Wide Angle

The post titles are cheeky, yes, but this one incredibly true. The more we see members implementing a social media strategy, the wider the gap grows between success and failure – and along with that, the attendant risks of failure. For those looking simply to make the social media case, failure means another year lost while consumers and technology forge ahead. For those making social media a central part of the customer experience, failure means massive personnel costs that could have been spent on tried-and-true techniques. So without further ado, the top ten list: Read More »

Advance warning: this post will likely open more doors than it closes. But they are important doors that need opening, especially if they aren’t already. Haniel Lynn pushed the first one open with his earlier post, asking if Marketing could foment a corporate cultural revolution through social media. Member conversations I’ve had over the past week have demonstrated there is a root-cause question that must come first – where does Marketing fit in the organization? Better yet, where should it? Read More »

You’ll find an extended report on social networking in this week’s Economist.  You may have seen it on the newsstand—it shows Steve Jobs, in Biblical raiment with nimbus, bearing the fabled tablet. 

Clever.  And glorious.  Or blasphemous, depending on your point of view. 

If you’re well-versed in social media, you won’t find the report mind-blowing, though it is characteristically well-reasoned.  If you’re newer to social media, I’d recommend it. Read More »

Delivering a preferred customer experience boils down to three easy steps:

• Step One: Clarify what’s unique about your experience and the distinct benefits you provide to customers.  Check.
• Step Two: Understand how customers interact with a variety of touchpoints and emphasize your unique benefits at the touchpoints that matter most.  Got it.
• Step Three: Make sure the dozens (and dozens) of other touchpoints in your customer experience reflect your unique benefits.  Hmmmmm…

We see a lot of breakdowns when it comes to this final piece of the puzzle.  To ensure that customers really understand and appreciate your unique benefits, every touchpoint must be viewed as an opportunity to reinforce or support them.  The problem, as marketers are quick to point out, is that Marketing doesn’t have enough time, money, or control to manage all the different customer touchpoints.  While it’s easy for Marketing to adjust collateral or update the Web site to better reflect benefits, it’s a different story when it comes to modifying packaging or customer service touchpoints.  New set of stakeholders, new set of rules, a whole new ballgame. Read More »

We all know the recession has drastically impacted consumer behaviors, but we may often overlook its direct impact on brands themselves.   The recession has changed the way marketers manage their brand portfolios as they try to do more with less.  As such, marketers are taking a closer look at how then can stretch existing brand equity across a greater number of products, often taking a parent brand/sub-brand approach.   

We generally see four different sub-brand approaches, each with their own benefits and risks:  Read More »

So, you’ve decided to bring some analytics hotshots onto your marketing team.  What should you do first? Whatever you do, don’t let them near the data!

Not yet.  It’s too dangerous.  More peril than you could shake a stick at.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a huge fan of analytics to improve marketing decision making. I spent four years leading a team in CapitalOne’s marketing and analysis group.  I have a deep appreciation for organizations that have built competitive advantage on analytics.  In fact, one of my “must reads” for marketers is Davenport’s Competing on Analytics (good introductory excerpt here). 

But what I have also observed with high-powered analytics is real-world myopia. Read More »

Marketers would be remiss to ignore the U.S. political events of the past week. Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts’ Senate race removed the air of inevitability from health care reform. President Obama’s plan for a tax on the largest financial institutions sent the Dow plummeting 5% across three sessions. As December home resale data proved less than stellar, the administration announced a wind-down of federal support for mortgage rates – potentially a double blow to that sector’s recovery. Let me back up: why should marketers care?

Political affiliations aside, government touches more elements of our consumer-driven economy than ever before. One policy change here, another there, ripples through the system with unprecedented speed (like perhaps, an unintended consequence). If banks feel less wealthy as a result of taxation and more limited mortgage support, the less likely they are to expand credit. Tighter credit, as we saw vividly in the fourth quarter of 2008, leads to lower business investment and greater consumer savings – starting another cycle of money removed from our economy exactly at the time it needs capital injected.

Senior leadership teams don’t want excuses, though. After two years of stumbles, most executives look to 2010 for growth. Yet the number of extraneous variables affecting that potential growth is incredibly high, hence marketers’ collective uncertainty. Just take several possible scenarios that could happen across 2010: Read More »

Watch a 5-minute video showing how Texas Instruments identified critical touchpoints in the customer experience.

Marketers typically use VOC as a barometer when weighing different investments in the customer experience.  But this reliance on customer voice biases marketers to only consider improvements to the existing set of touchpoints.  Existing touchpoints aren’t necessarily the best ways to engage customers and, moreover, “fixing” touchpoints that rank highly on the customer gripe list generally leads to an experience that’s comparable, not differentiated.  That’s not to say that VOC is always going to lead you astray, but its implications should be taken with a grain of salt. Read More »

One of the themes we’re picking up from Council members is a reckoning that new product development and innovation approaches are badly in need of an overhaul.  What’s driving it?  Here’s what we’ve heard from marketers at Global 2000-sized companies: 

• The recession has fundamentally recast customers’ hierarchy of needs, priorities and in some cases core values, giving rise to the “New Normal” customer
• The “Good Enough Revolution” (an important read) has demonstrated that, in many categories, the returns curve on adding new features has flattened or even inverted
• The increasing participation of our target audiences in digital and social media has presented an opportunity to dramatically reduce innovation cycle time
• The source of consumption growth is shifting to BRIC countries, which is putting more pressure on innovation processes to produce discontinuous innovation for those markets Read More »

It’s no secret that increased social media participation has given B2C marketers unprecedented access to customer data.   With just a customer email address, the right “data crawler” goes through blogs, networking sites, video sharing sites, and other social media outlets to report on a customer’s age, location, gender, social site participation and more.  Collect this data for thousands of customers and you have some potent information.

In our conversations with marketers, we’re coming across a variety of creative uses for these data sets.  At the most direct level, marketers are using social data to choose the best social media sites to invest in.  Some are discovering that their customers are spending time on social sites they (and their competitors) weren’t aware of—and are moving quickly to capitalize on these undiscovered opportunities. Read More »