Wide Angle

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 »

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are back with a second installment of the ‘freaky’ thinking that has now led them to advising would-be suicide bombers to buy life insurance. Over multiple plane rides last week, I scanned through SuperFreakonomics but was struck by one quote in the chapter on apathy vs. altruism: “People are people, and they respond to incentives.” Combine that with their analysis of unintended consequences – “among the most potent laws in existence” – and you begin to see why many marketing schemes fall short of perfect. Let’s take the example of the airlines and baggage fees. Read More »

If your web site was one of your sales reps—out there on the road, entering prospects’ offices, and making his best pitch—would he be a high-performer: informed, thought-provoking, and persuasive?  Or would he behave more like the typical low-performer: talking at length about your company’s history; describing products and services in an indiscriminate, “dump truck” fashion; asking unnecessary, tedious questions; making bold claims that outstrip anything your company can actually deliver on?  Read More »

Frank Sinatra famously crooned that love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.  Little did he know that, in an ironic bit of pop culture repurposing, the song would come to signify the often hostile—though ultimately committed—relationship between Peggy and Al Bundy in the TV sitcom Married … With Children.

Dysfunctional?  Yes.   Mutually dependent?  Absolutely.

The same can be said of Sales and Marketing.  The two functions often butt heads behind closed doors, but their cooperation and interconnectedness is necessary to achieve key business objectives.  Of course, getting the two groups on the same page is often easier said than done.  We typically see breakdowns in the following areas: Read More »

Mountain: Post-Mountaintop Removal

2009 was a year of taking sledgehammers to budgets, not least agency spend.  Many marketers have relied on the equivalent of mountaintop removal to get at those agency savings.  They’ve launched agency reviews or have consolidated agency relationships.  These approaches are imprecise, crude and unsightly—but can be effective in reducing spend. 

However, most of these marketers will be under continued budget pressure in 2010.  The problem with mountaintop blasting is that, once you do it, you can’t play that card again (uh, the top of the mountain is gone).  So what are marketers to do to find additional cost savings that won’t harm communications quality?  Read More »

When B2B marketers look for ways to improve their customer experience, they typically rely on voice of the customer (VOC) to direct their investment decisions.  More often than not, marketers tackle touchpoints that customers gripe about most frequently or fix issues mentioned by the largest customers.  But as far as helping companies demonstrate their unique benefits, this is rarely the best approach. Read More »