Wide Angle

Friday’s Wall Street Journal showed a delicious contrast in innovation approaches in side-by-side articles (yes, I’ve just revealed I still read a broadsheet from time-to-time).

On the one hand, you have P&G launching the latest, feature rich, premium-seeking version of its Fusion razor.  Blade edges so fine you need a microscope to see them.  Anti-hydroplane technology.  And an even more ergonomic grip. 

(Wait.  Backup.  My razor blade can hydroplane? On my face?  Scary… Does my auto insurance cover that?)

In contrast, the neighboring article details GE’s plans to launch a handheld ultrasound device.  Price point: under US$10,000.  Compare that to $25-50k for laptop-based machines, or $250k for a cart-based ultrasound.  Of course, the handhelds won’t have the functionality of the others, but for many situations, they don’t need to.  Cutting out features in favor of portability and low price actually opens up new markets.  That’s smart, “good enough” innovation in a tough economic environment. Read More »

Someone smarter than me has surely waxed poetic on the virtue of looking to the past to prepare for the future.  Yet if 2009 taught marketers anything, it is that the past is no predictor or guarantee of future performance.  Heraclitus figured it out long ago – the only constant is change.  2009 was the year of assumption upheaval, of predictable patterns overturned by equally unpredictable economic conditions.  How about a few examples? Read More »

My New York Giants didn’t play this weekend – that’s one way to end a losing streak. I hadn’t enjoyed four consecutive losing Sundays of gesticulating wildly at my TV to no avail. But Fox, CBS, NBC, or ESPN didn’t quite care – I was watching.

As were about 17.2 million others any given Sunday, helping the NFL to their highest TV ratings in 20 years, a 15% uptick over last season. That’s an increase far beyond the 2% decline in stadium ticket sales, so much so that NFL national sponsorships are up. The pattern extends to baseball as well – World Series TV ratings were up 42% in 2009, which we can’t attribute solely to my Yankees’ return to dominance.

Clearly, we’re seeing not just changing consumer behaviors, but new, never-before-seen behaviors. A 15% viewership increase isn’t just former fans returning to TV. Our latest research on consumer behavior tells us that today’s winners are somehow helping consumers satisfy emerging desired outcomes – not the outcomes consumers say they want, but the latent (often emotional) ones that ethnographic research could uncover. Read More »

I don’t know how many of you follow box office results, but I’d like to point your attention to Paranormal Activity, a horror movie getting a slow rollout from Paramount that just this past weekend grossed $19.6 million from just 760 screens.  That’s a per screen average of $25,813—a number more common for a summer blockbuster than a small, independent, genre film with a budget of $11,000.   So how did this small movie get so big?  Marketing, and more specifically a very smart use of social media. Read More »

Welcome to Wide Angle, a blog brought to you by the Marketing Leadership Council (MLC).  For the uninitiated, the MLC is a membership organization for senior marketing executives from leading B2B and B2C companies worldwide.  We provide quantitative and case-based best practices research and tools to help marketing leaders solve their immediate business challenges.

While this approach will always be core to our business, we also realize that the times they are a-changin’ and there are a number of other ways for us to more frequently connect with people as passionate about marketing as we are.  Enter Wide Angle, a blog where we’ll share unique and innovative perspectives to paint a broader picture of what’s going on in the world of marketing and within our member network.

How does our blog work?  We’ve organized our content into four sections to help you narrow in on the topics you care about most.

• We are in constant contact with the marketing teams at many Fortune 500 firms, so we have a pretty good sense of what leading marketers are saying and the issues they’re facing on a regular basis.  From the Road will provide an inside view on these conversations and our thoughts.
• Our Cornerstones section will reflect issues at the heart of Big M Marketing.  We’ll cover branding, product management, how to get a better understanding of your customers … basic hygiene issues critical to most every marketer.
• In MarketPulse, we’ll keep you abreast of pressing trends—think green marketing or changes in customer behavior.  This will be our chance to share strategies for coping with the downturn or ways to get ahead as customers’ fortunes turn.
• What does it mean to yammer?  How are companies using neural marketing?  What do I need to know about Web 2.0?  Check out Cutting Edge, where you’ll get the insider’s view on frontier practices as well as our take on the latest buzz sweeping the marketing world.

Wide Angle is our chance to connect with you on a more regular—and informal—basis.  We’re excited to begin the conversation and hope you’ll chime in with thoughts and comments along the way.