LVMH sees no slowdown in luxury goods, despite worsening economic conditions [Bloomberg]

And, given the stagnant economy, who’s driving US e-commerce? Overseas buyers [eMarketer]

Sharpie: the new tool for teenage self-expression? [NYT]

Google debuted a new layout for search this week [digital inspiration]

New software from Cornell University can spot fake online reviews [CNet]

Chinese news agency Xinhua is making a big step into America: a sign in Times Square [NYT]

Facebook is rolling out a toolkit for small businesses [GigaOM]

How much of consumer electronics consumption is linked to kids? More than (maybe) you think [MarketingDaily]

New service allows consumers to sell unused social coupons [KTSM]

In the last month or so, there have been two high-profile (and close to my heart) price hikes in American business: first, Chipotle announced that it would raise prices across its menu, in response to food cost pressures. Then, a few weeks ago, Netflix announced that it too would raise prices by splitting off its streaming video offering from the DVD-by-mail model.

I decided to take a look at these two price increases, to figure out why there was such a vehement reaction to one, but not the other. Read More »

Making the right financial decisions has always been tough – there’s a lot at stake, and things are often somewhat hard to understand. While the wealth of information on the internet and social media have allowed consumers to feel more educated about their decisions, it can often confuse the same consumers it is trying to help. Because of this, it is more important than ever to provide decision simplicity for financial services consumers.

One banking brand that has excelled at providing decision simplicity is Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), who designed a product suggestion platform that help consumers weigh their options.  Read More »

Customer Loyalty

More consumers are switching brands than ever before.  54% of consumers globally say they are more likely to try new brands than they were 5 years ago and 30-40% engage in recessionary behaviors (e.g., searching for deals, using coupons) even more than they did during the recession.  These behaviors are being enabled by new technologies—such as mobile search, social buying, and price comparison apps—that give consumers easier access to choice and information.

To keep consumers’ attention despite all these distractions, many brands seek to boost brand engagement. They aim to stay top of mind by building “personal” relationships with consumers via Facebook or interacting more frequently with them via email newsletters or mobile alerts, for example.

However, MLC’s 2011 study for B2C brands, including a survey of 7,000+ consumers (in the U.S., U.K., and A.P.A.C) found that engagement isn’t the best way to win shoppers over.  In fact, in many cases engagement efforts don’t help at all.  Frequency of interactions (i.e., email newsletters, mobile alerts) has no significant impact on loyalty (i.e., intent to purchase, purchase, repurchase, recommendation).  Strength of relationship with a brand does improve loyalty, but few consumers (typically, just 1 in 5) are open to brand ‘relationships’. Read More »

Marketers and technology have a long and tortured relationship filled with both good times and bad.  It seems every few years (or sometimes months) there is a new tech-based trend that has big implications for how Marketing interfaces with consumers and customers (websites, social media, mobile) and how it manages its pipeline (Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems – first in software form, now “in the cloud”).

The latest tech trend that is generating a lot of buzz among marketers is “marketing automation.”  For the uninitiated, in the B2B world, marketing automation is the umbrella name given to the software and other technology tools that allow marketers to systematize and mechanize tasks like lead generation, lead nurturing, and lead qualification.  It can be as simple as automatically sending out a segment-focused monthly newsletter to a list of prospects and current customers and as sophisticated as an algorithmic model that segments, targets, and scores potential leads based on a combination of tracked web behaviors and information collected through web-forms. Read More »

By Ana Lapter

Businesses are once again in the mood to grow revenues.  Unlike the pre-recession era, the source of growth, however, will no longer come from streamlining and automating processes, or from adopting systems for better management of structured data.  Since the majority of businesses have been improving processes and data management for some time, there aren’t too many gains to be had there.  Rather, the next era of growth will likely come from from understanding changing customer preferences and acting quickly on those insights. In other words, your company needs to get smarter about using information, as compared to processes, to more effectively drive customer insight and quickly translate that knowledge into usable plans and strategies.

It’s not that organizations don’t have this data; you do. But the problem is how to effectively use all the information that companies gather about consumer markets and customer preferences. Over the past few weeks, I heard the words “analytics” and “customer insight” in separate conversations with eight senior marketers, while discussing the key analytic competencies that their teams need to strengthen or develop to move forward.

Here is my list of things to avoid when building an analytics-driven Marketing organization: Read More »

Last week, The Economist ran a thought provoking piece on the future of news.  As I read it, I was struck by the parallels to some consumer goods and services categories, like apparel, quick service restaurants, electronics and even some kinds of fast moving consumer goods.

If you believe that what is happening to the news industry may be playing out in these other industries, marketers should be fundamentally reconsidering the role of brands and therefore the way they do branding.

To boil down the Economist’s 14 page report on the news industry into six bullets: Read More »

What keeps Facebook and Twitter going? Trust, mostly [Fast Company]

Ever notice how “Christmas” comes earlier every year? It’s happening to back-to-school, too [NYT]

Wondering how popular Google+ is? It’s the top free app on Apple’s app store [TechCrunch]

Latin Americans are among the most advanced mobile web users [Clickz]

American Express is getting into the social couponing game [NPR]

Web marketers, your thoughts: when you provide third-party sales, who’s responsible when deals go bad? [Internet Retailer]

Mostly aimed at small businesses, but here’s a good summary of four losing Groupon strategies [OPEN Forum]

Costco is expanding in Australia – Aussies, this is one of the best things America could possibly give you. Enjoy! [Herald Sun]

Some disturbing news on the retail front: 23% of goods sold in 2010 were sold at discount [Reuters]

Why the market for marketing analysts is so tight [ReadWriteWeb]

Qwest's Marketing Strategy

B2B marketing and sales organizations often get lots of referral requests from prospective customers – after all, when you’re about to spend serious budget on a solution, you’ll want at least some third-party hint that the solution will work. But the volume of these referral requests presents a problem for marketers: for sales staff, arranging for referrals is a huge drain on time and productivity, and for your customers, responding to referrals creates the risk of burnout.

But Qwest managed to scale these one-off reference requests into something greater – a customer testimonial video database. The database they created allows reps to search for testimonials by categories like industry and role, and the ease with which Sales and Marketing can access these testimonials has allowed the voice of the satisfied consumer to permeate all steps of the sales and marketing process.

A few months ago, we talked with Qwest’s Tom Robson, manager of the company’s Enterprise Retention & Loyalty and VOC Marketing teams, about how the company set up its database and the ways that they’re using testimonials to drive revenues. MLC members – check out the interview!

The announcement that Borders, America’s second-biggest bookstore chain, would close its remaining stores hit the retail and tech worlds hard this week. While the company’s demise was long-expected – a series of what can only be described as management blunders left the chain in a weak position to compete with online and brick-and-mortar rivals – there was still a fair bit of nostalgia about the closing, and smart analysis as to what this means to the retail and information industries.

To me, what’s notable about Borders closing is that its another loss for the forces of “good” against the forces of “good enough”. Contrary to what a lot of people think, the essence of disruptive innovation isn’t necessarily whiz-bang technology. Rather, its about providing a product or service at a radically lower cost, without a serious – as defined by the preferences of the buying public – concomitant decline in quality. In practice, this means the creation of “good enough” products and experiences that provide a radically different value proposition to the consumer. Read More »