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?

Having talked directly with 90% of the 500 organizations that have taken the diagnostic, we have a theory.  It boils down to a lot of organizations spending time and money on social media without a clear connection to, or at least hypothesis about, how those efforts could plausibly drive business results.

So, here’s what underneath the zero correlation in the regression analysis we did:

• Some of the organizations winning with social media spend little by way of resource, but focus those efforts very well on the few social activities that have potential to drive results.  Call these guys the Guerrillas.  They are winning through small but disciplined spend in social media.

• Meanwhile, on the losing end, some organizations put a lot of resource into social efforts, but don’t see much payoff because they are focused on areas that are unlikely ever to produce business results.  Think of B2B manufacturing organizations setting up Facebook pages.  Very unlikely to yield meaningful business results.  Call these guys the Shadow Jumpers.

• You’ve got another set of companies that spend a lot on social media, but spread their social efforts too thinly across many opportunities—call them the Peanut Butter Spreaders.  Altimer just reported the average global enterprise manages over 175 business-related social media accounts.  Yikes.  Time for “Operation Cull the Herd”.

Because you’ve got these high spend, low results organizations intermingled with high and low spend but high results organizations, you end up with zero correlation between spend and results.  Bottom line, it’s not how much time and energy you put toward social media, but how well focused those resources are on areas that have potential to create real business value. In other words, be a guerrilla.

If you’re an MLC member, and you’d like to take the social media opportunity diagnostic, let your account manager know or send me an email: pspenner@executiveboard.com.  We’ll put a report in your hands with all kinds of useful benchmarks, and offer some advice based on your results.

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.

If you’re like me, you would have guessed that the majority of happiness is driven by life experiences—in other words, nurture.  But Lykken and Tellegen found that about 50% of variability in happiness is explained by genetic factors.  Some of us humans are naturally predisposed to being happier people, and others of us are predisposed to being less happy.  That’s just the way it is.

So what’s the connection to marketing?  Bear with me here—I wanted to start with this research because it opens up the possibility that our assumptions about nature vs. nurture and what drives human emotions may be off.  We marketers care a lot about sparking and building emotional connections with consumers, after all.

Now consider this additional work, which addresses more directly a marketing outcome that we all shoot for: loyalty.

John Keaveney at Wunderman has been doing some interesting quantitative work looking at what drives humans to be loyal.  I’ll quote from Mobile Mania, a Wunderman e-book where I spotted this work e (p. 91):

Put simply, there are loyal people.

And there are disloyal people.

He [Keaveney] compared the attitudes of loyal and disloyal people to see why they differed.

He found that disloyal people wanted to pursue “a life of novelty and challenge” and enjoyed “taking risks.”

Whereas loyal people were the opposite.

Keaveney then examined personal relationships of these naturally loyal and disloyal people.  He found that loyals were more likely to value long term personal relationships.  Disloyals were much more likely to be single.  That carried through to sexual habits, as well, in terms of number of partners.  And it seems Keaveney controlled for age (for those of you thinking this is all a function of aging from our young, wild carefree selves to more settled-down mature adults).

Keaveney concludes that loyalty is less about some humans being true to some brands, and other humans being true to other brands.  Rather, loyalty is an “intimate facet” of who we are by nature.  Some consumers are loyal by nature, and will be loyal to brands and significant others.  Other consumers are not loyal by nature, and won’t be no matter how good the marketing is.

That brings us back to MLC’s work on relationships and loyalty.  In my last blog post (Consumers: They’re Just Not That Into You), I raised the possibility that some consumers are hardwired for certain kinds of engagement, while others are not.

If we marketers knew this to be the case—that nature accounts for far more than we think in consumer engagement and loyalty behaviors—we’d want to identify who is predisposed to be more loyal or enter into a brand “relationship”, and who isn’t.

If it’s something like half of the human population that is hardwired NOT to be loyal, imagine how much marketing cost and effort you could save by identifying those folks, implementing lower cost marketing approaches for them, and plowing the savings into higher ROI areas (such as improving the product or service experience itself).

The passage above from the Wunderman work even gives us hints about the kinds of questions you could use to identify and segment customers in this way.

“How important is it that you pursue a life of novelty and challenge?” (1-10 scale)

“How important is it that you take risks in your life?” (1-10 scale)

(FYI, I wouldn’t recommend asking about number of sexual partners as your segmenting question.  Big danger of self-reporting bias there…)

Do you find the evidence persuasive?  How would you pursue marketing differently if loyalty and engagement behaviors were more nature and less nurture?

MLC members, for more findings on engagement and relationships, see MLC’s work on decision simplicity and loyalty.

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.”

We also saw this in an IBM study looking at the reasons consumers follow brands in social media.  Approximately 65% of business and marketing professionals believe consumers follow their brands to “feel connected” or “be part of a community”.  Both of these are relationship-y sorts of desires.  However, only 20 to 30% of consumers said those are reasons they follow brands on social media.  Very consistent with our own 23% finding.  And it underscores the disconnect between marketers and consumers on relationship dynamics.

Just last week, I came across a very interesting report from L2 (www.l2thinktank.com) about digital savviness in the specialty retail category.  L2 did a clever analysis looking 60 specialty retailers, and the correlation between Facebook interaction rates and size of brand Facebook following.  The clear pattern is a decline in interaction rates as communities grow larger.  In communities of 20,000 consumers or fewer, interaction rates are 32 basis points (yes, that’s 32 interactions for every 10,000 people).  For communities of 50,000 or more, the interaction rate drops to 7 basis points.

One possible interpretation of this finding is that brands aren’t doing a very good job of deepening relationships with new Facebook fans. So, it stands to reason: if only brands could innovate in their relationship marketing, they could drive much higher interaction rates. Right?

But what if there’s a different way of looking at it? Maybe there are natural limits to the number of consumers who will engage in any sort of relationship with brands.  Brands tend to pick up those fans first when they launch Facebook pages.  Once they pluck the low-hanging fan fruit, they hit a threshold at which most incremental fans are just in it for some transactional advantage, like a shot at winning a contest, or discounts.

So, maybe brands are simply unlikely to ever convert a meaningful share of those second wave consumers to have a relationship. But why not?  Why shouldn’t brands be able to build relationships with 35% or even 50% of their consumer base?

I believe it’s because there are deeper, genetic factors at play for a huge swathe of the consumer population.  In my next blog post, I’ll highlight some of the research I’ve seen that points in that direction.

In the meantime, it’s time to take a hard look at your relationship marketing efforts.  Try to find a splitter question to discern which consumers are unlikely ever to be open to a relationship.  And then stop wasting marketing blood and treasure by giving those consumers the “relationship treatment”.  Instead, treat them to a dose of decision simplicity, as detailed in MLC’s work on simplifying purchase decisions.

Voice-of-Customer 2.0. Marketers are grappling with what kinds of customer data are most important to collect and how to make hay out of the data.  This topic received the most “top priority” votes by a big margin, so we’re making it the subject of MLC’s primary research initiative in 2012.

Early hypothesis from the MLC study team: marketers are over-investing in collecting and analyzing data about the customer, and not enough in gathering information and insight about customer context, which is critical for generating commercial insight (see #5 below)

Skillset Reset. There’s a creeping sense among B2B CMO’s that their marketing teams are in need of a capability overhaul.  With the rise of “no man’s land” in the mid-funnel (you can read more about it in MLC’s 2011 research) and rapid changes how buying centers are making purchase decisions, out-of-date marketing skillsets are being laid bare.

As one example of B2B marketing teams aggressively managing the skillset transition, consider the example of Cisco starting to “badge” and reward its marketers on their social media impact.   I wrote about this in a blog post on the Present and Future of B2B Social Media.

Ask yourself: how sweet/spooky would it be for 20% of your pay to rest on your social graph?

Disruption. Uncertainty is the lurking leviathan swimming beneath the surface of commerce these days (cheery, no?)  This came through in our survey loud and clear, as the third most popular topic was how to manage risk in changing customer buying behavior, emerging markets, technology and the like.  All we can suggest here is to build your house out of bricks, not sticks.  In commercial terms, that means delivering insight to customers (see #1 and #5).

Going Global. I wouldn’t call it new, but the Global Marketing topic continues to be a top priority for the half of the MLC membership that doesn’t see a continued growth run in Western economies.  See MLC’s resources on global marketing organization structure, and then get ready for new best practice case studies, showcase profiles and tools to help marketing leaders manage the global transition, due in Q1 2012.

Content Marketing Hits the Breaking Point. As marketing automation, segmentation and targeting continue to evolve and penetrate marketing activities, there comes a tipping point at which creating version X+5 of an email for sub-segment Y  to be delivered at trigger Z in the lead nurture program simply becomes unsustainable.  We believe many marketers on the content marketing train will hit this point, to be followed by a period of navel gazing, to be followed by a period of content rationalization, to be followed (depressingly) by content proliferation again.

Smarter angle: the answer isn’t more content, it’s commercial insight.  Cut off the long tail of content creation (those white papers are languishing out there, anyway) and re-invest the time and energy into insights that can fuel “commercial teaching”.  MLC and its sister program, the Sales Executive Council, have written extensively on this go-to-market approach.  Commercial insights trump relevant messaging all day long as drivers of loyalty and purchase in the B2B space.  This is the rocket fuel of successful go-to-market strategies these days, and it’s the heart of what makes the Challenger Sale work.

Mobile! Just kidding.  Not ready for primetime for most B2Bs…yet.  We’re seeing more near-term value creation from mobile as a sales tool than for marketing purposes.  Maybe 2013…

MLC will be doing research in most all of these areas in 2012.  If you’ve got expertise in any of these areas, we’d love to chat.  Please email me: pspenner@executiveboard.com.  Or, if you want to share your point-of-view on 2012, drop in a comment below.

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.

The juxtaposition of the Tiger and the Goat is probably, metaphorically, what stood out most in my first visit to India a couple weeks ago.  Around every corner, you get images like the one that sticks in my mind of an extended family scraping together a meager existence beneath a brand new elevated rail line.  But in talking with Indians, it’s striking how optimistic all of them are for what the future holds.

The sense of optimism isn’t the only difference between your average Indian consumer and an average Western consumer.  MLC pulled together a group of 15 CMOs from native Indian enterprises, from Reliance to Tata to SBI Life to Gujarat Tea.  We discussed MLC’s latest B2C work focused on Decision Simplicity, with an eye to understanding similarities and differences between Indian and Western consumers.

Here are a few other Indian consumer insights I picked up:

• “The Hindu Middle”: Indian consumers typically don’t use extremes in calling out products or people—they avoid hyperbole to the up- or down-side.  As a marketer, if you were hoping for Indian consumers to provide product ratings and reviews with the same grade inflation you see in the West, be sure to have a Plan B.
• Recommendation cynicism—Indian consumers are by nature not trusting of third party recommendations.  Despite (or perhaps because of?) a marketing culture of rampant celebrity endorsement (Bollywood and cricket stars plugging products everywhere you turn), Indians tend not to put much weight on recommendations coming from third parties they don’t know.  Ond CMO suggested that, unless an Indian consumer has a basis for deep trust in some other facet of life, she is unlikely to trust the recommendation of another Indian…even an acquaintance.”
• The novelty of brand choice—the average Indian consumer is very much in a state of welcoming all the new choices that a teeming free-market has to offer.  There’s a degree of amusement and entertainment for the Indian consumer in experiencing the range of choices that Western consumers are familiar with (and often jaded by).

Have another Indian consumer insight to offer?  Drop us a comment below.  And then, stay tuned for more to come as MLC continues to explore global marketing and marketing in emerging markets.

ps  You can, of course, find Wagh Bakri on Facebook.

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:

Think about “stop/start”. Anne talked about scaling back on the number of white papers being written, and instead funneling that energy into social media.  As marketers, it is all too easy to try to use all of the new touchpoints to engage customers, because they are there.  However, that’s death for marketing teams on tight budgets.  There simply isn’t time or resource to do them all well.  If you are going to start with social media, figure out early on what you’re going to stop or scale back.

To Facebook or not to Facebook? There was an interesting discussion, and a little disagreement on the panel, over whether every B2B should have a Facebook page.  Some on the panel said “why not?”  Others said “probably not every B2B”.  Cisco is finding Facebook is a new referral engine, as a place where loyal ambassadors of then Cisco brand connect with Cisco.  That probably works for B2B brands with a popular presence in culture.  For other B2B brands, there are likely better areas to invest precious time and energy than on Facebook.

Mix paid/earned/owned/shared media. Tom at Microsoft shared a great example of using banner ads (paid media) to showcase social comments and threads happening in real time about its products (earned or shared media).  In this case, the paid media amplifies the highly trusted social media, drawing more parties to the conversation.

Bring structure to your social efforts. Ari shared an example of a detailed editorial calendar for Jive’s social efforts leading up to its annual conference.  He pointed out that many business people have a perception that social media is all chaos.  It’s not.  The best social media marketers bring a deliberate, thoughtful, planned approach to social media.

Look for natural “triggers”, don’t invent something new. Too often, B2Bs try to do something new with social media.  Anne’s guidance was to think first in terms of how social media can boost predictable business events, such as product launch or big events.  Much easier to demonstrate returns on social media if they are hitched to an existing, critical business activity.

Don’t tweet or blog drunk. Nothing good comes of this.

One Wide Angle reader suggested I ask the panelists “What’s next in B2B social media?”  Here’s my paraphrasing of the panelists comments:

Hardwiring social media into roles and incentives. Until now, social media has largely been an activity done off the side of the desk, or perhaps by dedicated employees (community managers and the like).  Cisco is going to start weaving social media presence and effectiveness into the core evaluative criteria of its marketers more broadly.  Marketers who have a stronger social graph and can drive business outcomes via social media will advance faster and get paid more.

Integrating social media into the sales pipe.  None of the panelists claimed complete success in embedding social media into the mid- to lower-funnel, so as to improve sales metrics like deal size, velocity and profitability.  That seems to be a next frontier in B2B social media.

Corporate websites becoming social media properties! Several of the panelists mentioned the integration of social into their corporate web sites, boosting the authenticity and trustworthiness of the information.  That will lead to stickier web interactions with prospects and customers.

That’s my top line.

If you’d like to see some of the slides the panelists shared with the audience, shoot me an email at pspenner@executiveboard.com. Oh, and lean on MLC’s social media resource center for all manner of support tools, templates, strategy builder workbooks, and more.

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.

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:

• Spotty data with big gaps for swathes of consumers or swathes of the consumer experience (e.g., consumer behavior in iOS mobile apps is a black box, since Apple holds that data close)
• A churning and unpredictable privacy landscape, with legislative shifts threatening disruption
• Agency rosters that are fragmented and highly resistant to the kind of collaboration and change needed to actually move with real-time speed in an integrated way for much of the marketing mix
• Client-side decision making processes, structures and skill gaps that prevent executing as the vision would have it

Unless you are: a small, nimble company, a company that grew up online (e.g., Amazon) or a rare breed of large enterprise that grew up on an analytics culture and has data coursing through its veins (e.g., CapitalOne, Harrah’s), you just aren’t going to be able to overcome these barriers in the near term.

That’s the cynic’s view.  I’m not sure yet how much of it I believe.  I do think it makes sense for companies to start the Big Data marketing journey.  But this feels to me like CRM did 15 years ago–huge promise, results a long time coming.

Here’s where I think it’s safe for marketers to START: use Big Data and analytics to figure out who to STOP marketing to, or when to STOP trying to engage them with a direct mail piece, or yet another email, or yet another plea to join in a Facebook contest.  If Wannamaker was right, half of your marketing dollars are wasted–use analytics to figure out which half, and STOP wasting them.

Your consumers and customers will thank you for it.

And, it’s all in keeping with MLC’s findings on making consumer purchase decisions simpler.

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.

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.

First off, the Dish has a defined point-of-view on the world, driven by a set of core principles.  This enables the Dish to weave a narrative through the news, which is ultimately more compelling than simply reporting the facts.

Second, the Dish creates its narrative across a limited set of key domains, but broadly within those domains.  For the Dish, that means geopolitics, social policy, global cultural phenomena and religion.  Ninety percent of curation happens within those categories.  But Sullivan and his support crew range broadly within those categories.

By defining a limited set of categories, the Dish team can credibly claim to stay abreast of the most important events and writings and content happening in those domains.  As a Dish reader, I have come to trust that the Dish will scan far and wide within those domains to find the best nuggets, bring them to the fore, and synthesize them with their principles-led worldview.  That saves me time in needing to try to read widely myself and figure out what the most interesting, accurate news is.

Third, the Dish helps me discover new nuggets that I would never have come across in my regular news consumption.  Beyond drawing from a wide range of news sources I don’t have time to read myself, the Dish runs series of Mental Health Breaks, which include a captivating video or viral hit or meme that, 75% of the time, I find to be really cool—it expands my point of view or provokes my thinking or just entertains me in a refreshing way.  The Dish’s “View from Your Window” series plays a similar function.

Fourth, the Dish gives me a sense of belonging to an exclusive community with a shared point-of-view.  It does some really brilliant things here to promote that sense of club-iness.  For example, last holiday season, the Dish made available for purchase t-shirts with four different designs.  The designs included obscure references to the Dish that only other readers of the Dish would recognize and appreciate.  It creates a great sense of insider community when I wear my t-shirt, and some random person strikes up a conversation with me because they are an avid Dish reader too.

How does the Tory Burch brand reflect these lessons?  We’ll take the four lessons in order.

First, if you spend 10 minutes browsing the Tory Burch web site, Facebook page, Twitter feed and blog, you’ll quickly appreciate that the brand has a defined point-of-view on the world. It’s a sort of fun, laid-back angle, but with a sense of flare and class.  If you’re trying to define a point-of-view for your brand, we believe shared values work well here (much more on shared values here and in greater depth for MLC members here).

Second, like the Dish, Tory Burch curates within a limited set of domains.  The domains include fashion, of course, but also travel, food and entertainment.  Moreover, within those domains, you’ll quickly see that Tory Burch isn’t simply producing content; rather, it curates experiences.  As a Burch follower, you’d more often read about tips for traveling in Milan or niche books to read than you would tips for putting together the right accessories with your Tory Burch apparel.  That’s a critical point.  To be a trusted curator, brands have to extend beyond the commercial interests in their category to curate something broader.  I believe leading curatorial brands will focus on curating experiences for consumers across their own and adjacent categories, just as Tory Burch has done.  Take a scroll through the Inspirations , Entertains or City Guides section of the blog to see what I mean.

The other thing Tory Burch does here is partner with other curators, who bring expertise and credibility, especially in categories where Burch might not be as deep.  For example, the Tory Burch blog includes guest posts from carefully chosen chefs, travel writers, and creative directors.  Again, that helps reinforce the sense of trust that consumers have that the brand will be curating the most important experiences, not just plugging products.

Third, Tory Burch curates strongly for discovery.  So, within those few domains, it ranges broadly to introduce its followers to ideas or experiences that they would not otherwise have come across.  These include interior design motifs, books, niche movies, underappreciated places to visit, and so on.  Much of this discovery curation is reinforced or augmented via the Tory Burch Twitter feed .

Finally, Tory Burch uses its blog, Facebook and Twitter presence to give a strong sense of the community of other Burch followers out there.  There’s a bit of a clubby feel to it, just like you see with the Dish.

Of course, brands aren’t the only entities that can play curator for consumers.  Celebrities and other tastemakers are filling the curatorial void pretty effectively in some categories, as well.  It’s for bold brand managers to seize the opportunity to make theirs a curatorial brand.  Our hat is off to the marketing team at Tory Burch for helping to light the way.

If you believe that what is happening to the news industry may be playing out in these other industries, marketers should be fundamentally reconsidering the role of brands and therefore the way they do branding.

To boil down the Economist’s 14 page report on the news industry into six bullets:

• The era of mass news from early 1800s to about 2005 was a historical anomaly—news before the early 1800s was much more “atomized” (news came from social connections, vitriolic pamphlets printed in small runs, and from chatter at the local coffee house)
• In the past 10 years, the news scene has returned to an atomized state—the Internet and social media blew apart the mass news model by dropping production costs, commoditizing news and thereby dramatically increasing suppliers of news, while putting mass news outlets (newspapers) out of business
• The upshot: consumers of news (once again) fracture their attention across many more news sources than they used to.
• While consumers have many more news sources to choose from, they also suffer from a torrent of information coming from different sources.
• There is an opportunity for third parties to relieve this pain, and serve as filters and curators of the huge supply of news.  The best bloggers do this well (Andrew Sullivan and his blog the Dish is one of my favorite examples).  It also points up a new role for journalists and editors—many of them should shift their focus from generating the news to a more curatorial role, navigating the torrent of news and stitching together select news atoms into coherent and compelling narratives for consumers

So, why would any of this affect the role that brands play?  Well, if you step back and look at what is happening to select categories, a similar story is playing out (six bullets here, parallel to the bullets above).

• Before the rise of mass production and mass brands, consumer goods and services were provided by an “atomized” set of suppliers (think pre-Industrial Revolution cottage industries)
• In the past few years, the rise of social and mobile technologies are commoditizing many products (consumers can easily find lowest price and can easily source substitutes) and are injecting a huge dose of discoverability into consumers’ shopping, whereby they receive recommendations for brands or goods they never would have known about before
• The upshot: consumers are fracturing their walletshare across many more adjacent substitutes.  These aren’t lower priced, carbon copy substitutes for goods they regularly buy; these are substitutes that fulfill a need in a slightly different way.  Part of their value is that they aren’t mass produced—they are unusual or different or off-the-beaten path.  Here are recent examples that I’ve observed as a consumer:
  • My wife shops the Etsy bazaar to find a more unusual pair of earrings instead of going to the mall with the same old shops for the masses;
  • On the street in Chicago recently, I saw a sheet of paper taped to a lamppost with a QR code on it, advertising how a local artist can customize your shoes with special paint and a unique design—maybe consumers spend money here instead of adding a 25^th pair of name brand shoes to their collection;
  • My wife buys me a beer tasting class as a birthday gift instead of the usual name-brand apparel (see my previous blog post that spells out how Groupon is a breaker of consumer buying routines, much at the expense of mass brands).
  • In sum, mass brands in many categories suffer from a thousand tiny cuts as consumers fracture their walletshare in ways like these.
• While consumers now have many more options against which to allocate their (depressingly fixed) walletshare, they also suffer from a torrent of choices in what they could buy.  Our recent research on the consumer decision path suggests consumers are suffering from cognitive overload as a result of all this buying choice.
• There is an opportunity for third parties to help consumers deal with this pain, by serving as filters and curators to help them navigate this greatly expanded choice set.  Many entities are edging into this role already:
  • Google is using algorithms to help consumers find apparel they might like (see www.boutiques.com);
  • Some consumers are relying on their social networks to play this role;
  • Individuals are playing this role, oftentimes celebrity tastemakers (which may help account for the popularity of some celebrities on Twitter);
  • And new hybrids are arising, like Flipbook, that weave together social and algorithmic filters.

I’d argue the more powerful of curators won’t be algorithmic—they’ll be humans or have a very strong human component.  That’s because humans are better (for now, at least) at weaving together coherent and compelling narratives to make sense of these choices, and go beyond the cold buying guide.

The humans behind brands could well play this role.  In my next post, I’ll unpack what makes for a great curator, and why I think brands like Tory Burch are charting the path for a new model of branding that is better suited to categories that are dealing with a re-atomized marketplace.  Just like the news industry.

Innovation buyers make up 30% of B2B buyers. The key question they ask of suppliers is “How can you make me better?” They’re most likely to categorize purchases as “strategic” as opposed to “transactional”, feature larger-than-average buying groups, and are more likely to use RFPs to attract potential suppliers.

In the past, the sales force managed these buyers with deep conversations and solutions tailored to their innovation needs. But since our research indicates that customers are delaying contact with Sales departments until they’re 57% finished with the purchasing process, we’re finding that those Sales conversations don’t happen early enough in the process to actually make a difference on the ultimate decision. Marketing needs to step into the “middle funnel” to speak to innovation buyers – but how can it be done in a scalable way? We’ve found that part of the key to engaging innovation customers is to articulate unique, valuable supplier perspectives.

This year’s research process unearthed a great best practice from Danisco, a food ingredients company based in Denmark, whose marketing team is getting the “valuable supplier perspective” thing right. Want to learn more? We’ll unpack that concept in great detail at this year’s executive retreat! But, in the meantime, we can leave you with three concrete steps to increase your mind and wallet share among innovation buyers:

Spot topic areas where you should develop a unique perspective. The key to doing this is finding the intersection of core priority areas for your company and “adjacent” priority areas for your customers. Focusing on your customers’ secondary growth opportunities, as opposed to their primary markets, allows you to develop a perspective outside of areas where your customers are generating deep insight themselves.

Conduct credible analysis in the topic area. You can’t pepper the market with your message without building a little credibility first: you should partner with a respected, credible third party in the space and present authentic end-user voice in your findings. But most of all, to get maximum mileage out of your thought leadership efforts, any conclusions should overturn or correct the industry or segment’s conventional wisdom about the topic area.

Create “guided self-discovery” workshop sessions for prospective customers. Engage prospective customers in a dialogue that helps them discover and co-create ways to move forward in the targeted topic area. This isn’t a sales interaction; rather, it’s a genuine opportunity for knowledge transfer and ideation for your customers. These sessions should lead back to your core strengths as a supplier.  Leading marketers are investing in their virtual events channels to turn them into more potent workshop sessions like these.

Okay, so it’s not that simple – we’re leaving out a number of important details that are key in getting this right. You can find many of those details in the full case study. The results here can be quite powerful – suppliers end up with more customer-initiated sales interactions, and those interactions are happening with business managers focused on strategy and innovation, as opposed to procurement departments, largely focused on squeezing price concessions from suppliers.

MLC members, for more details, check out the full case, or register for one of our upcoming Annual Executive Retreats today.

MLC will be at the DMA11 Conference—insights and discounts herein!

We know from recent research that the top reason consumers follow brands in social media is for discounts.  So, MLC members, here’s your bone—you can save 25% off the regular price to attend the Direct Marketing Association’s 2011 conference in Boston this October.  Interested?  You can find details here.

And, if you’ll permit us to be so self-promoting, there’s extra reason to attend the DMA conference this year.  We’re facilitating two different sessions at the conference—and we think you’ll be excited about both of them! (we certainly are)

First, I’ll facilitate a stellar panel of New Media Ringmasters on Monday, October 3^rd during the general DMA conference. The stars of the show will be:

• Jeanette Gibson, who heads up Cisco’s social media center of excellence
• Zena Weist, who until recently led H&R Block’s social efforts (she’s since moved to Edelman Digital)
• Michael Donnelly, new media extraordinaire from Coca Cola.

I’ll facilitate an hour-long discussion with these Ringmasters, who will field Q&A from the audience and share their perspective and learning on questions like:

• What is the Ringmaster’s role in catalyzing change in the marketing and broader organization?
• What skills, experiences and traits distinguish Ringmasters?
• How do you know when your organization is ready for a New Media Ringmaster?
• Should you groom or import a Ringmaster?
• What should the Ringmaster’s first 100 days look like?
• What hard lessons have Ringmasters learned as they’ve sought to increase their organization’s new media “IQ”?
• What advice do Ringmasters have for those aspiring to the role?

For a sneak peak on the kind of practical expertise these Ringmasters will share, give the video below a view—Zena Weist talks about her first 100 days as a director of social media with H&R Block:

Special thanks to Zena and Jenny Love at H&R Block for allowing us to come onsite to shoot this (and other) video segments.

Second, my colleague, Brent Adamson, will present at the Strategic Summit the weekend before the official conference kickoff.  He’ll bring the latest B2B insights from the Marketing Leadership Council and Sales Executive Council.  The title of the session is “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision: Collaborative Sales and Marketing Strategies to Steer Today’s Buying Behavior”.

The broader theme of this pre-conference summit is the role that customer intelligence plays in driving the business.  The Summit is for VPs, Directors and upper-level managers.  There’s a special discount for members who want to register – the cost to MLC members is $299, 40% savings off the $499 sticker price.  Details here.  Hurry, as the Summit discount is available only until June 24^th.

Hope to see you in Boston in October!  Questions about the DMA session?  Feel free to email me directly – pspenner@executiveboard.com.

Note: the 25% general conference discount is good for MLC members through the end of September.  The special rate on the pre-conference summit expires June 24^th.

Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, talks about the way that the home video business has changed in the last few years. “People feel they do not have to own a movie unless they really like the movie.  It’s not just a buy because we may want to watch it one day. One of the reasons for that is the competition for their time.”  [italics are mine]

Similarly, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, points out that it will compete with satellite and cable competitors much more directly, because “in the long term, we’re all competing for a time share of the consumer”.  In the past, separate media pipes (cable/satellite vs. Internet) meant these models didn’t compete as directly.  But with digital convergence, it’s easy to see how Netflix and Comcast are going to bump into each other much more often.

In both cases, the “time share” of the consumer boils down to the finite attention that consumers have to give.  Here are a few facts that bring the issue into vivid focus:

• Across the past 20 years, the volume of information flying at or available to consumers is increasing at 30-60% annually
• Across the same time period, humans’ ability to process information is increasing at roughly 5% annually (largely through multi-tasking)

These demands on consumer attention were already stringent 10 years ago, when Davenport and Beck wrote their work on The Attention Economy.  Today, ten years later, the information-attention mismatch has quietly but inexorably become the key underlying phenomenon putting pressure not just on consumer electronics and media businesses, but on  most all marketers—or for that matter, any party seeking the attention of large audiences.

This attention scarcity dynamic explains why Decision Simplicity turned out to be so important in our recently completed consumer research.  The research took a deep look at what drives consumers to form and then follow through on brand purchase intent with a high degree of confidence (we call this “purchase stickiness”).

Decision Simplicity is a set of drivers that factor together, including the ease with which consumers learn, trust and weigh the information they need to make a purchase.  It was the most powerful driver of purchase stickiness.  More powerful than brand affinity.  More powerful than brand “relationship”.  More powerful than the number of interactions with the brand.

The upshot for marketers?  Help your consumers traverse the purchase path by acting in service to their attention scarcity, not by exacerbating it.  We’ll share more specific solutions sets—what marketers should stop doing, and what they should start doing—in upcoming blog posts.

Here’s a teaser for one of the solution sets: refashion your advocate strategy into an advisor strategy.

MLC members, we’re working on a web resource center to bring you the full results of this research, including best practice examples and case studies from companies that are getting Decision Simplicity right.

In the meantime, attend a Council executive retreat (reserved for seniormost Council membership sponsors and one right-hand person)—we’ll be in Chicago, San Francisco, Sydney, and London in the coming months.

Think of it as a mini-Etsy store-within-a-store concept.  Only instead of the Etsy buying experience, which at times feels like a slog through a fleamarket (check out Regretsy, occasionally NSFW, for DIY commerce gone wrong), the retailer has done the hard work of finding the best craftspeople.  I think it’s an idea worth considering based on five observations gathered from our research and recent news in the retailing space:

Observation #1: Affluent Consumers Don’t Trust Salespeople Anymore—According to the Journal article, only 2% say they trust retail salespeople, down from 50% just four years ago.  Yikes!  Stop accosting customers with salespeople hawking Hermès handbags.

Observation #2: Desire for Scarce/Unique Items—the reason consumers don’t like those Hermes handbags as much is they don’t want so-called “commodity luxury”.  By contrast, they are willing to pay a premium for items of limited supply that deliver something truly unique.  This trend is partly what’s driving the popularity of online bazaars like Etsy.

Observation #3: Consumers Like Localized Merchandise Mixes—chains like Macy’s are seeing good results by striving to mirror local demand.  For example, in its Kentucky stores, Macy’s upped the mix of silly hats around Derby-time.

Observation #4: Exclusive Merchandise Lines May Circumvent the Smartphone-equipped Superconsumer—Kohl’s, among other retailers, is launching exclusive clothing lines from JLo and the MAn (JLo’s ex-husband, Marc Anthony), available exclusively at its stores.  That makes it tougher for smartphone-wielding consumers to comparison shop or price compare.

Observation #5: There’s a Glut of Retail Real Estate—big box retailers are realizing they don’t need the same space they once did.  Remember how much space your local Best Buy devoted to games, CD’s and DVD’s five years ago?  Digitization is taking a huge chunk out of needed space.  As well, bankruptcies of chains like Circuit City and Linens ‘n Things mean there’s a surplus of retail real estate.

Put it all together, and what do you get?  A big opportunity for retailers to use some of that extra retail space to create Etsy-flavored store-within-a-store concepts.  Fill that space with a handful of carefully chosen local craftsmen and craftswomen, and rotate to a new set every three or six or nine months.  Worth noting: this isn’t a play for top line revenue—scaling would be too difficult, and it would ruin the scarce goods feel.  Rather, if chosen and promoted well, these Etsy-like artists practicing their craft and engaging customers in-store will draw additional well-heeled foot traffic, deepen your stores’ local connection and enrich your brand.

For more on engineering an enriching, useful customer experience, check out our look at Tesco’s Annual Customer Plan, La-Z-Boy’s easy in-store segmentation scheme, and a leading retailer’s customer experience storyboards.

MLC members, we’re presenting findings on the drivers of consumer stickiness starting on May 26^th in New York.  We’ll discuss ideas like these—not just for retail, for but high and low involvement goods and services—as well as the role of mobile and social media in creating simpler decision paths for consumers.  Won’t you join us?  Register here.

We argued that the underlying driver of the social stall for most companies is that they build their social house on sand, not bedrock.  In other words, they use social media to reinforce existing ways of creating value, rather than seeking to create new-in-kind value for their customers in ways that are uniquely suited to the advantages of social media.  These execution challenges are all the more disheartening when you think about the overinflated expectations created by the hype, which was fueled by venture capital firms, social media vendors, and rapidly growing social media platforms, all of whom had a strong economic interest in (over)hyping.

We’ve now had nearly 500 companies take MLC’s social media opportunity diagnostic (MLC members, if you haven’t taken it, you still can, and get a customized report with benchmarking data and suggestions for next steps).  Judging from the completed diagnostics, we are still finding that 9 of 10 companies are not driving business results with their social efforts. This ratio hasn’t changed across the last 18 months.

If you dig underneath the house-on-sand problem I mention above, the single greatest mistake we see marketers making is one of customer understanding.  Too many marketers don’t understand what customers are trying to accomplish in social media related to their category.  Marketers overestimate the percentage of customers who want anything to do with brands in social media in the first place, and they get the motivations wrong.  Look no further than this IBM report , page 9, for the damning evidence.

If you sense your organization might be getting this wrong, we’d suggest working through MLC’s Social Media Strategy Builder.  Over 300 members have attended a workshop on the strategy builder—based on strong member feedback, we continue to believe it’s the right sequence of principled thinking to do before putting significant effort against social media.

But more importantly, let all of this be a warning for mobile! We’re clearly in the middle of the mobile hype cycle.  Mary Meeker (you’ve doubtless seen her mobile computing deck) and the VCs, mobile agencies, mobile device makers, mobile OS owners—all of these guys have a strong incentive to hype mobile.  Have you thought about an app?  You need a mobile game!  Have you figured out your location-based check-in promotion?  It’s global!  It’s local!  It’s a dessert topping!

The hype is leading mobile to quickly become a noisy channel.  We believe the dreadful usage ratios for apps (60% of downloaded apps get used 5 times or less) will start to invade other mobile domains as they become more crowded.  That’s why we developed a tool—Hallmarks of an Enduring Mobile Marketing Execution—for MLC members to help ground mobile efforts in what will endure (much as the Social Media Strategy Builder does for social efforts).  It’s available in MLC’s new mobile marketing resource center.  We hope you’ll check it out—the tool is fairly self-explanatory, but if you’d like more details, see posts here, here and here for explanation.

Consider this your virtual tour.  If you’re an MLC member, we invite you to click through to the various sections of the resource center, and download to your heart’s content.

You’ll find four sections in the resource center (for now—more to come in the coming months as we continue our research).

First, Mobile Trends and Best-in-Class Showcases.  You can navigate by the global map to download PowerPoint pages specific to regions around the globe.  We’re starting with Europe, Asia, Japan, and North America.   Across 2011 and 2012, we’ll add additional data for more specific global theaters.

Each PowerPoint deck includes all sorts of facts and figures, projections and trends, about mobile growth and the ways that consumers use their mobile devices.  We hope you’ll use this part of the resource center to travel up the learning curve about mobile around the globe.

Moreoever, we invite you to cut and paste from those PowerPoints as you build your own internal presentations on mobile marketing.  Borrow liberally!

In each geography, we also have profiled a series of best-in-class mobile campaigns.  We know how easy it is for marketers to get caught up in what’s going on in their own markets—with mobile, where ideation and creativity are needed to develop breakthrough executions, gathering inspiration from around the globe is a good thing!

To access these, you’ll again navigate via the global map— click the pushpins to see best-in-class mobile executions from around the world.  If you like the snapshot, download the more detailed profile, with information on how the execution worked, what the execution can teach other marketers, and what sort of results the execution generated.

Third, Self-Assessment Tool: Hallmarks of an Enduring Mobile Execution.  There are all sorts of flash-in-the-pan mobile executions making for a noisy atmosphere.  This self-assessment scorecard will guide you to the elements that make for a mobile execution that sticks—and creates value for consumers (and your brand) over time.  Score your idea against the 11 hallmarks, and see if you’ve got bottled-lightning, or a dud.

Fourth, Mobile Vendors Around the World, which you can access via the main page.  Council members often come to us with questions about which vendors can help them execute.  We’ve built the start of a mobile vendor directory here, based on some of the strong work we’ve seen come out of these shops.

Let us know what you think and what resources you’d like to see us add next!

MLC members – If you missed the 30-minute webinar in which we walk through the Hallmarks of an Enduring Mobile Execution, you can listen to the replay here.

Here’s the idea: equip your account managers to approach a select set of customers to write LinkedIn recommendations about successfully-mitigated risks.

Early findings from our survey of B2B buying centers suggest that there’s a big opportunity for marketers to do a better job of communicating about risk in the earlier stages of the purchase exploration. There are all sorts of risks bundled into large B2B purchases—supplier risk; implementation risk; integration risk; and so on. You might say there’s a long tail of risks that buyers are often worried about.

It’s increasingly difficult for marketers to address a long tail of risks in a credible way. Customers are looking more often to word-of-mouth and peer recommendations to get the true scoop on what the supplier is like and how the solution actually works once you get past the “honeymoon”.

So, why not have existing customers write recommendations about how specific account managers successfully mitigated a risk when it cropped up? Here’s how you’d go about it.

1. Gather your list of top risk-based reasons that buyers choose a competitor brand over yours (e.g., “We’re just not sure we’d have access to the technical support help we need if the solution breaks when we eventually upgrade our broader systems”)
2. Identify a handful of account managers who are active on LinkedIn and who have more outgoing, pioneering mentalities—ask them for help with a LinkedIn pilot
3. Help them identify the right candidate customers to approach about writing a recommendation that includes a short story about how the account manager’s actions helped mitigate a risk
4. Equip the account managers with email and voice scripting points to make it easy for them to approach the target customers about getting that specific kind of recommendation
5. Once you get critical mass of recommendations, reference them in sales or marketing collateral in a “see for yourself” kind of way
6. Ultimately, insert a question into your win-loss analysis (or perhaps your voice of customer survey) asking about awareness and use of the recommendations

What do you think?

We think it has these important advantages:

• It’s a lower hurdle for customers to clear (versus taping a video testimonial, for example)
• It’s credible, in that customers need to make the time to write the recommendation, which they presumably would not do if they didn’t feel strongly about the recommendation;
• It’s discoverable and easily accessible, right there on LinkedIn for anyone to search and read

I’m sure there are downsides—account managers move on, so maybe you need to keep refreshing recommendations as new account managers join your team. Customers could write bad things about you (choose who you invite to write recommendations carefully!) But on balance, it seems worth trying, no? Let us know if you’ve already tried and found success (or not).

We’ll dive deeper into these and other ideas, as we share findings from the research at MLC’s Annual B2B Executive Retreat—first meeting is in Chicago on June 30^th.

Or, if you market and sell to small businesses, you may want to check out the Enterprise Council on Small Business annual conference, focused on Driving Active Advocates, in New Orleans June 6^th- 8^th.

1. Mobile is today where social media was 18 months ago and digital media about 5-7 years ago. While there is talk of 2011 being the year of arrival for mobile, marketing organizations still haven’t made changes to support these platforms as much more than an appendage to integrated marketing initiatives.  My prediction: mid-2012 (about a year from now) is when marketers get their act together on integration.
2. Start here: Three varieties of low hanging mobile marketing fruit. Marketers should first stand up a mobile website.  Then, they should be sure they’ve got a mobile search strategy in place.  Finally, they ought to think through all the ways they can use SMS-based marketing, which can be both inexpensive and effective.
3. Mobile search is going to be a really big deal. The rise of desktop search gave marketers a precious peek into consumers’ intent – but only every so often.  Since smartphone-armed consumers (most of whom keep their phones within arms reach 16+ hours a day) will be able to search on the go, marketers will get a more continuous view of consumer intent, often layered with the extra dimension of location.  As it happens, consumers use mobile search much closer to their points of decision-making—even more powerful than getting a Google user to click on your ad from her desktop, where she may be doing research a week out from her purchase decision.
4. Rule of Thumb: spend at least as much promoting and distributing your mobile execution as you do developing it. Too many marketers are taking the Field of Dreams approach – build it, and consumers will come -  with their mobile executions.  The vast majority of time, they don’t come.  Spend as much promoting your execution as you do building it.
5. A mobile bandwidth “day of reckoning” cometh.  Soon-ish. Mobile bandwidth is growing at a gentle linear rate.  Mobile data demand is growing exponentially—more consumers are getting smartphones, and those smartphones are ever more data hungry.  Somewhere 24-48 months from now, we will be facing some really big bandwidth problems.  Implication for marketers: make your mobile executions simple simple simple.
6. Mobile Thunderdome: apps vs. great mobile websites. I’ll spare you the “two enter, one leaves” cliché. Six to twelve months ago, before Android really took off, emphasis was on doing your mobile execution as an app (of the iPhone variety, mostly).  Since the market share of mobile operating systems has evened out with the arrival of Android (and to a lesser extent Windows Phone 7, now more significant with the Nokia partnership), opinion seems roughly split on the ROI of just doing a great mobile website (which anyone with a smartphone could access) and having to develop app versions for 3 or more mobile operating systems.
7. Mobile will lead marketers to give their segmentation approaches a fundamental rethink. We all know the relevance bar on mobile is far higher since the device is so personal and context dependent.  But, the amount and type of information available to marketers via mobile interaction also jumps dramatically.  Marketers will have all manner of variables related to time and GPS location potentially available.  So, your formerly demo/psychographically designated “Friendster Fran” segment may become “Friendster Fran at the mall on Saturday”.  That will require more advanced data infrastructure, analytics, planning and targeting approaches.  But the rewards of getting it right are potentially large.
8. Rewards, anyone?  Huge upside value for marketers in mobile loyalty/relationship-marketing. At the most basic level, mobile can help the average consumer manage her 27 loyalty programs.  But at a much more advanced level, marketers can create all sorts of unique experiences and high touch services for higher tier loyalty customers by weaving mobile data into their CRM databases.  Prepare for a giant database goldrush, as marketers scramble to gather mobile phone numbers and opt-ins, much like the rush in 1995-97 when consumers were establishing email addresses.
9. Mobile harmonizes traditional and digital media. It’s as simple as realizing that consumers will be able to scan (with QR code and the like) or otherwise recognize anything from billboards to in-store display via their mobile phones to unlock a richer, mobile interactive experience.  That will enable marketers to get their target consumers to traverse the purchase decision path much more quickly, potentially. Amusing sidenote: QR codes are already starting to show up on tombstones, allowing passersby to experience a multimedia obituary of sorts.  I suppose that could mean QR has jumped the shark.
10. Incoming!!!  Brands and retailers fight third parties for point-of-purchase attention. The point-of-purchase battle is joined.  Consumer goods marketers are partnering with retailers to develop in-store apps to “help” the consumer navigate the store and make purchasing decisions.  Of course, those marketers and retailers are hoping their branded app will displace Red Laser and Amazon Price Check as the consumer’s preferred app in the shopping aisle.  Color me skeptical.

Bottom line: it’s a fascinating time to be a marketer!  Much more on mobile marketing to come from the Council in the next few months.  In particular, mobile is shaping up to play a starring role in our major B2C research initiative this year, which is focused on how the best brands shape the consumer decision journey.   MLC members, reserve your seat now for the premier presentation of the research insights and best practice case studies in New York on May 26^th.

Thus, the speed to scale category is about driving broader consumer engagement with our mobile executions to improve the chance of driving real business results.

Here are the four Speed to Scale traits:

• Borrows cultural equity—you can accelerate uptake of your mobile execution by hooking into universally appealing aspects of culture—sports, music, cinema, games, celebrity and the like.  These are dimensions of culture that we humans get excited about at a deep, psychological level.  Moreover, we like to talk about them – so let your mobile execution borrow some of that equity and social mojo.  Take a look at how Bing tapped into the 100 greatest songs of each year or even how McDonald’s integrated mobile into its Monopoly promotion.
• Orchestrated with paid and earned media—a good rule of thumb is that you ought to spend the equivalent in budget promoting and distributing your mobile execution as what you spend to develop it.  Likely, that means some combination of paid and earned media to drive trial and use of the execution.  Bing did some great work here with its music app, mentioned above.
• Weaves in viral propellants—what mobile execution is worth its salt without some sort of viral or social component?  Table stakes is ensuring your mobile execution is compatible with social media platforms—in other words, it should be easy for consumers to “like” your execution on Facebook or tweet about it.  However, the best mobile executions have viral components woven into their very design.  Retailer H&M has done some clever work here.  Their “swarm to get warm” event triggered a 20% discount off any jacket when 50 consumers checked into an H&M location at one time.  The initiative made inviting friends via Facebook easy, but the real viral firepower came in its Groupon-like deal tipping at 50 participants.
• Promoted with “talkable teaching” (if applicable)—let’s face it, some consumers are still learning how to use basic functions, like SMS, on their mobile phones.  Many more have yet to figure out applications like Foursquare or Instagram.  If your mobile execution calls on your target audience to learn something new, this criterion applies to you.  The best mobile executions do this teaching in a “talkable” way—they employ surprise or serendipity to get consumers talking about how to engage with the execution, which stokes other consumers to want to participate, as well. For example, the Orange County Transport Authority (OCTA) deployed squads of staff wearing “Text 4 Next” t-shirts to bus stops around the county to draw attention to its “Text4Next” mobile initiative.  OCTA posted instructions on Text4Next at its bus stops, and could have stopped there.  But it realized many of its passengers might not immediately get how to input the text for their particular bus, so the on-site staff helped to clear that up, drew attention to the initiative, and got people talking about it.

That rounds out the beta version of the mobile execution criteria.  Again, we welcome feedback and additional ideas.

MLC members, we’ve created specific scoring criteria (and a point system!) that goes with each criteria, so you can grade your mobile executions against a world-class standard. Email me (pspenner@executiveboard.com) if you’d like an advance copy.  We’ll also include it in the Mobile Marketing Resource Center, due to hit the member website at the end of March.