5. Customer Jobs Touchpoint Assesment (Texas Instruments)

Learn how marketers at Texas Instruments use customer workflow to identify the most relevant touchpoints for experience investments, honing in on opportunities currently underserved by major competitors.

4. Making the Most of Voice of the Customer

Join Tom Robson, Voice of the Customer Program Manager at Qwest Communications, as he walks through his award-winning innovations in the use of customer testimonials. In this replay, Tom discusses how Qwest created an online database of video and audio testimonial clips and integrated targeted testimonials into both the sales cycle and broader marcomm mix, leading to an average sales cycle reduction of 4 days and a saving of approximately 20 FTEs per year.

3. Targeting Pricing to Meet Corporate and Customer Needs: Case Studies

This issue brief examines companies’ methodologies for developing effective pricing models, as well as customer perceptions of these diverse pricing tactics. Specifically, companies focusing on customer pricing preferences while simultaneously striving to increase profitability may create value-added services, simplify their billing approaches, or tailor pricing strategies to specific segment preferences. Profiled companies include Georgia Power, UPS and Virgin Mobile USA.

2. Social Media Strategy Builder

The Social Media Strategy Builder is a toolkit that will help you and your social media working group construct a world-class experimentation strategy. The primary output is a presentation that provides a coherent rationale for your strategy, which you can use to inform, evangelize, and make the case for resources.

1. Vista’s Corporate-Strategy Marketing Dashboard

Learn how Vista analyzes desired marketing contribution to firm strategy, drives selection of activities and provides transparency into marketing performance.

Also, here’s our most popular studies featuring travel and leisure industry members:

• How Southwest Airlines Uses Social Media
• Frontline Employee Empowerment Protocols (Southwest Airlines)
• Brand Leverage Protocols (Disney)
• Stewarding the Brand’s Voice (Marriott)
• Strategic Marketing Dashboard (British Airways)
• Outcomes-Driven Value Propositions (Aramark)
• The Ties That Bind | Loyalty Program Design Process (Amtrak)
• The Ties That Bind | Loyalty Program Dashboard (Marriott)
• Loyalty Program Toolkit

Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”.

The videos have been a smash hit, with PCWorld calling them “the most brilliant viral ad campaign of its time”.  Total views on Old Spice’s YouTube channel are over 100 million, while Google Trends reports a huge spike in searches for Old Spice:

Click Image to Enlarge

At MLC, we never counsel members to shoot for virality in their online campaigns. What we’ve learned from discussions with countless B2C marketers is that you can check all the “viral” boxes and still have a campaign that flops. There are simply too many variables in what achieves currency on the web for any marketer to accurately predict that a campaign will go viral.

But, the subset of campaigns that do go viral do have a few of these things in common:

1) Cash. Someone may have told you that online campaigns are supposed to be cheap. Cheaper than TV, maybe, but Old Spice is spending some fairly serious money on this initiative. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” was a sponsored trend on Twitter and the company is paying to get its branding on its YouTube channel – not to mention paying Mustafa and the video crew for long days of shooting.

2) Ego. By aiming most of the videos squarely at online influencers like Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, and Ellen DeGeneres, as well as blogs like Gizmodo, Old Spice ensured that they’d have ample access to the huge network of followers commanded by those celebrities and outlets. But they didn’t stop at focusing on big names – they shot videos for all kinds of social networking users. They also engaged the ego of communities – canvassing Reddit and the notorious 4-Chan (absolutely not safe for work) for potential questions well before shooting.

3) Anticipation. Old Spice built anticipation into the campaign in a few ways – first, the quick turnaround of the videos meant was a carrot for repeat visitors; second, there was no pattern to the responses, so a reply to Ashton Kutcher might be followed by one to WebLover222; and third, the videos themselves were so wacky that users couldn’t wait to see what would come next.

4) Paradigm Shift. The campaign challenges the way people think about several things, in the process changing the way people think about the Old Spice brand. Everything from the absurd monologues to the production-line nature of the shoot to the idea of responding to random web users leads people to think differently about Old Spice.

Like I said above – you can hit all these marks and still have a flop on your hands; the vagaries of the digital market are still too much for marketers to reliably understand. But its good to know that there are some common threads – and at least a little predictability – in what makes a campaign viral.

And that is exactly where our manufacturing members find today’s economy – a late summer afternoon, with limited predictive ability as to coming market conditions. They’ve seen the sun peek through the clouds (11 straight months of sector expansion per ISM’s Report on Business) but with markedly slower growth in June’s new orders, that grey cloud seeps back into the picture. With a consumer-driven economy, manufacturers can’t be too pleased that June housing starts also dropped 5.0%, while consumer confidence hit a low not seen since August 2009.

I’ve harped on uncertainty in markets since the genesis of Wide Angle (see here and here, shameless promotion, I know), yet it continues to dominate the mind of forward-thinking B2B marketers, manufacturers in particular. Manufacturing to a high degree is based on certainty and predictability – large capital requirements force long-term assumptions that must hold true for profitability to result. Senior marketers’ assumptions as to projected customer inventory levels, market size, and overarching GDP growth rates can make or break a company.

But with uncertainty comes opportunity for those manufacturing marketers savvy enough to push forward. Just because the market halts for the occasional thunderstorm doesn’t mean the marketing discipline required to produce growth stops as well. Manufacturing has never been the sexiest of marketing industries (for better or worse), but it does provide opportunities for incredible experimentation to assist in leapfrogging the competition:

1. Utilize social media to develop deeper individual customer relationships – Too often, manufacturers internalize the business-to-business aspect of industrial marketing. Social media offers the chance to build individual advocates on a 1-to-1 basis, rallying support across the customer organization. At the core of every B2B sale is a collective group of B2C customers, all with different motivations; social media can quickly shine a light on how to use those differences to your advantage in the sale.

2. Experiment with Discovery-Driven Planning – Designed to drive certainty from uncertainty, this planning methodology enables constant assumption testing, moving forward with projects only as data collection turns known unknowns into facts. Our sister program, the Corporate Strategy Board, has published some great research from Air Products utilizing this method.

3. Refine your Insight Marketing strategy – Markets may be uncertain, but members still control their ability to teach customers new insights that link explicitly to their differentiators. Learn more about how to embed this strategy in your organization.

Perhaps one day in the not too distant future the skies will fully clear. But until then, the cloud of uncertainty will reign supreme. And I promise, no more bad metaphors in subsequent posts.

(photo courtesy of mikebaird)

Video: Social Media on a Shoestring

Slidedeck: Social Media on a Shoestring

“Sharpie Susan’s” goal was increase brand loyalty by leveraging brand advocates they termed “bold expressionmakers,” who are Sharpie uber-users that gravitate toward new media.  To achieve this objective, Sharpie decided to showcase content from these “bold expressionmakers” that demonstrated creative ways to use Sharpie pens in daily life.

Investment:

• $1,000 for Blog Masthead
• $20 for Blog Theme
• $895 for eLancer
• Free:  monitoring tools to listen for brand mentions

Measurement:

At the time of Susan’s presentation, Sharpie measured Total Visits, RSS Subscribers, Blog Links, Google Friends, and Comments.

Here’s what Sharpie would like to measure moving forward:

Then I must ask the rhetorical question: how close do marketers come to that definition when it comes to marketing planning? The search term ‘marketing planning’ has appeared in the top five search terms on the MLC website for 24 months running. Our annual executive survey has reported ‘planning’ as a top-five area of improvement nearly every year since the poll’s inception.

Sincerely now, what do marketers keep doing year after year that keeps yielding the same underwhelming results?

There are two near-constant mistakes that prevent most organizations from building successful marketing plans:

1. They replicate the previous year’s marketing plan, subtly tweaking resource allocation and marketing activities from the previous year, which was only slightly different from the year before that, and so forth.

2. Interim changes to plans are either made with little regard to the original strategy, or not made at all. In layman’s terms, some call this tactic the ‘stick-it-in-a-drawer’ method of planning.

Taken together, these mistakes yield plans that are unresponsive to changing market conditions, miss shifts in customer needs, and produce tactical plans reliant on ‘traditional’ media.  With continued uncertainty in today’s economy and social media shifting the communications landscape daily, an incremental, unadaptable marketing plan is the surest path to wasted effort and misguided strategy.

So rather than simply expecting different results, how can marketer do planning differently?  For starters, marketing plans must link to corporate strategy – it’s the only way to demonstrate the function’s contribution to the ultimate arbiter: shareholder value.  Marketers should implement metrics immediately after settling on strategy – not after selecting tactics. Cross-functional leaders don’t much care how many Facebook fans you have; they want to know whether your strategy worked … which most CFOs measure in dollars. The closer your metrics are to financial outcomes, the stronger the case for marketing investment becomes.

With linkage to corporate priorities, Marketing’s performance is inextricably linked to the performance of peer functions. Harness that cross-functional input during planning – solicit input from Sales (particularly B2B companies); understand how the R&D pipeline will impact future sales; make sure Market Research provides the best customer insight. Lastly, practice integrated marketing communications, with each medium and touchpoint serving a clear purpose toward the achievement of marketing objectives.

Implementing these principles will at least break the insanity habit, but by no means will they alone yield long-term success. There remains a need to build a repeatable process embedded in daily workflow, where the plan is a living document referenced throughout the year.

MLC Members, if you’re struggling with planning, we’d love to understand your specific challenges so we can build better resources to support you on this perennial pain point.  Please take this two-minute survey about the state of your organization’s marketing planning process or e-mail my colleague Abhaya Menon, and we’ll be sure to follow up!

Mountain: Post-Mountaintop Removal

2009 was a year of taking sledgehammers to budgets, not least agency spend.  Many marketers have relied on the equivalent of mountaintop removal to get at those agency savings.  They’ve launched agency reviews or have consolidated agency relationships.  These approaches are imprecise, crude and unsightly—but can be effective in reducing spend. 

However, most of these marketers will be under continued budget pressure in 2010.  The problem with mountaintop blasting is that, once you do it, you can’t play that card again (uh, the top of the mountain is gone).  So what are marketers to do to find additional cost savings that won’t harm communications quality? 

The answer lies in the many hundreds of individual-level, daily interactions happening between client and agency personnel.  Council research suggests that many clients have 25%+ in potential labor savings tied up here.  But to get at them requires a technique far more precise than mountaintop removal.  To extend the mining metaphor, you need something more like solution mining.

In the business world, that’s lean process management.  I know, I know.  You’re thinking “fat chance of applying lean management to a creative activity involving fundamentally right-brained people.”  But hear me out. 

The key insight enabling marketers to get those 25%+ in labor savings is this: you don’t apply lean process management to the creative activities themselves—you apply it to the dozens of process steps surrounding those creative activities.

MLC members: evaluate whether you might be able to apply lean techniques.  See this case study and then view this webinar replay showing how one CPG reduced labor by over 45% in FSI production. 

Here are a few tips for getting started:

1. Pilot with a low-risk, highly-repeated marcomm activity: there are dozens you could choose from (see the last page of the case study for a list), but find one that would be a low-risk test case.
2. Use a neutral party to facilitate: You’ll want a neutral party (i.e., outside of marketing) to ensure an objective view of individual process steps. 
3. Aim for high granularity in your process mapping—the savings come from making a set of surgical changes to an often overlooked set of steps in the processes we repeat over and over with our agency partners.  Granularity matters.

For a good, short read on lean process application, see this WSJ piece detailing how Starbucks has applied lean in its shops.

Unfortunately, many of the marketing reorganizations that will kick off in 2010 will take a year or two to implement.  Right around the time that key players settle into their new roles, teams start to gel, and new processes start to fire on all cylinders, market conditions will have changed, and it will be time to start all over again. 

Having seen this scenario play out more than once, some CMOs are searching for a new model—an organization that adapts to changing markets, and doesn’t require a wrecking ball every three years.  Sounds nice, but what does that actually look like?  Here are a few of the tenets we see emerging:   

• A common view of target customers that spans Sales, Marketing, and other customer-facing functions
• A common view of the company’s value proposition across all commercial functions
• Flexible teams, typically tied to segments and market opportunities, versus functional silos
• Efficient flow of information across Sales, Marketing, and their key stakeholders

Marketers who’ve experimented with this model find that while flexible, customer-aligned teams present their own management challenges—albeit microscopic compared to the challenges of sweeping, function-wide reorganizations.  Similarly, when individuals are equipped with a single view of both customers and company, it’s much easier for them to bounce from team to team and take on new roles—even when teams and roles toggle between the traditional boundaries of Sales, Marketing, or Operations.  

While few marketing organizations will take the plunge and adopt this approach wholesale, here are a few steps any marketing organization can take to start down the path:

1. Establish a common set of priorities across all commercial functions, starting with Sales and Marketing
2. Define distinct roles for Sales and Marketing for achieving those commercial priorities
3. Codify a common base of customer understanding for all customer-facing functions

MLC Members: Before redrawing any lines, we’d suggest establishing some sort of baseline on what is and isn’t working.  Take our Commercial Integration Diagnostic to help you pinpoint breakdowns and spot competing priorities across Sales and Marketing. 

And to celebrate the coming year of the tiger, click here to see the best tiger-related ad of 2009.

Results from our tenth annual survey show that in 2009, spend on channels conducive to driving consideration (website, social media, direct mail, PR) held flat or grew; while spend on channels that primarily drive awareness (broadcast, print, online display ads) declined in comparison to 2008. The question we asked was what is driving this trend?The answer lies (as it rightly should) in viewing marketing budget allocation with the lens of business objectives. The vast majority of survey respondents – from both B2B and B2C companies – said accelerating loyalty (retaining and growing share of wallet from existing customers) was their key priority in 2009. The tight pressure on business is forcing most companies to focus on their existing clients and ensure that these clients ride through the storm with them.

Interestingly though, the tactics to drive consideration might have changed – perhaps as a result of cost pressure.  We found that the channel mix is most definitely changing. Although traditional channels (broadcast, media, print, shows, etc.) continue to remain important, the marcomm channel mix shifted gradually in favor of digital channels this year.  Digital spend in most companies skyrocketed in 2009.

Do the whiffs of optimism around the economic turn around reach the survey respondents? Not yet. Most marketers surveyed do not expect significant changes in their budget size next year.

MLC Members, download the full 2009 Marketing Investment Benchmarks study  or compare your spend to peers using our Marketing Benchmarks Center tools.