So perhaps the title here is a bit harsh, but something needed to catch your eye. We’ve long known retailers to be a unique beast, managing more products than any CPG marketer could imagine, focusing on category-specific merchandising strategies (often to the detriment of cross-sell), and most recently, managing the tradeoffs between brick-and-mortar stores and online sales.

But frankly, this too often turns retailers into myopic, proximity-biased incrementalists in their customer strategy (too harsh again?). Imagine my encouragement when I see retail CMOs begin to tout the very elements of customer-focused strategy their CPG peers have long known. Read More »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

Measuring social media campaign effectiveness is a topic near and dear to the marketers we speak with – and justifiably so.  Experimentation is a key element of social media strategies, and evaluating the impact of experimental campaigns helps marketers maximize future investments.

For marketers who target viral campaigns to the blogosphere or use online PR as a marketing channel, measurement can be especially challenging.  Mentions of a brand can be monitored, but if they don’t link to the brand’s website, it’s hard to tell which mentions are leading to web visits, online purchases, or other objectives.  Certain third party sites might be especially influential in directing traffic to a brand’s website – but without the direct link, how do you know? Read More »

Source: youtube.com/nikegolf

Now that the frenzy over the Masters is winding down, let’s take a look at the Tiger ad from Nike.  Smart move by Nike, or not?  More importantly for the Wide Angle readership, are there lessons here for marketers more generally? (Beyond be careful which superstars you get in bed w—sorry, bad choice of words) 

If you look at numbers released Monday after the tournament, it certainly doesn’t look good for Nike.  Confusion, skepticism and other negative emotions reign. Read More »

By Rob Hamshar

One of the many hats I wore while posted in CEB’s Asia hub in New Delhi was that of “glocalizer”—contributing to the organization-wide effort to translate insights for the region.  It was exciting to see such efforts come to fruition. 

One of the more visible projects I was involved with is CEB’s joint initiative with the Indian business publication Mint Magazine (a partnership of HT Media—inaugurated by The Mahatma himself—and The Wall Street Journal).  With Mint, we publish a monthly series, entitled the Six Myths, based on the thought leadership from the global memberships at CEB and the regional expertise of the folks at Mint. 

Recently, our Six Myths installment focused on six common misconceptions about the world of Sales that are especially relevant to heads of Sales and Marketing in central and east Asia.  Though most of the myths align to the broader challenges faced anywhere in the world, some were especially resonant in India.  Read More »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

The Sales and Marketing relationship at many B2B companies can be characterized by the term “managed dissatisfaction”.  Competing goals and time horizons prevent the functions from seeing eye-to-eye, resulting in Marketing and Sales doing just enough to placate each other while pursuing separate agendas.

Marketing and Sales have traditionally seemed resigned to this, content to work around each other if they couldn’t work together.  That’s changing.  We’ve seen a dramatic rise in the attention marketers are paying to alignment with their sales counterparts.  Three factors are driving this interest in improved coordination across the commercial organization: Read More »

By Laura Morris

Want your brand to “go viral?”  Get in line.  With marketers lining up to create the next “Subservient Chicken,” it’s becoming increasingly difficult to create attention-grabbing content that will get your target customers talking.

The smartest brands are taking a more scientific approach, thinking deliberately about how they can engineer a social experience that sparks positive word-of-mouth.  Here’s how Purina thinks about using social media to spark advocacy. Read More »

As marketers try to get their companies back on a path to growth, bets on innovation—be it product, service, or other—are top of mind for most of us.  Unfortunately, when we ask how approaches to innovation are changing in 2010, most marketers default to a “more” strategy—more spending, more experiments, or more time and attention.

As we begin to dig around for some new ideas, Council members have pointed us to an emerging trend: their best ideas are coming from outside the walls of their companies, or at least outside of traditional marketing and R&D functions.  “Outside-the-walls innovation” generally shows up in one of three flavors: Read More »

Crikey! That healthcare legislation was a wee bit contentious. 

One thing we can all agree on is that it will be tough for marketers to predict precisely how the new laws will affect consumer and stakeholder behavior.  Simply put, the sheer complexity of the US healthcare system makes prediction difficult.  Moreover, legislation this sweeping will almost certainly yield unintended consequences, thereby increasing the levels of unpredictability.

How should marketers cope?  Try these two tools.  Read More »