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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s no secret that, for a lot of large organizations, the very nature of business is changing. B2C brands – once happy to blast one-way messages at static demographic targets and watch the dollars roll in – have been and still are embroiled in a transition to new paradigm, that of one-to-one marketing. B2B marketing organizations are just beginning their forays into social, but they’ve been dealing with an equally-challenging phenomenon – that of growing commoditization of business products and the resulting shift towards solutions.

In fact, I’d argue that the shift away from cyclical commodity sales to non-cyclical solutions sales is the bigger of the two changes – it not only required marketing organizations to acquire new skills and staff up, but it tasked them with essentially creating a new market. For B2B marketing organizations, previously relegated to creating brochures and other content for Sales – that was a big shift, and it’s one that many companies are still navigating.

So how are companies making the shift from sales supporters to a more strategic orientation? The first thing the best B2B organizations are doing is taking a hard look at their talent. Is it ready to support a richer, more strategic commercial presence?

That’s exactly what one company, Dow Chemical, did when the company was faced with a mandate to transition its business from a cyclical, commoditized business to a non-cyclical, solutions-oriented one. Realizing that selling solutions required a bit more than providing salespeople with some interesting collateral, the company put together Dow Marketing University – a training resource designed to get its marketing staff ready to take on a radically-different market and challenge. Using principles and data from CEB’s Marketing Excellence Survey – a survey resource designed to test your marketing organization’s attitudes and skills across a range of key marketing disciplines – the company upskilled its staff across two years, driving strategic marketing ability and ultimately, marketing profitability.

How did they do it? Dow, with help from MES, kept three things in mind: Read More »

It’s a perennial complaint we hear from B2B marketers: “We did all this work to put together a great sales tool/piece of collateral/campaign, but Sales refuses to use it! What’s going on?”

Most marketers throw up their hands, call the salespeople a few choice names (“cowboy” is one I can repeat for a family-oriented business blog like Wide Angle) and just start plugging away again, thinking that someday those dastardly cowboys will realize what Marketing can offer. Others get frustrated and quit.

So what seems to be the problem? In our research into Sales/Marketing alignment, we’ve noted two things: first, salespeople reject 80% of the tools Marketing creates for them. 80%! And second, that the most important driver of this phenomenon is that Marketing lacks a real view into the customer/rep dynamic, and that the tools created don’t reflect the realities of that dynamic.

Two segments of our recently-launched Marketer’s Playbook address this divide head-on: Read More »

As I’m sure most know, we at MLC have been knee deep in our 2012 research project for a few months now (check out what it’s about! and register for the meeting!). Roughly speaking, we’re looking at ways marketing organizations can best take advantage of sustainable evolving demand – emphasis on the sustainable. In other words, we’ve surmised that the best thing marketers can do in an era of evolving expectations is not to chase daily fads but is focus on new demand that is long-lasting. Determining sustainability, of course, is a lot easier said than done.

In any case, in the process of looking into what kinds of things marketers can do to identify sustainable demand, we started thinking about what it is, exactly, that marketers do in general. We basically are starting to think that all marketing activities can be filed into one of two buckets: Read More »

Segmentation is one of those things that marketing organizations have to get right. Poorly-designed or outdated segmentation schemes can result in irrelevant marcomms, lost sales, dissatisfied customers and worse. Most marketers consider segmentation a top priority, yet few have reaped the benefits that segmentation can provide. They often struggle to clearly define segmentation objectives, select the right segmentation methods, and execute segmentation across the organization.

When we launched The Marketer’s Playbook, our new resource for marketers looking to get up to speed on modern approaches to the key challenges of the discipline, we knew segmentation had to be a huge part of it. So we put together a resource designed to help marketers do three things, where you’ll hear from companies like LG, Best Buy, Reynolds and Reynolds and FedEx:

Define segmentation objectives. You’ll learn how to gather cross-functional input on segmentation objectives, ensuring that all functions have a say and that segmentation is aligned to functional needs. It’ll also get you buy-in from executives before you begin studying the ways you can segment your customers – something that will avoid a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth down the road.

Selecting segmentation methods. You’ll learn how to select the segmentation method that best fits your organization. Because segmentation models vary in their sophistication, ease of implementation, and resource intensity, there’s no one model that will work for every organization. Our resources will help you pick from a few commonly-used segmentation methods.

Executing segmentation. Once you’ve picked out your method, it’s time to put it in play! You’ll learn how to embed the knowledge you gain from segmentation throughout the organization. Inability to translate segment knowledge into actionable steps for key stakeholders often causes segmentation initiatives to stall, lose momentum, or fail altogether. Our resources will help you prevent segmentation initiatives from breaking down and embed segment voice into the workflows of cross-functional stakeholders.

Please check out our playbook for segmentation, and don’t hesitate to peruse through the whole thing, where you can also learn about topics like thought leadership, performance measurement, and customer understanding.

Insurance is one of the few things you buy hoping never to use. Dollar for dollar, you’d rather avoid mayhem than have Allstate (or your insurer of choice) catch you when you fall.

If we want to understand what makes the best insurance company, it pays to understand how consumers define their relationship to their insurer. Shoulder to cry on? Professional advisor? Or just service provider? Given the fluffy nature of sentiments, the only way we could make this more concrete is to have people tradeoff different sets of characteristics because in a perfect world we all want the cheap plan with extensive coverage that pays every cent while also offering timely advice.

Our particular focus is on health insurance, since flood or car insurance is less universally applicable. The way the exercise is conducted consists of us mixing and matching the insurance characteristics in the background via algorithm while respondents go through the survey picking their favorite plan out of each set of choices presented. By the time they’re done, they have implicitly drawn a preference curve and it tells us the things they care about: Read More »

Last month, Shelley wrote an insightful piece on the possibilities and dangers of using Net Promoter Score, and the comments suggested that NPS may be on the way out.  Common arguments against NPS are that it is too difficult to know customers’ true needs through one question, and that companies should not place as much emphasis on one simple question.

For those of you who don’t deal with customer surveys on a daily basis, Net Promoter Score is a one-question survey (that is often supplemented with other questions) that assesses a company by asking customers: “How likely are you to recommend X Company to a friend or colleague?”  Respondents rate their likelihood or recommending X Company on a scale of 0-10, where 0-6 are “Detractors”, 7-8 are “Passives”, and 9-10 are “Promoters”; to determine a company’s NPS, companies subtract their percentage of “Detractors” from their percentage of “Promoters”.  The system is based on the joint work of Bain & Company, Inc. and Satmetrix.

Even though some are now questioning the value and validity of NPS, many are still using it.  Some companies have even been very successful in aligning themselves around NPS – it has given them an easy way to measure their customers’ happiness with the brand, and they have aligned their whole customer experience around making their customers more likely to recommend their brand.  Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey’s Ultimate Question 2.0 mentions two interesting ways companies have used NPS to boost their brands. Read More »

If you found an oracle and could ask it anything, what would you want to know?  Most of us would go right to life’s great questions, like “What happens when we die?” and “Is that Donald Trump’s real hair?”  But I’ll bet a lot of marketers would also reserve a little time to unlock a few mysteries that hit a little closer to home, namely, “What do my customers want/need/expect from me as a supplier?” and “How can I convince my customers that I am providing something more than just goods or services – and that they should pay more for it?”

In our recent conversations with B2B marketers, we’ve heard a lot about these very questions.  Many feel that there is a competitive edge to be gained through superior customer understanding, but most haven’t yet seen those efforts translate into bottom line results.  Ultimately, the goal is not learning more about customers just for the sake of knowing it, but figuring out those key insights that can shape and inform Marketing and Sales strategy, approaches, and collateral.

From our early work, there seem to be two key elements: Read More »

I’ve picked up on sort of a meta-theme from this year’s SXSW – constructed, perhaps only in my own head, over the course of several panels and conversations. It’s the general idea that marketers need to be less prescriptive and more descriptive – designing brands, campaigns, and interactions that reflect, not shape, consumer behavior. I talked about it a little bit in our post outlining the trends we spotted during the conference, but thought I might expand on it a little further here.

The idea of “humble marketing” is a departure from the normal model of corporate branding and marketing – full of long-term plans, “big ideas”, and top-down implementations that wave at customer centricity but mostly reflect brand legacies, internal pressures, and practitioner biases. The result of such processes are brands that don’t pass the Turing test – they have superficial human-like traits, but once you actually start to interact, you realize that what you’re talking to isn’t human at all.

So what does “humble” mean, in this context? It means brands and marketers that do two things: first, they legitimately realize that they have a lot to learn from the consumer. By that I mean, they don’t just pay lip service to that idea, they literally go into consumer-facing decisions with the idea that the data could say anything. Second, they don’t try to impose much on the consumer, allowing context to dictate how the brand interacts.

The analogy goes like this: Big Idea marketers attribute things to brands, but those things don’t change depending on consumer context. So, he might associate a soda brand with ostentatious luxury (for instance). But when economic circumstances change and ostentatious luxury stops being so popular, maybe the brand loses share or price points migrate south. On the other hand, a brand with a simpler essence (“pleasure”, for instance) is capable of pivoting quickly to new realities, both macro and micro. Pleasure is popular in economic recessions and expansions, it’s something folks associate with good times and also something they long for when they’re sad. Just about everyone likes pleasure, and brands can take the motif of pleasure and translate it into messages for just about every segment.

But doing this requires most brands – beyond the classics, like Coke, Chevy Trucks,  etc. – to seriously rethink their positions in the market, to abandon preconceived notions of who the customer is and what they care about, and to recommit to planning the kind of brand that can survive in all contexts. That’s the challenge, I think, facing most marketers; it’s one thing to stand on a stage and talk about human brands, but it’s quite another to make them actionable.