Marketers have always found ways to grab consumers’ attention to get their message across.  But attention is scarcer than ever – given messaging overload (ad fatigue), DVR uptake (ad skipping) and the rise of multi-tasking (lower attention/focus in general).

The latest tactics for breaking through increasingly high barriers to attention all have some serious limitations: Read More »

Wouldn’t you love to know how Microsoft, Cisco and National Instruments demonstrate the value of their social media efforts in a B2B environment?

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 marketing 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.

A marketer at a member company recently summed up his current situation as follows: “We’re awash in data, but short on information.” A difficult challenge to be sure, but not a unique one.  A recent Unica survey found “measurement, analysis, and learning” was marketers’ top bottleneck and “turning data into action” as their top organizational issue.  And according to a February 2010 Economist article, the amount of digital information increases tenfold every five years.  This data supernova presents obvious issues for CIOs and CTOs dealing with server capacity and security protocols, but it also clearly impacts marketers struggling to plug into and make sense of the right data streams in order to infuse decision-making with fact-based evidence. Read More »

In its battle with online sellers, the brick-and-mortar retail industry has refined its value proposition, offering customers more of a reason to come to the store. A key part of enabling this changed value prop is technology, so we decided to look at a few new shopping technologies that are making a splash in the world of retail marketing: Read More »

I’m in Boston this week attending the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference, billed as “The Global Event for Real Time Marketers”.  There’s certainly no shortage of hype and hyperbole. My early observation, about four days into the five day conference, is that marketers may be getting a bit ahead of themselves in terms of their ability to evolve in the direction of real-time.

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: Read More »

Editor’s note: We put this up (and in our member newsletter) prior to last night’s news that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had passed away. We’ll have thoughts on his legacy later this week.

The following is a guest post from Robert van Alstyne, a media and technology analyst with our sister program, Iconoculture.

It’s a testament to technology’s ascendant role in pop culture that today’s Apple press conference had more consumer buzz than any new TV show this fall season. With media-saturated consumers’ tastes increasingly splintered, gadget lust is now one of the last common denominators uniting the masses.

Heading into today’s press conference, professional pundits and John Q. Public speculated wildly, debating what new treats Apple would unveil. Would we get an iPhone 5 or just a new iPhone 4? Prior to the event, rumors of a slimmer, 3X-faster iPhone 5 reached a crescendo. By the time new Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage this morning, online chatter had reached such a pitch that one colleague speculated on Twitter, “I wonder, did America stop what it was doing in, say, 1953, when the next model *car* was announced?”

In a move that disappointed some true believers, there was no iPhone 5 announcement, “just” the iPhone 4S, which will hit stores October 14. The new phone still boasts impressive hardware advancements. Among the iPhone 4S’ selling points are the ability to switch intelligently between two antennas to transmit and receive (thereby doubling data download speed), along with a serious camera upgrade. Initial online reaction was “meh,” but we’d be shocked if the 4S doesn’t sell extraordinarily well, just like its predecessor.

Right now, Apple’s main selling point is its image as a cutting-edge company, so the product details matter relatively little to the average consumer. By tirelessly turning their brand into an essential emblem of digital savvy, Apple has carved out both a cult-like following and an ever-broadening base of users. Apple’s old-guard faithful might be disappointed, and they might not “need” the latest iteration of the iPhone. But whatever the specs, in a growing number of consumers’ eyes, Apple’s latest remains a cherished status symbol, broadcasting to all that they’re in step with our fast-moving information-driven world.

MLC members, for more great Iconoculture insights, check out the selected pieces we publish each week on the latest consumer trends.

Crowdsourcing in B2C marketing is not new. The most prominent example—the immensely popular fan-created commercials for Doritos as part of its Crash the Super Bowl campaign. Probably taking a leaf out of Doritos’ book, Chevrolet has also announced plans to follow a similar strategy.

However, such stories should not mislead marketers to believe that crowdsourcing is a quick way to achieve amazing results. In contrast, reaching out to a large average crowd can actually overwhelm marketers with the sheer number of ideas they receive, and the time and effort in sifting through those ideas can be much larger than engaging an agency to do the job. Moreover, the ideas can also turn out to be completely off-track and unusable.

That said, the good news is—some new agency models have evolved over the last 3-4 years that help to conduct, what can be called, “targeted crowdsourcing” or “expertsourcing.” Here, instead of broadcasting a project brief to masses, only select few specialists are chosen to do the assignment.

Here are some examples of such models: Read More »

By Ana Lapter

Radical changes in the consumer, technology and business landscapes are forcing executives to rethink their approaches to marketing strategies. But successful execution of these new strategies calls for an adequate pool of marketing talent.

Senior executives who are effective at talent management can generate up to 7% more in revenue than those less-focused on developing staff skills. Unfortunately, more than 80% of executives are ineffective at talent management.  Part of the reason is that typical approaches to crafting future talent plans are infused with executive bias, as reflected in the adage “Old habits die hard”.  Acknowledging this problem, one member told us that “What got us here won’t get us there,” suggesting the need for new skills and capabilities road mapping.

We’ve been studying the evolution of marketing talent for the last few weeks, and trying to summarize my recent talent-related conversations with numerous MLC members, I came up with a list of 3 key competency areas that are necessary for the Marketing function of the future: Read More »

Generation Y is a hard crowd to please.  Being a Millenial myself, I know that our generation never stops demanding more from the world around us.  Over the past two decades, no part of our lives has ever been static.  Our music tracks blasted from cassettes, then CDs, then mp3s.   Our online chatter accelerated from dial-up to DSL to cable.  As students, we took notes on paper notebooks, then laptops, and now tablets.

Of course, few things are more important for a female Millenial than shopping.  Now I haven’t been the most ardent shopper amongst my friends and peers (and not just the ladies, mind you), but I have been an ardent observer of their passion.  From what I’ve personally noticed, shopping, too, underwent a layered transformation, one that is particularly significant to marketers. Read More »

Even though the weather and leaves are just beginning to turn, and we still have to get through Columbus Day, Halloween and Thanksgiving before turning our thoughts to visions of sugarplums and eight crazy nights, marketers are hard at work figuring out ways to close the year off strong with a good holiday season.

But how should they do it, while stengthening their brand positions for the year to come? We’ve got a few tips below:

Find ways to lighten the load. For kids, the holiday season is a magical, wonderful time of presents, candy, and sometimes magical elves. For adults, though, it’s probably among the most stressful times of the year – even if the stress is likely to pay off in the form of fun with family and friends.

Great brands recognize that not only is the season particularly hectic, the very act of brand interaction might be, too. Finding ways to save consumers time and money, as well as raising the chances they’ll make the right choice when it comes to gifts, can pay dividends throughout the rest of the year.

So how does this play out practically? Offer your consumers some measures of assurance that they’re making the right choices. Some brands we’ve studied have done this through transparent buying guides – presenting consumers with a range of criteria and offering relevant gift ideas for each – while others have gone the technology route, using social networks to make gift recommendations.

Clarify the brand promise – and deliver it, 100%. There’s no better time to make sure brand promises are airtight – and delivery consistent – than the holidays. The uptick in shopping offers brands an opportunity to make a positive imprint on the consumer, but if crowd-weary shoppers aren’t satisfied with what they get, you may suffer the consequences the rest of the year.

MLC has a wealth of material designed to help companies consistently deliver their brand promises: for instance, here’s how Exxon Mobile motivated employees to consistent brand delivery, how Starbucks ensured consistent brand delivery across all touchpoints – human and not human, and how we recommend brands ensure consistent brand delivery across geographies and segments.

Find avenues of emotional differentiation. Here’s the place where brands – particularly consumer and retail brands – have a golden opportunity to set themselves apart from the competition: finding areas of shared values and ways to emotionally differentiate themselves from competitors. We’ve found, for instance, that brands that align with consumers around emotional values perform at a much higher level than brands that emphasize functional differentiators.

Luckily, emotions are running high during the holiday season, and there are a number of brands that have particularly strong associations with the holidays. Macy’s, for instance, is associated in my mind with the holidays: their sponsorship of the Thanksgiving Day parade and the movie “Miracle on 34th St.” form that association in my mind, and I’m much more likely to shop there during the holidays than at any other time.

Understand and fit into seasonal routines. Routines shift a bit during the holidays for a lot of people and families. I’d say that, on average, one is more likely to bake cookies on a random Tuesday night during December than in other months; one is more likely to visit a mall in December than in other times, one is more likely to drive around looking at tacky Christmas lights – all sorts of things.

Brands that unearth subtle shifts in consumer routines during the holidays can capitalize big on them. For instance: there’s the classic case of General Mills’ Betty Crocker brand figuring out that parents often spent the first week of the holidays doing nothing special, then felt guilty about doing so. So the brand targeted cookie-baking in the second week of the holidays, figuring this was an easy way to assuage parental guilt about not being festive enough.

MLC members, how are you shifting your brand communications mix for the holidays? Let us know in comments below.