Core Vs Casual Vs Aspirational – Does It Make A Difference In Your Customer Relationship & Experience Strategy?

Energetic discussion #1 of the past couple of weeks has been the impact of Core, Casual and Aspirational customers on Customer Relationship Experience (CRX) strategy. A few simple definitions and some questions may help.

Core Customer –the customer segment or demographic the company or product / service is built around or targets. Your “core” target customer will tend to be loyal once you have them and buy repeatedly.  Generally you don’t really have to constantly inundate them with messages, keep them up to date with why your product is value for them. May have high cost of acquisition but low churn once secured. Big investment should be service and new product and feature/benefit marketing. They don’t want to go anywhere unless forced.

Casual Customers – People who will buy or use the product once in a while based on their current whim, convenience and its qualities. Flips between brands over time . Usually looks a lot like the core from an age and demographic perspective. Your casual customer could be a competitor’s core customer who is just trying you out. Psychographic and behavioral modeling will usually reveal a causing factor behind their indecision but rarely do we have that information (MIllenials for example are always said to have not developed many brand loyalties although the iPhone / Android wars among the 19 year olds I know might contradict that). Focus of significant percentage of marketing spend, interesting return on marketing investment (for more on ROMI see this nice article http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2012/05/14/understanding-the-new-roi-of-marketing/)

Aspirational Customer – Customers who would love to use your brand but don’t for some reason. Usually associated with luxury product aspiration but not always. Aspirationals hold your core customers of the future. It could be because they cannot afford you. It could be because they cannot reach your retail or service outlets (digital helps here). It could be because they have an unmet need and don’t know enough about you (“I really need a higher return on my savings account, doesn’t anyone offer more than 2%”). Aspirationals can be innately core or casual.

My favorite example is embedded in the “Fashionistas” segment. “Fashionistas” are usually fickle casual shoppers looking for the next “hot logo”. However there is a special breed of “Fashionista” (especially in the emerging market and BRIC economies like Brazil, Russia, India, and China). These are brand and logo “trophy hunters” because they are being exposed to many things they can buy for the first time (to quote an American phrase “acting like a kid in a candy store”). Applies from  Burberry to Walmart, from Porsche to Fiat. Buried in this group are long term, loyal, core customers of the future if you can just connect with them

So Should You Care As a Customer Experience Professional –  What’s The Customer Experience Impact

The difference becomes very important when defining long term Customer Relationship Experiences and Customer Journeys. Rather than a long description here are 10 questions to ask yourself about your customer experience design that should point you in the right direction.

1. Do you have a clear difference in your segmentation model about which of your customers are classified as Core vs Casual vs Aspirational vs Unknown?
2. Do you have a journey model that shows how Aspirationals move to Core, or Casuals move to Core,  or Core moves to Aspirational or Casual?
3. Do you know your revenue, margin, CRM investment (sales/marketing/service) and return on CRM for each?
4. Do you capture enough of the right type of data and have the right analytics to know?
5. How are you treating your  Core, Casual and Aspirational customers differently? (e.g. all loyalty club members are not loyal core customers, messages are very different)
6. Do you need to and do you differentiate by product offering, service or experience model?
7. Do you know if a repeat customer lapsed because they are a natural Casual or an Aspirational  who is working on being loyal Core?
8. Do you have an Aspirational capture strategy that converts them to long term Core  customers?(e,g, the Mercedes “C” class has always been one of my favorites, offering the full Mercedes Benz experience at a price point much lower than their core product and target market, I know many people who have been hooked on Mercedes that way and traded up several times)
9. If you are global how does this affect your emerging markets strategy?
10. How do you help your Core customers to bring their friends? (“Core’s” are natural advocates)

To prove this applies everywhere I suspect I am not a Core customer for my friends at Walmart. In their mission of “Saving people money to help them live better” and their “Every Day Low Prices – EDLP” consumer commitment I suspect they are targeting the working, middle and military class that fills my local store, here in the USA “the heart of America”. I believe they would consider me a Casual. Although I buy a lot of fishing tackle, bike parts, storage containers, office supplies and an increasing amount of groceries from there.so I am quite a valuable Casual !