I had the opportunity to attend the ANA’s Masters of Marketing Conference this weekend.  The topic of this year’s conference was “Growth: Defying the Recession.”  I wanted to pass along a few of the great insights from the first day of the conference.

My biggest takeaway was the focus on authenticity I heard from all of the presenters.  “Your brand has to be who it is” was the common refrain. Read More »

In recent posts, perhaps I’ve been a little sour on marketers’ efforts to emerge from the economic doldrums to provide growth for their businesses in 2010 and beyond. One more sour point, and then I promise to make some lemonade. Fifty percent of the share you lose to private label this year, you will never regain. Stick with me, you optimists – our research shows if your brand can use the recession to jump into the top quartile in your industry, you’ll likely retain that premium position for at least three years.

 Here’s the challenge I’m seeing in recent client meetings, from financial services looking to recover to media companies searching for identity. The single biggest asset we have as marketers is also the likeliest thing we de-emphasized as budgets were slashed in the past 18 months: our brands.  Read More »

I sense an eerie (and I think false) sense of security from marketers as they enter 2010 planning, that the worst is behind us, we can forecast 1-2% GDP growth for the next 12 months, and the Fed has the financial crisis under control. 

After meeting with a regional retail bank, a Fortune 500 CPG company, and a host of planning executives last week, I’m almost frightened by the sense of stability I see in 2010 plans.  The picture is not rosy, certainly, but it assumes stability.  We seem to have checked any Black Swan thinking at the door.  How the economy recovers, its precise trajectory, and changes in consumer behavior are far more volatile than the stability many marketers are putting into their plans.  And let’s be honest – too many of us leave those plans on the shelf for 12 months without revision. Read More »

By Laura Morris

We’ve been really busy the last few days presenting results of the Social Media Opportunity Diagnostic to member companies. Two things strike me about these conversations:

• An enormous amount of risk aversion to investing in social media: Having a Facebook page doesn’t mean you’re investing in social media. Real investment means not just money, but people, time and political capital. Many marketers veer away from conversations about ROI and default to not thinking about it until they have to. Even a simple test & control experiment would be a great place to start.
• Low levels of understanding (or acceptance) about the creative power of the medium:  Are you thinking carefully about how social media could be used to move customers through the purchase funnel? Or how to use social media to compress the purchase cycle altogether? One company I spoke with was thinking innovatively about using Twitter as a pre-sales tool, to get a specific segment of customers interested in a new product they were launching before the sales person’s visit. Read More »

Driving down the New Jersey Turnpike to visit a Council member, a billboard caught my eye (please, no jokes about the Turnpike and billboards).  It read as follows – “Recession 101: Interesting fact about recessions . . . they end.”  Pithy and humorous, I thought.  When I reached my hotel, I did some searching and the Recession 101 campaign is nationwide, paid for by members of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and designed by an unnamed private donor.

Seeing the billboard and scrolling through Recession 101’s Twitter feed (sidebar: good social media integration with ‘traditional’ media), it did prompt me to realize that our members are asking one question with increasing frequency – does MLC think that the economy has turned the corner? Read More »

Cramped in seat 17F somewhere 30,000 feet over Texas, I’m reading Business Week’s 100 Best Global Brands issue and trying to square the circle of David Kiley and Burt Helm’s article “The Great Trust Offensive,” outlining how companies are bringing trust back to the forefront of marketing to boost consumer perceptions (and ostensibly, profits).  Earlier this month, I heard 20 B2B CMOs from major Fortune 500 firms agree that ‘trust’ was merely table stakes, a common benefit all customers expect.  If you don’t have it or can’t build it, you might as well pack your bags.  Yet none of them were staking their future growth on it; none saying it was their unique differentiator. 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.