“Uh, ‘Tiger-Goat’ isn’t what your modern day brand consultants would come up with for a tea brand.  What’s the story?”  So began my recent conversation with Yogesh Shinde, the General Manager in charge of Marketing for Gujarat Tea.   Yogesh explained the origin of the name roughly as follows:

Over 100 years ago, the founder of Wagh Bakri wanted to create a tea that would unite all Indians.  ‘Wagh’ means ‘Tiger’, standing for Indian upper classes.  ‘Bakri’ means ‘Goat’, and represents the lower classes.  The idea is to bring the Tiger and Goat together over tea, an important and shared ritual. Read More »

This weekend, most of our readers will celebrate Halloween – a celebration of the macabre and scary in life. In honor of that, we’re posting some of marketers’ biggest fears. Here are five we came up with, along with ways to fight back. What else are you scared about? Let us know in comments. Read More »

Most marketers feel stressed when it comes to consumer marketing these days. They know that today’s cynical consumers trust each other more than they trust brands.  And they know that trust boosts chances of purchase.

However, some marketers underweight two key elements of trust: Read More »

Business decisions didn’t used to be numbers-based, but now the pendulum is swinging to “In God we trust, all others bring data”, for good reason.  One of the best analogies I’ve heard is that a company built on analytics is like an animal while a company with no analytics is like a plant. Analytics enables the former to respond dynamically to opportunities and dangers while the latter can only sit and wait hoping that nothing bad happens. Back when everyone is a plant (i.e. not analytical), you’re probably fine being the neighboring tuft, but the day one of them turns into a cow (i.e. becomes analytical), well, good luck.

This evolution is to a great extent accelerated by the proliferation of consumer data and the many good things you can get out of it. While you can certainly observe customers in store (people still do), it is infinitely more scalable to use web mining to “observe” thousands perusing the net, estimate what stage they are at in their purchase process and tailor your messages accordingly. Few would have heard of Signet Banking Corp but many are familiar with its spin-off Capital One, the 8^th largest bank in the country – and one that was built to a great extent on the strength of analytics.

But just like anything with massive impact, analytics can also go massively wrong and the failure very often has less to do with the tool itself than with the one wielding it. The only thing worse than no data is bad data, and the only thing worse than bad data is bad interpretations. Here’s how you go down that slippery slope and how you can climb back up: Read More »

Our second annual Sales and Marketing Summit, “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision,” wrapped up in Las Vegas on this past Wednesday.  Over the three-day event, I had the privilege to be a part of many fantastic presentations, events, and member conversations, all focused on arming Marketing and Sales professionals with the ideas, strategies, and tools to deal with the newly empowered B2B customer.

One presentation, in particular, offered a very unique perspective on the purchase process – our colleagues at the Procurement Strategy Council (PSC) offered us a peek behind the curtain at how procurement professionals view the world today.  I have to admit, it felt a bit like I had snuck behind enemy lines.  After all, it’s fair to say that many in B2B Marketing and Sales (including most of those in the room with me in Las Vegas) think of Procurement as price-haggling, value-killing, nickel-and-dimers.  And that’s what we say when we are being nice. Read More »

On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of moderating a great panel conversation on the use of social media in B2B sales and marketing.  The panelists included Anne Plese from Cisco, Tom Vaughn from Microsoft, and Ari Newman from Jive Software.

The discussion was all in keeping with MLC’s B2B research this year, Influencing the Newly Empowered Customer, in which we suggest marketers need to build conversation muscle in the mid-funnel, as customers engage sales forces later and later in the purchase cycle.

Huge thanks to Anne, Tom and Ari for sharing their wisdom.  And so much of it!  There were too many nuggets to share them all here, so I’ll include some of the ones that stuck out for me: Read More »

“Oil companies need holes, not drills” - Old Sales & Marketing Saying

This post was written by former colleague Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council. Visit the original here.

The utilities business faces a looming crisis—if not today, then in the decade or two to come. Simply put, the industry’s current business model is set up such that smarter use of its product threatens its profits, and this tension between supplier and customer can’t go on forever.

But utilities companies need not view this as a threat. On the contrary, leading utilities are already capitalizing on one of the biggest megatrends in Sales today: the need to make more money by selling less stuff.

The root of utilities’ problem is this: their ability to grow depends on selling more kilowatt-hours each year, but consumers and society have an urgent need to use less—and are waking up to the fact that they actually can. Peter Fox-Penner writes in the Harvard Business Review (July-August 2009): Read More »

Earlier this year Wells Fargo announced its new presence in Manhattan through a ‘flash mob’, recorded for posterity on YouTube:

Read More »

With social media an increasing part of budgets and mindshare in most marketing organizations, we thought we’d do a quick run-down of some of the biggest ways corporate social media efforts fail. What do you think? Let us know in comments below: Read More »

Improved technology, policy intervention, and the recession have led to broad structural changes in a number of industries we write about on Wide Angle, but probably none so much as healthcare. In the past few years, we’ve seen a major health reform effort in the US that will bring millions of new patients into the system, growing consensus around a reformation of the patent system abroad, and technological shifts that may soon allow for a very rapid scaling in diagnosis and other medical services.

So, how should marketers expect their jobs to change? We came up with a few ways; let us know more in comments! Read More »