By Rob Hamshar

Admit it.  We B2B marketers have all looked on with thinly veiled envy as our counterparts in premier consumer goods companies pit their products against competitors with minimal (or no) actual differences and still manage to command massive price premiums. 

The magic of branding and emotional connection, so powerful yet so mysterious that—remember now—it was only fairly recently that GAAP rules were amended to account for brand value in financial statements; official acknowledgment of the reality and potential of such intangibles. Read More »

Jeff Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak, keynoted at MLC’s opening executive retreat last week. Arriving in his signature cowboy boots, Jeff shared his fittingly defiant approach to leadership in the “Wild West” of social media. He also shared insights from his new book, “The Mirror Test”.

Adversarial Leadership

Jeff opened by saying:“my job as CMO is to create tension,” and explained how he challenged the status quo and broke the rules to get action on social media at Kodak. He once asked Legal how many people he would have to annoy before he got fired. When they said a third of the company, he decided he still had plenty of leeway to push his plans through.  Similarly, when we asked how to deal with Legal’s approval processes for social media, he answered “You’re in marketing, be creative.” Read More »

By Laura Morris

Last year at Blogwell, Nick Ayers, Interactive Marketing Manager at Home Depot, shared his perspective on how the company is using social media to revitalize its customer service reputation.  Check out the video below for extra details.

Video: You Can Do It, We Can (Still) Help

Slidedeck: You Can Do It, We Can (Still) Help

The Opportunity:

Home Depot found that previously overlooked “passionates” that sat outside the brand’s historic target audience were engaging with the Home Depot brand online.  The company would try to capitalize on this organic interest to use social media as a way to differentiate itself from competitors with the goal of recapturing a group of consumers they lost during the customer service slip. Read More »

“I’m particularly intrigued by the competitive differentiation that needs be thought through—strategically—before you can start to think about ‘What am I doing on Twitter?’”

–Jennifer Lavelli, Group Executive, Worldwide Marketing, MasterCard

At MLC’s recent executive retreat in New York, Jennifer Lavelli put her finger on one of the key traits distinguishing social media exemplars (the 10% of large enterprises that are seeing real business results from their social efforts).  These exemplars are focusing their efforts on areas that could change the competitive dynamics in their category. By the way, “changing competitive dynamics” is not taking a category by storm with a viral hit.  Those results, while good, are fleeting.  By competitive dynamics, we’re talking Porter’s 5 Forces here.

And this goes well beyond the typical advice offered by social media pundits.  They will tell you to think through the business objective first, before determining which social media to engage with or build.  That’s not bad advice—its just that it isn’t enough. Read More »

Best Buy’s Twitter-based customer service tool has created a lot of buzz over the last year. We asked John Bernier, Best Buy’s Social Media Steward, what makes it work behind the scenes. John is the Digital Product Line Manager and Social Media Steward at Best Buy. He develops digital products and tools for Best Buy employees and customers, while shepherding social media initiatives, such as Twelpforce.  He has worked at Best Buy since 2004, playing a variety of roles in marketing communications and marketing strategy. We spoke to him early last month. Read More »

This week marks the official release of the Customer Effort concept into the “wild” with the publication of our article, entitled “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers,” in the July/August issue of Harvard Business Review. If you haven’t seen the article, feel free to download a complimentary copy. You will also find some cool podcasts and our Customer Effort Audit tool available to download.

As you’ll read in the article, our research shows that “delighting” the customer—in other words, going above and beyond—yields only marginal additional loyalty from the customer.

We also found that customers are four times more likely to leave a service interaction disloyal as compared to loyal, and the primary thing companies can do to mitigate this disloyalty in the service channel is to focus on reducing the effort customers must put forth to get their issues resolved.

Put succinctly, loyalty in the service environment is a matter of reducing effort, not delighting the customer. Read More »

Last week, MLC hosted it’s first Annual Executive Retreat of 2010, Closing the CMO Leadership Deficit in Social Media. The event featured the presentation of our last six months of research, as well as nearly 40 CMO’s and heads of social media sharing their challenges and successes in the social space. We’re very pleased with the response coming out of the event (stay tuned for some of those this week and next), and we owe a huge thanks to Jeffrey Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak, and Zena Weist, Director of Social Media at H&R Block, for presenting to the group.

One thing that elicited a vocal response from the participants in today’s retreat was the eternal bogeyman of social media marketers and communicators – how do we get Legal, HR, and others to sign off on our social media efforts? One participant identified two threads of pushback that she receives at her organization – first, what I’ll call “demand-side risk” – aka “What if our customers say mean things?”. The other could be called “supply-side risk”, or “What if our employees screw up?”  The group then identified a third – the dreaded ROI question. Read More »

By Whitney Satin

MLC has long extolled the virtues of “commercial teaching”—i.e., providing insight to customers in a way that makes them better appreciate your distinct value.  Despite our obvious marketing bent, our past research has perhaps inadvertently implied that the delivery of these insights comes down to a “moment of truth” between sales reps and the customer.  We’ve tended to focus on ways that Marketing can support Sales in this interaction, everything from working together to craft a teaching sales pitch to tools that reinforce key teaching points after the rep has performed the heaving lifting.

The rep interaction undoubtedly plays a crucial role in many purchase decisions; in fact our sister program, the Sales Executive Council, has put plenty of time into understanding the specific rep skills and manager characteristics that make this teaching effort most effective. Read More »

Susan Lavington has been SVP Marketing at USA TODAY since 2007. During that time, she spearheaded the brand’s adoption of social media – including turning 100 journalists into regular Twitterers.

We asked her how she did it. Read More »

By Laura Morris

Last year at Blogwell, Ken Kaplan, the Director of Public Relations at Intel, shared his perspective on how social media has evolved from a grassroots experiment to a globally orchestrated effort at his company.  Check out the video below to hear first-hand how Intel’s approach to managing social media has changed over time.

Read More »