Viper Strategic

Finding Your Tipping Point

Author: Neil Wilkins

Neil learnt his marketing with the likes of Orange, NatWest, BP Castrol and Ordnance Survey and now helps individuals and businesses to communicate more effectively. He trains and mentors marketers on professional Chartered Institute of Marketing qualifications through to post-graduate level.

If you think about it, the concept of Tipping Point is an interesting phenomenon in the world of communication.

What's your Tipping Point when it comes to how you respond to a television advertisement that you see time and time again? From this frequency are you encouraged to pick up the phone and enquire or order, or does it tip you over the edge, never to feel positively about the brand again?

When social networking on say Facebook, what's your Tipping Point with that annoying 'friend' who hour by hour posts how they are doing in Farmville or buying and selling arms for their Mafia Wars? At what point do you click 'hide' never for them to appear on your wall again?

In personal relationships where's your Tipping Point with that person who you have been progressively feeling as though they should no longer be a significant part of your life? At what point do you call it quits and move on?

Tipping Points are everywhere in our everyday lives but so often we are oblivious to them.

From a marketing and communications perspective perhaps less is actually more. How close can we afford to take our target customers to their Tipping Points? We do want to push them into responding to us, enquiring from us and ultimately buying from us but do we truly know what their Tipping Point is? 

Perhaps that loyal customer who we believed would stay with us forever but has now moved on was actually pushed by us over their Tipping Point? It's a fine balance.

So how do we understand where and what the Tipping Point is for individuals who are important to us? Well the simple answer is by listening to them and watching their reactions, not just once in a while but consistently and constantly. We'd do this with significant others in a personal relationship so why not with our clients and customers who help to keep us in business? Ongoing customer research and satisfaction surveys are a good starting point to keep close to the big picture of how consumers and businesses are feeling about us.

But just once in a while perhaps we ask those who we pushed over their Tipping Point just what it was that we did that created that outcome. It's a brave thing to ask but being able to predict Tipping Points in the future just might be that key factor that keeps our customers ultimately satisfied.

- Posted on Friday 09 Apr 2010 at 00:08 by Neil Wilkins

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