By Karen Mapstone of Eclipse Marketing

Concerns about global financial instability and the troubles of banks in France and the UK have shaken consumer confidence throughout the financial services industry.

In difficult times, CRM strategies assume an even greater importance. Effective marketing and CRM techniques can go a long way towards counteracting negative consumer perceptions, and providing customers with the services they want and need.

This means treating customers as individuals, making them feel valued and delivering a better all-round customer experience which will inspire loyalty, reduce churn and help rebuild confidence.

At Eclipse we’ve been banging the drum for word of mouth with some vigour for quite a while. Now, it seems a new survey backs up our belief in brand advocacy.

The European Advocacy Study shows that brand advocacy – or word of mouth – is five times more effective at driving sales than advertising in the UK. Auto and PC brands were the most likely to be bought as a result of word of mouth marketing across Europe.

And what appealed most to customers? A brand’s ability to ‘surprise and delight’. So plenty of scope there for some really creative marketing.

Some commentators were amazed when Saga announced the launch of its social networking site for the over 50s. They were even more taken aback when 13,000 users signed up for the trial, the oldest being 87. They shouldn’t have been.

Those of us working in the Social Media field weren’t surprised. To us, it seems logical that the social networking trend should sweep away the over 50s, just as it did the under 35s. The way we see it, before long all of us, young and old, could be creating mashups and microblogging* across the generation gap.

A rash of seemingly conflicting online marketing stories caught our eye. First came the news, as reported in Marketing Week and many others, that the European Parliament is considering restricting the use of online behavioural targeting (BT).

The tracking of the online behaviour of individuals and the selling of data to advertisers raises difficult privacy issues, according to the European Parliament, and the strengthening of existing EU legislation hasn’t been ruled out. Jack Jia included some interesting comments on privacy in his blog, as well as a rundown on the pitfalls of BT, particularly looking at how much Facebook really knows about its users’ intents. Meanwhile, Matthew Finch at e-consultancy tells us that use of behavioural information can boost your marketing success by up to 600%.

Then we heard that no less a brand than Vodafone is launching – you’ve guessed it – a new behavioural targeting campaign. So which way is the confused marketer to turn?