Marketing’s a busy field, and sometimes its hard to pull up and think about what can be done to make our lives easier and our work more effective. Here are a few plays we’ve seen your peers call to take advantage of missed opportunities: Read More »

What makes brands vital, and what makes consumers associate particular brands with innovation?

This question recently struck me as I read Roobini Aruleswaran’s great piece about Bose. She really captures what makes Bose a great brand in her first few paragraphs, as she retells her first encounter with their audio products, but her deep look into the company’s drivers of innovation is worth a peek. To summarize, she isolates a few key things about Bose that drives innovation and consumer-to-brand connections: R&D overdrive, maverick ideas, an understanding of consumers’ unspoken motivation, advertising lifestyle rather than product, and simplicity.

Now, marketers don’t have a ton of control over R&D (although that’s changing in some companies). But we do have control over a lot of the rest, and it’s worth looking at how some of the brands we’ve profiled have driven the other factors that add up to innovative, consumer-resonant brands: Read More »

Hand in hand with commercial teaching/insight marketing approaches – something we at MLC understand to be the most effective method to break buyer assumptions and make complex sales – comes something else: namely, having smart things to teach customers in the first place.

This is, unsurprisingly, a lot easier said than done. The core of the commercial teaching approach is the notion that, in order to change customer assumptions, reps have to teach the customer something they don’t know or don’t realize about their own business. In situations where the buyer is a grizzled veteran of an industry – and the salesperson, maybe not so much – the burden of proof is awfully high, and Marketing needs to put serious effort into generating the kinds of insights needed to clear the bar.

That’s why we created the Thought Leadership Playbook, designed to give B2B marketers instant visibility into the ways the best companies are creating insight and transmitting it to customers, reframing their own offerings in the process. In our studies of thought leader B2B companies, we’ve noticed that successful thought leadership efforts have a few things in common: Read More »

As a whole, B2B marketing is becoming more strategic, as companies’ offerings, as well as buying processes, get more complex. B2B marketers, accordingly, have spent a ton of time tackling things like messaging, competitive differentiation, thought leadership and performance measurement. But, at the end of the day, most sales still depend on a successful interaction between customer and rep, and marketing still has an enormous role to play in driving message resonance inside customer organizations.

And, still, one of the best ways to do exactly that is by developing great collateral that speaks to customer needs and enables a successful sale. MLC created a Sales Collateral Showcase (PDF), full of some of the best B2B collateral we’ve spotted, as well as a Sales Collateral Scorecard (Excel file), designed to help members evaluate their existing sales collateral and identify areas where it could be improved to drive greater resonance with customers. But it’s worth examining: what are the principles behind great pieces of collateral?

Simply put – great sales collateral accomplishes three things: Read More »

First off, I should be completely honest: this post is a shameless plug for the fact that we’ve got a long piece in this month’s Harvard Business Review on last year’s research into decision simplicity. If you’re a new member, or have forgotten, here’s the gist of what we found: in an atmosphere where consumers are bombarded with thousands of messages a day, the brands that simplify their consumers’ lives – rather than burden them further with more offers and messages – are the ones that will win in the new consumer environment. Read More »

Amazon.com, the e-commerce behemoth, has been around for awhile now – 18 years, in fact, making it positively ancient in the world of technology. Retailers especially have understood the threat Amazon’s model poses to their businesses for probably just as long, but only recently are we beginning to see signs that the marketplace is fully tilting in Amazon’s favor. Witness:

• Borders’ decision to close its doors for good last summer (granted, the company had some extenuating management issues, but Amazon certainly helped speed the chain’s demise)
• Tesco, the UK grocery chain, has decided to launch an Amazon competitor amid stagnant sales
• Best Buy’s decision – announced just this week – that it will close 50 underperforming stores around the country (Best Buy, unlike Borders, is a genuinely well-managed company with a particularly strong CMO)
• The US Justice Department’s decision to go after a consortium of Apple and five publishing companies for alleged anti-competitive activities those companies undertook to protect their market share from Amazon Read More »

If you’re a marketer – particularly in the B2C space – you’ve heard endless references to Big Data over the last year or so. It’s a tremendously exciting space for marketers – offering brands the potential to get closer to customers, hug demand curves more tightly, and identify new and emerging consumer segments. Opportunities and costs are converging in a way that will soon make it easier for relatively novice analysts to produce useful insight from large data sets.

Big Data helps form the backdrop of this year’s major study for B2C companies, “Evolving With Consumer Expectations“. Marketers’ opportunities to create value are increasing – between Big Data and social and mobile and the constant stream of other new channels – and as a result, folks are finding it hard to keep their teams focused on opportunities that drive profitability. As Big Data gets easier, other things – like keeping your team’s eye on the prize – get harder.

Anyway, you can learn more about how to tackle the dizzying array of possibilities by registering for the meeting. In the meantime, we’re aiming to put together a resource for members just getting started in the data and analytics space, including a Quick Start Guide, profiles of notable vendors in the space, typical analytics job descriptions, and a glossary of commonly-heard Big Data terminology.

The glossary is where we need your help. We have a decent list of terms to start with, but we’re interested in knowing: what words are you hearing that you think should be included in a glossary for Big Data newbies? Please take a few seconds to let us know what you think.

The resource should be launched in the first few weeks of May, and we’ll include the best member contributions in our soon-to-be-launched resource center. Thanks for your help!

Many marketers fail to meaningfully differentiate their customer experience strategy from that of their competitors. So how can you blame customers that who don’t perceive much of a difference between you and your competitors, and instead make their decisions on price? MLC’s study, “Delivering a Preferred Customer Experience”, outlined just how customer experience investments pay off for B2B suppliers – namely, a great customer experience scrambles the competitive set, and makes it very difficult for buyers to compare suppliers on price alone.

So, given that the customer experience is probably the best non-price investment B2B suppliers can make, what’s stopping them? Well, it’s a difficult thing to do, involving a lot of soul-searching, walks on the beach alone at dawn, that kind of thing. But seriously, here are three things you have to take care of before you can offer a world-class customer experience: Read More »

We’ve written a bit in recent months about how brands will survive in an era that’s decidedly unfriendly towards top-down institutions of any kind. At SxSW, the theme of many marketing events was one of humility – the notion that brands and marketers shouldn’t overly path the consumer journey and allow a more organic, flexible brand definition. But the implicit question here is, if marketers aren’t pathing the way that consumers interact with brands, what is? And what can we do about it?

I was reminded of this central conundrum when I read a recent piece on GigaOm about the evolution of the modern workplace. The article summarizes a blog post by Dachis Group’s Dave Gray, repositioning managers as urban planners. It seems that, just as brands have begun to realize that their efforts to meticulously design a perfect customer experience aren’t working, managers are beginning to realize that the organizations they lead are not machines but organic cities of talent that should be allowed to flow freely, rather than report up to rigid hierarchies and goals. According to Gray: Read More »

It’s the never-ending question from Finance and the C-Suite: prove your ROI! Measurement, and ROI determination specifically, is something inherently hard to do in marketing. But as more organizations come under budgetary pressure and Marketing becomes more important to other corporate functions, expect measurement to only become more important in the coming years.

In our newly-launched Marketer’s Playbook, we profiled three key things marketing organizations must get right in order to tackle measurement in a rigorous way. Here’s what we think:

Align marketing goals with corporate goals. You’ll learn how to ensure that marketing’s investments support corporate-level (not marketing-level) goals. By linking marketing activities and metrics back to corporate priorities, you increase Marketing’s credibility and give yourself a better platform to showcase your contribution to business performance. Our case studies from some of the world’s most advanced Marketing departments will show you how to collect cross-functional input on marketing metrics, give you tips for securing broad executive buy-in on marketing metrics, and how MLC can help you get input on activities and goals.

Select the right metrics. Once you’ve selected your goals, you’ll need to figure out how to measure them. Easier said than done, right? We’ll show you how to select a small set of meaningful metrics to track marketing performance, ensuring that you don’t invest resources tracking things not aligned to corporate goals. You’ll learn how to narrow down a list of meaningful metrics from the universe of potential ones and get tips for identifying redundant metrics. We’ll also show you how to use MLC tools to build a brand experience storyboard.

Design actionable marketing dashboards. So you’ve selected your goals and your metrics; how do you report progress? We’ll show you how to design user-friendly marketing dashboards that encourage stakeholders to incorporate marketing metrics into the decision-making process. You’ll learn how proper organization and aesthetics drive usage of marketing dashboards, how to design dashboards that are easy to use and act on, and how to design scorecards to communicate metrics effectively.

MLC members, please check out the “Performance Measurement” section of our brand-new Marketer’s Playbook for more.