Wide Angle

At first blush (okay, pun intended), it’s hard to imagine anything that would be fit for print in a post on a marketing blog.  But in reality, NASA and the nudists in question are but two examples of an increasing trend we are seeing as marketers.  If I said the answer is “open source innovation” would that allow for too many bad jokes?  The truth is NASA has been a proponent of open source innovation since 2003 and in 2002 market researchers at Moen Faucets recruited 20 nudists to be videotaped while bathing to enhance their product development efforts.

Whether co-opting outsiders into helping you innovate as NASA does or getting creative with your ethnographic research as Moen did, we are seeing more and more members reaching out to their customers – and even their non-customers – for innovation help.  Already NASA’s Centennial Challenge Program has resulted in technological breakthroughs orchestrated by a “regular guy” from Maine working alone in his dining room as well as a group led by an undergraduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Read More »

Arriving in South Africa yesterday, I was reminded of what British heritage leaves around – driving on the left, spelling key as quay, and televising every world cricket match. One day I’ll understand that sport. You also can’t escape the reality of global branding from the moment you exit the plane – the ubiquitous HSBC jet bridges, Visa adverts plastering baggage claim, and a Coca-Cola vending machine in every corner.

There’s also this large sporting event coming up (in case you haven’t heard): the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Or rather, “the-every-fourth-year-global-football-tournament-to-determine-a-single-country-champion,” as FIFA would like me to refer to it in this space.

FIFA is playing brand police here in South Africa, and a ruthless outfit at that. You can find just a taste of their efforts in this article. My personal favorite – their request of Kalula, one of South Africa’s low-cost airlines, to withdraw its slogan “Unofficial National Carrier of the You-Know-What.” While fully understanding that FIFA and its corporate partners paid truckloads of money for brand exclusivity at the tournament, the brand management tenacity at play here seems to far exceed rational boundaries. Read More »

Ah, the sweet smell of redemption on a Thursday morning. Last week, I wrote about whether executives could tag companies as ‘innovative’ if they failed to deliver revenue growth (and implicitly, fail to meet customer needs). BCG’s listing of the top 50 innovative companies said yea; I, nay. And this week, I think I’ve got 23 companies to back me up: Fortune’s list of 23 companies that achieved double-digit revenue growth despite the turbulent economy in 2009. Perhaps not innovative, but doing a great job of exceeding shareholder expectations.

Discerning a common thread among those on the Fortune list isn’t easy, especially since most would rarely appear on an ‘innovative company’ list. You could certainly argue that value positioning helped tremendously, i.e., the right economic proposition to capitalize on retrenched consumer spending. Companies like Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Ross Stores certainly fit the bill. Yet, there are plenty of ‘value’ retailers that noticeably didn’t make the cut, from Family Dollar to the granddaddy of them all, Walmart. There isn’t an easy industry lens to the list either – in what was generally another poor year for financial services, USAA, Wells Fargo, and Erie Insurance beat the odds handily. Even with oil prices up across 2009, there isn’t an energy company to be found. Read More »

One of the many hats I wore while posted in CEB’s Asia hub in New Delhi was that of “glocalizer”—contributing to the organization-wide effort to translate insights for the region.  It was exciting to see such efforts come to fruition. 

One of the more visible projects I was involved with is CEB’s joint initiative with the Indian business publication Mint Magazine (a partnership of HT Media—inaugurated by The Mahatma himself—and The Wall Street Journal).  With Mint, we publish a monthly series, entitled the Six Myths, based on the thought leadership from the global memberships at CEB and the regional expertise of the folks at Mint. 

Recently, our Six Myths installment focused on six common misconceptions about the world of Sales that are especially relevant to heads of Sales and Marketing in central and east Asia.  Though most of the myths align to the broader challenges faced anywhere in the world, some were especially resonant in India.  Read More »

Note to self: Scandinavia is cold in March. But my visit there this past week will be memorable for more than chills. One member visit stands out against the rest for the remarkable shift the marketing function has made in the last few years.

Four years ago, this Council member was spending 100% of its marketing resource in a traditional “fire and forget” manner—campaign-driven with traditional media featuring heavily. Today, that mix has shifted to three-quarters digital and emerging media.

The speed and magnitude of the shift is remarkable in its own right, but more interesting has been the shift in the operating mentality of the marketing team. Fully half of the marketing team’s resources, time and energy is managed in an “Always On” mode, not on a fire-and-forget basis. This Always On mentality, more than anything else, has poised the company to see great success with digital media and social networking in the coming years. Read More »

Those who live and breathe marketing have a problem: we can never fully unplug. Marketing follows us wherever we go. The TV ads, the social media forums, the direct e-mail – there’s a constant wondering of the strategic idea behind a campaign, whether the target audience was properly selected, and whether the channel mix works. Or perhaps this is just me and I’m projecting. Let’s move on.

Following my last post on globalization and its ramifications for the structure of global marketing functions, I spent a week trying to unplug in Italy (thank you, Starwood points). What spurred the above introduction was the amazing difference in marketing communications techniques required in the Italian market versus the United States – both industrialized Western countries with heavy penetration of traditional and digital media. Similar on paper, far different in practice. Read More »

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Concourse D and I’m eating Sbarro, drinking a Coke, and overlooking flag carriers from the Netherlands, France, Italy, and the UK. The voice from above announces flight information in three languages – Dutch, English, and the language of the country’s destination. The passengers next to me are listening to iPods singing American pop, heading for Africa.

Whither globalization? I beg to differ.

There was a bit of consternation at the Davos confab earlier this year as to whether the era of globalization was the root cause of the global financial meltdown, and as a result, perhaps it was time to roll back some of that interconnectedness. Nicolas Sarkozy was particularly pungent in his argument to this effect. Granted, globalization certainly hastened the onset of recessionary tendencies the world over; international capital flows have only increased since the Asia financial crisis of the late 1990s sent a minor shock wave through the system. Read More »

Advance warning: this post will likely open more doors than it closes. But they are important doors that need opening, especially if they aren’t already. Haniel Lynn pushed the first one open with his earlier post, asking if Marketing could foment a corporate cultural revolution through social media. Member conversations I’ve had over the past week have demonstrated there is a root-cause question that must come first – where does Marketing fit in the organization? Better yet, where should it? Read More »

One of the themes we’re picking up from Council members is a reckoning that new product development and innovation approaches are badly in need of an overhaul.  What’s driving it?  Here’s what we’ve heard from marketers at Global 2000-sized companies: 

• The recession has fundamentally recast customers’ hierarchy of needs, priorities and in some cases core values, giving rise to the “New Normal” customer
• The “Good Enough Revolution” (an important read) has demonstrated that, in many categories, the returns curve on adding new features has flattened or even inverted
• The increasing participation of our target audiences in digital and social media has presented an opportunity to dramatically reduce innovation cycle time
• The source of consumption growth is shifting to BRIC countries, which is putting more pressure on innovation processes to produce discontinuous innovation for those markets Read More »

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are back with a second installment of the ‘freaky’ thinking that has now led them to advising would-be suicide bombers to buy life insurance. Over multiple plane rides last week, I scanned through SuperFreakonomics but was struck by one quote in the chapter on apathy vs. altruism: “People are people, and they respond to incentives.” Combine that with their analysis of unintended consequences – “among the most potent laws in existence” – and you begin to see why many marketing schemes fall short of perfect. Let’s take the example of the airlines and baggage fees. Read More »