Amazon.com, the e-commerce behemoth, has been around for awhile now – 18 years, in fact, making it positively ancient in the world of technology. Retailers especially have understood the threat Amazon’s model poses to their businesses for probably just as long, but only recently are we beginning to see signs that the marketplace is fully tilting in Amazon’s favor. Witness:

• Borders’ decision to close its doors for good last summer (granted, the company had some extenuating management issues, but Amazon certainly helped speed the chain’s demise)
• Tesco, the UK grocery chain, has decided to launch an Amazon competitor amid stagnant sales
• Best Buy’s decision – announced just this week – that it will close 50 underperforming stores around the country (Best Buy, unlike Borders, is a genuinely well-managed company with a particularly strong CMO)
• The US Justice Department’s decision to go after a consortium of Apple and five publishing companies for alleged anti-competitive activities those companies undertook to protect their market share from Amazon Read More »

I imagine consumers of the 1960s would be horrified if they knew what marketers can know about them now. To think that their thoughts can now light up a monitor in the form of brain activation, or that retailers might know that their daughter’s pregnant before they do (et tu, Target?).

50 years later, we have computers, and algorithms that used to take days to run now take seconds. While analysts of ages past were often slaves to Excel and had to build their own bridges, data analysis nowadays is much easier and comes complete with nice intuitive graphic interfaces. This democratization of data has made marketers happy, but has made market researchers somewhat wary.

Why? Because market researchers think it their prerogative to keep tabs on what’s going out to their business partners. When marketers brought home an analytics team, often conveniently embedded in their own function, market research sulked over their loss of control. When the analytics team started brandishing social media listening tools and data mining algorithms, some marketing functions started wondering if market research will go the way of dinosaurs with their surveys and focus groups. This premature tendency to ditch established methods is what one might call the Shiny Object Syndrome in analytics. Read More »

(editor’s note: Pat contributed this piece to Forbes a few weeks ago. MLC members: get a view into our research process, and register for the meeting!)

In my last post at Forbes, I wrote about Chief Marketing Officers’ collective desire for greater marketing agility. They want their marketing teams to keep pace with rapidly changing consumers. As if you needed more evidence, take a look at the recent New York Times piece on how quickly consumer shopping habits are changing as a result of mobile technology.

With this background, one key question arises: What will be the distinctive trait of a successful marketing function of the future? Read More »

If you’re a marketer – particularly in the B2C space – you’ve heard endless references to Big Data over the last year or so. It’s a tremendously exciting space for marketers – offering brands the potential to get closer to customers, hug demand curves more tightly, and identify new and emerging consumer segments. Opportunities and costs are converging in a way that will soon make it easier for relatively novice analysts to produce useful insight from large data sets.

Big Data helps form the backdrop of this year’s major study for B2C companies, “Evolving With Consumer Expectations“. Marketers’ opportunities to create value are increasing – between Big Data and social and mobile and the constant stream of other new channels – and as a result, folks are finding it hard to keep their teams focused on opportunities that drive profitability. As Big Data gets easier, other things – like keeping your team’s eye on the prize – get harder.

Anyway, you can learn more about how to tackle the dizzying array of possibilities by registering for the meeting. In the meantime, we’re aiming to put together a resource for members just getting started in the data and analytics space, including a Quick Start Guide, profiles of notable vendors in the space, typical analytics job descriptions, and a glossary of commonly-heard Big Data terminology.

The glossary is where we need your help. We have a decent list of terms to start with, but we’re interested in knowing: what words are you hearing that you think should be included in a glossary for Big Data newbies? Please take a few seconds to let us know what you think.

The resource should be launched in the first few weeks of May, and we’ll include the best member contributions in our soon-to-be-launched resource center. Thanks for your help!

I recently saw a lecture by Jonah Lehrer, the Wired blogger and author of How We Decide about his latest book: Imagine: How Creativity Works.  He explores the seeds of creativity, covering a broad range of research on the topic and sharing findings from the wacky (blue walls and collective bathrooms foster creativity) to the practical (individual feedback is usually more effective than group brainstorming sessions).

Two themes particularly interested me:

• What distinguishes creative geniuses from everyone else
• What leads to those moments of insight when you suddenly have a great idea

First, Lehrer looks at new research on what distinguishes creative geniuses (Picasso, Einstein, Beethoven etc.) from the rest of us – and shares some pretty surprising findings.

These people don’t stand out from the average population in terms of IQ. They might not even do better at traditional creativity tests.  The key factor that sets them apart?  “Grit” — persistence and passion for long-term goals.  Grit is the ability and willingness to stick at something far longer than the rest of us – in spite of disappointment and difficulty.  The most talented people tend to be focused to the level of obsession.  Beethoven, for example, would try as many as 70 different versions of a musical phrase before settling on the right one. Read More »

We’ve written a bit in recent months about how brands will survive in an era that’s decidedly unfriendly towards top-down institutions of any kind. At SxSW, the theme of many marketing events was one of humility – the notion that brands and marketers shouldn’t overly path the consumer journey and allow a more organic, flexible brand definition. But the implicit question here is, if marketers aren’t pathing the way that consumers interact with brands, what is? And what can we do about it?

I was reminded of this central conundrum when I read a recent piece on GigaOm about the evolution of the modern workplace. The article summarizes a blog post by Dachis Group’s Dave Gray, repositioning managers as urban planners. It seems that, just as brands have begun to realize that their efforts to meticulously design a perfect customer experience aren’t working, managers are beginning to realize that the organizations they lead are not machines but organic cities of talent that should be allowed to flow freely, rather than report up to rigid hierarchies and goals. According to Gray: Read More »

It’s the never-ending question from Finance and the C-Suite: prove your ROI! Measurement, and ROI determination specifically, is something inherently hard to do in marketing. But as more organizations come under budgetary pressure and Marketing becomes more important to other corporate functions, expect measurement to only become more important in the coming years.

In our newly-launched Marketer’s Playbook, we profiled three key things marketing organizations must get right in order to tackle measurement in a rigorous way. Here’s what we think:

Align marketing goals with corporate goals. You’ll learn how to ensure that marketing’s investments support corporate-level (not marketing-level) goals. By linking marketing activities and metrics back to corporate priorities, you increase Marketing’s credibility and give yourself a better platform to showcase your contribution to business performance. Our case studies from some of the world’s most advanced Marketing departments will show you how to collect cross-functional input on marketing metrics, give you tips for securing broad executive buy-in on marketing metrics, and how MLC can help you get input on activities and goals.

Select the right metrics. Once you’ve selected your goals, you’ll need to figure out how to measure them. Easier said than done, right? We’ll show you how to select a small set of meaningful metrics to track marketing performance, ensuring that you don’t invest resources tracking things not aligned to corporate goals. You’ll learn how to narrow down a list of meaningful metrics from the universe of potential ones and get tips for identifying redundant metrics. We’ll also show you how to use MLC tools to build a brand experience storyboard.

Design actionable marketing dashboards. So you’ve selected your goals and your metrics; how do you report progress? We’ll show you how to design user-friendly marketing dashboards that encourage stakeholders to incorporate marketing metrics into the decision-making process. You’ll learn how proper organization and aesthetics drive usage of marketing dashboards, how to design dashboards that are easy to use and act on, and how to design scorecards to communicate metrics effectively.

MLC members, please check out the “Performance Measurement” section of our brand-new Marketer’s Playbook for more.

I looked at my marketing text books one last good time – the pages seemed fairly crisp, but most examples cited in the book seemed obsolete. It seemed like between 2008 and now, marketing had undergone a transformation and the textbook couldn’t keep pace with it. So what happened to the classical marketer – the one whose world circled around the 4Ps? The answer to this question lies in the evolving nature of marketing.

Earlier this year, MLC surveyed a group of 30 leading CMOs on 15 dimensions that they think will influence marketing in the future. The results suggest only one theme – marketing is becoming a smarter function. Some of the top things CMOs identified as value creators for marketing in the future include:

• End-to-end experience management
• Agile planning
• Advanced analytics
• Insight-based marketing
• Enhanced listening capabilities

As marketing’s role is expanding in the face of changing economics and evolving technology, marketer’s roles must evolve too. So what does a next generation marketer look like? Here’s what we heard from our CMOs: Read More »

In celebration of our newly-launched Marketer’s Playbook, as well as our upcoming Marketing Development webinar on social, we thought we’d distill some of the best social media advice we’ve gotten from leaders in the space over the last few years. Here are a few things you can do to develop your skills: Read More »

I’ll admit – I’ve been mentally dismissive of “social commerce” since the term began washing up in the never-ending tide of new trends in the space a few years back. It just didn’t make sense: why buy something on Facebook when I could buy it on a company’s website, or on Amazon, or at an actual brick-and-mortar location? It didn’t make sense to me, at least not then.

I’m still skeptical about the idea of F-commerce; the whole thing feels very much like AOL circa 1995, when brands launched “channels” within the walled garden that was AOL at that time. When I hear “Visit us on Facebook…” in an ad, I mentally go back to old copy that asked listeners to “Go to AOL keyword…”. But regardless of whether Facebook lasts longer than the heyday AOL’s dial-up business, or whether people ever seriously buy on Facebook in large numbers, one genie looks to be out of the box: people will increasingly share what they desire and what they ultimately buy on the internet.

How so? Check out this piece on what Facebook shoppers look like. Christian Taylor, the CEO of Payvment, a platform that processes most Facebook commerce, tells WebProNews that most buyers on the site are women – specifically stay-at-home moms –  buying cute things for their children, like baby clothes and hair accessories. When men shop on Facebook, they often buy cause-related t-shirts – ones that raise money for a charity, for instance.

What’s the similarity between those things? They’re all examples of things people buy conspicuously. In the case of cute baby clothes, it’s perhaps an outgrowth of the central role Facebook now has for connecting mothers to each other (as I’ve gotten older, I can see the number of parenting-related conversations growing exponentially; I’m sure you’ve noticed it too). As a result, young mothers see Facebook as a place where they can share more parenting-related decisions in general, including new things to dress their kids in. And, of course, advertising the causes one supports is a phenomenon as old as the bumper sticker.

But beyond Facebook, the recent trend of Pinterest-like sites indicates that there’s a real desire on the part of consumers to share products they’re affiliated with – whether they’ve bought them, would one day like to buy them, or whether they just think they’re cool. But by opening product affiliation to social influence, what was once an individual buying decision – someone pointing at something and saying, yes, I want that – has now implicitly become a group purchase. Your social network won’t literally weigh in on your every purchase, but their anticipated reactions might.

That opens up a huge playground and enormous challenge for marketers – not only do you need to influence the buyer, but you also have to influence the buyer’s social circle. What that means, I’m not sure – but it’s worth keeping an eye on, anyway.