The clock is ticking for retail: create a truly multi-channel customer experience or perish.   A recent consumer survey released by ATG reveals:

• 78 percent said they use two or more channels to browse, research and make purchases; 30 percent said they use three channels or more
• 43 percent said they start their research online or through a mobile device, but then need to call a customer service or call center representative to complete the transaction because the necessary product or service information cannot be found online
• 39 percent said they browse via the online or mobile channel and then make purchases in the store because they prefer to touch and feel the product; 36 percent said they do this to compare several brands of the same product

Consumers are embracing the freedom the new multi-channel environment provides them in evaluating products and services to ensure that whatever purchase they make is the right one.  Retailers are starting to follow suit, but they face some significant barriers in doing so: Read More »

Ah, the sweet smell of redemption on a Thursday morning. Last week, I wrote about whether executives could tag companies as ‘innovative’ if they failed to deliver revenue growth (and implicitly, fail to meet customer needs). BCG’s listing of the top 50 innovative companies said yea; I, nay. And this week, I think I’ve got 23 companies to back me up: Fortune’s list of 23 companies that achieved double-digit revenue growth despite the turbulent economy in 2009. Perhaps not innovative, but doing a great job of exceeding shareholder expectations.

Discerning a common thread among those on the Fortune list isn’t easy, especially since most would rarely appear on an ‘innovative company’ list. You could certainly argue that value positioning helped tremendously, i.e., the right economic proposition to capitalize on retrenched consumer spending. Companies like Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Ross Stores certainly fit the bill. Yet, there are plenty of ‘value’ retailers that noticeably didn’t make the cut, from Family Dollar to the granddaddy of them all, Walmart. There isn’t an easy industry lens to the list either – in what was generally another poor year for financial services, USAA, Wells Fargo, and Erie Insurance beat the odds handily. Even with oil prices up across 2009, there isn’t an energy company to be found. Read More »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

The marketing applications for social media data can seem endless – and overwhelming. At the MLC we’re doing our best to stay on top of emerging opportunities to put social data to use. On May 4th MLC members can tune in to our webinar on Cutting Edge Uses of Social Media Data. We’ll be joined by three experts from leading social media data companies (Radian6, Rapleaf and Tealium) who will discuss effective and innovative ways they’ve seen customers use social data to achieve marketing objectives.

A few things we’ll cover:

• Use social data to identify behaviors and demographics in your current customer base – and target your marketing campaigns to similar people.   I touched on similar possibilities in my previous post on Social Media Value Many Marketers Are Missing.
• Measure awareness and find new places to connect with customers using data from a social listening platform. My colleague Laura posted a good introduction to social media listening, Be a Better Listener: Three Things You Should Be Paying Attention to Online.
• Track the effectiveness of social media marketing campaigns – even if clickthru data aren’t available. I introduced this topic a couple weeks ago in my post on Measuring Social Media Effectiveness Without Clickthru Metrics.

MLC Members: Register for the May 4th webinar Cutting Edge Uses of Social Media Data and learn more from the experts.

The term “emerging markets” is a misnomer—many of these markets have already emerged and are better described as “ascendant markets”.  That much is clear after reading The Economist’s special 18-page report on innovation in emerging markets.  The key takeaway for marketers is that these markets are increasingly the source of commercial innovation (innovation in the way products are taken to market), not just product innovation (innovation in product design and features). Read More »

The case for better Sales and Marketing alignment is pretty obvious to most Marketers—selling and marketing in concert stands to yield much better results than doing them each independently.  Unfortunately, what actually leads to good Sales and Marketing alignment has eluded most of us for a long time.  We’ve been collecting data on the topic for a few months now, and have come across a couple of admittedly simple but thought provoking findings: Read More »

By Whitney Satin

Sales and marketing leaders constantly look for ways to build greater alignment between their two functions.  But efforts to enact joint planning or sync activities across the purchase funnel stall right out of the gates if the two functions don’t first develop a shared view of the customer.

This may sound like an obvious first step but, more often than not, Sales and Marketing aren’t on the same page when it comes to having a common understanding of customer needs.  We often hear tales of Sales accusing Marketing of being notoriously slow and impractical when analyzing customer needs, while marketers argue that Sales “manages by anecdote” and misses broader trends across segments. This tension ultimately hampers the organization’s ability to truly meet customer needs and capture new opportunities as they appear in the marketplace. Read More »

I’m a sucker for top ten lists – world’s busiest airports, tallest buildings, largest bankruptcies, habits of effective social media marketers (ok, the last was just a shameless plug). Yet there’s one list each year that always piques my interest – BCG’s Most Innovative Companies, and this year’s survey results were a bit of a head-scratcher.

Not because of the leading companies on the list – the old standbys of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and IBM still head the class. What was more startling was that 11 companies had declining revenues and 17 companies had declining margins across the 2006-2009 survey period. You can play devil’s advocate with the recession all you’d like, but in a top 50 list of innovators, more than 20% falling shy of growth raises an eyebrow. Read More »

A recently released report by Gallup underscores how difficult it is for marketers today to know where to focus their efforts.  The report, which is based on a survey of US consumers’ retail shopping behavior (and includes some really interesting data on the engagement premium), at first suggests that success lies in the quality of customer service efforts and ease of shopping—both very functional aspects of the retail experience.  But three paragraphs later, the authors argue that retailers’ most effective strategy is to build an emotionally engaging experience. 

Well, which is it?  Of course, we’d all like to have an experience that is as good as can be, both functionally and emotionally.  However, we as marketers have limited time and financial resources.  We appreciate advice that steers us on how to prioritize. 

So, here is MLC’s take on how to make those tradeoffs.  Read More »

My previous summaries of the Sales Executive Council’s rep success work (The Five Profiles of Sales Reps and Unpacking the Winning Sales Rep) explained how the most successful sales rep profile (the Challenger) wins by doing three things well:  Teaching, Tailoring and Asserting Control.

But who should be on the hook for encouraging successful behaviors when it comes to these activities?  Should it be left up to the individual rep?  …the sales manager?  …a central training group?  …how about Marketing?

Common sense not only tells us that it is a critical combination of all of the above, but dictates that Marketing needs to play a critical role in just about all of the competencies for them to be successful.  Here’s our take: Read More »

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much? Read More »