The Jasmine Experience

We marketers really mess up the "Jasmine Experience", don't we?


Remember, Jasmine is a whole different shopper than we're used to.  The economy caused her to have a laser-like focus on price.  She's going to buy a handbag, but she'll pay $99 on MyHabit instead of paying $399 on Nordstrom.com.  She's going to trust what a friend says over trusting marketing messages.


So emails, flash sales, deals, Facebook, and friends comprise her preferred experience.


Let's say she buys from Cuddledown of Maine, maybe because a friend told her that the sheets are amazing.  All we see, as marketers at Cuddledown of Maine, is that this customer purchased online.  So, what do we do?

1. We send her a hotline catalog, after all, this is a "best practice" in catalog marketing, right?
2. We make sure that she receives six or seven catalogs in her first six months as a customer.
3. We push eight promotional email campaigns at her, each month, offering 20% off.

We make the mistake of treating Jasmine like Judy, don't we?

Not surprisingly, those dollars are largely wasted, causing us to say that some of these online channels "don't work".

Maybe, just maybe, we should work hard to identify this customer as "Jasmine" after the first order.  We take online data from Omniture or Coremetrics or Webtrends and append it to her customer record.  Maybe we ask her for her Twitter ID when she purchases, and then we thank her for her purchase within a day of the order.  Maybe we give her content that she can put up on her Pinterest page.

I know, you'll say that those are "dumb" ideas.  Maybe they are.  But how much dumber are they than sending a half-dozen expensive catalogs to a customer that has no interest whatsoever in purchasing via catalogs ever again?

We need to segment customers, and start treating customers differently.

• Judy is the quintessential catalog buyer.
• Jennifer is a charter member of the online marketing generation.
• Jasmine is the social commerce shopper who will make the purchasing decisions that fuel the economy from 2020 - 2029.