Wide Angle

Last month, the Altimeter Group, a social media consultancy, released a report titled “The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing” – a set of common behaviors and attributes of corporate Facebook pages that they correlated with a high degree of social media success. Here are the eight criteria: Read More »

While the English language is certainly a common denominator in the business world, assuming everyone speaks it is definitely ill-advised.  So how does a marketing team ensure its product materials are accurate in another language?  One executive poses this question in our recently-launched Marketing Org & Ops Forum, asking “What are the best practices in assessing the quality and correctness of translation service jobs?” Read More »

“The single biggest reason companies fail is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.”

–Gary Hamel, Author and Professor, London Business School

Professor Hamel puts his finger on one of the most important undercurrents facing marketing leaders in large enterprises today.  As products, channels, and geographic markets proliferate, marketers will overweight to the familiar (that which “is” today), and fail to account for the size of future opportunity (that which “might be”).  Why?

They certainly won’t do so intentionally.  Rather, the sheer complexity of resource allocation decisions across geographies, products and channels will lead many marketers to settle for incremental changes to last year’s budget allocation.  In the face of overwhelming complexity, this will feel like the safe, smart choice. Read More »

Marketing is about creativity, punchy language, and ad campaigns, right?  Not in social media. This post summarizes 5 outdated marketing beliefs and offers quick tips for adapting to the new world of ‘unmarketing.’ Read More »

(Note: This is Part 4 of our 6-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Part 2, “Selecting Metrics“, can be found here. Part 3, “Marketers Squeezing Productivity“, can be found here. Check back here every Wednesday in August and September for a new installment!)

As you’re preparing for another year of marketing planning, ask yourself these three questions:

• Do our marketing plans reflect our company’s overall strategic objectives?
• Are our marketing plans based primarily on incremental changes to last year’s activities?
• Even if we know that marketing is making progress, can we tie our activities to business objectives?

We all know what the answers here should be, but how many of us actually get it right? Read More »

On Monday, Fortune came out with a long, in-depth piece on the success of Trader Joe’s – the wildly popular small gourmet grocery store. The chain, owned by German grocery conglomerate Aldi, has experienced dynamite growth in the last 15 years, expanding from its base in Southern California to over 200 stores nationwide. Their sales numbers ($8 billion in 2009) are similar to those of semi-competitor Whole Foods, and their sales per square foot are an estimated $1,750, more than double those of Whole Foods.

Fortune spends a lot of ink (or pixels, I suppose) analyzing aspects of Trader Joe’s success. It’s a good article, but what has made TJ’s such a cultural phenomenon isn’t too difficult to discern. I’d separate it into a few key buckets: Read More »

Often times in an organizational structure, the approval chain of command can be quite unclear.  Logically, the CEO would make all the executive decisions, and the CMO would sign off on all marketing decisions.  But is it really efficient or even necessary for the big cheese to approve everything the company makes in his or her respected department?  Seeing as there are more than likely bigger fish to fry, it probably isn’t. 

Questions about organization structure are very popular in our recently-launched Marketing Org & Ops Forum, where one executive question asks, “What type of communications get what type of approval?”

Read More »

(Note: This is Part 3 of our 6-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Part 2, “Selecting Metrics“, can be found here.  Check back here every Wednesday in August and September for a new installment!)

Early results from the Council’s ongoing marketing budget and spend survey suggest that Marketers are (understandably) cautious as they look ahead to 2011.  With the cooldown in businesses re-stocking their inventories and consumers continuing to keep pursestrings drawn tight, budgets appear to be flat to marginally up. Read More »

The US is in a kind of tough place right now. Let’s see: unemployment is hovering around 10%, not only idling millions of workers but keeping millions more stuck in jobs they don’t like; it’s shaping up to be the hottest summer on record in many parts of the country; and, to top it all off, traffic is getting worse as local governments run out of money to invest in public transit and new roads. Add these (and many, many other) factors up, and it’s no secret why your average American is a little on edge these days.

So when JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater made a dramatic exit from his job on Tuesday, delivering an expletive-laced tirade to passengers over the intercom before grabbing a beer from the service cart and sliding down the plane’s emergency chute, it wasn’t surprising when he became something of a cause celebre. A Facebook fan group established after the news broke on Tuesday now has nearly 200,000 fans, and there’s talk of a legal defense fund (Slater was cited for public endangerment). Slater has been hounded by reporters and paparazzi since being released on bond, and his relatives have made the talk-show rounds. Read More »

Ah, the good old United States of America. Home of mom, baseball, apple pie, the Mustang and the Corvette. It stands to reason that the most auto-dense country in the world would be leading the charge of automotive innovation, and we covered some of the innovative products coming from domestic manufacturers here.

But that’s not stopping the rest of the world from employing their resources to make car ownership easier, cheaper and greener. Our friends at Iconoculture have rounded up some of the best examples of how car ownership is changing throughout the world. Read More »