We’re well into this year’s research into marketing’s use of Big Data, and we’re starting to learn a lot about what marketers expect from the technology and how consumers might react. It’s clear there’s a ton of promise here, but there’s also significant reason to watch out for the hype.

If your’e interested in Big Data’s potential for Marketing, please join us for a webinar in a few weeks, featuring experts from Intel, Hearst, and Maersk Line.

In the meantime, here are a few reasons we’ve spotted to question the potential of Big Data in B2C Marketing, with the caveat that we’re purposefully not covering the positive here: Read More »

Lately it seems that every other marketer we speak with wants to know about marketing in emerging markets. Perhaps this isn’t too surprising as growth in developed markets has effectively come to a halt and by some accounts emerging economies are expected to account for 59% of global GDP by 2030. (Likely one more instance of a long-run trend being brought to a tipping point by the disruptions of the past three years.)

As we speak with marketers moving into emerging markets, many cite considerations such as how to organize staff to support these consumer markets or how to manage the trade-offs of having staff in disparate locations. In simple economics terms: how should they manage the “supply- side” factors”?

While examining the supply-side is important, an equally productive, but often under-usedtactic, involves analyzing “demand-side” factors—namely, what will drive customers in an emerging market to buy your product(s). Regular readers of our blogs will know that our latest research reveals that the drivers of customers’ purchase decisions are changing significantly in both B2B and B2C sectors (for those unfamiliar with this work, our B2B analysis of customer behavior here, and our B2C analysis on simplifying purchase decision here).

But, what do these findings mean for emerging markets? Read More »

By Claire Tassin

It seems clear that, for a variety of reasons, energy and resource constraints will continue to be key concerns for small business owners for the foreseeable future. Those constraints take a few forms – sometimes they’re around environmental concerns, other times they’re around cost. But what language should you speak to business owners concerned about energy costs?

We know that green marketing can be effective in the B2C world, but how influential are environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility on small businesses’ purchase behavior? This year, the Enterprise Council on Small Business tested the impact of a myriad of factors on small business owners. As it turns out, value alignment – such as on green – has only moderate influence on owners.

Source: ECSB Research, July 2011, n=1099 N.A.

So, if green marketing isn’t an effective way to reach small businesses, what is? ECSB recommends positioning how members’ products and services can alleviate business owners’ pain points. In a recent study, ECSB asked owners what their biggest pain points are in all areas of managing their businesses. In the area of building and office administration, the cost of utilities ranked highest – despite the majority of owners not anticipating price increases for 2012.

At the end of the day, messaging how your products and services can positively impact the bottom line is likely to be more effective than green marketing per se in targeting small businesses. So, rather than focusing on going green, show business owners how your company can help them save some green.

How would you feel if you were served a dish which you never ordered, instead of the one that you really wanted? I can imagine feelings of shock and disappointment. Switch gears to marketing. Many B2B customers today find themselves unpleasantly surprised, when companies design offerings for them that they never asked for. Customers complain that companies claim to design products “just like they wanted”, except that they never wanted it!

Which brings up the question – how can B2B companies get better at customer understanding and at serving their customers? We’ve gathered some of MLC’s research over time to help marketers identify what their customers want. The following will help marketers gain an insight into their customers’ mind: Read More »

By Ana Lapter

People are an organization’s greatest asset.  No process, vision or tool can compensate for the lack of an adequate marketing talent pool when elaborating or executing a strategic marketing initiative.   Having the right mix of capabilities and skills dishes up the key ingredient for any successful Marketing recipe.

Obviously, this is easier said than done.  To solve this challenge, a lot of marketers with whom I have spoken recently professed to employing previous talent planning experiences as a proxy for building a roadmap of future capabilities.  The major problem with this approach is that it assumes that the marketing organizations operate in relatively similar consumer, technology, business, regulatory and economic environments as in the past.

How can a Marketing organization design the right capability model that acknowledges radical change and forward looking planning? Read More »

The most dangerous assumption in relationship marketing:

Most consumers are open to entering a relationship with my brand.

They aren’t.

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that, at most, somewhere between 20% and 30% of consumers are willing to engage in a “relationship” with a brand.   The vast majority of consumers simply aren’t wired to enter into brand relationships.

When we asked 7,000 consumers via a global survey earlier this year whether they have a relationship with any brands, only 23% said yes.  The rest said “no”, and when we gave them an opportunity to elaborate on their response in a free-text field, we got lots of comments like “It’s just a brand, not a member of my family.” Read More »

One of marketers’ top priorities next year is digital integration, or – more specifically – adapting to the increasingly central role of digital in the marketing mix.  In a recent MLC poll, B2C marketers rated this their second highest priority.

Despite several years of slowly shifting mindsets, Digital Marketing is too often still treated as its own stand-alone function, separate from Promotions, PR, Direct Marketing etc.  It should, by contrast, be treated as a part of all marcomm efforts.  Here are a few reasons why: Read More »

This summer, we asked the marketing community to nominate some of the best B2B campaigns of the previous year for our 2011 B2B Marcomm Awards. And now, the results are in – and we’ve created a members-only resource that looks at what makes all of the finalist campaigns tick.

Every year, we notice that the best campaigns seem to revolve around a few principles that tell us a lot about where B2B marketing is heading. Here are a few we uncovered this year: Read More »

Go ahead, curse me for getting the song stuck in your head. But there’s something important here that I think many marketers don’t realize or understand, and that’s that social media marketing may in fact be weakening your branding initiatives.

Typically, we hear the refrain that channel proliferation and the more information-dense lives of consumers offers companies an opportunity to reinforce – not dilute – their brands. Consumers spend greater chunks of their life connected to various information platforms and, at least so the story goes, this offers brands three things: more screen real estate to do branding, better data about which consumers to target with which branding initiatives, and more “dense”, interactive ways to experience the brand.

So, what could go wrong? One clue comes from a recent paper by Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca, who examined the effect that Yelp has on the restaurant market in Washington State. First, the good news: he found that a one-star bump in a restaurant’s Yelp rating led to a significant rise in revenue (between 5-9%). The bad news: he found that that effect did not apply to chain restaurants, and that as Yelp usage has proliferated, the market share for chain restaurants has declined.

What’s driving this? My theory is that the informational power of a strong brand is declining. Look at these two signs: Read More »

When I was young, my parents always told me, “Don’t speak unless you can improve silence.”  That can be quite the challenge, and to this day, I’m still not sure all my words are better said than unsaid.  But when speaking meant possibly worsening the silence, I knew to keep my mouth shut.  This rule-of-thumb always comes to mind when I’m giving word-of-mouth recommendations.

As many marketers know, word of mouth is one of the most powerful consumer marketing tools, and smart marketers are learning to harness, amplify, and improve upon this medium.  Typical approaches to boosting word of mouth focus on identifying and engaging the brand’s biggest fans (or – one better – the brand’s most networked and credible fans).   To engage these fans, brands often offer discounts, exclusive information, or even live visits to the brand’s HQ etc.  The aim of all these efforts is to motivate fans to speak – and they’re often successful.

However, two things are often missing: Read More »