As the song from the Axa ad says, it’s true that little things mean a lot. A seemingly small action from someone else can make our day or even week. Capitalising on this was Random Act of Kindness Day in February which encouraged people to spontaneously do nice things for others.
Random Acts of Kindness (RAK) is defined as a selfless act performed by a person, company or group wishing to either assist or cheer up an individual. It is understood to have originated in Sausakito, California in 1982 when Anne Herbert scribbled the words “Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty” on a placemat in a restaurant.
Her book of the same name was published a decade later and since then Random Acts of Kindness as a concept has permeated common vernacular and official RAK initiatives have been implemented.
More recently brands have got in on the act and RAKs have become a popular form of marketing, also coined generosity marketing. For example, a few days ago at Super Bowl 50 SoCal Honda Dealer announced on Twitter that it would pay for anyone in the Los Angeles area to take an Uber home up to two hours after the game ended.
In her most recent series, Mary Portas encouraged the hapless owners of a hair salon to build RAK into their business plan, treating customers to surprise treatments for free in order to engender loyalty.
And at Christmas, Santander installed a cash machine in its Barnsley branch which gave Christmas treats to its customers – similar to Coca Cola’s famous “2011 Friendship machine”, a vending machine which dispensed free gifts and drinks to passers-by.
These examples show that the issue with the majority of RAK campaigns is that they are often very tactical; used as a mechanism for creating social or above the line content. It is consequently very difficult to track the impact of the initiative and more importantly the recipients of the acts of kindness.
A direct marketing approach would serve to make RAK more strategic. Without wishing to remove the selfless, fun and spontaneous nature of RAK, it is important that as RAK becomes a more prevalent marketing technique that it delivers incremental revenue for the brand.
This means that a significant proportion of the Acts of Kindness should be received by customers or prospects with a strong or potentially strong lifetime value.
Moreover, like with the best examples of direct mail, the act itself should be tailored to the individual, making it as relevant as possible to them. The principle right time, right place, right channel couldn’t be more applicable here and key to this is data. Without a clean and up to date prospect and customer database it is impossible to make RAK strategic.
With data decaying at a rate of up to 3% a month, it is conceivable that within a year a third of an organisation’s data will be rendered obsolete, meaning that one in three people targeted by a strategic, data driven RAK campaign might not receive it wasting time, money, effort and ultimately goodwill.
As well as best practice data hygiene techniques, such as deceased and goneaway suppression, salutation formatting and preference screening keeping demographic data fresh will also help to ensure relevancy of the campaign.
RAK has the potential to be an extremely powerful marketing strategy which can drive sales, increase brand awareness and encourage customer retention, but with increasing emphasis being placed on ROI, a fresh approach to RAK should be considered for brands wanting to both treat their customers and derive tangible business benefit.
Will Anthes is managing director of W8 Data
