Last month, Corey blogged about a surprising result from MLC’s  social media opportunity survey—that relying on social media vendors to craft your social media strategy actively harms your ability to drive business results with social media.

Here’s another interesting finding from the social media survey—there is zero correlation between social media resourcing and business results.

That may or may not surprise you when it comes to financial resources.  But the result held true for people resources, as well.  That came as a surprise to us, since social media efforts are often so labor intensive.

How could this be? Read More »

What if genetic factors counted for more than quality of marketing efforts in driving consumer engagement and loyalty?

From all of our conversations with marketers over the years, I think it’s safe to say that most marketers behave as if it’s 90% nurture and 10% nature.  In other words, most marketers believe that, if only their marketing were good enough, they could get most consumers to engage with the brand and be loyal.

I believe there’s a case to be made that genetics accounts for far more of consumer behavior than marketers appreciate.  I’d guess it’s more like 50/50 nature vs. nurture.  And if that is true, it ought to dramatically change who we market to and how we market to them.

So let me share some of what I’m seeing by way of evidence, and I’d love to get your reaction via comments below.  The evidence is by no means conclusive, but it is certainly provocative.

I’ll start with some fascinating empirical work that David Lykken and Auke Tellegen conducted back in the 1990s.  The study is called Happiness is a Stochastic Phenomenon (catchy, eh?).  The authors looked at pairs of identical twins (who by definition share the same genetic makeup) to understand how much of happiness is driven by nature vs. nurture. 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 »

Each year, MLC surveys our members about their top challenges looking ahead.  As we read the tea leaves in the survey results, here are our thoughts on what’s creeping into (or storming) the B2B marketing consciousness for 2012. Read More »

“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 »

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 »

Wouldn’t you love to know how Microsoft, Cisco and National Instruments demonstrate the value of their social media efforts in a B2B environment?

That’s just one of the questions an expert panel will address at next week’s Sales and Marketing conference, hosted by CEB in Las Vegas.  The panelists will include:

• Anne Plese, who works in line marketing with Cisco Systems and has extensive experience integrating social media into the marketing mix.
• Tom Vaughn, who heads up social media within Microsoft’s central marketing group.  Tom has been building social media infrastructure and best practice within Microsoft for the past year or so.
• Deirdre Walsh, now at Jive Software, but formerly with National Instruments, where she played ringmaster for social media efforts across the NI enterprise.

As the panel moderator, I’ll also ask them to share their advice for B2B organizations that are just starting on their social media journey.  As well, we’ll learn how they think about integrating social media into other marketing and commercial activities—they all believe this is a critical part of creating real business value with social media in a B2B context.

If you have other questions you’d like to hear the panel address, let us know by commenting below.

If you’ll be in Vegas with us next week, I hope to see you at the social media session.  If you aren’t able to join us, look for a blog post late next week with key takeaways from the panel.

I’m in Boston this week attending the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference, billed as “The Global Event for Real Time Marketers”.  There’s certainly no shortage of hype and hyperbole. My early observation, about four days into the five day conference, is that marketers may be getting a bit ahead of themselves in terms of their ability to evolve in the direction of real-time.

Here’s the cynical interpretation of what is evolving in the marketing space right now.  All this talk of Big Data, smarter commerce and real-time marketing is science fiction for most marketing functions. With some exceptions (high tech, some retailers and some areas of financial services), the marketing ecosystem in which we operate isn’t structured to support real-time, hyper-targeted, Big Data-driven marketing.  It’s still 5-10 years off.

And the hype around all of this is being driven by an unholy trinity of bankers/VCs, the entrepreneurs in social, mobile, and location tech they represent, and vendors selling data and analytics solutions.  It’s not a conspiracy at all – it’s just that each of these parties have huge financial incentives to drive the hype.  And so they do.

But consider the barriers facing a typical large enterprise marketing organization that wants to achieve the vision of real time, data-driven marketing laid out by the unholy trinity: Read More »

I had the pleasure of attending Retail Advertising and Marketing Association’s CMO meeting here in DC last Thursday.  Conversation ranged from loyalty to simplifying consumer decisions (MLC presented this year’s B2C findings) to the growing economic divide in developed economy consumer populations (our friends from Iconoculture shared their insights on this topic).

But the most fireworks happened around a discussion on mobile marketing.  Sean Bartlett, the director of mobile strategy & platforms at Lowe’s, presented on recent mobile activity by that company.  What they’ve accomplished is great mobile work for marketers to emulate. The new Lowe’s app, which has been on the top download boards in the App Store, scores very well against MLC’s 11 criteria of a world-class mobile execution.

Why the fireworks? One marketing leader in attendance asked a simple question: how does Lowe’s measure the ROI on its mobile efforts?  The assumption behind the question was that Lowe’s is spending well into six digits, or even seven digits, and so how to justify the resources internally?

(light fireworks here)  The discussion quickly bounced back and forth between various other retailers in the room, several of which stated that the ROI discussion is over—that was for 5 years ago.  Consumers are moving so quickly that it’s not a question of if, but how.  One retailer shared that it had just launched m-commerce the week before, and watched as its mobile sales ticked up to 3% of total–in just 3 days!!  The CMO indicated customers must have been wondering what took the retailer so long to offer mobile purchasing.

The discussion took on a life of its own, and ultimately landed in a place that struck me as a turning point for retail marketers—if you’re obsessed with ROI to the point that it’s hampering getting some big mobile bets up and running, you’re moving too slow for your consumer.  I’m sure there are exceptions in categories that serve older generations, but by and large, the mobile train has left the station.

MLC members, score your mobile concepts against world-class criteria using our Mobile Execution scorecard.

In my last post, I suggested that the Tory Burch brand is positioning itself nicely to help its target consumers manage the torrent of information and choice in their lives.  By curating experiences that are broader than the fashion category itself, I believe Tory Burch is helping to blaze a new trail for branding in the next decade.

To pick up the thread from my last post, there’s a strong parallel to the news industry and the role that a rare set of blogs are playing there.  I happen to think that Andrew Sullivan and his blog, The Dish, offer many lessons for brands that want to play curator for consumers.  Let’s unpack what makes the Dish a great curatorial blog, and then dive into how the Tory Burch brand reflects those lessons. Read More »