When we talk with heads of marketing about what “good” information flow between sales and marketing looks like, you can imagine the usual suspects that pop up: marketing updates provided to the sales team, sales providing feedback on messaging that’s resonating (or not resonating), and some type of ongoing win-loss analysis.

One conversation that stood out for us, though, was a conversation we had with the marcomm team at TELUS last year (TELUS is one of Canada’s top telecom service providers).  We were discussing their “Who Knew” marketing communications campaign (a submission from last year’s B2B MarComm Campaign Awards), which was an initiative that targeted influencers and decision-makers at medium and large businesses in Ontario. 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 »

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much? Read More »

Launching a new product and want customer advocates to help spread the word for you?  See what you can learn from National Instruments’ LabView product launch (a software program for engineers).  The launch campaign, which won MLC’s 2009 B2B Marcomm Awards, generated more than 2,000 customer tweets and 80 customer blog posts in just one month.

What was their secret?  Building platforms and content around customer needs – not their own product launch.  Read More »

Perhaps you’ve seen episodes of Name That Tune on the Game Show Network (or maybe you’re old enough to remember when it was a hit in the 1970s).  Regardless, contestants competed to identify a song by listening to as few notes as possible.  I was reminded of that show while watching commercials during the Olympics last week.  Within the first few seconds of seeing a new ad, I knew it was for McDonald’s.  There were no golden arches or kids eating French fries to help me; there was just a vibe, an emotional connection that immediately made me recognize the ad as McDonald’s.

In an age when brands are identified by an icon like a duck or gecko, a recognizable sound like the deep voiceover of Morgan Freeman, or a celebrity spokesperson, I found it refreshing to see an ad that relied on none of those but still made a lasting and memorable impression. Read More »

In my last post, I wrote about the ever higher authenticity expectations that consumers have of their brand interactions.  To meet those expectations, marketers spend millions with agency partners and agonize over how to structure their agency rosters. 

Click Image to Enlarge

In fact, we found that two-thirds of clients are establishing lead or full-service agency partnership models in hopes of achieving integrated communications.  But if you ask clients their likelihood of recommending their current agency partners on their ability to deliver the most target-resonant creative or touchpoint ideas, you get embarrassing NPS scores (see the graphic at left). 

What gives?

Here’s the problem: the cast of characters on the typical agency roster is too far removed from today’s target audiences to routinely and convincingly clear a higher authenticity bar.  Read More »

We may not have the jet-set, champagne-fuelled ceremonies of the B2C ad world, but our 2009 B2B MarComm Awards are just as exciting, if somewhat lower scale. 

MLC Members can access the links in this post, including our showcase of all 50 entries to see the high quality of work and get ideas for your own campaigns. Despite the consistently high standard across campaigns, we had to select a few that stood out from the rest.

We are pleased to announce 8 finalists that excelled in terms of campaign focus, target understanding, message relevance, and channel impact:

2009 MLC B2B Marcomm Awards Finalists

• Alcatel-Lucent | Hotel Experience
• Motorola | Two-Way Radio Lead Generation Campaign
• National Instruments | Energizing Engineers at NI Week
• Qwest Communications | Voice of the Customer
• Telecom NZ | No One Will Know You Are Gone
• Telstra | Enterprise & Government Productivity
• TELUS | Who Knew
• Thomson Reuters | ProLaw Office

Read More »

There’s nothing like a recession to make your agencies work really hard for you.  But as we start to see the dimmest of lights at the end of the tunnel, you’d be smart to think about getting the best work from agencies that are poking around for new business from clients starting to spend again. 

I see a blind spot for client-side folks–we think about the agency as an institution, not a collection of smart, creative workers.  You can bet that, just like the agency business itself, the staffers on your account are poking around for new job leads, too (at least the best ones probably are); it’s natural, but it costs you money and time when the best staffers leave.

Don’t leave this to the agencies to manage without your input.  With all the pressure we’re putting on their margins, there’s no guarantee they’ll do what’s best for their staffer’s compensation. 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 »