Marketing leaders are grappling with some tricky questions these days. They need to adapt to a more digitized, fragmented and faster-changing consumer landscape, but with limited budgets they have to make a lot of trade-offs.

The CMOs we’ve been speaking to lately are asking 3 big questions, and they all can be boiled down to building agile organizations. Our Marketing Agility Diagnostic compares nimbler vs. clunkier marketing teams to see which trade-offs seem pay off – or if there are ways to break the trade-offs.  To learn more, email abird@executiveboard.com – or, if you’re a CMO, take the survey now.

But for now, here are the conclusions that the smartest CMOs are making: Read More »

Late last week, Facebook filed for its initial public offering for the US securities market, and its filing shed a lot of light on a business that few people really know about. There’s a lot of punditry in the blogosphere and tech worlds about the filing, so we decided to take a look and give marketers only what they need to know:

Friend/follower value. Does the filing give us any insight into the value of a Facebook contact? Well, sort of. According to the filing, Facebook had 845 million monthly users in December 2011 and advertising revenue of $3.2 billion. Breaking out the long division, we learn that the company is raking in around $4.39 per user, per year.

Give or take, I think this is a useful lower bound for the value of a quality friend or follower across an entire year. Granted, that revenue per user of $4.39/year is made up of advertising revenue gleaned from hundreds of companies, but it also includes non-quality contacts, doesn’t include brand-to-consumer communications in the user’s feed, and it seems clear that Facebook is not nearly taking full advantage of its ad revenue opportunities (see below for why I think so).

Facebook is everywhere. Seriously. 845 million monthly users. 483 million daily users. 250 million photos uploaded every day. 2.7 billion likes and comments. This is a scale that I honestly cannot quite fathom, and the ubiquity of the service and its importance in the day-to-day lives of its users suggest something more akin to a utility or a highway network than a tech company. 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 »

Maybe you’ve seen the new JC Penney 30-second spot, entitled Enough.Is.Enough?  It’s certainly memorable (check it out below, if you dare).  It teases JC Penney’s strategy under former Apple retail head Ron Johnson’s leadership as the new CEO: Read More »

B2B marketers typically don’t get to participate in the Super Bowl hoopla – at least, not in the same way that their B2C colleagues do. There are only a few kinds of B2B products that lend themselves to the Super Bowl treatment – in recent years, they’ve tended to be tech products, for instance – and so B2B marketing organizations typically slog ahead, doing the things they do best, instead of creating glitzy ads for mass audiences.

But if you’ve got the budget for it, there’s a smart way that Super Bowl ads can fit into B2B marketing plans. Recall that, in last year’s research project for B2B marketers, we talked about the “mid-funnel” – that grey area between awareness and purchase that, increasingly, it’s Marketing’s job to own:

That area – the second half of customers’ information-gathering process and the first half of the evaluation process – is currently an area not covered well by Marketing and Sales organizations, and it’s a prime vacuum for what we in a B2C context might call branding – the provision of well-designed mental shortcuts that address areas of customer need. In the B2B space, those needs tend to be more practical. “I need a blade server that won’t burst into flames during key processes” is something you might hear from a target of B2B branding, while a B2C consumer would say – perhaps subconsciously – “I need a potato chip that makes me feel young and vital again.” But the needs of business buyers are needs nonetheless – and they’re complex and subject to heuristics that simplify the buying process.

How might a B2B Super Bowl ad work in an empty mid-funnel world? Let’s look at last year’s ad for Chatter.com, Salesforce’s enterprise social media platform:

There’s an emotional message here: the cloud, as embodied by Chatter, is a futuristic, quasi-magical solution for keeping far-flung, overworked teams on the same page. But emotions typically aren’t enough to justify a B2B purchase, one that typically has to be worked through a committee or a procurement department. Pairing the emotional message with one tailored for the four profiles of B2B buyers yields functional and emotional differentiation, and consistently using the symbols of the original ad allows marketers to re-invoke the emotional cue whenever they’d like. In other words, the advertisement serves as both the opening salvo for a campaign – driving customers into the wide end of the funnel – but also as a template for more functional, tailored messaging as the funnel narrows.

Now, Chatter hasn’t done that. The original ad was not well received by pundits, and perhaps it wasn’t well-liked by customers, either. (Using the Black-Eyed Peas, who later turned in a sub-par halftime performance, probably didn’t help). But one could imagine a successful campaign along these lines.

MLC members, what do you think about B2B ads in a Super Bowl setting? Let us know in the comments.

Usually, the Super Bowl features some cool ads, some interesting new takes on long-standing brands – oh, and right, a football game. But this year, I think we saw a big step towards mobile and digital integration with traditional TV advertising – and, depending on the results, it’s a shift that could make brand extension onto the second screen most folks have in their pockets a more permanent part of the advertising landscape.

The Giants won the game, but we think mobile won the event. Here’s why: Read More »

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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