I’m not the primary shopper in our household but I love wandering the grocery store aisles when I get the chance.  Even if I take my marketer hat off, I am mesmerized by the colors, images, and words of the hundreds of products on the shelves (okay, I don’t get out much).  What never catches my eye, however, are the refrigerated cases that hold the milk, yogurt, chicken, and ice cream I’m grabbing. 

That changed recently when I spent time visiting with marketers at Ingersoll-Rand, makers of Hussmann refrigerated cases.  In this day and age, I couldn’t imagine there was a lot of innovation in the design of refrigerated cases.  Their job is pretty simple – keep stuff cold while maximizing shelf space and minimizing energy use – and people have been building them for decades.  I mean really, what’s left to do with commercial refrigerators?!?  Apparently a ton. Read More »

Jeff Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak, keynoted at MLC’s opening executive retreat last week. Arriving in his signature cowboy boots, Jeff shared his fittingly defiant approach to leadership in the “Wild West” of social media. He also shared insights from his new book, “The Mirror Test”.

Adversarial Leadership

Jeff opened by saying:“my job as CMO is to create tension,” and explained how he challenged the status quo and broke the rules to get action on social media at Kodak. He once asked Legal how many people he would have to annoy before he got fired. When they said a third of the company, he decided he still had plenty of leeway to push his plans through.  Similarly, when we asked how to deal with Legal’s approval processes for social media, he answered “You’re in marketing, be creative.” Read More »

Did you know that social media exemplars (the roughly 10% of brands driving significant business results via social media) aren’t spending all that much more on their social efforts compared to non-exemplars (brands not seeing business results)?* 

Turns out, it matters much more where you point your social efforts than how much financial and people resources you put behind those efforts. Read More »

We’ve now gathered information from over 250 companies on their social efforts via MLC’s Social Media Maturity Diagnostic.  While 90% of the participating companies are not seeing significant business results for their social efforts, a few social media exemplars are seeing big returns.

One of the ways exemplars are driving results is by using social to embed the brand into customer routines—the recurring “jobs” we do in our personal and professional lives.  These brands are using social to aid the customer across a whole range of sub-tasks that go into completing a routine. Here are a few examples: Read More »

Ah, the sweet smell of redemption on a Thursday morning. Last week, I wrote about whether executives could tag companies as ‘innovative’ if they failed to deliver revenue growth (and implicitly, fail to meet customer needs). BCG’s listing of the top 50 innovative companies said yea; I, nay. And this week, I think I’ve got 23 companies to back me up: Fortune’s list of 23 companies that achieved double-digit revenue growth despite the turbulent economy in 2009. Perhaps not innovative, but doing a great job of exceeding shareholder expectations.

Discerning a common thread among those on the Fortune list isn’t easy, especially since most would rarely appear on an ‘innovative company’ list. You could certainly argue that value positioning helped tremendously, i.e., the right economic proposition to capitalize on retrenched consumer spending. Companies like Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Ross Stores certainly fit the bill. Yet, there are plenty of ‘value’ retailers that noticeably didn’t make the cut, from Family Dollar to the granddaddy of them all, Walmart. There isn’t an easy industry lens to the list either – in what was generally another poor year for financial services, USAA, Wells Fargo, and Erie Insurance beat the odds handily. Even with oil prices up across 2009, there isn’t an energy company to be found. Read More »

The term “emerging markets” is a misnomer—many of these markets have already emerged and are better described as “ascendant markets”.  That much is clear after reading The Economist’s special 18-page report on innovation in emerging markets.  The key takeaway for marketers is that these markets are increasingly the source of commercial innovation (innovation in the way products are taken to market), not just product innovation (innovation in product design and features). Read More »

I’m a sucker for top ten lists – world’s busiest airports, tallest buildings, largest bankruptcies, habits of effective social media marketers (ok, the last was just a shameless plug). Yet there’s one list each year that always piques my interest – BCG’s Most Innovative Companies, and this year’s survey results were a bit of a head-scratcher.

Not because of the leading companies on the list – the old standbys of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and IBM still head the class. What was more startling was that 11 companies had declining revenues and 17 companies had declining margins across the 2006-2009 survey period. You can play devil’s advocate with the recession all you’d like, but in a top 50 list of innovators, more than 20% falling shy of growth raises an eyebrow. Read More »

Click to Enlarge | Domino’s Pizza (NYSE: DPZ) Share Price vs. S&P 500, Dow, and Pizza Sector (PZZA) August 21, 2009 – April 13, 2010 (Red line denotes launch of new crust)

(This is a guest post by Andrew Kent of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for sales leaders.)

Domino’s Pizza’s new crust has been making the company a lot of dough.  The pizza delivery chain announced a new and improved crust on December 16, and has been blitzing the airwaves with ads ever since—ads which you’ve no doubt seen many times by now.  Over that time, the firm’s share price has leapt by 84%, trouncing the S&P 500, Dow, and pizza sector.

That’s a meteoric improvement—and no doubt a relief to Dominos’ marketers, who spent “tons of time — about 18 months — and millions of dollars” experimenting with various recipes and testing them with customers, according to CMO Russell Weiner.

Those marketing dollars certainly translated into a mouthwatering share price, but what about the pizza?  Did the crust really improve by that much? Read More »

As marketers try to get their companies back on a path to growth, bets on innovation—be it product, service, or other—are top of mind for most of us.  Unfortunately, when we ask how approaches to innovation are changing in 2010, most marketers default to a “more” strategy—more spending, more experiments, or more time and attention.

As we begin to dig around for some new ideas, Council members have pointed us to an emerging trend: their best ideas are coming from outside the walls of their companies, or at least outside of traditional marketing and R&D functions.  “Outside-the-walls innovation” generally shows up in one of three flavors: Read More »

Crikey! That healthcare legislation was a wee bit contentious. 

One thing we can all agree on is that it will be tough for marketers to predict precisely how the new laws will affect consumer and stakeholder behavior.  Simply put, the sheer complexity of the US healthcare system makes prediction difficult.  Moreover, legislation this sweeping will almost certainly yield unintended consequences, thereby increasing the levels of unpredictability.

How should marketers cope?  Try these two tools.  Read More »