Customer churn is a perennial problem, particularly for those in service and utility businesses.  When it comes to solutions, it’s easy to get into an internal rut.  Practices, processes and metrics build up over time to support a particular worldview of churn.  The worldview works for a time, but retention gains inevitably flatten as competitors replicate the approach and the business evolves.

We often find that fresh ideas from outside the industry can catalyze new, healthy thinking about churn.  Here are a few ideas to hopefully freshen your thinking: Read More »

Those who live and breathe marketing have a problem: we can never fully unplug. Marketing follows us wherever we go. The TV ads, the social media forums, the direct e-mail – there’s a constant wondering of the strategic idea behind a campaign, whether the target audience was properly selected, and whether the channel mix works. Or perhaps this is just me and I’m projecting. Let’s move on.

Following my last post on globalization and its ramifications for the structure of global marketing functions, I spent a week trying to unplug in Italy (thank you, Starwood points). What spurred the above introduction was the amazing difference in marketing communications techniques required in the Italian market versus the United States – both industrialized Western countries with heavy penetration of traditional and digital media. Similar on paper, far different in practice. Read More »

By Laura Morris

Whether you want to get smart or sound cool, here’s what ten commonly used social media buzzwords mean in layman’s terms.  What other jargon is your digital agency (or, more likely, your 14 year-old) throwing your way?

1.  Social Graph: A visual representation of the different connections that an individual has within a larger social network.    Click here to learn more.

2. Social CRM: A process to monitor, engage and manage conversations and relationships with existing and prospective customers and influencers across the internet, social networks, and digital channels.  Click here to learn more.

3. Geo targeting: In geomarketing and internet marketing, the method of determining the physical location of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location.   Click here to learn more. Read More »

Launching a new product and want customer advocates to help spread the word for you?  See what you can learn from National Instruments’ LabView product launch (a software program for engineers).  The launch campaign, which won MLC’s 2009 B2B Marcomm Awards, generated more than 2,000 customer tweets and 80 customer blog posts in just one month.

What was their secret?  Building platforms and content around customer needs – not their own product launch.  Read More »

By Whitney Satin

History is ripe with famous feuds: the Capulets and Montagues, Alexander Hamilton and Andrew Burr, or, as I glibly noted in a previous post, Peggy and Al Bundy.  Enter Sales and Marketing to the fray: often at odds, though truly dependent on one another for the successful operation of any given company.  If early results from our sales and marketing alignment diagnostic are any indication, the two groups have managed to find at least some common ground: commercial messaging is crucial … and it’s something we’re not very good at it. Read More »

A few weeks ago, I pulled 10 nuggets from The Economist’s special report on social media. Fittingly, The Economist followed that this week with a special report on managing information.

Managing and making best use of all the data trails that consumers create via digital and social media is critical for marketers (see this prior post on managing information richness). This capability is one of a few that will separate winning marketing functions (and even enterprises) from losing ones in the next 3-5 years.

So, without further delay, here are 10 of my favorite takeaways from the report. Read More »

Perhaps you’ve seen episodes of Name That Tune on the Game Show Network (or maybe you’re old enough to remember when it was a hit in the 1970s).  Regardless, contestants competed to identify a song by listening to as few notes as possible.  I was reminded of that show while watching commercials during the Olympics last week.  Within the first few seconds of seeing a new ad, I knew it was for McDonald’s.  There were no golden arches or kids eating French fries to help me; there was just a vibe, an emotional connection that immediately made me recognize the ad as McDonald’s.

In an age when brands are identified by an icon like a duck or gecko, a recognizable sound like the deep voiceover of Morgan Freeman, or a celebrity spokesperson, I found it refreshing to see an ad that relied on none of those but still made a lasting and memorable impression. Read More »

Following up on The Five Profiles of Sales Reps, I promised to discuss the ramifications of these findings for B2B marketers.  But first, let me offer some clarity around that work as there seems to be a fair amount of interest from across the membership…

The work previously summarized is specifically designed to help senior sales executives prioritize investments in skill development broadly across the sales force assuming a finite amount of training dollars. In other words, what skill set improvement investments will give us the biggest bang for our buck?

Our guidance is to think about the five profiles like potential college majors – yes, everyone takes the core curriculum (science, math, etc), but everyone specializes as well. These profiles represent the different sales rep “majors” that exist. Read More »