Wide Angle

“The single biggest reason companies fail is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.”

–Gary Hamel, Author and Professor, London Business School

Professor Hamel puts his finger on one of the most important undercurrents facing marketing leaders in large enterprises today.  As products, channels, and geographic markets proliferate, marketers will overweight to the familiar (that which “is” today), and fail to account for the size of future opportunity (that which “might be”).  Why?

They certainly won’t do so intentionally.  Rather, the sheer complexity of resource allocation decisions across geographies, products and channels will lead many marketers to settle for incremental changes to last year’s budget allocation.  In the face of overwhelming complexity, this will feel like the safe, smart choice. Read More »

(Note: This is Part 3 of our 6-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Part 2, “Selecting Metrics“, can be found here.  Check back here every Wednesday in August and September for a new installment!)

Early results from the Council’s ongoing marketing budget and spend survey suggest that Marketers are (understandably) cautious as they look ahead to 2011.  With the cooldown in businesses re-stocking their inventories and consumers continuing to keep pursestrings drawn tight, budgets appear to be flat to marginally up. Read More »

Chunky aloe vera cooler, anyone? According to a recent Reuters article, Coca-Cola is trying “drink texture” innovation along these lines, in hopes of finding the next billion-dollar brand.  In another development, earlier this summer, P&G launched its eStore, enabling it to sell everything from Fusion razors to Regenerist micro-sculpting cream (whatever that is…bet it could double as a dessert topping).

Seemingly unrelated developments—but if you look closer, there’s an interesting link in these two anecdotes that reveals an opportunity for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to think differently about innovation.  That is, the rise of digital and social media should enable CPGs to relax some important constraints on their innovation strategies—namely, the tyranny of fixed shelf space in retail stores.

That’s where the P&G anecdote comes in.  What if you relaxed that shelf space constraint, along the lines of what P&G is doing with its eStore? If you do that, you have to worry less about giving up some of the shelf space of tried-and-true, mass appeal, high earnings products in return for stocking untried, new products that may not deliver the same earnings per-square-foot.  That’s because with a virtual storefront, warehouse space for stocking physical product is cheap and plentiful.  This opens up the opportunity for brands to increase the mix of ideas in their innovation portfolios that are of a more niche profile, because they can stock the product without the fixed shelf space constraint. Read More »

Here’s a common thread that I’ve picked up from conversations recently with CMOs and some research we’ve done into innovation.  There’s an interesting connection between what some call “polycentric innovation”, what I’ll call innovation “crucibles”, and marketing talent development.

Starting with polycentric innovation, in a recent special report on innovation in emerging markets, The Economist described how companies like Cisco and IBM are building innovation centers in emerging markets.  These aren’t just laboratory outposts—these are major innovation centers on par with those in developed markets. These emerging market innovation centers act as a sort of crucible—an intensely pressured, constrained environment that accelerates innovation, and potentially leads to discontinuous solutions that you simply wouldn’t get in other contexts. Read More »

With the World Cup winding down, which brand sponsors will have done the best? And what will have been the key to their success? 

There’s no shortage of sensational reporting on the sponsors.  For example, there’s an interesting report here on the buzz between Nike and Adidas (the official sponsor). Observation: the PR success for Adidas from the Jabulani ball has, like the flight of the ball, been erratic and unpredictable, but probably a net positive for Adidas. 

Meanwhile, other sponsors fled like rats off a sinking ship to get away from the implosion of the French national team.  Sacre (les) Bleus!

Non-sponsor brands also saw their share of action. In a provocative tale of ambush marketing, 36 female Dutch fans were detained for wearing orange miniskirts, evidently a clear symbol of Bavaria beer (NOT an official sponsor, by the way).

But beyond all the buzz and antics, what characterizes great, enduring world cup sponsorship marketing? Read More »

“I’m particularly intrigued by the competitive differentiation that needs be thought through—strategically—before you can start to think about ‘What am I doing on Twitter?’”

–Jennifer Lavelli, Group Executive, Worldwide Marketing, MasterCard

At MLC’s recent executive retreat in New York, Jennifer Lavelli put her finger on one of the key traits distinguishing social media exemplars (the 10% of large enterprises that are seeing real business results from their social efforts).  These exemplars are focusing their efforts on areas that could change the competitive dynamics in their category. By the way, “changing competitive dynamics” is not taking a category by storm with a viral hit.  Those results, while good, are fleeting.  By competitive dynamics, we’re talking Porter’s 5 Forces here.

And this goes well beyond the typical advice offered by social media pundits.  They will tell you to think through the business objective first, before determining which social media to engage with or build.  That’s not bad advice—its just that it isn’t enough. Read More »

Did you know that social media exemplars (the roughly 10% of brands driving significant business results via social media) aren’t spending all that much more on their social efforts compared to non-exemplars (brands not seeing business results)?* 

Turns out, it matters much more where you point your social efforts than how much financial and people resources you put behind those efforts. Read More »

When it comes to loyalty program enhancement, most marketers are squeezing basis points of response out of email marketing or are micro-tweaking status tiers and reward levels.  Of late, however, we’re noticing a handful of brands pursing discontinuous innovation, which seems to fall into one of three categories: Read More »

We’ve now gathered information from over 250 companies on their social efforts via MLC’s Social Media Maturity Diagnostic.  While 90% of the participating companies are not seeing significant business results for their social efforts, a few social media exemplars are seeing big returns.

One of the ways exemplars are driving results is by using social to embed the brand into customer routines—the recurring “jobs” we do in our personal and professional lives.  These brands are using social to aid the customer across a whole range of sub-tasks that go into completing a routine. Here are a few examples: Read More »

Marketers are awash in data.  Digital, social and (increasingly) mobile marketing are spinning off data streams faster than we can humanly manage.  Analysis-paralysis ensues, and for some of us, data drowning shortly thereafter.

Few marketing organizations today have the analytical chops and creativity to squeeze gamebreaking insight from these increasingly rich data streams (see this prior post on coping with information richness).   Most marketing leaders will settle for a life preserver—they’ll outsource analytics to vendors or shunt it off to an analytics team buried inside of market research.

By contrast, sage marketing leaders will build surfboards to ride the data waves.  How? Read More »