on the lapse of time between similar customers’ first and second purchases. Having determined that repeat customers bought their second products almost immediately after the first, the system launches follow-up dialogues while that initial transaction is still warm. By reaching out again so soon, however, the company risks alienating customers who dislike the hard sell. So Logitech designs those dialogues with a service orientation—for example, explaining how its portable products can assist customers in their travels.

The dialogue to stimulate a second purchase unfolds through a series of such informative e-mails, each of which invites the customer to take one of several actions. If those missives receive no response, the system queues up a replacement product dialogue to commence at a time determined by historical data on the pace of replacement purchases for the customer’s product type. As the dialogue-marketing program bears fruit, Logitech’s rates of repeat and replacement purchases should rise, spawning more and more data. The company is incorporating that new data into its model, and that, in turn, should cause dialogues to launch at more precise intervals.

A Dialogue for Every Season

Customer relationships are rich in transitions and events. At different times, companies will need to talk people into a commitment or out of a defection, over a conceptual hurdle or through a complex process. Working with their technology departments, marketers can design repositories or “houses” of dialogues that manage every category of customer interaction. Once the software engine is rolled out, marketers can gradually phase in those dialogues, monitoring their effectiveness and optimizing them until they achieve their desired ROI.

Every company’s house should eventually contain four types of dialogues that scale upward in sophistication and ambition.

Foundation Dialogues.

As their name suggests, foundation dialogues manage the fundamentals of the customer life cycle: the marketing version of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man. These dialogues require only basic data, such as a customer’s name and contact information. They do not demand significant process changes or cross-functional coordination. Examples include:

Acquisitions.

Acquisition dialogues aim to bring in new customers. They start out in batch fashion with a targeted audience and grow more specialized as prospects respond.

Service Follow-Ups.

Follow-ups might begin with a thanks-for-your-recent-purchase message, a notification that an item is ready for pickup, or a simple satisfaction check. They then unfurl into additional offers of help.

Win-Backs.

Win-back dialogues launch in response to defections: when a customer asks to terminate her cell-phone-service plan or cancels a magazine subscription, for example.

Level I Dialogues.

Each of these product- or event-centric dialogues is named for the type of message that starts the exchange. (See the sidebar “Turning Invitations into Dialogues.”) More sophisticated than foundation dialogues, they leverage customer purchase data that may include such information as price or deal sensitivity. Integration with inventory and other systems requires greater IT participation. Examples include: 

Event Notifications.

Notification dialogues draw on geographic data and purchase histories to invite select customers to marketing events. 


Striking Up the Conversation

Repurchase Reminders.

Repurchase reminders are gentle nudges to purchasers of consumable products—such as laser printer cartridges, paper, sneakers, drill bits, oil, and lightbulbs—that it is time to buy again. Dialogue-marketing systems can be programmed to correlate an individual customer’s purchase of such a product with the known life span of that product.

Inventory and Price Alerts.

Inventory alerts announce new arrivals and promotional items of presumed interest. For example, a shipment of Celtic folk CDs to a music retailer would automatically trigger messages to customers whose purchasing histories are rife with Clannad and the Chieftains. Loyal customers can receive advance notice of price changes, having first crack at a markdown or sale.

Overstock Outreaches.

These dialogues launch when overstocked items are about to be marked down. Before prices are slashed, the system seeks customers who have bought such items before and might do so again, perhaps because they are approaching the next level of a loyalty program or because the last such item they purchased is due to expire.

Level II Dialogues.

These dialogues draw on individual customers’ purchasing patterns or on predictive modeling to influence the progression of the relationship with that customer. They require a sophisticated understanding of a customer’s history with the company and considerable cross-functional coordination as everyone from corporate buyers to executives gets involved. Examples include:

Defection Interventions.

Defection dialogues are triggered when the system detects early warning signs, such as a decline in purchasing frequency. They rely on predictive modeling and so are distinct from win-back dialogues, which launch after a customer has already been lost.

Life Cycle Progressions.

These dialogues move customers through states of increasing loyalty. For example, when Harrah’s customers approach the highest tier of the company’s loyalty program, life cycle dialogues automatically contact them with a message such as, “You are only one visit away from our Total Diamond reward level.”

Category RFM Transitions.

These dialogues allow category managers, merchandise managers, buyers, and product managers to respond to changes in customers’ individual RFM scores within their categories.

Brand RFM Transitions.

These dialogues allow brand managers to respond to changes in customers’ individual RFM scores within their brands.

Level III Dialogues.

Level III adds a physical element to dialogues. These on-site interactions—although just feasible now—will likely be common in the future, when customers carry RFID cards into stores or key their identities into smart shopping carts. As they shop, customers will receive personalized messages on their cell phones or PDAs, or on screens scattered around the store. Those messages will draw on the same data other dialogue-marketing applications use. So a book buyer passing the cooking section might receive an alert that only $20 separates him from the store’s Chef’s Club and its 25% discount.

That final, futuristic category of dialogue is especially appealing because it reaches even beyond “when” to answer the question of “where”—drilling down to the very aisle a customer is passing. For now, though, marketers must focus on timing as they seek to bind customers more closely.• • •

The technology to conduct dialogue marketing exists today, and it will only get better. Marketing organizations will need to collaborate with their IT departments to develop or install these systems, but once they are in place the demands on IT will decline significantly as dialogues fire off automatically, without any need for additional database queries. Ultimately, such systems will prove far less expensive than trying to field a service staff large enough to handle the many complex circumstances and evolving states that customer relationships present.

Turning a traditional marketing strategy into a dialogue-marketing program is a straightforward matter. Begin by identifying the communications you make with customers in a batch fashion, then ask yourself what events could trigger those communications to make them more timely. Add a question or call to action to each message, and prepare a different treatment or response for each possible answer. Finally, create a series of increasingly urgent calls to action that kick in if the question or call to action goes unanswered.

Companies that blast frequent, irrelevant messages dilute their brand equity. What customers want is great service and a consistently excellent experience across all channels. For those reasons, we believe that many elements of dialogue marketing will be ubiquitous in five years. Companies that adopt the dialogue model early can rise above today’s unwelcome din and become not just the voice that customers hear but also the one they listen for.

Chris Michael Wanzala (Chriswanzala@gmail.com) is the founder, Chairman, and Managing Director of Global Media.