(Note: This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on marketing planning. Check back here every Wednesday in August for a new installment!)

Don’t know if it’s time to spend more on marketing?  Unsure how to convince the CFO?  Pat LaPointe – managing partner at NPV Marketing, a leading marketing measurement firm – recently spoke to our members about how to justify spend increases. Read on for a summary of his top tips.

NPV’s research shows that ‘historical spend’ is still the number one means of allocating marketing budget, but lacks both rigor and credibility with the CFO.  What CFOs want isn’t certainty about the ROI of marketing spend (no business investment has a certain ROI, e.g., building a new plant in a developing country), but rather clearly stated assumptions and a sound understanding of risk factors. You can make a solid business case that will pass the CFO ‘sniff test’ by taking the 5 steps below. Read More »

Sometimes the cornucopia of plenty in American grocery and general merchandise stores can be, well, a bit monotonous. The bread aisle is a monochrome light brown (occasionally accented by, oddly enough, brown shelves), the dairy case a washed out sea of white plastic bathed in a pale fluorescent glow, the men’s undershirts an undifferentiated mass of white, brown and light gray. It’s no wonder, then, that consumers crave a little variety in packaging and presentation. It’s not just to make the scenery a little less boring; it also makes products dramatically easier to find. Read More »

By Rob Hamshar

WD-40, the famed degreasing and rust-preventing agent, is widely known for its versatility.  As the story goes, it was originally designed and marketed in the aerospace industry to aid in airplane maintenance. But through the years, thousands of new applications were found and problems solved.  Everything from lubricating door-hinges to de-squeaking bedsprings to freeing tongues stuck to frozen metal in wintertime.  The value of a can of WD-40 has undoubtedly increased in the mind of consumers as its perceived utility increased.

The reality is, most B2B companies are much more capable of doing something very similar.  One example that we’ve found is from Dow Chemical.  Like many B2B companies, Dow has a broad array of products and services and interacts with their customers in many different ways.  But, through surveys and conversations with their sales reps, they’ve found that there are often pockets of customers within every customers segment that tend to value a particular part of Dow’s offer far more than other customers in the same segment. Read More »

Chunky aloe vera cooler, anyone? According to a recent Reuters article, Coca-Cola is trying “drink texture” innovation along these lines, in hopes of finding the next billion-dollar brand.  In another development, earlier this summer, P&G launched its eStore, enabling it to sell everything from Fusion razors to Regenerist micro-sculpting cream (whatever that is…bet it could double as a dessert topping).

Seemingly unrelated developments—but if you look closer, there’s an interesting link in these two anecdotes that reveals an opportunity for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to think differently about innovation.  That is, the rise of digital and social media should enable CPGs to relax some important constraints on their innovation strategies—namely, the tyranny of fixed shelf space in retail stores.

That’s where the P&G anecdote comes in.  What if you relaxed that shelf space constraint, along the lines of what P&G is doing with its eStore? If you do that, you have to worry less about giving up some of the shelf space of tried-and-true, mass appeal, high earnings products in return for stocking untried, new products that may not deliver the same earnings per-square-foot.  That’s because with a virtual storefront, warehouse space for stocking physical product is cheap and plentiful.  This opens up the opportunity for brands to increase the mix of ideas in their innovation portfolios that are of a more niche profile, because they can stock the product without the fixed shelf space constraint. Read More »