Throughout last month’s ANA TV & Everything Video Forum, leading marketers and media experts repeated one phrase over and over:

“It’s time to rethink the idea of TV!”

In my previous posts, I had begun that process by exploring TV’s comeback as well as its development as a “new” medium.  Now it’s time to go further and rethink TV’s media role. Read More »

I’m sure most of you have heard about the eye-opening stats from the Super Bowl by now around social media – a couple of the most popular:

• The highest single event tracking ever at 2.1 million people streaming the game
• The new Twitter record of 12,223 tweets per second)

Here’s some that may not be as familiar:

• Half of the Super Bowl ads were Shazam-able (that is, you could download associated songs and content with the Shazam app)
• Over 1 million people Shazam-ed those ads!

It’s no news that brands are increasingly using social to leverage interactivity – we’re all familiar with facebook applications or twitter campaigns.  However, only a few innovative companies have begun leveraging social TV.  (Strictly defined, social TV is the convergence of social media and TV.)  This topic took center stage at the 2012 ANA TV & Everything Video Forum.

The key takeaway: if brands don’t seek to engage TV audiences in conjunction with other media and devices, they will lose.

Ready to start getting on board?  Well, there are two main ideas that every marketer should keep in mind: Read More »

Last week I attended the ANA’s annual “TV & Everything Video Forum” in New York City.  The conference explored the use of video across screens and devices, including mobile, internet, traditional TV, and more, between promotional spiels and a blazing performance of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (yup, Cyndi Lauper made an appearance, and clad head-to-toe in black leather).

The general consensus?  TV is back on track. There are two things that traditional TV still does incredibly well: it brings together sight, sound, and motion to engage customers on a large screen, and it creates unmatched real-time reach (after all, we don’t TiVO the Oscars or the Super Bowl!).

The proof is in the numbers: video consumption is rising, and TV still attracts twice as many viewers as the next medium (internet).  Advertisers are well aware of this – although they’re still not completely satisfied with traditional TV placements, 21% believe that TV ads have become more effective (up from 7% just two years ago).  And more than a third of marketers are planning to spend more in TV advertising in 2012. Read More »

Consumers’ lives are changing faster than ever due to new technologies, economic realities, and family structures.  Consequently, marketers are struggling to keep their offerings relevant and timely.  Many are mining data to better track and understand consumer behavior and preferences.  However, they often are portrayed as big bad wolves threatening customer privacy.

It’s the ultimate catch-22 for marketers: consumers are annoyed by irrelevant targeting, so marketers dig for more information to improve relevance.  But consumers get creeped out when offers are too relevant, and usually don’t want to share much anyways.  So what’s the key to finding a balance?

Here at the MLC, we recently surveyed over 6,000 consumers about various factors – including privacy – that drive their decision-making across several industries.  The results revealed some interesting patterns that might make the privacy problem a little less scary.  I’d like to share some highlights with you here.  Important to note: price was almost always more important to consumers than any other consideration, including privacy. Read More »

Yesterday afternoon, I watched eMarketer’s recent webinar on measuring social media success.  What particularly caught my eye were the top challenges that marketers face when managing their social media marketing efforts: measuring the ROI, making the case for investment, integration/measurement with other marketing channels, getting the right talent, and deciding who does what.

This list was eerily reminiscent of the results from MLC’s Marketer Quick Poll from a couple of months ago.  Only in our case, we had asked marketers about their top challenges on the data management frontier.  If these challenges are so similar between such different subjects, then perhaps it’s time to reposition and take a step back to look at the broader marketing environment.

The easiest big-picture framework that came to me was the traditional supply-and-demand curves.  For simplicity’s sake, we can consider the consumer market for baby food.

Assume we hold the supply curve constant.  To increase the amount of consumer surplus under the demand curve, we can do one of two things:

1. Try to make our captured demand hug the full consumer demand closer.  (Gerber battles Baby’s Best!)
2. Attempt to shift both demand curves further out along the supply curve.  (Expand the economic pie – for instance: Gerber using analytics to discover that older adults without teeth were an underserved market)

Most marketers would agree that achieving both would be ideal, and if they had to pick, they’d aim for the latter.  But if we look at actual practices, most marketing departments are focusing their social media and analytics efforts in the first one.

Their thought process might go something like this:

Sure I’d like to just burst through the innovation bubble and find a whole new untouched consumer population…

But we don’t have the innovative power, and it certainly won’t be easy justifying riskier, creative ventures to the rest of the organization.

Besides, the consumer landscape is changing so fast, I’m having a hard-enough time just keeping up with my competitors!

So let’s just work on speeding up current activities and getting as much consumer information as possible.  Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and come across something that will push innovation forward!

However, while aiming for “real-time” relevance has its merits, it may not be the smartest way to secure customer value and loyalty.  Consider the following: are marginal increases in market share sustainable?  Are consumer preferences really changing so quickly, or does it just seem that way with recent technological/analytical advances?

We’ve recently been thinking that focusing on speed may lead to smaller marketing improvements with fleeting market advantage.   Keep an eye out for our survey in February, when we’ll be gauging Marketing Agility (speed, flexibility, and all the factors that represent entrepreneurial readiness).  Participating companies will get a benchmarking report.  Email me if you’re interested in taking the survey or learning more: yzhang@executiveboard.com

Some of you may already know that this year, one of the MLC’s key goals is to help marketers activate their information to generate better insights and improve decision-making.  One key perspective is relates to customer understanding: most organizations already use a variety of market research techniques to better understand their customers.  However, even when they can gather quality information, they have difficulty producing effective business insights.  Why are marketers struggling here?  The answer can be pretty complex, so for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just look at customer understanding within a new product development context.

Traditional research methods – including win/loss analyses, voice of the customer, etc. – don’t usually identify actual problems that customers are trying to solve.  The information is mostly limited to existing offers, revealing little about how customers actually derive value from them.  Then there are the non-product-focused techniques, like focus groups or anthropological research.  Unfortunately, analysis of this type of information often involves a level of “inference,” which means that the resulting insights are open for speculation.  As one might expect, interpretation discrepancies so early in the NPD process can lead to disappointing new product launches.

Let’s see how the marketing team at Reynolds & Reynolds (R&R) is able to overcome these two shortcomings.

First, R&R implements a rigorous methodology, surveying their customers to understand their:

• Jobs – individual activities that combined make up a business workflow
• Desired outcomes – measures of success when completing a job

This allows R&R to move away from a product-centric perspective towards a focus on their customers’ goals and success metrics, giving them a better understanding how their customers actually value their offerings.

Next, they survey their customers again to filter those desired outcomes by importance and satisfaction to identify which are important but underserved.  These then become focal points that align the solutions innovation community, streamlining the NPD process.

The results? In what was considered to be a highly saturated market segment, R&R’s first implementation of the jobs-outcomes methodology was extremely successful.  They uncovered nearly 400 high-importance, low-satisfaction customer goals, leading to a sevenfold increase in the number of solution-worthy opportunities.

Talk about a way to make your customers work for you!

MLC members, to learn more about how R&R did all of the above, read the full case study here.

Americans (and maybe some of our non-American friends) all know the familiar gameshow scene of the Price is Right: Bob Barker (or Drew Carey, if you prefer the new guy) inviting crazed contestants to guess the price of everything from oatmeal to cars to exotic trips to Fiji.  And as the title says, the focal point is price, price, price.

Outside of the gameshow arena, consumers are arguably just as obsessed with price, and this attitude has become a pain point for many a sales representative.  How does a sales rep keep the conversation away from price when that’s all that a customer is thinking about?

Teach them something else that’s right.

Let’s look at a case on truck driver engagement and retention to see how Marketing at Volvo was able to deal with this issue.

Initially, no matter what sales reps went in with…

“We have a better product!  We have more features!  We can address your needs!”

… the customer always brought the conversation back to price.

“Well… a truck is a truck, but hey maybe you can throw in some free chrome bumpers!”

Volvo convened a small group of mid- to upper-level directors in a workshop to brainstorm and develop a new message for the sales reps.  MLC members, read more about the key elements to this workshop here.

They recognized an opportunity to improve driver management for their customers…

“Customers are underestimating how much unsatisfied drivers are costing them.”

… and crafted a pitch that teaches customers the value of Volvo solutions.

“Instead of telling them how our 2,092 square inch windshield will reduce the likelihood of an accident, let’s talk to them about the costs associated with driver turnover.”

Notice that instead of leading with the value of product features and focusing on known customer needs, the new approach leads with issue(s) costing customers money and telling them something they don’t already know about themselves.

And voila, you’ve shown your customers that the price is not the only thing that’s right when it comes to your business!

MLC members, read the full case study here.

The main benefit of advertising via mass media –its broad reach– is also its downside: a high percentage of wasted impressions on non-target customers. The precision that marketers can now achieve in targeting has far outgrown traditional media planning and media buys.

Marketing at Kimberly-Clark found a way to create a more effective communications plan by making principled shifts in media spend.  The secret?  Rather than beginning with mass media and then making other investments if budget allows, they plan media touchpoints outward from the consumer first.

Kimberly-Clark begins by identifying a clear overarching creative concept called an “Engagement Idea” that drives touchpoint selection.  A well-developed Engagement Idea also provides necessary support and rationale for initial budget allocation into nontraditional media channels.  It develops the “Engagement Idea” through four steps:

1. Understand the brand – Ensure comprehensive knowledge of the brand’s positioning and the consumer-centric rationale behind it.
2. Brainstorm ways to drive engagement around the brand– Use consumer feedback to find potentially resonant ways to represent the brand.
3. Screen potential ideas for flexibility – Test the Engagement Idea for flexibility (i.e. it can last for two to three years’ worth of campaigns) and breadth (i.e. it doesn’t directly prescribe specific touchpoints)
4. Identify touchpoint roles – Determine which touchpoints are best suited to conveying the Engagement Idea as well as any others needed to drive people towards those touchpoints.

To get Marketing to accept this new approach and the ideas produced, Marketing also takes an aggressive sales approach to convince internal audiences to accept nontraditional touchpoint mixes.

In Jack Johnson’s first US hit, he sang “I want to turn the whole thing upside down… I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found.”  Turn your media planning upside-down, and maybe you’ll find a more efficient media mix.

MLC members, read in detail how Kimberly-Clark reversed its media marketing strategy and earned positive returns in brand revenue, cost-effeciency and resonance.

Business intelligence initiatives are complex, cross-functional processes that are only as strong as the weakest link in an organization.  What might that weakest link be?   Well, if numbers tell us anything, the weakest link may well be marketing analytics.  A recent IBM study reveals that over 70% of CMOs feel unprepared to deal with the explosion of big data.  And our own research finds that – of all internal functions – people in Marketing have the least confidence in their own data (perhaps a problem with perception as much as with the data itself).  This is also the view put forward by Gert Laursen, head of Customer Intelligence at Maersk Line in his book, Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence Beyond Reporting .

Mr. Laursen’s latest book, Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers, tackles marketing analytics head on.  He explains a pragmatic “top-down” approach for determining what data to use, which algorithm to select, and how to implement the results.

Intrigued by his insights, we took some time last week (a windy Friday afternoon in Denmark) to chat with Mr. Laursen about the role of data and analytics in marketing.  Here are a few interesting nuggets from the conversation: Read More »

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

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

However, two things are often missing: Read More »