First, I think it’s probably important to get some definitions right. As the Forbes link above says, I think it’s fair to say that mobile-enabled e-commerce does not equal mobile commerce, at least strictly speaking. When you buy a book from Amazon on your iPad, you’re not engaging in mobile commerce per se – you’re using an e-commerce portal adapted for your mobile device. “Mobile commerce” is probably best described as shopping that takes advantage of unique properties of mobile devices.

So, why doesn’t it ever seem to happen – and when it does, why does the development in the space seem to happen so slowly?

VentureBeat took that subject on a few days ago. They posit that there are two big barriers to widespread adoption of mobile payments and commerce:

The lack of a developed, recognized standard. There is an industry-wide standard for credit cards, and processors work such that almost any credit card can be swiped at almost any retail point of sale, and the transaction will go through. The same is absolutely not true for mobile payments, at least not yet: retailers wishing to accept mobile payments have to guess what kind of phones their customers use, and potentially install multiple pieces of hardware to handle the transactions.

The significant cost of updating retail infrastructure. Hand in hand with the lack of certainty around a particular processing standard is the big cost retailers face in upgrading their infrastructure to handle mobile payments. Big retailers often use purpose-built or highly-customized point of sale software, designed to integrate smoothly with inventory and payment processing systems – positive qualities that make implementation of a new payment method prohibitively difficult and expensive. Included under this heading is the cost of training new staff to use the equipment – no small feat.

To this, I’d add one more: consumers just don’t seem to be interested. And I can’t entirely blame them. I might be being small-minded here, but it sounds like there’s no inherent advantage to whipping out one’s phone to pay for a retail transaction vs. whipping out one’s credit card. In the development of other forms of e-commerce, there was a real sticking point – the need to get up and go to a store to get books and other items, for instance – and there doesn’t appear to be one here. Unless it’s possible with mobile payments to walk out of a store without checking out – and it sounds like that day is very, very far in the future – I just don’t see the draw, at least in a retail setting.

So, I won’t go the easy pundit’s route, and say 2012 is the year of mobile commerce. I think 2012, and 2013 for that matter, will be years of mobile-enabled e-commerce – a series of incremental innovations designed to make the buying experience easier for mobile users. There’s real growth in that – maybe not whiz-bang growth, but growth nonetheless – and it’s something worth pursuing.

MLC members, for more on mobile, check out our Mobile Marketing Resource Center.

It’s the organizational part that’s more difficult, though – people naturally get stuck in routines, are averse to change, and executives are loath to take risks on projects that have uncertain chances of success. We’ve collected our best practices in getting organizations to adapt in our Make the Case to Invest in Social Media challenge center, and most of the lessons there hold true for channels like mobile, as well.

With that in mind, we also thought we’d take a second look at an interview we did a few years back with Susan Lavington, former SVP of Marketing at USA Today. She was at USA Today during the heyday of social adaption, and led that paper – a progressive one, by print journalism standards – through a difficult transition to social.

MLC members can read the interview in its entirety.

Usually, when the customer has an issue, customer service is there to help. But in this case, the reps are often as confused as the customer. As a rep at a national retailer recently told me when I called, the personalized ad “is not on our site so it’s Pandora’s ad not ours”. With personalization being a relatively new and under-regulated phenomenon, the chance to be exactly right is often counter balanced by the chance to be completely wrong. Sophisticated algorithms running in the background don’t guarantee success – any financial firm can tell you that.

As marketers rightly understand it, personalization is on their turf. While they are positioned to take the lead in delivering greater relevance to consumers, marketers can’t hope to ace it on their own. Here’s why:

• Personalization calls for inter-departmental coordination. Your interactive marketing vendor isn’t the only party you’ve got to work with. Not letting your left hand know what the right is doing when it comes to targeting customers is inviting trouble. At the very least, sales and customer service need to know what personalization is and be able to give a informed explanation when customers call with questions/comments ranging from “Why am I seeing this?” to “Stop spamming me!” To consumers, anything with your logo on it is your ad and hence your responsibility to explain / fix / make disappear. Having a short, scripted FAQ beforehand on how personalized ads work and how settings can be adjusted could save reps from coming up with their own explanations. For sales, integrating the detailed customer data your use for personalization into the CRM system could help them gain valuable context before each conversation and more willing to track additional consumers metrics for you next time around. The simple fact is, if you don’t talk to other departments beforehand about what’s going on, they’ll come back to you later about what’s going wrong.

• Personalization calls for coordination within marketing itself. In the same vein, marketers involved in personalization shouldn’t be allowed to sit in their own niche while keeping the rest of the department in the dark. Digital and social marketers can tell you who is poking around on brand’s Facebook and campaign pages; product managers can help you zoom in on purchase motivation in a particular segment; and market research analysts have primary research and tracked metrics that would add another layer of do’s and don’ts.

Hippocrates said, “First, do no harm.” Embarrassed or annoyed consumers aren’t likely to be loyal – they said as much in our recently concluded consumer survey on personalization and privacy. The bottom line: consumer data can be bought but consumer trust cannot. We’ll talk more about how you can get personalization done right in your segment so stay tuned for more insight.

That might work (and be necessary) for TV, a channel where ad buys have to be coordinated months in advance and audience preferences don’t change too much. But for social media, where channels change near-daily and audience behavior is still in flux? We think companies should be focused primarily on experimentation and flexibility – and that plans should optimize to those goals.

Our Social Media Plan on a Page will help get you there – it’s a five-step method for creating a world-class social media experimentation strategy, one that’s grounded in enterprise priorities and audience preferences. Here’s what you’ll do:

Ground strategy in business objectives. Pick – and fully understand –  your company’s 2-5 growth priorities for the year. This guards against wasting time and money by choosing projects that don’t mesh with enterprise-wide priorities.

Assess your audience dynamics. Dig deep, and understand how and why your target audience consumes social media. Make sure you have an idea of where consumption might be headed in the future by identifying your lead users and examining their behaviors.

Identify your strategic opportunities. Explore how social media can help your company accentuate its strengths, as well as meet customer needs in ways that are difficult for competitors to replicate.

Select the highest-potential experiments. Determine which near-term experiments in social media will help position your company to take advantage of longer-term strategic opportunities in social media.

Measure your social media efforts. Use a “Return on Objectives” approach to assess if and how your social media efforts are driving business results.

MLC members, you can download the full Social Media Plan on a Page template and get started on your social plan today.

But many brands struggle with the risk involved when using consumers to market the brand.  After all, giving consumers the license to share their thoughts on your brand allows them to share the bad along with the good.  In addition, it can be hard to select the right people to represent the brand.

Ford tackled these challenges to launch the U.S. model of the Ford Fiesta by using consumer advisors, or “agents.”  To ensure that both consumers and the brand could trust the agents, Ford implemented a rigorous selection process to ensure good brand fit and social media reach.  Ford selected a very diverse group of agents, so most consumers in the Fiesta’s target demographic can find agents like them.

A larger struggle for most brands, though, is giving up control over what the consumer advisors say.  Ford knew it needed to balance the need for some brand control with the need to generate authenticity by giving agents uncensored speech, so they assigned monthly missions to give some structure to the agents’ experiences. Ford then allowed the agents to use their own blogs, tweets, and YouTube channels to tell their stories in their own words, pictures, and videos.

In addition to providing structure for the agents, Ford further leveraged these missions by selecting some that highlighted the car’s features.  For example, one mission had one agent drive until his car ran out of gas, showcasing the car’s high gas mileage; other missions included turning the car into an ice-cream truck (showing off a large amount of trunk and storage space) and taking a road trip (to demonstrate its comfort over long distances).

Using the agents to tell the brand’s story had really positive results: Ford generated the same name awareness for the Fiesta as the Ford Edge and Flex had after two years of traditional advertising at just 10% the cost of a traditional media campaign.

After seeing such great success in the United States, Ford adopted the campaign for India.  MLC members, click here to read about how Ford used the agents to generate brand interest in an emerging market.

Marketing at Kimberly-Clark found a way to generate more effective communications by making principled shifts in media spend.  The secret?  Rather than beginning with mass media and then making other investments if budget allows, they plan media touchpoints outward from the consumer first.

Kimberly-Clark begins by identifying a clear overarching creative concept called an “Engagement Idea” that drives touchpoint selection.  A well-developed Engagement Idea also provides necessary support and rationale for initial budget allocation into nontraditional media channels.  It develops the “Engagement Idea” through four steps:

1. Understand the brand – Ensure comprehensive knowledge of the brand’s positioning and the consumer-centric rationale behind it.
2. Brainstorm ways to drive engagement around the brand– Use consumer feedback to find potentially resonant ways to represent the brand.
3. Screen potential ideas for flexibility – Test the Engagement Idea for flexibility (i.e. it can last for two to three years’ worth of campaigns) and breadth (i.e. it doesn’t directly prescribe specific touchpoints)
4. Identify touchpoint roles – Determine which touchpoints are best suited to conveying the Engagement Idea as well as any others needed to drive people towards those touchpoints.

To get Marketing to accept this new approach and the ideas produced, Marketing also takes an aggressive sales approach to convince internal audiences to accept nontraditional touchpoint mixes.

In Jack Johnson’s first US hit, he sang “I want to turn the whole thing upside down… I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found.”  Turn your media planning upside-down, and maybe you’ll find a more efficient media mix.

MLC members, read more about this process here.

The most dangerous assumption in relationship marketing:

Most consumers are open to entering a relationship with my brand.

They aren’t.

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that, at most, somewhere between 20% and 30% of consumers are willing to engage in a “relationship” with a brand.   The vast majority of consumers simply aren’t wired to enter into brand relationships.

When we asked 7,000 consumers via a global survey earlier this year whether they have a relationship with any brands, only 23% said yes.  The rest said “no”, and when we gave them an opportunity to elaborate on their response in a free-text field, we got lots of comments like “It’s just a brand, not a member of my family.”

We also saw this in an IBM study looking at the reasons consumers follow brands in social media.  Approximately 65% of business and marketing professionals believe consumers follow their brands to “feel connected” or “be part of a community”.  Both of these are relationship-y sorts of desires.  However, only 20 to 30% of consumers said those are reasons they follow brands on social media.  Very consistent with our own 23% finding.  And it underscores the disconnect between marketers and consumers on relationship dynamics.

Just last week, I came across a very interesting report from L2 (www.l2thinktank.com) about digital savviness in the specialty retail category.  L2 did a clever analysis looking 60 specialty retailers, and the correlation between Facebook interaction rates and size of brand Facebook following.  The clear pattern is a decline in interaction rates as communities grow larger.  In communities of 20,000 consumers or fewer, interaction rates are 32 basis points (yes, that’s 32 interactions for every 10,000 people).  For communities of 50,000 or more, the interaction rate drops to 7 basis points.

One possible interpretation of this finding is that brands aren’t doing a very good job of deepening relationships with new Facebook fans. So, it stands to reason: if only brands could innovate in their relationship marketing, they could drive much higher interaction rates. Right?

But what if there’s a different way of looking at it? Maybe there are natural limits to the number of consumers who will engage in any sort of relationship with brands.  Brands tend to pick up those fans first when they launch Facebook pages.  Once they pluck the low-hanging fan fruit, they hit a threshold at which most incremental fans are just in it for some transactional advantage, like a shot at winning a contest, or discounts.

So, maybe brands are simply unlikely to ever convert a meaningful share of those second wave consumers to have a relationship. But why not?  Why shouldn’t brands be able to build relationships with 35% or even 50% of their consumer base?

I believe it’s because there are deeper, genetic factors at play for a huge swathe of the consumer population.  In my next blog post, I’ll highlight some of the research I’ve seen that points in that direction.

In the meantime, it’s time to take a hard look at your relationship marketing efforts.  Try to find a splitter question to discern which consumers are unlikely ever to be open to a relationship.  And then stop wasting marketing blood and treasure by giving those consumers the “relationship treatment”.  Instead, treat them to a dose of decision simplicity, as detailed in MLC’s work on simplifying purchase decisions.

Despite several years of slowly shifting mindsets, Digital is too often still treated as its own stand-alone function, separate from Promotions, PR, Direct Marketing etc.  It should, by contrast, be treated as a part of all marcomm efforts.  Here are a few reasons why:

• To provide social proof from peers and validate brand messages (via social media)
• To offer real utility that helps prove campaign promises (e.g., via mobile apps, microsites)
• To create memorable experiences that bring brand benefits to life (e.g., via interactive games, virtual or live events promoted online etc.)
• To connect touchpoints together. Mobile and social can be the glue between all others touchpoints – and a means of accelerating consumers along the purchase path. For example, mobile enables consumers to purchase or learn more about a brand/product wherever they see an ad. This stops people forgetting about the ad and increases chances they’ll be just interested enough to take the next action then and there. Mobile plays a similar role in the store, i.e., it enables shoppers to check reviews online and saves them having to go home to do that due diligence before buying.

Now, we haven’t seen anyone who’s fully solved this one yet, but here are a few techniques that leading marketers have been using to integrate around digital:

Shift organizational and agency structures. Make your digital agency the lead agency (we’ve spoken to quite a few companies that have done this).

Appoint an ‘integration champion’ with a background in digital.  This person needs clout with multiple digital and non-digital teams/agencies as well as the power to enforce collaboration. MLC members, learn more about the role of an integration champion.

Assign a digital expert to each offline channel team ( e.g., TV, Promotions, Shopper Marketing, Direct Mail) to ensure each team considers digital extensions to their ideas and tests/optimizes ideas online before running with them is less flexible channels.

Start sourcing leaders (in any marketing position) from digital marketing roles to ensure a focus on digital comes from the top.

Make digital part of everyone’s job. Build a digital academy (as Intel has done) and require all marketers – even those in traditional channels – to pass at least the first module of lessons. Create more complex modules based on each individual’s requirements.

Encourage all marketers to participate in social media discussions with consumers (and thus learn more about it) by allocating badges/rewards for participation.

Get senior marketers to shadow junior marketers to learn about the new world of social media (some companies call this ‘reverse shadowing’).

Organize marcomm planning around digital. Start marcomm planning by coming up with a  ‘digital idea’ or an ‘experiential idea’ instead of any other kind of ‘big idea’ and then work out how it can play offline.  An ‘experiential idea’ should be an experience that conveys the brand benefit (and ideally breaks people out of their old ways of thinking).  Typically, these involve multiple digital elements, both to drive people to the experience and to enable the experience itself.

Make sure mobile and social media teams are included in campaign planning from the start. (See “Structure” tips above to help with this).

Optimize budgeting towards experimentation and rapid deployment. Save up to 20% of campaign budget for flexible deployment. Digital allows for faster detection of new opportunities and faster reaction to them, but this requires campaign budget to be reserved for later use in the campaign.

To stay on top of emerging digital platforms ensure a portion of the budget is always allocated to media experimentation.  Allocate 70% of budget to tried-and-tested touchpoints (to avoid excessive risk), 20% to emerging touchpoints that have shown promise, and 10% to totally new touchpoints with no expectation of in-year ROI. MLC members, learn more about the 70-20-10 approach.

Adapt relevant measurement methods and frames. Don’t rely too much on mix models that can underestimate the impact of emerging media (due to low spend and limited sales history). Consider using agent-based modeling and/or the Market Contact Audit to get a better sense of how mobile and social media influence sales.  Agent-based modeling also helps explain how digital and offline channels interact, which aids integrated planning as well as buy in.

Instead of only measuring the number of people reached, also measure the amount of media spend/impressions wasted on the wrong targets. This will encourage a shift away from inefficient offline channels. MLC members, see other ways to make this case.

MLC members, watch this space for more ideas on how to integrate around digital; it’s a topic we’re always interested in!  If anyone has any ideas or potential best practices to share, please let us know.

Pew Research recently took the time to ask people that question directly, and here’s what they found:

First, let’s talk about the elephant in the room, the one thing that’s not on that list, and that’s “Keeping in touch with brands and products I enjoy.” We know that many consumers do that, of course, but it’s obviously not high on their list for being on social media in the first place – more like an ancillary benefit. Yet another reason why marketers should be wary of “engagement” strategies – the people you’re targeting simply aren’t there to be engaged by brands.

But beyond that, this rank ordering of social media uses is useful for marketers trying to figure out how to best integrate social into their products, services, and messages. One thing that surprised me quite a bit was the low ranking users assigned to “Connecting with others w/ shared hobbies or interests” – something that’s personally, for me, probably the most important use of social media. It implies that marketers, when designing social campaigns, should be discounting the stated interest of users, and focusing instead on truly social dimensions – stuff like staying in touch with friends and family, and connecting with old friends.

In practical terms, what does this mean? Well, if you’re General Motors, it’s fairly trivial to launch a Facebook campaign aimed at muscle-car enthusiasts to promote the new Camaro, for instance. But are those enthusiasts open to interest-oriented messaging on that channel? If the data above is true, maybe the answer is no – and instead, maybe it’s better to target a social experience, instead. Encouraging users to think of themselves and their friends in the car, driving the car to social events, and that sort of thing might be more effective than appealing to the gearhead in them.

It’s still early days in terms of targeting users on social networks, and figuring out the right way to target them, but we’ll need to think hard in the coming years about each channel and the expectations the customer brings with them in order to market effectively.

MLC members, for more on social media, check out our social media topic center. Also, do you have thoughts on the right way to target your consumers via social platforms? If so, e-mail me – I’d love to talk further!

But take a step back. Marketers have been on the “engagement” treadmill for probably close to 10 years now, ever since e-mail became a viable commercial channel. Yes, in the interim, we’ve gotten a good deal closer to our consumers – in some cases, giving them a seamless, cross-channel experience both in marketing communications and customer service. We can reach them via e-mail, we can reach them via SMS, we can reach them via Facebook, we can reach them via Twitter. And the cost of hitting those touchpoints is much, much lower than in the old-media world of radio, televisions, and newspapers. But at what cost?

This year, MLC’s key B2C research effort focused on how customers have responded to the barrage of branded information marketers are throwing at them, and the results aren’t pretty: rather than feeling closer to brands, and rather than feeling more sure about their shopping decisions, they’re more confused than ever. The barrage of messages and product choice has led to all kinds of indecisive behaviors, such as endemic brand-switching and “decision spirals” in grocery aisles and retail sales floors. Customers still buy, but many make sub-optimal purchases (and, subsequently, aren’t loyal to the brands they buy), and many put off buying because they’re oversaturated with brand information.

Marketers know a lot of this, but they think that consumer indecision and brand disloyalty happens because of ineffective engagement strategies, not because the very nature of “brand engagement” itself leads to cognitive overload and sub-optimal decisionmaking. MLC members can read the full study to learn why it’s engagement itself, and not poor engagement strategies, that leads to consumer stagnation.

At the end of the day, though, competing brands are taking up more and more of your customers’ cognitive capacity, and you can’t just let them have that real estate. In the study, we advise brands to influence customers in three more targeted ways:

Help consumers advise each other. Consumer-to-consumer information cuts through better than the cacophonous noise of branded information. We profile a number of brands that are serving as consumer advice hubs, helping one-to-one product recommendations take place and bypassing traditional commercial messages.

Simplify the learning journey. Along with more choice, consumers have more variables to take into account when choosing a product. The idea of buying a big-screen television, for instance, is incredibly daunting even to consumers familiar with and conversant in technology. We profile some examples of how companies have simplified the informational component to purchase.

Allow for easier comparison. Give your consumers the tools to deal directly with product proliferation. We profile brands that have deployed simple buying guides, easy-to-remember purchase criteria (like – speaking of engagement – DeBeers’ 4C model), and easy-to-use schemas to allow customers to make the right choice for them.

The latest tactics for breaking through increasingly high barriers to attention all have some serious limitations:

• Tactic: Create such attention-grabbing ads that consumers stop and watch or even actively seek them out (the Old Spice strategy). Limitation: There was only one Old Spice campaign last year. There’s just no process for reliably producing viral hits.

• Tactic: Encourage consumers to sign up to regular targeted communications e.g., email newsletters, mobile alerts, Twitter feeds, Facebook news feeds. Limitation: Marketing message saturation is hitting consumers’ inboxes and news feeds.  Soon it’ll be just as hard to stand out there as it is elsewhere.

• Tactic: Hyper-targeting, i.e., send such super-relevant messages that consumers take notice. Limitation: Marketers often underestimate the bar for relevance that has to be met before a consumer actually clicks on an ad. Even with new data and automation tools, hyper-targeting is still pretty hard.

Leading marketers realize this and are adding an extra strategy to the mix. Instead of doing more to get consumers’ attention, they’re doing more to get through to consumers WITHOUT their full attention.  MLC members, we recently added a set of tips on low-attention branding to our website. Here are the basic steps to take:

Redesign ads/packaging to maximize unconscious information absorption. Consumers do absorb some information even when they’re not really paying attention. Marketers are now turning to new technologies, e.g., eye tracking, pulse/sweat sensors and even brain scans, to help present information in the most compelling and natural manner.

Establish routines around product use. Product routines secure repeat purchase without the need for in-your-face reminders.  The problem is, disrupting existing habits and cementing new ones is incredibly hard.  See how one CPG managed it here.

Publish useful or entertaining content on consumers’ interests with subtle branding in the background. Instead of forcing consumers to pay attention to explicit ads, brands are creating interesting/fun content and hoping the subtle background branding will create positive associations. Learn more here.

Identify and activate consumer cravings. Better understanding of cravings also helps boost product use without the need for explicit messages around product benefits etc. Some marketers of consumable products are turning to fMRI brain scans to identify the precise moment of consumption that provides the biggest dopamine hit. Creating ads focused on these moments improves effectiveness when consumers are only half-listening.  See  how a CPG used brain scanning to identify and activate consumer cravings here.

MLC members, learn more about low-attention branding, and consider taking this anonymous 7-minute survey on future trends in marketing. We will share aggregate results with all survey takers to give you a sense of how your peers think marketing is evolving. Thank you!

Editor’s note: We put this up (and in our member newsletter) prior to last night’s news that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs had passed away. We’ll have thoughts on his legacy later this week.

The following is a guest post from Robert van Alstyne, a media and technology analyst with our sister program, Iconoculture.

It’s a testament to technology’s ascendant role in pop culture that today’s Apple press conference had more consumer buzz than any new TV show this fall season. With media-saturated consumers’ tastes increasingly splintered, gadget lust is now one of the last common denominators uniting the masses.

Heading into today’s press conference, professional pundits and John Q. Public speculated wildly, debating what new treats Apple would unveil. Would we get an iPhone 5 or just a new iPhone 4? Prior to the event, rumors of a slimmer, 3X-faster iPhone 5 reached a crescendo. By the time new Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage this morning, online chatter had reached such a pitch that one colleague speculated on Twitter, “I wonder, did America stop what it was doing in, say, 1953, when the next model *car* was announced?”

In a move that disappointed some true believers, there was no iPhone 5 announcement, “just” the iPhone 4S, which will hit stores October 14. The new phone still boasts impressive hardware advancements. Among the iPhone 4S’ selling points are the ability to switch intelligently between two antennas to transmit and receive (thereby doubling data download speed), along with a serious camera upgrade. Initial online reaction was “meh,” but we’d be shocked if the 4S doesn’t sell extraordinarily well, just like its predecessor.

Right now, Apple’s main selling point is its image as a cutting-edge company, so the product details matter relatively little to the average consumer. By tirelessly turning their brand into an essential emblem of digital savvy, Apple has carved out both a cult-like following and an ever-broadening base of users. Apple’s old-guard faithful might be disappointed, and they might not “need” the latest iteration of the iPhone. But whatever the specs, in a growing number of consumers’ eyes, Apple’s latest remains a cherished status symbol, broadcasting to all that they’re in step with our fast-moving information-driven world.

MLC members, for more great Iconoculture insights, check out the selected pieces we publish each week on the latest consumer trends.

But evidence is emerging – not the least of which, from our 2011 B2C research – that paid media is becoming less and less effective in terms of driving sales and positive brand sentiment. It’s up to marketers to find the channels that consumers trust most, and re-optimize spend for those platforms.

Just as a review, here are the three broad buckets of media spend we’re thinking about:

Paid Media: Channels that you pay for (TV, radio, print, billboards, retail displays, online ads)

Owned Media: Channels that you own (website, blog, building, uniform, vehicles, product itself), or partially own (facebook page, twitter page, YouTube channel)

Earned Media: Consumers become the channel (PR, WOM, mentions in blogs, tweets,  or product reviews), which you can neither buy nor own

Typically, marketers use a PEO framework, where they start with Paid media first, then look to Earned, and put least focus on Owned. Some of the beliefs that drive them to do this are:

Myth #1: We don’t have budgetary limitations, so we don’t require earned media.

Some marketers and agencies put most of their resources on paid media and the leftovers are spent on earned media. Only when they’re tight on budget, they plan their entire or most of their marketing strategy around the earned media. In effect, they push down earned media’s status to a “media of last resort.”

Reality: While it’s easy to “buy” media, it’s not really easy to create the “buy-in.” With so much information overload, consumers have become highly insensitive to traditional media (Kogi BBQ learnt this the hard way). What they actually value is information that comes from credible sources. I’m sure when Mercedes-Benz wanted to capitalize on Google executive’s testimonial, cost-saving wasn’t the motivation. Rather, it was the credibility of the source that Mercedes wanted to leverage.

While earned media is relatively cheaper than paid, it is certainly not free. Nor it is easy or quick. The cost of buying media gets shifted to cost of creating and managing content. Even if the companies now will need to become creative thinkers to develop and plan content, the ROI is still better compared to paid media.

Myth #2: Earned media can’t be controlled, so there is no point planning for it.

Some marketers fear that since they don’t have any control over the reach and impact of earned media, they’ll end up wasting dollars, or probably even worse—earning negative WOM.

Reality: Though the control may not be “completely” in your hands, but with some thoughtful planning, you can initiate and drive the conversation in your favor. Generate curiosity (Kaizers Orchestra did it by launching a record on paper), create value (Best Buy’s Twelpforce), empathize (J&J’s Baby Center), or just challenge the conventions (Men With Cramps! Really?), and Voilà! You’ve influenced the influencers.

Further, owned media is a low-hanging fruit that can play a significant role in driving your influence. Brands use their website, twitter page, facebook page, or YouTube channel to seed content. Even the product (customized M&Ms), the packaging (Bronx shoes), and the distribution (Coke’s uVend) can be creatively utilized.

Are the flaws in PEO apparent now?

Imagine turning the PEO framework upside down and making it OEP. That is, try to capitalize on Owned first and use it as a driver to initiate Earned, then focus your strategy on increasing and sustaining Earned, and if necessary seek Paid support.

Earned media should play a “central role” in the marketing strategy, while owned and paid play “supporting partners.”

By the way, while you were reading this post, the brands mentioned above just earned some more media for themselves. So next time you meet your agencies, ask them (a few weeks ago, we wrote about how agencies should transform in the new advertising landscape) to utilize your budget in a way that gives you more dividends, and that too, sustainable.

In an effort to channel Africa’s love of soccer into a greater love for Guinness, the beverage company created “The Guinness Football Challenge,” a TV game show that incorporates physical challenges with trivia in a competition to win prizes.  First kicked off in Kenya, the television program is expanding to Ghana and Cameroon in hopes of turning passionate soccer fans into Guinness fans as well.  So, besides sponsoring the game show, how did Guinness actively engage its audience?  Simple.  Before the first 10-episode season of the popular African game show aired, Diageo handed out Guinness bottles during filming that contained a text code under the cap.  Not only was the audience given beer (read: free beer!), but users could then text in for a chance to win a lump sum of money.

It was a win/win situation for Guinness.  The company was able to deliver its product into the hands of consumers quickly and efficiently, while at the same time capturing phone numbers of users that texted in and storing them in a consumer database.  Diageo also maintained its “Reach for Greatness” slogan and brand message for Africa to allow consumers to easily recognize the brand and to help Guinness easily transition from an old campaign to a new one.

As with any mobile marketing initiative, however, Diageo also faced risks in implementing its “Guinness Rollout.”  To see these risks, along with the final results of the campaign and other campaigns, visit our Mobile Marketing Resource Center.

Last week, Rick Karlton over at the Sales Executive Council wrote a great post on the role iPads and other tablet computers are playing in re-shaping the pharma marketing landscape. Playing off a Wall Street Journal article from a few months back that posited a link between increasing tablet use and declining sales employment in the pharma space, Rick makes the point that fewer salespeople are almost certainly a function of a slowing R&D pipeline, not technology.

Since a key role of pharmaceutical salespeople is product education, it’s expected that the relative importance of Sales might decrease as pipelines slow. But the relative importance of Marketing only increases as fewer products enter the market, and marketers will need a way to reach healthcare professionals with a potentially-smaller sales staff.

Given the restraints that pharma marketers are likely to face, there is absolutely a role for an intimately-personal technology like tablets to step into the void. But marketers should be careful not lose sight of how doctors trust various channels.

Medical professionals, when choosing a medication for their patients, are making very important decisions – occasionally, even life-and-death ones – and they’re inevitably going to respond better to information sources they can trust. Stepping into MLC’s recent B2C work, we found that branded information channels tend to be less trusted by consumers – a big reason why brands like JC Penney are relying on third-party advisors as opposed to information from the brand.

Now: doctors are a more sophisticated lot than the broader pool of consumers, but although they know that Adam the Salesperson works for AstraZeneca and Shirley the Salesperson works for Sanofi, at some margin they’re likely to view the sales folks they have regular contact with as trusted advisors. By replacing regular human sales contact with technological solutions, pharma brands run the risk of replacing a higher-trust channel with a lower-trust alternative.

So, what’s the solution? Pharma brands interested in trying out iPad and other tablet apps should be considering a two-tiered strategy. First, one “level” of applications should act as a complement to the human sales and product education process. Cool animations of things like pathophsyiological and pharmacological processes and device functions illustrate can illustrate key messages. The second level of apps should fit directly into medical workflows: everything from patient evaluation, diagnosis and education to records-keeping and insurance. Ideally they’d facilitate doctor-to-doctor networking and interactions – imagine calling in a specialist via Facetime, for instance.

For decades, pharma salespeople have played a key role in physician education and in driving new medication adaption, and you can’t expect that to change overnight. But pharma companies can remain relevant by fitting their marketing efforts into modern medical workflows, and becoming not only a trusted advisor, but a key facilitator in getting the job done.

Numbers aside, location based social media is a marketer’s segmentation dream come true. Not only can you decide what campaigns and promotions you want to target to pre-defined micro-segments, but you can also customize messages by geography. You can even identify brand loyalists, through the number of people who check-in to virtual locations you own.

Assuming you’ve decided to go ahead and launch a geo-social campaign, these are 5 questions that you must ask while designing a location-based social media marketing campaign:

Does the campaign have local resonance? Geo- social media provide marketers the opportunity of the customizing their marketing, literally to the last mile. But even leading marketers like Starbucks do not geo-target or customize promotions locally. An irate customer recently wrote a blog post to say how fed-up he was to see the same Starbucks deal pop-up everywhere he went.

Are there actual customer benefits? Since most campaigns reward higher number of check-ins, customers must walk in to the location multiple times. Make sure that your customer check-in incentive matches the customer effort proportionally – you don’t want to make customers feel cheated. Pizza hut felt customer heat when it decided to restrict free breadsticks to its store mayors, that too only if they purchased other things.

Is it really expensive to run this campaign? It doesn’t have to be. It’s easy to assume that location based promotions can only be successful if significant freebies are given away. When Ben and Jerry’s offered extra scoops of ice-cream to loyalists, they demonstrated that even little incentives can result in repeat purchase, with minimal impact on profits.

Are the benefits reaching the right people? Don’t be surprised if your employees win rewards for checking-in to their work place, more than any customer. Customers got disappointed to learn that their Starbucks baristas were also the mayors of their stores and brewing themselves $1 discount coffee. While you can’t legally stop employees from checking-in, internal social media and reward policies can prevent employee misuse.

External threats like counterfeit check-ins from nearby locations could also result in false benefit claims. Foursquare is working on technology to reduce fake check-ins, and ensure only in-store check-ins count.

Can you define and measure success? Geo-social campaigns are a shiny object, and it’s easy to “join the herd” aimlessly. Make sure your chase has an end objective in mind. For example, if you want to increase brand visibility, you might want to advertise in locations with high loyalties, and measure check-ins.

Need further guidance? MLC members can explore our Mobile Marketing Resource Center that showcases some of the best-in class mobile marketing campaigns from around the world, and provides guidance on launching a mobile marketing effort.

If you believe that what is happening to the news industry may be playing out in these other industries, marketers should be fundamentally reconsidering the role of brands and therefore the way they do branding.

To boil down the Economist’s 14 page report on the news industry into six bullets:

• The era of mass news from early 1800s to about 2005 was a historical anomaly—news before the early 1800s was much more “atomized” (news came from social connections, vitriolic pamphlets printed in small runs, and from chatter at the local coffee house)
• In the past 10 years, the news scene has returned to an atomized state—the Internet and social media blew apart the mass news model by dropping production costs, commoditizing news and thereby dramatically increasing suppliers of news, while putting mass news outlets (newspapers) out of business
• The upshot: consumers of news (once again) fracture their attention across many more news sources than they used to.
• While consumers have many more news sources to choose from, they also suffer from a torrent of information coming from different sources.
• There is an opportunity for third parties to relieve this pain, and serve as filters and curators of the huge supply of news.  The best bloggers do this well (Andrew Sullivan and his blog the Dish is one of my favorite examples).  It also points up a new role for journalists and editors—many of them should shift their focus from generating the news to a more curatorial role, navigating the torrent of news and stitching together select news atoms into coherent and compelling narratives for consumers

So, why would any of this affect the role that brands play?  Well, if you step back and look at what is happening to select categories, a similar story is playing out (six bullets here, parallel to the bullets above).

• Before the rise of mass production and mass brands, consumer goods and services were provided by an “atomized” set of suppliers (think pre-Industrial Revolution cottage industries)
• In the past few years, the rise of social and mobile technologies are commoditizing many products (consumers can easily find lowest price and can easily source substitutes) and are injecting a huge dose of discoverability into consumers’ shopping, whereby they receive recommendations for brands or goods they never would have known about before
• The upshot: consumers are fracturing their walletshare across many more adjacent substitutes.  These aren’t lower priced, carbon copy substitutes for goods they regularly buy; these are substitutes that fulfill a need in a slightly different way.  Part of their value is that they aren’t mass produced—they are unusual or different or off-the-beaten path.  Here are recent examples that I’ve observed as a consumer:
  • My wife shops the Etsy bazaar to find a more unusual pair of earrings instead of going to the mall with the same old shops for the masses;
  • On the street in Chicago recently, I saw a sheet of paper taped to a lamppost with a QR code on it, advertising how a local artist can customize your shoes with special paint and a unique design—maybe consumers spend money here instead of adding a 25^th pair of name brand shoes to their collection;
  • My wife buys me a beer tasting class as a birthday gift instead of the usual name-brand apparel (see my previous blog post that spells out how Groupon is a breaker of consumer buying routines, much at the expense of mass brands).
  • In sum, mass brands in many categories suffer from a thousand tiny cuts as consumers fracture their walletshare in ways like these.
• While consumers now have many more options against which to allocate their (depressingly fixed) walletshare, they also suffer from a torrent of choices in what they could buy.  Our recent research on the consumer decision path suggests consumers are suffering from cognitive overload as a result of all this buying choice.
• There is an opportunity for third parties to help consumers deal with this pain, by serving as filters and curators to help them navigate this greatly expanded choice set.  Many entities are edging into this role already:
  • Google is using algorithms to help consumers find apparel they might like (see www.boutiques.com);
  • Some consumers are relying on their social networks to play this role;
  • Individuals are playing this role, oftentimes celebrity tastemakers (which may help account for the popularity of some celebrities on Twitter);
  • And new hybrids are arising, like Flipbook, that weave together social and algorithmic filters.

I’d argue the more powerful of curators won’t be algorithmic—they’ll be humans or have a very strong human component.  That’s because humans are better (for now, at least) at weaving together coherent and compelling narratives to make sense of these choices, and go beyond the cold buying guide.

The humans behind brands could well play this role.  In my next post, I’ll unpack what makes for a great curator, and why I think brands like Tory Burch are charting the path for a new model of branding that is better suited to categories that are dealing with a re-atomized marketplace.  Just like the news industry.

After being in a relationship with you for two years, I feel as though we should take a break.  You recently increased your prices, and it’s just not working for me anymore.  I feel as though you are taking way too much and giving me too little.

For example, yesterday you announced that you will increase my monthly bill from $9.99 to $15.98.  A 60% increase is just too much, Netflix, especially since I don’t know if it will offer me anything more.  We both know that I rely on you for most of my entertainment now (you’ve helped me live without cable since we started our relationship), but even I have my limits.

I can tell that it is really important for you to have some time to work on yourself right now.  The transition from physical media to digital is rough for all of us (especially for newspapers and print media).  But with video, we both know that this change would be a lot easier on me if you just offered more choices online.  Unlike with a newspaper, I get no joy from holding a physical DVD in my hand; in fact, I find it even more convenient to watch things via instant streaming.  With online streaming, I can decide what I want to watch moments before I start watching it, and I do really believe that this is the future of video rentals.

But there’s one big problem with this plan: You don’t have enough online options.  Right now, most movies that I want to see aren’t available online.  I do like what you are trying to do with Starz Play, where you have some newer releases and bigger hits available, but I want more of it!  You currently only have 1,000 titles available through this, and I want more.

Your dearth of online options didn’t use to be a dealbreaker: You used to let me supplement your online offerings with a very cheap physical disc rental plan.  For $2 a month, I was able to guarantee that I could watch almost any title I could possibly dream of.  This rental plan allowed me to watch everything from big hits like “Love Actually” to smaller features like “The Young Victoria.”  But now that you want $7.99 a month from me for this option, it just isn’t worth it.  I don’t want to pay this much just to supplement your failure to offer me most things I want online; $7.99 is a pretty expensive way to hedge my bets that you’ll have a given movie I want to see.

Netflix, hopefully your friends will learn from your failure to me.  While I may be brand-loyal, I’m not going to wait for brands to transition from physical to online media, and many other consumers are with me.  It is very important to make the transition swift (even if there are big barriers, like deals with big movie houses, standing in your way) or painless for me.  Dragging it out while charging me more isn’t good enough, Netflix.

Netflix, I hope we can get together again once you have worked through all of your “transitioning to digital media” issues.  I was willing to wait this tough time out with you, but asking me for more support before you are ready to give me your all isn’t right.  Call me when you have more of the things I want to watch available online, and I’m sure we’ll get together again.  I’ll miss you while we’re apart.

Hope to hear from you soon,

Courtney

MLC will be at the DMA11 Conference—insights and discounts herein!

We know from recent research that the top reason consumers follow brands in social media is for discounts.  So, MLC members, here’s your bone—you can save 25% off the regular price to attend the Direct Marketing Association’s 2011 conference in Boston this October.  Interested?  You can find details here.

And, if you’ll permit us to be so self-promoting, there’s extra reason to attend the DMA conference this year.  We’re facilitating two different sessions at the conference—and we think you’ll be excited about both of them! (we certainly are)

First, I’ll facilitate a stellar panel of New Media Ringmasters on Monday, October 3^rd during the general DMA conference. The stars of the show will be:

• Jeanette Gibson, who heads up Cisco’s social media center of excellence
• Zena Weist, who until recently led H&R Block’s social efforts (she’s since moved to Edelman Digital)
• Michael Donnelly, new media extraordinaire from Coca Cola.

I’ll facilitate an hour-long discussion with these Ringmasters, who will field Q&A from the audience and share their perspective and learning on questions like:

• What is the Ringmaster’s role in catalyzing change in the marketing and broader organization?
• What skills, experiences and traits distinguish Ringmasters?
• How do you know when your organization is ready for a New Media Ringmaster?
• Should you groom or import a Ringmaster?
• What should the Ringmaster’s first 100 days look like?
• What hard lessons have Ringmasters learned as they’ve sought to increase their organization’s new media “IQ”?
• What advice do Ringmasters have for those aspiring to the role?

For a sneak peak on the kind of practical expertise these Ringmasters will share, give the video below a view—Zena Weist talks about her first 100 days as a director of social media with H&R Block:

Special thanks to Zena and Jenny Love at H&R Block for allowing us to come onsite to shoot this (and other) video segments.

Second, my colleague, Brent Adamson, will present at the Strategic Summit the weekend before the official conference kickoff.  He’ll bring the latest B2B insights from the Marketing Leadership Council and Sales Executive Council.  The title of the session is “Inside the Customer’s Purchase Decision: Collaborative Sales and Marketing Strategies to Steer Today’s Buying Behavior”.

The broader theme of this pre-conference summit is the role that customer intelligence plays in driving the business.  The Summit is for VPs, Directors and upper-level managers.  There’s a special discount for members who want to register – the cost to MLC members is $299, 40% savings off the $499 sticker price.  Details here.  Hurry, as the Summit discount is available only until June 24^th.

Hope to see you in Boston in October!  Questions about the DMA session?  Feel free to email me directly – pspenner@executiveboard.com.

Note: the 25% general conference discount is good for MLC members through the end of September.  The special rate on the pre-conference summit expires June 24^th.

By Ana Lapter

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post describing two different types of user communities as viable options for B2B marketing organizations:  communities of practice and communities of interest.

Our most recent customer purchasing survey reveals that supplier communities enjoy a higher degree of influence over customer purchasing decisions than other types of communication channels. We believe this is due to the interactive nature of peer communities.   Despite their large influence, however, many B2B community programs are far from reaching the level of maturity and sophistication needed to fully capitalize on their potential.   A variance analysis shows significant gaps in how marketers leverage this channel to interact with their customers.

To enhance the effectiveness of community programs, marketing professionals should consider the following:

Link a community to a specific marketing goal. Rather than aiming for generic brand awareness, marketing organizations should link a community to a specific goal, using the concept of the bridge metric. For instance, after noticing that one of their target audiences was actively seeking peer advice through on-line channels, a company developed a user community as a “nurturing” campaign, and as part of broader, multi-channel demand management program.   In that case, the supplier-hosted community provided a perfect opportunity to collect crucial customer insight based on targeted communication of product-related content.   Unlike traditional communication strategies, such as email blast campaigns or direct mailing programs, a user community enables the communication and dissemination of customer-relevant information in a less invasive and more precise way.  Part of the reason is that users decide whether or not to participate in these programs and, therefore, can leave valuable and genuine feedback regarding their opinions or interests in specific topics.

Link measurement decisions to the community’s objective. While general metrics, such as number of comments and number of users contributing to the discussion are useful indicators of a community’s overall health, they are less effective in measuring a supplier’s degree of influence over its customers.  These metrics should be closely linked to the specific marketing goals envisaged for the channel.   In this more objective-specific context, indicators addressing rate of participation and engagement at the topic level can be correlated with metrics tracking customer’s research interest, behavior or perception in a given area.

Use a less formal communication style to  drive better engagement with customers. Unlike vendor centric -white papers or other marketing materials, user communities are more conducive to direct engagement with customers.  The key to better customer engagement is to instill a general perception of familiarity and trust via simple and direct dialogue that excludes commercial terminology or academic-type of communication.

If carefully implemented, a supplier community program can contribute to the realization of important marketing goals, ranging from facilitating customer care, collecting customer insight for lead management programs to raising customer loyalty.

If you had a successful experience in building supplier communities, please don’t hesitate to share with us by reaching out to abostan@executiveboard.com . Also, if you haven’t yet done so, please enroll in our series of executive meetings addressing customer purchasing decisions in the B2B space.