Is innovation on the decline in the pharmaceutical space? [The Atlantic]

A public interest group says Facebook’s Credits product violates antitrust law [CNET]

Google is activating 500,000 new Android devices daily [TheNextWeb]

AdKeeper is sort of an Instapaper for banner ads [NYT]

Consumer spending stagnated in the month of May [Bloomberg]

LivingSocial is expanding across the world, particularly in Asia, Europe and the Middle East [Reuters]

Seven personality traits of top salespeople [HBR]

Dan Ariely’s latest: You Are Being Gamed [Posterous]

Deos your company have an in-house social network? [NYT]

Get ready, world: the internet is about to change your car, too [San Jose Mercury News]

Athletes given the green light to tweet at next year’s Olympics [Reuters]

Google tests NFC payment platform in Tokyo [Near Field Communications World]

Automakers and other consumer brands looking for inspirational mobile campaigns and executions, look no further: our Mobile Marketing Resource Center has a large and ever-growing Showcase section, which contains some of the most inventive and creative mobile campaigns around the world.

Two examples to pick out:

Ford’s Bluetooth Zone at the Australian International Auto Show. Ford set up four separate interactive Bluetooth zones across its stands at the Australian International Motor Show. Each zone interacted with passersby and made mobile content available to download. The results were fantastic: the Bluetooth Zone generated over 18,400 consumer interactions, and drove over 44,000 consumer-initiated downloads during the five motor show events.

Mini’s “Getaway Stockholm 2010 Challenge”. MINI created an iPhone app that placed a ‘virtual MINI Countryman‘ on a map of Sweden. Users could see their location in relation to the car, and once within 50 meters of it, could ‘claim’ it. The goal was to have the MINI in possession at the end of one week. The winner received a real MINI Countryman. The game featured 11,000 participants, particularly impressive in a smaller country like Sweden, and the average player spent over five hours playing the game.

MLC members, for more great mobile executions, check out our Mobile Showcase, or get up to date with the latest mobile trends from around the world.

To make marketing efforts more trusted, brands typically turn to consumer recommendations. That’s the right move, since a brand’s own information will never appear as objective as an outsider’s viewpoint. The problem is, consumer recommendations are often too vague to convince today’s anxious shoppers to buy.

Instead of targeting recommenders, brands should be targeting advisors: consumers who teach other shoppers when, why, and how to buy. While recommenders focus on features and benefits and only discuss positive points, advisors cover both pros and cons and also share information about the best usage occasions and retailers. This extra detail makes their suggestions far more persuasive and helpful. The chart below outlines the key differences between recommenders and advisors.

There are two challenges with harnessing consumer advisors:

1. How to find consumers who will make good advisors (not just good recommenders)
2. How to teach consumers to provide better advice

Intuit’s Quicken Software group has done some good work on both fronts. First, they have a thorough ambassador screening process that ensures selected consumers are both genuine brand lovers and also credible sources of information. MLC members, see their screening questions here.

Second, they don’t just do research to understand what kinds of advice shoppers’ need. They also interview advisors to understand barriers to advice-giving, e.g., it’s hard to bring up the topic of personal finance. Based on the findings from this research, they create a toolkit of educational materials and incentives that target ambassadors’ top concerns. MLC members, see their research and targeted ambassador toolkit here.

By Ben Berman

Environmentally-sound practices have become all the rage as of late. Organizations ranging from the US Air Force to Johnson and Johnson have made huge strides in sustainability and green marketing.  Powerful consumer preferences have propelled this focused shift; according to one study, environmental issues evoke a visceral response even among consumers who don’t fully understand what they mean! Producers, especially energy and utility companies, have taken note of customer preferences and adjusted their practices accordingly.

But the great rewards at the end of the “green behavior” rainbow have led some marketers to cut corners. Greenwashing has become a 21^st century reality. In response, customers are forming watchdog groups, exposing questionable claims, and creating PR/marketing nightmares for anyone found guilty of these transgressions.

A few years ago, we spoke with Scot Case of TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, who gave his take on how companies can best avoid the greenwashing stigma. He shared six greenwashing sins to avoid, and gave some advice to members on how to responsibly market their green credentials. For more, read the whole conversation, or listen to the webinar!

Here are Scot’s six greenwashing sins to avoid: Read More »

One of the most unsettling aspects of business purchase decisions is deciding whether or not you’re buying the right thing. Purchasers fret a lot less over whether they’ve bought the “best” over the “better” product than they do over whether they’ve eliminated “bad” product in favor of the “good”. Risk needs to be addressed, and addressed well.

Moreover, in any environment, risk left unspecified turns into uncertainty, which is still risky, but worse. When I go to Vegas and sit down at the roulette table, I know the chances that little ball lands on the colored pocket I select is only 1 in 38. When I go to bed at night and my neighbor upstairs drops one shoe, I wake up to the uncertainty of not knowing whether or when the other shoe will drop. The time I stay awake in anticipation is longer, thus more frustrating.

Many companies believe that emphasizing positive differentiators is the key to winning business. This is true but insufficient. We forget that for the most part success is simply the absence of failure, as opposed to of the celebration of pure technical genius. It is this less inspiring definition that requires marketers to be able to focus on risk as much as they do their value proposition. With the economic recovery in slow motion, you cannot afford to let your prospects and customers wake up to the realization that their supplier may or may not be there when issues arise with their purchases. Worse still is the tendency of many companies to get tongue tied when asked what the underbelly of their offering looks like.

Our survey data shows that not only do risk conversations matter, it matters how you convey that information to customers. In a set of scenario questions fielded this year, we asked real business customers to assess their willingness to pay for hypothetical products that differ only in terms of how their risky aspect is presented. Here’s what we learned: Read More »

By Claire Tassin

Small business owners are funny people, not quite consumers and certainly not full-fledged enterprises. They are particularly puzzling to marketers, as a traditional B2C or B2B strategy will miss the 26 million + small businesses in the U.S. alone. This is why MLC’s sister program, the Enterprise Council on Small Business, exclusively studies business owners and how large enterprise companies can best market to them.

With small business owners spanning most traditional demographic and firmographic profiles, it can be difficult to develop a B2SB marketing strategy with a broad reach. Yet, we know that established small businesses expect to be treated differently than consumers despite their small size. Specifically, consider three of ECSB’s best strategies to effectively target the small business market. Read More »

As consumers become more and more overloaded by the number of decisions they need to make, about 2/3 of shoppers are procrastinating on making a purchase decision until they are in the store.  In addition, many consumers are still holding on to their recessionary behaviors: 36% are buying the store brand more often than they did a year ago, and 56% are more likely to try new stores than they were five years ago.   With these struggles that are being faced by both CPGs and retail outlets, CPG-retail partnerships are becoming even more important than ever before. Read More »

Car doors, Skype calls, and ATMs – three things that make fake noises to reassure their human operators [Humans Invent]

The people interviewed in this survey must not have come from my social circle [ReadWriteWeb]

Are wineries telling white lies to consumers on alcohol content? [Felix Salmon]

Flash-sale sites – usually used to control inventory – may have an added benefit: brand awareness and repurchase [NYT]

Facebook users have a higher degree of social well-being [LA Times]

This “reverse Groupon” sounds a lot like a suggestion box to me [WSJ]

Smartphone functionality is expanding in Ford vehicles next year [Reuters]

Shopkick, a shopping rewards app that has partnered with major retail brands, is honing in on small business [Business Insider]

Cigarettes sold in the US are getting some interesting packaging [AdAge]

The latest craze in china: making pet dogs look like panda bears [CNN]

Last week, my colleague Shelly wrote a preview of this year’s B2B research, which we’ll present for the first time in Chicago later next week. She mentioned 4 purchase need profiles: Total Cost of Ownership Buyers,  Service Buyers, Risk Avoidance Buyers, and Innovation Buyers. It’s the last category, Innovation Buyers, that I want to discuss in some more detail today.

Innovation buyers make up 30% of B2B buyers. The key question they ask of suppliers is “How can you make me better?” They’re most likely to categorize purchases as “strategic” as opposed to “transactional”, feature larger-than-average buying groups, and are more likely to use RFPs to attract potential suppliers.

In the past, the sales force managed these buyers with deep conversations and solutions tailored to their innovation needs. But since our research indicates that customers are delaying contact with Sales departments until they’re 57% finished with the purchasing process, we’re finding that those Sales conversations don’t happen early enough in the process to actually make a difference on the ultimate decision. Marketing needs to step into the “middle funnel” to speak to innovation buyers – but how can it be done in a scalable way? We’ve found that part of the key to engaging innovation customers is to articulate unique, valuable supplier perspectives.

This year’s research process unearthed a great best practice from Danisco, a food ingredients company based in Denmark, whose marketing team is getting the “valuable supplier perspective” thing right. Want to learn more? We’ll unpack that concept in great detail at this year’s executive retreat! But, in the meantime, we can leave you with three concrete steps to increase your mind and wallet share among innovation buyers: Read More »

Retailers face a unique set of challenges in the B2C world, so it’s not a surprise that the MLC case studies and resources our retail members use most often are slightly different than the rest of the membership.

Here are the top 5 cases, as accessed by our retail members so far this year:

In-Store Segment Diagnostic Protocols (La-Z-Boy) La-Z-Boy’s simple in-store segmentation scheme is explained in detail, including how floor reps use two simple, easy-to-remember questions to give consumers an optimized shopping experience.

Annual Customer Plan (Tesco) How Tesco, the world’s third-largest retailer, embedded customer focus in the highest levels of the organization.

Investment Screening Protocols (Victoria’s Secret) Organizations are often tempted by the allure of pursuing ideas that align with customer demands, but are nonetheless off strategy or damaging to the brand. Here’s a method for rigorously screening investments and new concepts, using a highly detailed understanding of its brand attributes and a short, clearly articulated set of corporate priorities.

Executive Immersion Sessions (Payless ShoeSource) Too often, traditional customer focus initiatives fail to deliver results. Payless ShoeSource overcomes this by crafting a series of structured events to immerse senior executives in the customer experience and force them to assess performance from the customer’s perspective.

Collaborative Experiment Protocols (Food Lion) A collaborative approach to insight-driven experimentation allows Food Lion’s marketers to gain cross-functional buy-in early on in the process.