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Math takes marketing

December 2, 2006 By 1 Comment

math_400I was moderating a conference session a few weeks ago and asked marketing executives from Gillette, Dunkin’ Donuts and Circle Lendng what they thought was the most important competency for marketing professionals today.

Their unanimous response: math.

With so much customer data available today analytics is becoming one of the most strategic aspects of marketing, yet there’s a huge talent shortage in this area.

"One of the new marketer’s key skills is the ability to marry fluency in higer mathematics and computer modeling to marketing flair and creativity," wrote Richard Rawlinson in last summer’s issue of Strategy & Business. "Just as mathematics has revolutionized finance, it will now invigorate the marketing field, as new models and algorithms are developed to extract value from consumer and business databases, and to allow more precise targeting of ‘hot’ topics to each consumer."

I know a lot of students read this blog, so if you’re interested in a marketing career think about analytics. And for the rest of us, maybe it’s time to learn more about the scientific and mathematical aspects of marketing to be able to be creative in measurable new ways, and to elevate the value of our profession.

Filed Under: Marketing trends, Musings, Uncategorized

Rating digital marketing techniques

October 26, 2006 By Leave a Comment

 

Speaking to marketers recently, two ideas seem to be really resonating with people.

 

Digital listening

The first is that listening is as big a part of digital marketing as creating things like blogs or social networks. And there are two ways to listen: passively, reading blog posts, listening in to social networks, subscribing to consumer generated media analysis services; and actively, where you make it easy for customers to talk with you and your company, which might take the form of communities, or a more inviting way to find and contact the right person in an organization instead of just being directed to info@acme.com or customerservice@acme.com. If a company doesn’t make it easy for me to talk to a person who’s interested in what I have to say, does the company really care about listening? Probably not. The good news is that’s easy for companies to fix.

How to involve people

The second concept is that the purpose of marketing is to involve people with your organization so they can get to know you, trust you, and do business with you. What is most likely to involve people are fresh ideas, conversations, stories and entertainment that are relevant, framed in new context, and elicit emotions. Successful union organizers and educators have used this approach to involve people and children for years.

So where do social media and digital marketing techniques fit into this picture? This chart suggests which techniques are best suited to deliver on involvement. (Blogs only get half a check because some have a lot of conversation via talk backs, but most don’t.)

Ideas Conversation Stories Entertainment
Blogs X X X
Podcasts X X X
Communities X X X X
Social networks X X X
Wikis X
Virtual worlds X X X X

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Uncategorized

IBM’s hilarious sales videos

September 22, 2006 By Leave a Comment

ibm_mainframe_video_shot If you've ever sat through annual sales  meetings, don't miss IBM's hilarious sales training parody videos at YouTube.  IBM made the videos as a spoof to use at its mainframe sales meeting and then put them up on YouTube.  These three short videos probably due more to change the image of stodgy old IBM than anything else IBM has done. By the way, the guy in the video is the real director of sales for IBM's mainframe busness.

Filed Under: Smart company stories, Uncategorized

What Advertising Week Conference Says About Advertising

August 2, 2006 By 1 Comment

Maybe traditional Madison Ave. businesses need to retire or get out of the office and spend the rest of the summer  on listening tours, learning first hand how deeply people have changed and what that means to marketing and advertising.

 In today's Advertising Age Matt Creamer reports on the "new and improved" Advertising Week focus , to be held Sept. 25 – 29 in New York.  "The schedule, released today,  is a response to criticism from industry observers, Advertising Age chief among them, that the week's first two incarnations featured agency folks speaking to themselves," writes Creamer.

 A look at the schedule makes you wonder whether the adverising industry is in touch with shifts in marketing. It also begs the question whether the industry sees itself  as the people who make ads or as  strategic marketers.  Just as the public relations industry has hurt itself by focusing too much on publicity rather than communications, it appears that the ad industry identifies with ads.

Here are a  few of the agenda highlights that struck me as out of touch.   If you have others, please share them with us.

  •  "About 100 are expected to pile into Jeep Wranglers in the procession from DDB's Madison Avenue headquarters to Times Square," reports Advertising Age.   That's right, a gas-guzzling, smog-hogging testosterone-laden kick off.   A great spectacle and a three-hour buzz for the Wrangler brand. 

 

  • "In Search of the Big Idea: Top CMOs share insights on getting the job done."  Pssst. It's not about the big idea any more; it's about listening to the customer, providing lots of useful and sometimes entertaining information through channels customers prefer,  and delivering product/service  experiences that consistently knock their socks off.  They don't really care about the big creative idea. 

 

  • "Blurring: A Truly Intgegrated Approach to Multichannel Marketing. A stellar panel discussing a revolutionary marketing model. This executive panel will decipher the challenges of today's marketers in collaborating efforts bewteen advertising and direct marketing."  Yikes.  Aside from the decidely old hypey language style, the fact is that Web 1.0 blured the lines of advertising and direct back in the 90's.  (And some say we're in the Web 1.0 or 3.0 phase.) Marketers get that digital marketing does double duty and have been doing consistenly innovative "blurring" work for over a decade. 

 

  • And my favorite.  "The 3rd Annual Stars of Madison Avenue:  The Business of Celebrities will honor popular celebrity and athlete endorsers and the big name marketers they represent."  Honor them for what? Being really smart about cutting $10 million endorsement deals and never having to be held accountable for whether the endorsement moves the sales needle?  How relevant is this to marketers?

I hope advertising is evolving, but this conference signals that the industry is stuck. The good news is that there are huge opporutnities for the new breed of marketing services agencies — and they've already eating the ad industry's party appetizers. Lunch is next.

Filed Under: Advertising, Uncategorized

Innovation conferences

May 4, 2006 By Leave a Comment

Interested in getting some fresh perspectives and practical know-how
about innovation? Two upcoming conferences promise to be out of the box
while also providing ideas to use when we have to get back in the box.

The 2006 Marketing Innovation Conference: Building a New Marketing To Meet a Changing Market will be held June 8-9 at Columbia Business School in New York City. Corante and The Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia are sponsoring the event.

BIF2, sponsored by the Business Innovation Factory, will be held on October 4-5 in Providence, RI. The 30 speakers are
really eclectic, from big company executives, successful entrepreneurs
and university presidents and professors to scientists, entertainment
executives, writers and journalists (each speaker gets just 15 minutes
to tell a personal story).

What I like about these conferences
is that there won’t be any talking heads going through PowerPoint decks
promoting their companies. Both are about provoking thinking and
providing a forum for talking with interesting people we don’t meet in
our usual business circles.

Hope to see you in NY or Providence…

Filed Under: Innovation, Uncategorized

Going postal: USPS’ “Deliver” magazine

February 28, 2006 By 2 Comments

Should the United States Post Office be in the business of promoting direct mail?

Yesterday I received a copy of “Deliver,” the USPS’ expensively produced, 32 page magazine. USPS sends the free bi-monthly magazine to 350,000 marketers.

The business world is moving to a paper-less, digital world, but the Postal
Service is trying to promote the value of direct mail and other “innovative marketing tools.”

“Finding innovative marketing tools is a must for any company that needs to promote its brand and products to the consumer,” according to USPS press release announcing the magazine last winter. “Today the U.S. Postal Service is Deliver-ing a magazine for marketers about strategies and trends thatare shaping the world of marketing and advertising.”

My view is that the USPS has no business trying to be in the marketing advice business, especially as their advice is grounded in the old print world, which is hardly innovative. That’s just a bad use of our tax dollars. Not as bad as the USPS’ huge sports sponsorship spends a fewyears ago, but still rather irresponsible.

USPS should take the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on the magazine and
address its real issue: how to create a new USPS business model for a world with less and less mail.

Now, back to getting my tax returns completed…

Filed Under: Dumb company stories, Political communications, Uncategorized

Listening or spin at White House today?

January 5, 2006 By Leave a Comment

I got excited this morning when I heard that President Bush had invited
about a dozen former secretaries of state and defense — from both
parties — to the White House today to talk about Iraq.

Imagine
the potential value of putting such talented people to work to figure
out how to best navigate the complexities of this situation?

But
was the intention to really listen to new voices or simply to put a
more positive public spin on the Bush Administration? Here’s how to
tell the difference.

My communications scholar friends, like Walter Carl at Northeastern University,
say that there are three general categories of listening, a sort of
Maslow’s hierarchy of listening, if you will. People tend to feel
listened to when they reach the third level.

  1. Recognition: just recognizing the other person’s existence
  2. Acknowledgement: acknowledging what another person feels or thinks or says
  3. Endorsement: accepting another person’s thoughts or worldview as valid and legitimate

Were these former global public policy leaders really listened to today?

PS: This listening hierarchy is also helpful to assess whether we’re really listening to customers.

Filed Under: Political communications, Uncategorized

Best Holiday Card for Marketers

December 16, 2005 By Leave a Comment

This time of year we all receive many
Holiday Cards. But the best card for marketing people EVER, has to be
from advertising agency Phil Johnson & Associates, written like a marketing plan. Here’s what it says:

Objectives

  • Evaluate existing holiday greetings
  • Determine which greetings work best to:
  • Change perceptions of the holidays
  • Convey sense of community and love
  • Reduce cynicism
  • Help you be the best holiday greeter you can be

Holiday trends

  • People are busier than ever
  • Fewer “Happy” or “Merry” people out there
  • William Hung has just released a Holiday CD

Current holiday greetings

Season’s Greetings
  • Generic
  • Universally accepted for its ambiguity and utter vagueness
  • Leaves the door wide open for the Greetee to assume the Greeter is denomination-sensitive
Warm Wishes
  • Soft and sappy
  • A great opener and closer for holiday toasts
  • Brings out the “hugger” in people
Peace
  • Efficient, to the point
  • Perfect in situations where you’d like to keep the conversation to a minimum
Happy Holidays
  • Has legs
  • Most
    commonly used between November and New Year’s but could potentially be
    used for Groundhog Day, Arbor Day, and an other “holiday”
  • Great in a pinch

Focus group quotes

  • Feedback from holiday greeting focus group participants (not a representative sample)
  • “These cookies are free, right?”
  • “I bought my wife an iron. Is that bad?”
  • “What’s wrong with ‘Hey you?’”

Conclusions

Each holiday greeting is relevant and unique and the market could benefit from you using it.

Agency recommendations

  • Use them all
  • Try not to forget what’s really important this holiday
  • Grab as much health and happiness as you can
  • Drinking too much “eggnog” and trying to sing Auld Lang Syne spells trouble.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Why so many copycats? Testosterone and…

December 1, 2005 By 2 Comments


Dov Gordon of The Gordon Group, a management consultancy in Israel, was surprised to learn from one of
my posts that BK’s Subservient Chicken campaign hadn’t increased sales.
From reading about the campaign in marketing publications, his
perception was that it was hugely successful.

"When
you get a chance, please tell me why you think it is that advertising
and marketing people continue with these viral campaigns if sales have
not gone up. What’s their rationalization?"

First I sent Dov a link to Adrants about the new Maxtor campaign, yet another Subservient Chicken copycat.

Then tried to answer his question.

  1. Marketing and advertising people are getting rather desperate.
    Traditional advertising isn’t working so there’s a rush to create
    something new that will.
  2. Many don’t know how – or may not
    want to – or aren’t responsible for – doing the heavy lifting needed to
    increase sales. Making less “stuff” and listening more to customers in
    new ways to get ideas on how to deliver more value. Developing more
    thoughtful insights and new ideas to help customers and create loyalty.
    While new roles are emerging in marketing, the silos and old rules
    still remain. Advertising is still very promotional and creative driven.
  3. Wacky “innovative” ideas, spun right, look good on a resume Most
    marketers aren’t responsible for creating new customer value models,
    which is a real career builder. That’s usually the CEO’s domain. So
    they often feel stuck in the realm of tactics.
  4. Now this one is likely to get me in trouble, but I have data from a study by Dr. Kevin Clancy, CEO of Copernicus
    to prove it. There’s a whole lot of testosterone in marketing and
    advertising. The boys posture, brag, taunt, copy — and are afraid to
    say the emperor has no clothes. They make more decisions based on their
    gut than women do. They create campaigns and promote them so well that
    people like Dov think they were successful, when they were not.
  5. And then there’s the copycat mentality…

Filed Under: Musings, Uncategorized

Transactions not conversations

November 30, 2005 By Leave a Comment


I’m
a little down after meeting yesterday with a respected chief marketing
officer of a large fast food company. But what I learned was a valuable
reminder about what it takes for change.

“I don’t care about the concepts of community and conversations and consumer relationships,” the marketing exec told me.

“What
matters to me is transactions. Does a marketing tactic connect directly
to sales? If it does, it has value. If it doesn’t, we shouldn’t be
doing it.

“The concept of a having a community for our customers
is nice. So are more viral, entertaining ads. But I’m not sure the
investment is worth it. For one, it would appeal to a limited number of
customers. Secondly, I can’t measure its value in terms of sales.”

The exec pointed to some of Burger King's promotions, like the Subservient Chicken, which got a lot of people talking. But, he added, Burger King's chicken
sales didn't budge. So the money was really, to him, a waste.

While
so many of us see the value of a shift in marketing from “talk at”
promotions to "talk with" conversations, we probably need to remember
that decision makers are reluctant to change without measurement
metrics.We need more proof.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Uncategorized

Wind, Nick Hornby & Context

November 1, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Knowing how to frame ideas into the right context seems to be a
common stumbling block in marketing and communications. I don't know
whether it's because understanding context is diffcult or putting
things in context is difficult.

Here are two examples I came across last week that may help you think about context.

Wind power.

On Friday two architecture professors, Charlie Cannon of Rhode Island School of Design and Leftheri Pavlides of Roger Williams University, walked me through a presentation about why wind turbines are good for
communities. The deck, written eight months ago before energy prices
went bonkers and Exxon Mobil declared a $9 billion net quarterly
profit, was packed with economic, environmental and health data and
benefits.

“So, what do you think,” they asked. “Is it persuasive and convincing?”

Not
quite. My advice was that they talk about wind in the context of the
out-of-control energy prices, and the impact of those prices on poor
and working class folks who are just trying to make it. (Flash back to
images of Hurricane Katrina and the poor and working class with no
safety net.)

Of course, the environmental and health benefits
are solid, but what moves people in the current context is that wind is
something we can approve locally to help local people. I can’t do
anything about the big oil companies or utilities. But I can approve
wind turbines for my local community, which will help some people who
are on the brink of financial disaster. Wind is a simple thing we can
do that can have a profound effect.

A Long Way Down.

Another example of context comes from Nick Hornby’s new novel, A Long Way Down
about four really different people who meet by chance on a rooftop on
New Year's Eve with the intent of committing suicide. (Almost but not
quite as good as High Fidelity and About A Boy.)

This
excerpt is from JJ, one of the loser characters who is on vacation in
the Canary Islands with his new New Year's Eve friends, and is going
out to “jumpstart my libido.”

“I went back to the room to get
dressed. I’m not a bare-chested kind of guy. I’m like a hundred and
thirty pounds, skinny as f**k, white as a ghost, and you can’t walk
around next to guys with tans and six-packs when you look like that.
Even if you found a chick who dug the skinny ghost look, she wouldn’t
remember that she dug you in this context, right? If
you were into Dolly Parton and they played a blast of her album during
a hip-hop show, she just wouldn’t sound good. In fact, you wouldn’t
even be able to f******g hear her. So putting on my faded black jeans
and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the
right people.”

JJ dressed for the context and did indeed
jumpstart his libido. I'd like to share more about the other characters
and bigger context ideas but that might ruin the book for you. It's
worth the read.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

BIF-1 Innovation Summit: Seeing new possibilities

October 21, 2005 By Leave a Comment

My head is still spinning (in a good way) from the stories from 25
business, entertainment, education, arts and government leaders at this
week’s Business Innovation Factory
Summit in Providence, RI. Hosted by Richard Saul Wurman of TED fame and
Xerox PARC’s former chief scientist John Seely Brown, the conference
challenged the way most of us think about innovation.

After
digesting the stories, lessons and advice of some remarkably diverse
and successful people, here are some patterns I took away:

Have a dream. Reframe.

These game changers had an idea – a vision – that turned them and their
people on to do what many might have thought was impossible. The
“dream” was almost always a bigger purpose than anything financial.
Stuart Moore, co-founder and co-CEO of Sapient,
told the story of three stone masons. They first one said he was
cutting rocks. The second said he was working to feed his family. The
third said he was building the world’s biggest cathedral. They were all
doing the same work, but the third one loved his work because it
connected to a bigger vision, an important piece of work.

The conversations around creating a higher purpose and dream reminded me of this illustration from Hugh MacLeod.

5x Ask "why" and "why not."

Innovators ask why, and then they ask why again, and again and again, and again.
Ask “why” 5 times and you’ll begin to get into possibilities and
obstacles. John Seely Brown suggested that we also asked “Why Not?”
five times as we explore possibilities.

Dennis Littkey, founder of the Met School, recipient of multiple Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grants,
fundamentally changed the success of largely high-risk inner city high
school kids, by asking the question, “Why is school so boring for kids?
What’s really best for kids? How do they want to learn?’ Rather than
looking at how to change schools, he looked at what the kids wanted,
and then designed education around that. The graduation rates are in
the high 90% while graduation rates from conventional inner city
schools is around 50%.

Get out of your world.

Larry Huston of Procter and Gamble talked
about how tapping into the world of 1.5 million “experts” for new
product ideas – vs. relying on an internal 7,500 person R&D team –
has helped this consumer packaged goods company add $3billion in
revenue a year. Rather than a typical “research & development”
approach P&G now uses a “connect & develop” approach, with more
than 30% of new product ideas coming from outside the company; the goal
is to get to 50 percent.

Work has to be fun and engage people on intellectual, emotional and visceral levels.

“Innovating and change isn’t “hard” work; if it’s framed within a
context of the “dream” and an exciting purpose, work takes on a new
meaning. Jim Lavoie, CEO of RiteSolutions,
and Stuart Moore, dissed the idea that change is hard. “Today’s
knowledge workers want to have fun. If it’s not fun, why get out of bed
in the morning?”

Innovation comes from the opposite of expectation.

The future his here, ripe with possibilities. We need to be more
intellectual curious, inquisitive, brave, see – truly see – what’s
going on, shun accepted “wisdom,” challenge the norm, and explore
radical alternatives.

Sounds like fun to me.

Filed Under: Innovation, Uncategorized

Advocates & Identity

October 13, 2005 By Leave a Comment

One particualry interesting piece of research about what makes
people evangelists and advocates for an organization, comes from the
University of Queensland, and was presented by Sam Friend of Wotif.com
at last week's International Word-of-Mouth Marketing Conference.

The
overriding reason people advocate for an organization or product is
that they identify with the organization or share a sense of community
with other people who support/buy from the organization. (62%)

I was truly surprised to hear that satisfaction and experience accounted for just 21%, and trust for 9% in comparison.

Here are the standardised “path estimates” for the model.

Advocacy à Loyalty (.88)
Identification à Advocacy (.62)
Satisfaction à Advocacy (.21)
Trust à Advocacy (.09)

Filed Under: Research, Uncategorized

Takeaways from the International Word of Mouth Conference

October 12, 2005 By 1 Comment

Last week two conferences about the future of marketing were held — the giant annual Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference in Phoenix, and the first International Word of Mouth Conference in Hamburg, Germany, which I attended and spoke at.

While
the ANA conference sounded the alarms for new ways to connect with
consumers amid an increasingly fragmented world, the WOM conference
showed how to do just this.Here are some highlights from the WOM conference.

WOM is a discipline with proven ways to research, plan, target, test and measure. Fergus Hampton of Millward Brown laid
out the most cogent strategic approach to moving brands from “talk at
me brands” to “talked about” brands. I especially liked Fergus’ example
of religion as word-of-mouth at its most effective.

Content:
WOM is about engaging the customer, and this can be done through
experiences, ideas, and beliefs. “What starts WOM are ideas,” said
Steven Erich from Crispin Porter.
“Ideas also need to be killed to make room for new ideas. “ Jaap Favier
of Forrester, noted that we remember 10% of what we read, 15% of what
we hear, and 80% of what we experience.

Style:
WOM must be authentic, truthful, provide value, and use a human voice.
One of my presentations talked about the need to make meaning, not
buzz, and that meaning making requires context, relevancy and honest
emotion. Meaning making, done right, builds trust.

Influencers drive WOM: Alex Macris of The Themis Group,
who presented with game producer Scott Foe of Nokia, explained the
secrets to marketing to influencers, who he calls “superconductors”:
respect their power, build relationships, accelerate their experience,
and offer them status. Inus Hwang of Azooma Marketing Lab in South
Korea showed how effectively engaging a community 200 women has
accelerated the national adoption of new products at a fraction of the
cost of TV advertising. (1/13th the cost in one of her cases.)

Internal WOM:
Euan Semple of the BBC talked about the value of using blogs internally
to more openly share ideas, problems and opinions. “When you get people
talking internally you’re less likely to make mistakes and more likely
to create better things,” he said. Added Hugh MacLeod,
“How you talk internally affects how people talk externally.” Hugh
thinks that you need to create an environment where internal people can
have more open, frank real conversations before you can have genuine
external conversations. He pointed to the example of how Robert Skoble of Microsoft has changed the internal conversations within the company and affected the company’s culture.

New Research: Several academics presented new research on WOM.

Today, just 3.4% of WOM conversations are stimulated by a company’s marketing efforts; and a whopping 77% is through face-to- face conversations. Walter Carl, Assistant Professor of Communications Studies, Northeastern University.

Netnography,
with its ethnographic roots, can provide valuable insights in how to
communicate with and influence consumers, and glean message themes,
according to Kristine De Valck of HEC University in Paris.

Visualization of data can pinpoint influencers
in WOM communities, according to Suresh Sood, University of Technology
in Sydney. He presented a project where he was able to identify 25
influencers among 65,000 people through visualization of mobile phone
calling patterns.

The value of positive and negative online consumer reviews differ
based on the product type, said Shahana Sen of Farleigh Dickinson
University. Her research shows that 61% people rate negative reviews as
useful for utilitarian products. But for hedonic products (books. CD’s,
etc.) just 28% rated negative reviews as useful

How do you establish consumer advocacy?
A University of Queensland study presented by Sam Friend of Wotif.com
showed that customer identification is the most important antecedent to
consumer advocacy, more than consumer satisfaction or trust.

My favorite takeaway from the conference were two remarks by Hugh MacLeod:

“The market for something to believe in is infinite.”

“To control the conversation, improve the conversation."

Now there’s something for marketers to talk about as they plan next year's strategy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized, Word of mouth

Fat or Fabulous?

September 9, 2005 By Leave a Comment

Dove’s new advertising campaign is a great example of how powerful it
can be to stir up the market conversation with a new point of view.

The
campaign features confident, happy women of all sizes and shapes,
dressed only in underwear. They’re not the super-skinny fashion models,
but real women with real curves. In other words, the campaign
challenges the media image that you must be thin to be attractive.

The campaign has generated enormous press around the world, including a People magazine cover article, an editorial in the The New York Times, and appearances on the "Today" show.

In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine
article, “Social Lubricant: How a Marketing Campaign Became the
Catalyst for a Societal Debate,” Rob Walker hit on just how effective a
debate-stirring marketing campaign can be.

“Maybe it is somehow
inevitable that marketing, which caused much of the underlying anxiety
in the first place, can offer up a point of view that blithely tries to
resolve that anxiety.

“Moreover, as the entertainment side of
the media fragments, marketing becomes the one form of communication
that permeates everywhere – and is just as effective whether you’ve
actually seen the campaign or you simply have an opinion about it based
on what you’ve heard,” he wrote.

How refreshing to not only to see real women and real beauty, but to see a marketer stir up conversations – and brand interest.

For more about the campaign, see http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/.

PS –Happiness and kindness are the top attributes that make a woman beautiful, according to a Dove global study.

Filed Under: Smart company stories, Uncategorized
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