It’s officially 2012, and, again this year, we’re hearing “2012 is the year of mobile commerce“. We heard it in 2011 too. Did we hear it in 2010? Yep. In fact, as far back as 2007, pundits and observers have been prophesizing that the days of whipping out our phones to pay for all sorts of retail sundries are just around the corner.

First, I think it’s probably important to get some definitions right. As the Forbes link above says, I think it’s fair to say that mobile-enabled e-commerce does not equal mobile commerce, at least strictly speaking. When you buy a book from Amazon on your iPad, you’re not engaging in mobile commerce per se – you’re using an e-commerce portal adapted for your mobile device. “Mobile commerce” is probably best described as shopping that takes advantage of unique properties of mobile devices.

So, why doesn’t it ever seem to happen – and when it does, why does the development in the space seem to happen so slowly? Read More »

At MLC, we’ve been harping on innovation for a few years now – why its important for marketers to be active participants – if not leaders – in the innovation process, bringing to bear important consumer perspectives that only they can offer. We hope you were listening, because for many industries, the time is coming fast where innovation won’t be a luxury but a necessity to stay afloat.

For an example, look no further than the auto industry. The recession years saw a few automakers nearly go out of business, while others, like Hyundai, Kia, and Subaru, posted double-digit increases in sales and market share – albeit in a seriously depressed market. In particular, Hyundai accomplished this by offering an excellent price-to-value proposition and with a few catchy campaigns that engendered a ton of consumer trust, like their Hyundai Assurance program – which allowed buyers to walk away from their car loans if they lost their income or were disabled during the term. Read More »

If previous “ages” of marketing could be described as eras of Big Brands, or Madison Avenue, this age of marketing can probably just as well be described as the era of New Channels – a time when one of Marketing’s principal jobs is to navigate new communications technologies and the shifting consumer behavior that results. It’s something that lies at the heart of what marketers tell us about agility – the subject of this year’s B2C research – marketers and their organizations need to be prepared for what’s next at all times.

It’s the organizational part that’s more difficult, though – people naturally get stuck in routines, are averse to change, and executives are loath to take risks on projects that have uncertain chances of success. We’ve collected our best practices in getting organizations to adapt in our Make the Case to Invest in Social Media challenge center, and most of the lessons there hold true for channels like mobile, as well.

With that in mind, we also thought we’d take a second look at an interview we did a few years back with Susan Lavington, former SVP of Marketing at USA Today. She was at USA Today during the heyday of social adaption, and led that paper – a progressive one, by print journalism standards – through a difficult transition to social.

MLC members can read the interview in its entirety.

As I’m guessing everyone is aware of by now, MLC’s B2C team is currently knee-deep in our 2012 research project. This year, we’re looking into analytics and “Big Data” – a space where there seems to be a lot of potential (and a lot of hype) but not too much in the way of best practices or frameworks for moving forward.

So we’re currently trying to tease out, exactly, what people are using analytics for, and what ultimate goals those actions feed into. When we’re on the phone with members, overwhelmingly we’re hearing that data brings enterprises closer to the consumer, leading to all sorts of better outcomes: more resonant marcomms, higher margins through more effective price discrimination, and, for some companies, better products that arise through access to protected, proprietary data assets (like Nike+).

I could imagine two ways that data might feed into customer centricity (whether it’s helping or hurting). Story number one more or less goes: we as a company had very little idea who our customers were, what they liked, how they socialized and what kind of products they bought from others that they could be buying from us. When we integrated advanced marketing analytics and unstructured data, the numbers told us more about our customers than we already knew, and we became more customer-centric.

The other story goes: we as a company had very little idea who our customers were, and therefore we integrated big data and advanced analytics. But we couldn’t choose which data to use, and our analysts and marketers got caught up in a never-ending cycle of analysis paralysis. Moreover, thinking about the consumer as an abstract concept in data led to people forgetting the importance of experience and observation. In the process, we lost sight of the softer, qualitative ways that we learned about customers, and ended up becoming less customer-centric.

Which of these is more plausible? I’m not sure, but my gut says it’s the second story. I can count the number of companies with great, consumer-apparent uses of data on my fingers and toes, and analytics vendors have bigger appetites than that; there are surely hundreds of companies out there with data on their hands of varying effectiveness.

So, we thought we’d bring the question to you. Answer the poll below to let us know how you feel about data and analytics’ role in customer-centricity. Want to add some details? Let us know in the comments section.

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With social media moving towards the maturity phase in a number of big companies, we’re finding that more and more members are looking for formal plans from their social media teams – detailed ideas about what the team will do in a channel in a given year.

That might work (and be necessary) for TV, a channel where ad buys have to be coordinated months in advance and audience preferences don’t change too much. But for social media, where channels change near-daily and audience behavior is still in flux? We think companies should be focused primarily on experimentation and flexibility – and that plans should optimize to those goals.

Our Social Media Plan on a Page will help get you there – it’s a five-step method for creating a world-class social media experimentation strategy, one that’s grounded in enterprise priorities and audience preferences. Here’s what you’ll do:

Ground strategy in business objectives. Pick – and fully understand –  your company’s 2-5 growth priorities for the year. This guards against wasting time and money by choosing projects that don’t mesh with enterprise-wide priorities.

Assess your audience dynamics. Dig deep, and understand how and why your target audience consumes social media. Make sure you have an idea of where consumption might be headed in the future by identifying your lead users and examining their behaviors.

Identify your strategic opportunities. Explore how social media can help your company accentuate its strengths, as well as meet customer needs in ways that are difficult for competitors to replicate.

Select the highest-potential experiments. Determine which near-term experiments in social media will help position your company to take advantage of longer-term strategic opportunities in social media.

Measure your social media efforts. Use a “Return on Objectives” approach to assess if and how your social media efforts are driving business results.

MLC members, you can download the full Social Media Plan on a Page template and get started on your social plan today.

As detailed in our decision simplicity work from last summer, using trusted brand advisors can help build a brand.  These brand advocates help consumers relate to the brand, and they have much more credibility than other branded communications.  This trusted advice, along with helping consumers learn about your brand and weigh their options, simplifies decisions for consumers; these simpler decisions make them more likely to have brand intent, to follow through on that intent, to repurchase, and to recommend the products to their friends.

But many brands struggle with the risk involved when using consumers to market the brand.  After all, giving consumers the license to share their thoughts on your brand allows them to share the bad along with the good.  In addition, it can be hard to select the right people to represent the brand.

Ford tackled these challenges to launch the U.S. model of the Ford Fiesta by using consumer advisors, or “agents.”  To ensure that both consumers and the brand could trust the agents, Ford implemented a rigorous selection process to ensure good brand fit and social media reach.  Ford selected a very diverse group of agents, so most consumers in the Fiesta’s target demographic can find agents like them.

A larger struggle for most brands, though, is giving up control over what the consumer advisors say.  Ford knew it needed to balance the need for some brand control with the need to generate authenticity by giving agents uncensored speech, so they assigned monthly missions to give some structure to the agents’ experiences. Ford then allowed the agents to use their own blogs, tweets, and YouTube channels to tell their stories in their own words, pictures, and videos.

In addition to providing structure for the agents, Ford further leveraged these missions by selecting some that highlighted the car’s features.  For example, one mission had one agent drive until his car ran out of gas, showcasing the car’s high gas mileage; other missions included turning the car into an ice-cream truck (showing off a large amount of trunk and storage space) and taking a road trip (to demonstrate its comfort over long distances).

Using the agents to tell the brand’s story had really positive results: Ford generated the same name awareness for the Fiesta as the Ford Edge and Flex had after two years of traditional advertising at just 10% the cost of a traditional media campaign.

After seeing such great success in the United States, Ford adopted the campaign for India.  MLC members, click here to read about how Ford used the agents to generate brand interest in an emerging market.

The US economy might be improving, but business leaders are still walking a tightrope: budget pressures and the increased cost of failure have led to buyers scrutinizing purchases more than ever before – both as individuals and in group buying settings.

Part of this has to do with greater information availability – customers are educating themselves about products and solutions before they ever see a rep, and, as such, are in a better place to make more thorough and deliberate decisions about what they buy. Time pressures have led business leaders to spend less time with reps, as well, reducing the amount of messaging purchasers absorb prior to the buying decision.

But one important element of buyer scrutiny is fear: fear that the solution will fail or not work as advertised, and that their key metrics – or, even worse, their careers – will take the hit. And who can blame them? In today’s networked world, the cost of failure is a lot higher than it once was.

Autodesk, a 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software company, solved the problem using a purpose-built online community that connects credible customers to qualified leads, enabling customers to assuage the risk-oriented fears of the prospects. Using a variety of incentives for existing customers, the online forum enables conversations across customer groups. The best conversations are converted to product messaging – helping bring “social proof” into the company’s marcomm efforts.

MLC members, for more on this solution, check out the full case.

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

A lot of folks have made New Year’s resolutions to stay more on top of developments in marketing and related fields – I know I have. Obviously, one of the best ways is to keep following this blog; but while you’re not doing that, check out some of these important new books:

Thinking, Fast and Slow. Just when you thought the cognitive-science fad in business circles was wearing out, Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman releases what is likely to be considered his magnum opus on the way people think and make decisions, particularly commercial ones.

In general, I think marketers intellectually know that consumers are not rational and will often make unexpected choices, but our models often assume a rational or quasi-rational consumer. I think that, in some respects, this book will help folks truly re-think what drives commercial behavior.

The Filter Bubble. Here’s one that describes a phenomenon marketers are (in part) responsible for: the splintering of society made possible by long-tail affiliations and the internet, and the resulting “bubble” most people find themselves in when it comes to news, information and products.

This is an important phenomenon that really does limit the kind of serendipity that drives a lot of product adoption and preference switching, and it’s worth looking in-depth at author Eli Pariser’s argument. His examples are primarily from the world of politics, but the parallels are clear: when algorithms and social circles control what one is exposed to, serendipity dies.

Steve Jobs. I’ll be honest – I’ve only just picked this one up, and I’m not quite sure I have well-developed thoughts on what the book has to offer folks. I have read a number of excerpts from the book, around the time it was released – and I can say that they paint a picture of an incredibly enigmatic leader, the kind whom we’re not likely to see again any time soon.

I think, if anything, the big takeaway from this book will be just how reliant Apple was in its early days on Jobs’ genius, and how other companies that compare their innovation and design acumen to Apple’s are likely chasing unicorns.

The Challenger Sale. You know we couldn’t write a post about the best recent business books without plugging our own. Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, both of our sister program for sales executives, have a great new book out explaining how the relationship sales approach is becoming less effective, and how the best sales reps for the new environment are those that don’t acquiesce to the customer’s every demand, and who push back and remain in control of the sale.

The book teaches executives how to implement a Challenger sales strategy in their organization, and even includes great information on how marketers can help enable Challenger selling. Definitely worth a look.

Banks and other financial companies have long-since taken notice: having a mobile presence is a giant boost to customer satisfaction and retention. How giant? Well, to grab a few anecdotes from a study that our sister program TowerGroup did for Accenture, banks experienced returns of 300% and 270% on their mobile investments, and one European bank experienced annual customer growth rate of 60%, partially due to expanded mobile capabilities. The study that TowerGroup did analyzed 10 banks seen as leaders in the mobile space – notably, only a few were American banks – and, in each, mobile delivered significant returns.

Part of this strikes me as catch-up growth: for awhile, there were significant differences in the mobile offerings between various competing banks, here in the US. Just about any bank of size offers a few standard mobile features: balance check, transfers between same-bank accounts, bill pay – features that more or less mirror the offerings from online banking platforms. Now that the major players in the market have more or less adapted similar mobile platforms, I’d expect that the explosive returns TowerGroup found might not be as common as they once were.

To continue driving results and returns from mobile banking, then, banks are going to have to start getting innovative. I think that answering these two questions are a great place to start: Read More »