Happy New Year!  December and January are common times for people to reflect on the year that was and make predictions about the year that will be.  The B2B prognosticators have been out in full force.  Some of them take the easy route, proclaiming 2012 as the year of mobile marketing or the year of content marketing (uh, 2009 called, it wants its title back).  Among the more creative titles I came across: 2012 as the year of “preference-driven multichannel marketing breakthroughs” (that one really rolls off the tongue).   But what do those in the trenches see on the horizon for the coming few years?  To find out, we went ahead and asked them directly.

At the end of last year we conducted a survey of 92 B2B marketers asking them to evaluate some of the big changes looming on the horizon.  From the list of 14 potential shifts threatening to rock marketers’ reality, five emerged as holding the greatest potential for impact on business results (from the survey takers’ perspective).  They were: Read More »

Ah, New Year’s – the time when we step back, reassess, and resolve to do better in the coming 365 days. Most New Year’s resolutions are pretty predictable – stop smoking, lose 20 pounds, finally set up that household budget – but what should marketers, specifically, be thinking about their marketing startegy for the coming year? Based on our conversations, we came up with a few resolutions we’re hearing: Read More »

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.

It’s almost time to say goodbye to 2011, and to things that worried us this year. Judging from our conversations, many of you spent the year tweaking your customer segmentation strategies. If only segmenting was as simple as they teach in Marketing 101! The problem marketers face with textbook-ish methods of segmentation is that they’re, well, suited to the textbook world.

While segmentation can be approached in many ways, some of MLC’s members have evolved best-in-class winning segmentation strategies that have propelled them to success. Presented below are a couple of strategies our members have used for customer segmentation and consumer segmentation. The key take-away, as you read through these examples is that these are simple to enforce, yet innovatively different ways to segments your customers and consumers. Read More »

MLC’s B2C team is in the midst of its annual research project, and this year we’re focusing on Big Data. In the process of figuring out why organizations have trouble making sense of unstructured data streams, one of the biggest themes is “marketer skill”. We’re hearing time and again from marketing and analytics leaders that decision-making processes are biased against the inclusion of data, in part because individual marketers aren’t comfortable with it – they place too little weight on it, for instance, or they endow it with magical properties and expect it to remove all the subjectivity from their work. The result is sub-optimal decisions.

That got me generally interested in the idea of marketing training – how do you teach a group of marketers, whose job is notoriously nuanced and imprecise, to do their jobs better? To see more of the market, and in a more detailed way?

In any case, it might turn out that training marketers to handle data better won’t make marketing organizations more fact-based – we’re not sure, and it’ll take a lot more interviews and thought on our part to figure out the challenges here. But I wanted to highlight some of our most popular marketing training and development resources, just in case you’re on the same path. Here are a few steps to building a better marketer: Read More »

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.

By Chris Frank, a former marketer at Microsoft and the author of a new book on decision making.

We have become a world of data addicts. But with more data comes the feeling of, “How do I make sense of all this? Can’t we break this down into a handful of simple points?” Critical questions about market demand, customer buying behavior, subscriber acquisition, brand positioning and your product’s roadmap are great. However, the interesting discussion comes to a screeching halt when the data arrives. Instead of being a well-arranged piece of music, it is a mash-up of sounds. The volume drowns the substance.

Data Rehab

Information is essential to making intelligent decisions, but more often than not, it simply overwhelms us. The 24/7 data explosion around us is both troubling and addictive. Consider that this year, The Economist estimates we will create 1,200 exabytes of data or more than 22 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. That’s eight times the amount in 2005 and the annual volume is increasing geometrically.  The question isn’t how to stop the deluge, but how to get real value from it. How do you find the truly essential nuggets of information and use them with confidence to effectively grow your business and distinguish yourself in your company?

The answer, ironically enough, is found in asking questions. The smartest person in the room is the one that knows the questions to ask to separate the wheat from the chaff. This leads to discovering relevant facts, developing insights and delivering them with impact. Adapted from a new book, “Drinking From the Fire Hose”, below are three questions to ask yourself whenever you are suffering from information overload: Read More »

Want to get a peek at what B2B marketing leaders are spending their money on in 2012? Look no further than our 2011 Marketing Investment Benchmarks.

Here are the big four headline trends for spend this year:

Read More »

As marketers, we’re doing a lot to get closer to our customers. It’s partly because we want to improve customer service and sell better to them – tailor messaging, that sort of thing – but it’s also because we want to do a better job of designing the offering to their needs. But what’s much more difficult to accomplish is making customer insight a key driver of strategic internal processes, an asset that animates key decisions across the firm.

Facing a mismatch between internal processes and voice of the customer, health care products company Cardinal Health had to do just that. Looking at sales data, the company’s marketers realized that customers – seeking to dampen costs and not seeing the value in Cardinal Health’s complete offering – often purchased one element of what was intended to be an integrative solutions deal. Not good! Read More »

It’s no secret these days that B2B sales requires a lot more consensus than it did before. You might have a great relationship with one buyer who can push through a small-ticket purchase on his or her own, but what happens when you want to increase your share of the customer’s wallet, or move up to higher-level solutions deals that involve more than one functional silo?

That’s one of the questions Sales is asking itself, as recessionary habits persist in the buying centers of big organizations. The dynamics of internal buying centers are too complicated to be solved with a single solution, but one way Marketing can help is to make sure those buyers that love you – the ones still receptive to “relationship selling” – are equipped to make the case around the organization.

That’s exactly what Iron Mountain, the document management company, did when presented with a similar problem. They noted that typical Iron Mountain buyers – typically too junior to engage in strategic-level relationships – faced three obstacles that stood in the way of advocating for their solutions internally: Read More »