Cuidado com o cross-selling

O topo dos mapas da estratégia que ajudo a desenvolver nas empresas costumam ser parecidos com a figura que se segue:

A imagem traduz a ideia comummente aceite de que clientes fidelizados são clientes que compram mais, que adquirem mais produtos ou serviços da gama que o fornecedor oferece e, que isso é bom para a rentabilidade.
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Cuidado com as generalizações!!!
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Esta lógica só é válida se esses clientes fidelizados corresponderem à figura do que considerámos ser o cliente-alvo.
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Essa é a escolha central de uma qualquer estratégia, a resposta à pergunta: quem são os clientes-alvo?
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Este é um tema já abordado no passado aqui no blogue (2008 e 2009) e que agora pode ser reforçado após a leitura de "Unprofitable Cross-Buying: Evidence from Consumer and Business Markets" publicado no Journal of Marketing em Maio passado de Denish Shah, V. Kumar, Yingge Qu, e Sylia Chen.

"Conventional wisdom, marketing literature, and cross-selling practices to date are based on the notion that customer cross-buying is positively associated with customer profitability. However, this study finds that when certain customers with persistent adverse behavioral traits (e.g., limited spending, excessive revenue reversals, excessive service requests, promotion purchase behavior) engage in cross-buying, they exhibit a downward spiral of unprofitable relationship, with the losses increasing with higher levels of cross-buy. The authors analyze the customer databases of five firms and find that 10%–35% of the firms’ customers who cross-buy are unprofitable and account for a significant proportion (39%–88%) of the firms’ total loss from its customers."

O artigo procura responder a uma série de questões:

"Can customers who willingly purchase additional products and/or services of a firm be unprofitable? If so, what factors can potentially characterize customers with unprofitable cross-buy? Can the collective actions of such customers substantially affect the firm’s bottom line over time? In such a scenario, what are the implications for the firm’s current marketing practices and policies, which are typically directed at maximizing cross-buy opportunities across all the firm’s customers?

Convém recordar os gráficos de "We are all weird" acerca do Estranhistão.

"the relationship observed at the aggregate customer base level need not hold true for every customer of the firm due to the inherent differences in customers, commonly referred to as “customer heterogeneity” in the research literature." (Moi ici: E o fenómeno da heterogeneidade está a expandir-se, basta recordar a hipótese Mongo)

Assim, para reforçar a importância da escolha dos clientes-alvo e, para reforçar a coerência com essa escolha:

"First, researchers need to refine the basic understanding that not all cross-buying is profitable. The proportion of customers engaging in unprofitable cross-buying is relatively small. However, these customers account for a disproportionately high level of total losses from customers by virtue of habitual proneness of adverse behavior. Second, conventional cross-buy models that focus on the propensity of a customer to cross-buy fail to account for persistence of adverse customer behavioral traits and thus fail to detect customers who are likely to result in an unprofitable outcome. In the light of these findings, crossbuy models should make cross-sell recommendations to firms conditional on the propensity of the customer to generate more profits (after cross-buy)."

BTW, este recorte de 2004