Wide Angle

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A social media strategy without metrics is like Thanksgiving dinner without turkey, truly missing a core ingredient. A social media strategy with the wrong metrics serves the turkey with pasta sauce rather than gravy. Sure, it adds flavor, but it completely distracts from the purpose of the meal. Here’s my point – in marketers’ rush to prove that social media investments produce the required ROI, our social media plans trumpet metrics that may have little relation to what we’re actually trying to accomplish.

In delivering the results of our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic to multiple members over the past month, I sense two problems with social media measurement schemes (and trust me, some are more scheme-like than your local bank heist): Read More »

Inauthenticity.  Human senses are wired to sniff it out.  We pick up subtle cues in non-verbal gestures.  Entire fields of expertise have developed to study nonverbal communications.

We make note of eye contact, or lack thereof (known as oculesics).  We know when smiles are artificial from movement of facial muscles (known as kinesics).  We can sense undercurrents of real emotion in voices (paralanguage or vocalics).

All of these are subtle indicators that, taken together, enable us to judge reasonably accurately whether something (or somebody) is fishy or truly authentic.

Click Image to Enlarge | Consumer expectations of authenticity are increasing; marketers who don’t keep up risk consumer punishment.

When it comes to marketing communications, consumers seem willing to tolerate moderate authenticity—the middle in the distribution at left.  After all, we as consumers expect some level of artificiality from advertising, as with movies or TV shows.  But, consumers duly reward or punish communications in the tails of the authenticity curve. 

Focus on the Zone of Reward in the right tail of the authenticity curve.  You see this kind of authenticity in Burger King’s Whopper Freakout ads—you don’t need a subtitle to tell you those are real people’s reactions.  As a result, these ads are subtly more powerful for consumers, and they reward Burger King for that.  Read More »

There’s nothing like a recession to make your agencies work really hard for you.  But as we start to see the dimmest of lights at the end of the tunnel, you’d be smart to think about getting the best work from agencies that are poking around for new business from clients starting to spend again. 

I see a blind spot for client-side folks–we think about the agency as an institution, not a collection of smart, creative workers.  You can bet that, just like the agency business itself, the staffers on your account are poking around for new job leads, too (at least the best ones probably are); it’s natural, but it costs you money and time when the best staffers leave.

Don’t leave this to the agencies to manage without your input.  With all the pressure we’re putting on their margins, there’s no guarantee they’ll do what’s best for their staffer’s compensation. Read More »

My New York Giants didn’t play this weekend – that’s one way to end a losing streak. I hadn’t enjoyed four consecutive losing Sundays of gesticulating wildly at my TV to no avail. But Fox, CBS, NBC, or ESPN didn’t quite care – I was watching.

As were about 17.2 million others any given Sunday, helping the NFL to their highest TV ratings in 20 years, a 15% uptick over last season. That’s an increase far beyond the 2% decline in stadium ticket sales, so much so that NFL national sponsorships are up. The pattern extends to baseball as well – World Series TV ratings were up 42% in 2009, which we can’t attribute solely to my Yankees’ return to dominance.

Clearly, we’re seeing not just changing consumer behaviors, but new, never-before-seen behaviors. A 15% viewership increase isn’t just former fans returning to TV. Our latest research on consumer behavior tells us that today’s winners are somehow helping consumers satisfy emerging desired outcomes – not the outcomes consumers say they want, but the latent (often emotional) ones that ethnographic research could uncover. Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge | A Unique Benefit-driven approach selects and improves touchpoints in a way that delivers a Unique Benefit to customers.

We know by now that leading B2B companies build customer loyalty by focusing on unique benefits—not touchpoints—as they look to enhance the customer experience.  Check out MLC’s video for a quick refresher on the research behind this.

Again, we’re not saying to let your touchpoints go by the wayside.  But while a touchpoint-driven approach to the experience seeks to optimize each touchpoint individually, companies with the highest levels of loyalty instead isolate the benefits their company can uniquely provide to customers.  They select and improve touchpoints to ensure that customers actually perceive this benefit throughout the experience. Read More »

I’ve just left the lush autumn of the Pacific Northwest, having visited Microsoft to talk social media shop with the leaders of their customer support group.  Microsoft is working on some impressive social media tools, to be sure.  But they were quick to point out that social media is about conversations FIRST, not the platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) or the management tools.

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It’s a point worth underscoring, especially for marketers.  From the data we’ve gathered via our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic, we know that Marketing and/or Corporate Communications are leading the social media charge in large (i.e., Fortune 1000) enterprises 65% of the time.  But when it comes to Customer Support involvement, more than 40% of large companies don’t involve support peers at all!  In another 50%, they are only moderately involved. That’s a huge problem. Read More »

Following up on my last post, I wanted to share my key takeaways from the last two days of ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference:

• The importance of authenticity remained a key theme throughout the rest of the presentations.  David Jones of Havas Worldwide talked quite a bit about making sure your brand genuinely connects to real issues consumers care about.  According to Havas research, 86% of consumers expect companies to stand for something other than profits.  (MLC members who are interested in creating these types of connections with consumers should click here to see the Council’s approach.) Read More »

I’m on United 7094 to Chicago, thinking through a barrage of B2B member conversations last week that all led back to a seemingly intractable problem – the proper structure, interface, and (potential) integration of Marketing and Sales. B2B marketers have long had an inferiority complex relative to their B2C brethren, to which B2B folk reply, ‘if you had Sales to deal with, you’d feel equally humiliated.’ Touché.

Why the conflict? Why the insistence on separate spheres of influence? Why all the talk and no walk? Over the past two years, MLC members have seen quantitative research demonstrating the necessity of marketing and sales partnership, whether it be in differentiating the purchase experience to drive loyalty, or crafting a unique customer experience to boost preference. Here’s what I’m hearing as the stumbling blocks to full partnership and better business results: Read More »

A recent New Yorker article on the financier Martin Armstrong’s obsession with cycle theory got me thinking: while I don’t know anything about cycle theory, I’ve looked at enough data to observe that some numbers are indeed fixed. Not literally fixed in that they are absolute numbers like pi, but fixed in the sense that they are hard to move and in that they will tend to revert back to the mean. This makes them very powerful from a management perspective in that changes in either direction provide you with a lot of information about what’s happening in the marketplace. Read More »

Click Image to Enlarge Sample "Plan on a Page"

Almost every member I speak to is in throes of planning season, and many are struggling to build plans that reflect a growth agenda as budgets edge closer to pre-recession levels.  In many cases, we see marketers try to make up for lost time, sprinkling in a little bit of everything that they couldn’t afford to do last year.

To help members, we’ve been presenting a tried and true best practice more than ever. MasterCard’s Plan on a Page is about getting back to the basics – mapping your planned marketing activities to your company’s strategic objectives – and scrapping the ones that don’t help meet them.  Easier said than done, especially when your internal partners are grilling you about not being on Twitter or not sponsoring that golf tournament the CEO really likes. Read More »