Wide Angle

A few weeks ago, I pulled 10 nuggets from The Economist’s special report on social media. Fittingly, The Economist followed that this week with a special report on managing information.

Managing and making best use of all the data trails that consumers create via digital and social media is critical for marketers (see this prior post on managing information richness). This capability is one of a few that will separate winning marketing functions (and even enterprises) from losing ones in the next 3-5 years.

So, without further delay, here are 10 of my favorite takeaways from the report. Read More »

The post title is cheeky, yes; but this one incredibly true. The more we see members implementing a social media strategy, the wider the gap grows between success and failure – and along with that, the attendant risks of failure. For those looking simply to make the social media case, failure means another year lost while consumers and technology forge ahead. For those making social media a central part of the customer experience, failure means massive personnel costs that could have been spent on tried-and-true techniques. So without further ado, the top ten list: Read More »

So, you’ve decided to bring some analytics hotshots onto your marketing team.  What should you do first? Whatever you do, don’t let them near the data!

Not yet.  It’s too dangerous.  More peril than you could shake a stick at.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a huge fan of analytics to improve marketing decision making. I spent four years leading a team in CapitalOne’s marketing and analysis group.  I have a deep appreciation for organizations that have built competitive advantage on analytics.  In fact, one of my “must reads” for marketers is Davenport’s Competing on Analytics (good introductory excerpt here). 

But what I have also observed with high-powered analytics is real-world myopia. Read More »

Watch a 5-minute video showing how Texas Instruments identified critical touchpoints in the customer experience.

Marketers typically use VOC as a barometer when weighing different investments in the customer experience.  But this reliance on customer voice biases marketers to only consider improvements to the existing set of touchpoints.  Existing touchpoints aren’t necessarily the best ways to engage customers and, moreover, “fixing” touchpoints that rank highly on the customer gripe list generally leads to an experience that’s comparable, not differentiated.  That’s not to say that VOC is always going to lead you astray, but its implications should be taken with a grain of salt. Read More »

One of the themes we’re picking up from Council members is a reckoning that new product development and innovation approaches are badly in need of an overhaul.  What’s driving it?  Here’s what we’ve heard from marketers at Global 2000-sized companies: 

• The recession has fundamentally recast customers’ hierarchy of needs, priorities and in some cases core values, giving rise to the “New Normal” customer
• The “Good Enough Revolution” (an important read) has demonstrated that, in many categories, the returns curve on adding new features has flattened or even inverted
• The increasing participation of our target audiences in digital and social media has presented an opportunity to dramatically reduce innovation cycle time
• The source of consumption growth is shifting to BRIC countries, which is putting more pressure on innovation processes to produce discontinuous innovation for those markets Read More »

It’s no secret that increased social media participation has given B2C marketers unprecedented access to customer data.   With just a customer email address, the right “data crawler” goes through blogs, networking sites, video sharing sites, and other social media outlets to report on a customer’s age, location, gender, social site participation and more.  Collect this data for thousands of customers and you have some potent information.

In our conversations with marketers, we’re coming across a variety of creative uses for these data sets.  At the most direct level, marketers are using social data to choose the best social media sites to invest in.  Some are discovering that their customers are spending time on social sites they (and their competitors) weren’t aware of—and are moving quickly to capitalize on these undiscovered opportunities. Read More »

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner are back with a second installment of the ‘freaky’ thinking that has now led them to advising would-be suicide bombers to buy life insurance. Over multiple plane rides last week, I scanned through SuperFreakonomics but was struck by one quote in the chapter on apathy vs. altruism: “People are people, and they respond to incentives.” Combine that with their analysis of unintended consequences – “among the most potent laws in existence” – and you begin to see why many marketing schemes fall short of perfect. Let’s take the example of the airlines and baggage fees. Read More »