As a modicum of affluence appeared in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, companies began making more concerted marketing efforts on a market by market basis.

Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour” in the fall of 1992  unleashed (or ratified) individual efforts across China focused on the pursuit of wealth.  Soon, some people were talking about more markets than they could count on two hands.  Impressive.

Somewhere along the line in the run up to the turn of the century, discussion of “Tiers” emerged to facilitate sharing of information and depth of market penetration.  Where you only spending media in Tier 1?  Was your product showing up in Tier 3?  This was merely shorthand for talking about the big four markets, the other provincial capitals, and the rest.

The problem is that the rest is actually some amalgam of 361 official cities, 2,811 couties, and 34,171 townships.  Over the first decade of this century, some MNC’s were actually seeing their brands reach every corner of the country.  Others were managing points of sale across hundreds of cities.

Despite the blunt tool, business executives were stuck with tiers to discuss their market coverage.  These conversations could be quite frustrating.  We might all agree on Tier 1, and maybe had an 80% overlap for Tier 2, but then your Tier 3 was different from mine.  You had a tier 4, I had a tier 5.

The reocognized disconnect was that each company’s “Tier” definition was different.  And if I needed to create a market expansion plan to grow from 30 markets to 100 markets, which 70 were supposed to be my priority.   Some efforts started to appear that attempted to index all the markets in China by certain economic statistics, but if you’ve ever worked with Chinese economic statistics you know how you felt about that.

Well, I think the new decade is finally bringing around some sound thinking about how to talk about China market coverage without putting up a list of 600 cities:  Clusters.  Most recently advanced rather publicly by McKinsey, the concept was already in practice as executives looked at the total market and preceived newly defined regions that did not adhere to provincial boundries or other traditional market maps.

The cluster approach won’t surprise any practioner.  Afterall, who would ignore a neigboring market that absorbed your media, was easy to distribute to, and spoke the same dialect as your sales team?  Just because it was indexed 40 spots lower?

Talk of Clusters recognized not the indexing of cities, but the interconnectedness of markets that emerged in the wake of rapid infrastructure development, personal car ownership, and the reach of the internet.  Manageable in number (less than 30) these geographicly defined areas offer scalabilty and reach to brands that need efficiency.  Tackling 31 provincial capitals at the same time offers none.

With Clusters, executives can dismiss with talk of cities.  They can focus on reachable populations within defined geographies.  The market becomes manageable again – almost intuitive.  Distribution centers, media spend, and trade marketing investments scale up better.  Focusing on three or four clusters is naturally simpler than focusing on 50 or 75 markets.

Clearly, I’m a fan of clusters.  I recommend you adopt it in China.  Like all good ideas, this one isn’t new, but it sure feels good when you use it in a new location for the first time.

But not every company is maximizing their use of data.  One common problem is that individual employees aren’t using the data correctly.  As this quarter’s Executive Guidance says, only 38% of employees are Informed Skeptics, or employees who make good decisions based on data by combining the knowledge gleaned from the data with their own personal judgment.  Instead of balancing the qualitative and quantitative, almost half of employees (43%) trust empirics over their own judgment, while 19% ignore the data.  MLC members, to learn how your employees can become part of the 38% of Informed Skeptics, read the Executive Guidance here.

There are also two common organizational challenges to achieving results through data.  First, companies often provide too much data to too many employees.  This quarter’s Executive Guidance shows that employees currently spend an average of 36% of their time gathering and analyzing information and that poor information accessibility creates a 52% drag on employee productivity.  Because efficient information-gathering can have a huge boost in employee productivity, many companies are investing in making this process more efficient.  To do this, many companies are developing dashboards and other tools to share the data with as many employees as possible.  Unfortunately, this can be the wrong approach.  In our initial interviews with members, one common problem is that sharing all of the information handicaps – rather than empowers – marketers.  By sharing the information with everyone, executives create a tragedy of the commons situation in which no one takes ownership because everyone is involved.

Another common problem is that too much time is spent digging for random insights.  Since 85% of data is unstructured, many companies believe that they need to garner valuable insights from this vast data frontier.  To do this, many companies are focusing much of their time and resources on ad-hoc data requests rather than doing standard analyses on critical topics.  Unfortunately, this process can be incredibly resource-intensive: Sending employees on an insight-fishing expedition can yield useful results, but these insights often come at the expense of necessary analyses on critical business measures.

MLC members, please look out for more posts on analytics as we delve further into our 2012 research.  If you would like to be interviewed on your use of analytics, please email me at colong@executiveboard.com.

The problem is a “bottom-up” approach.  Marketers spend a lot of time collecting data to show progress against marketing-specific targets.  And  they typically start with data that is easy to track.   But the volume of likes and re-tweets isn’t likely to convince a CFO that money is being well-budgeted.

Instead, marketers should work their way backwards.

When I was little, I loved solving those maze puzzles in my local newspaper.  Only I always did them backwards, starting at the center and tracing my way out.  I had trouble defending my method, but to this day, I’m still a firm believer in starting from the end goal when developing a problem-solving strategy.

The marketing function at Vista – a high-tech firm that has asked us to use a pseudonym on this case – seems to agree.  Facing scrutiny from senior management, they set out to link themselves to overarching corporate goals, rather than focus on internal (marketing-specific) measurements.  The key to their dashboard: a bold, 4-step reverse-engineering process that ensures alignment between marketing and other senior management.  In other words, work your way out from the center of the maze!

1. Begin with stated corporate goals.
2. Determine the supporting marketing goals and the metrics that best capture their progress.
3. Select the activities best-suited to impact the chosen metrics.
4. Capture this information with a broadly accessible web-based dashboard.  (MLC Members, see an example of the dashboard here.)

See how Vista worked out which activities did/didn’t align with corporate goals here.

The explicit alignment of company goals and marketing progress boosts non-marketers’ understanding of the function’s impact on firm performance.

MLC members, read more about how to effectively re-engineer your marketing plan to align with your company’s goals.

Here’s the cynical interpretation of what is evolving in the marketing space right now.  All this talk of Big Data, smarter commerce and real-time marketing is science fiction for most marketing functions. With some exceptions (high tech, some retailers and some areas of financial services), the marketing ecosystem in which we operate isn’t structured to support real-time, hyper-targeted, Big Data-driven marketing.  It’s still 5-10 years off.

And the hype around all of this is being driven by an unholy trinity of bankers/VCs, the entrepreneurs in social, mobile, and location tech they represent, and vendors selling data and analytics solutions.  It’s not a conspiracy at all – it’s just that each of these parties have huge financial incentives to drive the hype.  And so they do.

But consider the barriers facing a typical large enterprise marketing organization that wants to achieve the vision of real time, data-driven marketing laid out by the unholy trinity:

• Spotty data with big gaps for swathes of consumers or swathes of the consumer experience (e.g., consumer behavior in iOS mobile apps is a black box, since Apple holds that data close)
• A churning and unpredictable privacy landscape, with legislative shifts threatening disruption
• Agency rosters that are fragmented and highly resistant to the kind of collaboration and change needed to actually move with real-time speed in an integrated way for much of the marketing mix
• Client-side decision making processes, structures and skill gaps that prevent executing as the vision would have it

Unless you are: a small, nimble company, a company that grew up online (e.g., Amazon) or a rare breed of large enterprise that grew up on an analytics culture and has data coursing through its veins (e.g., CapitalOne, Harrah’s), you just aren’t going to be able to overcome these barriers in the near term.

That’s the cynic’s view.  I’m not sure yet how much of it I believe.  I do think it makes sense for companies to start the Big Data marketing journey.  But this feels to me like CRM did 15 years ago–huge promise, results a long time coming.

Here’s where I think it’s safe for marketers to START: use Big Data and analytics to figure out who to STOP marketing to, or when to STOP trying to engage them with a direct mail piece, or yet another email, or yet another plea to join in a Facebook contest.  If Wannamaker was right, half of your marketing dollars are wasted–use analytics to figure out which half, and STOP wasting them.

Your consumers and customers will thank you for it.

And, it’s all in keeping with MLC’s findings on making consumer purchase decisions simpler.

Marketing plans are often 20 to 100 page documents that cover every team’s goals and strategies, from the promotions team to the social media team.   Though comprehensive, these longwinded plans are too confusing to help individuals understand how their goals align with those of the broader organization.  Without alignment, marketers cannot create results, even when all the right elements are in place.

To tackle this problem, Marketing at MasterCard ruthlessly streamlined its annual marketing plan to one single page – the “Plan on a Page.”  MLC members, see an example of a completed Plan on a Page here or download this customizable marketing plan template.

Keep it sweet and simple.

We took a look at how MasterCard built their “Plan on a Page.”  A sampling of the Plan’s key traits:

Simplicity –the single-page rule limits the plan to the few goals that matter most.

Clarity – the plan links day-to-day tactics to high-level strategies (to help marketers understand how to achieve strategic goals).

Measurability – each goal, strategy, and tactic is tied to a clear measure of success.

The “Plan on a Page” not only saves planning time but also improves cross-functional understanding and alignment around strategic goals.  It also lends legitimacy and discipline to the marketing division, which is great because 73% of CEOs say marketers lack credibility!

All of that makes this simple marketing plan pretty sweet.

MLC members, read more about how a “Plan on a Page” can help marketing deliver greater bottom-line value.

By Ana Lapter

Businesses are once again in the mood to grow revenues.  Unlike the pre-recession era, the source of growth, however, will no longer come from streamlining and automating processes, or from adopting systems for better management of structured data.  Since the majority of businesses have been improving processes and data management for some time, there aren’t too many gains to be had there.  Rather, the next era of growth will likely come from from understanding changing customer preferences and acting quickly on those insights.  In other words, your company needs to get smarter about using information, as compared to processes, to more effectively drive customer insight and quickly translate that knowledge into usable plans and strategies.

It’s not that organizations don’t have this data; you do. But the problem is how to effectively use all the information that companies gather about markets and customer preferences.  Over the past few weeks, I heard the words “analytics” and “customer insight” in separate conversations with eight senior marketers, while discussing the key analytic competencies that their teams need to strengthen or develop to move forward.

Here is my list of things to avoid when building an analytics-driven Marketing organization:

Confusing analytical maturity with the need for absorbing more data and information. The “Information at your fingerprints” phenomenon can easily motivate Marketing to become more analytical.  The real problem is not about getting more data and information, but, rather, differentiating between real customer insight and mere sets of facts.  A recent cross-functional survey of knowledge workers from our sister program, the CIO Executive Council, shows that Marketing relies excessively on data analysis, especially at the management level. Meanwhile, only 44% of marketers have high confidence in information from their own function, and only 34% have high confidence in information from other functions.

Interestingly, the survey indicates that despite excessive reliance on data and information, Marketing has a low degree of analytical maturity, as compared to other functions.  As a result, marketers miss opportunities to improve performance in areas such as new market identification, market strategy development, targeting customer segments and demand forecasting.

Over-relying on data as a basis for strategic planning decisions. The CIO survey suggests that progressive organizations use a combination of judgment and data when making strategic decisions.  This means that data should not be a substitute, but a complementary tool supporting experience, judgment and instinct.  From the perspective of organizational capability, Marketing should balance investments in getting better at data collection and analysis with the need to leverage the full potential of personality characteristics like creativity and imagination to drive effective strategic decisions.

Considering analytical tools as a solution to problems. Tools are as good as the people who use them.  A better approach to driving an information-driven culture is to consider tools as a means to solve a particular problem, improve a workflow or support a specific, narrowly-defined objective.  In addition, a decision to select a specific analytics tool should take into consideration the degree of organizational maturity and user involvement in performing diverse activities, ranging from basic reporting and visualizing information, to aggregating data, conducting pattern recognition and making predictions based on trends.

We will be exploring the topic of analytic capabilities as part of our upcoming research into marketing talent.  I would love to get your thoughts on the topic, so please contact me at: abostan@executiveboard.com.

As part of our B2B research this year, we surveyed over 2,000 B2B customers across a wide range of industries.  A major part of this study was the channels these customers use and are influenced by when researching business purchases.  Not surprisingly, the sales conversation and the supplier website were the two most influential sources.

More interesting to us was how the various channels grouped together when we plotted them in a 2 x 2 matrix with influence on the vertical axis and variability of influence on the horizontal (see below).  For those who aren’t familiar, variability or variance is a measure of how far a set of numbers are spread out from each other.  So two sources might both rank a “6” in terms of influence, but Source A may get that score because everyone rated it a 4, 5, or 6 in equal measure (low variance), whereas Source B may get that score because some people rated it a 2 and some people rated it an 8 (high variance).  This suggests that some suppliers use Source B really well and others really poorly.

You see three clumps of channels in the matrix:

Emerging: Circled in green, these are newer sources that haven’t yet hit the mainstream.  They currently have low influence and low variability because very few B2Bs are using them at all.  While this is good news for some B2Bs who are worried that they haven’t yet figure out social media, it also suggests the chance for first mover advantage.  Do something truly innovative with social media or blogs and you can own the space as the definitive source.

Tried-But-Not-True:  Circled in tan are three very traditional marketing channels with low-to-medium influence and variability.  These channels have been around for a long time and are used by virtually every supplier – yet it seems no one is employing them with much success.  Customers generally don’t rate them very highly, perhaps suggesting it is time to shift some resources away from these channels (or at least relegate them to pure awareness-building tools).

Opportunity: Highlighted in the blue oval, this group is a mix some newer channels with some more traditional ones.  Characterized by medium-to-high influence and high variability, these sources are ones that many suppliers are using well, but many are not leveraging to their full potential.  Note the interactive/conversational nature of many of these channels.  Additional resources here could net big returns.

At this point, this data is more food for thought than justification for a total marketing mix overhaul, but hopefully it can provide some guidance to B2Bs trying to figure out which channels they should prioritize.  One caveat, so far, we haven’t found much in the data about the impact of channels on any critical post-purchase outcomes (i.e. those who do research in a particular channel or set of channels are no more or less satisfied or likely to recommend than anyone else).  Ultimately, it is more what you say than where you say it.  But in a few years the dynamic might be different.

MLC members, want to learn more about the research that led us to these results and, more importantly, the innovative practices the Council has uncovered to help you solve the most pressing B2B Marketing challenges?  Register for our Annual Executive Retreat, “Responding to Heightened B2B Customer Uncertainty.”

• In the book “Winning,” Jack Welch describes a tactic he used at GE to force himself to always enter a business situation with a fresh perspective.  Every time he travelled, he got off the plane imagining that the Jack Welch of yesterday had had no idea what he had been doing.  He felt that this ritual of taking a critical eye to past decisions helped him enter every situation as an opportunity for improvement.

• In a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Laura J. Soave, a marketing executive at Fiat discussed details of Fiat’s ‘Return to North America’ marketing launch, adding that “My ultimate goal would be not to spend one dollar in traditional advertising.”  Instead, she says that she will focus on social media and other grassroots approaches to target likely buyers.

Now, consider the following:  If you were starting the marketing function within your business today, how would you choose to allocate your media mix?  In other words, if you had a zero-based planning process (rather than one based on the previous year’s plans), what would you choose to spend your money on?

Year after year the Council’s various investment benchmarking exercises show that, even as marketers identify more efficient and precise channels, few organizations tend to move beyond small-scale experiments to shift budget into these channels.  So what’s stopping us?

One big culprit: legacy thinking, which primarily manifests itself in one of two mindsets:

• How we manage our organization – The Council identified the key factors of ‘agile’ marketing organizations, i.e. having the ability to shift the marketing mix by 30% year over year vs. the average shift of about 5%.  It turns out the ‘legacy’ way of doing things actually puts up barriers to being nimble enough to shift the media mix in any substantial way.  Spoiler alert: contrary to popular belief, inability to measure returns is a factor but not the major factor; most ‘organizational inertia’ resides in motivation and engagement of brand / product owners, the nature and management of agency relationships, and the design and efficiency of an organization’s communications planning and execution process.
• How we think about our role – As Gandhi so eloquently put it, “we must become the change we want to see in the world.”  If marketers are responsible for keeping the customer at the center of our business, it must naturally follow that marketers must change as fast as our customers are changing (and they are changing; insert blatant plug here to participate in our 2011 research).  How fast are you changing?  How much time do you spend executing vs. experimenting?   What mix of your success metrics are backward-looking (to benchmark against historical data) vs. forward-looking (to invest in new and different media vehicles)?

Fortunately, there are ways to leave the legacy that binds us behind.  Let me offer Three Ideas to Break the Shackles of Legacy:

1. Proof of Life – do you have any “Zombies” in your marketing plan?  In other words, can you link each marketing tactic to a marketing metric to a marketing strategy to a corporate objective?  If you can’t see a straight line between these four pillars, then marketing shouldn’t do it (and you can potentially free up budget for more efficient channels).  Here’s how Vista (pseudonymed high-tech company) did this.
2. Permission to Play – it’s time to break out the sandbox.  Encourage experimentation among your team; foster an environment of learning.  As new ideas come up, encourage discussions to determine if the idea: a) could contribute to a desired business outcome, and b) if there is a fast and cheap way to test the idea.  Think about using a 70/20/10 approach to allocate your marketing communication budget.
3. What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? Your customers are talking – are you listening?  What are they saying, and where are they going for information?  Who influences their decisions?  Thought leaders?  Peers?  Here’s an idea from Purina – they use influencer network maps so that they can influence the influencers.



This question drew a variety of responses from other members.  Beyond the routine Brand Tracker studies, a more precise gauge is to measure direct sales lift, ideally versus a control market in which the campaign is not running. Methods for this kind of measurement include mix modeling and in-market testing.  Moreover, members have recommended mix modeling vendors in a related Discussions post here.

Other members report that consideration and purchase intent are key metrics for brand campaigns, but they warn that baseline measurements are needed to have confidence in the lift that a brand campaign might generate for these metrics.   One member suggests tracking market share as part of a broader set of metrics, because measurement efforts should account for natural growth or shrinkage in the category.

MLC members, read through the discussion on the Q&A forum here. To learn more about identifying and measuring the key drivers of brand equity, check out our Overview of Brand Equity Measurement Approaches.  Or, see MLC’s specific case studies on marketing mix modeling and in-market testing.  For those seeking a robust marcomm measurement and resource allocation system, see MTV Networks’ approach here, and then give the webinar replay a listen here.

While you might not exactly be “carbon copying” your previous plan, determining which elements to include in your plan, as well as how to ensure you’re planning around your customer, your products, and your partners requires huge effort and a significant amount of experience and knowledge. Each step of the process requires a comprehensive understanding of various marketing concepts and tools to ensure the strongest possible marketing plan.

For example: assume that your team is building a marketing plan for a growth brand or product. One of the early steps in identifying sources of growth is developing an accurate assessment of current and potential markets.  Your team needs to:

• Link emerging market trends to customer and stakeholder needs
• Use market insights to build the business case for seizing new market opportunities
• Identify value driver trends across industries and segments
• Create objective criteria for assessing undefined opportunities
• Screen opportunities based on sources of differentiation

According to Marketing Excellence Survey research, however, about 1/3 of marketers (of 43,000 first time respondents of the MES) had below average scores for marketing planning knowledge.  Surprisingly, this lack of knowledge is not just limited to small companies, or industries that aren’t known for their marketing prowess. In fact, this lack of marketing capability is spread across many industries including computer software and internet, construction/engineering, financial services, food & beverage, manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications services.

Every CMO and member of the marketing leadership team needs to believe that your team is functioning on all cylinders when it comes to marketing capability. But the scary thing is that your team might not have anywhere near the marketing knowledge necessary to conduct these assessments in a high quality way. Worse: do your teams even realize they aren’t equipped to manage marketing planning, new product development, and the like?

Based on our survey, we know that most marketers are predicted to make bad strategy and execution decisions because of overconfidence. Based on a survey of 65,000 marketers, they assess their knowledge and skill sets to be 25% better than is the actual case.

Are you confident that your team has the capability to get marketing planning right?  Are they spotting early opportunities for growth and differentiation?  How prepared are they really to leverage the consumer insight and marketing planning tools that lead to discovery of these growth opportunities? Do they know what they don’t know?

MLC members, join us on October 19 for “Building Better Marketers“, a teleconference that will give you insight into the skill and knowledge gaps that could be affecting your team’s ability to run competitive marketing planning.  We’ll review key findings, comparing scores from the most recent Marketing Excellence Survey respondents to our database of 65,000 marketers.

Also, be sure to check out our upgraded marketing planning solution. MarkPlan™ 2010 is a software suite that leads you through a series of well defined steps and proven templates for building strategic marketing plans that fit your organization.  Think of it as a TurboTax wizard that will help you generate your marketing plan.  Learn More.

As planning season got started, Anna shared thoughts on how to justify spend increases in a down economy, courtesy of Pat LaPointe of Marketing NPV. The takeaway here? Squeeze every drop from your current spend, make your priorities clear, and actively manage risk. Your CFO will thank you!

The next week, Erin explained how the best B2B marketers select metrics for their insight marketing campaigns. That’ll vary depending on the campaign, but what’s important is to select metrics that continually measure the engagement of both your customers and your sales staff.

Pat Spenner told us how marketing leaders aren’t just relying on better-planned campaigns to drive their bottom lines – they’re also holding onto their budgets and expecting greater results out of fewer marketers. Why? Suspicion over the long-term direction of the economy – why spend when you can save?

Karen talked about how it’s essential to link marketing plans to broader corporate priorities, and explained how one MLC member did it, and got buy-in from business partners across the enterprise. The key things here are to poll relevant stakeholders, explicitly map the link from corporate goals to marketing priorities, and build a dashboard to allow transparency, accountability and ongoing evaluation.

Pat then shared MTV Network’s approach to planning. They identified a key problem – marketers plan for what is, rather than what will be – and solved it by integrating a variety of market and channel data into the planning process.

Finally, Whitney presented the ultimate in simple marketing plans – MasterCard’s plan on a page. While putting your entire marketing plan on one page may sound miraculous, it’s anything but – MasterCard marketers pick one goal for the year, only plan activities that further that goal, and select rigorous metrics that ensure they’re going the right direction.

Having shared our perspective across the last month and a half, we want to hear from you. What is your organization doing to ease the pain of planning? What do you think could be improved in your process? How are you incorporating non-traditional channels into your plan?

MLC members, as your planning process comes to a close, ours is just beginning! We’re looking into our research agenda for 2011, and we need your input. Please take a few minutes to complete this survey, which will help us narrow down our priorities for 2011.

Given post-recessionary optimism about the global economy, the question may seem a little passé. However, I recently responded to a member who wanted council on this topic in advance of her annual budgeting process – and this member is not alone. In an uncertain world it would be unwise not to ask the question.

A ton of stats suggest counter-cyclical marketing investment pays off. An HBR article in 1927 tracked 200 companies’ actions during the 1923 recession and found that those that advertised the most during the downturn experienced the largest sales increase. A Buchen Advertising Agency study of recessions across the mid-20th century  showed that companies that reduced marketing spend experienced a profit slump during the recession, and continued lagging behind when the economy later picked up. The same trend was observed in the early 1990’s recession, where a survey found that firms that spent heaviest on marketing made the greatest gains in market share, and continued to make gains in market share in the recovery. For more historical depth see MLC’s Justifying Marketing Expenditures in a Down Economy.

More generally, the Council’s 2009 Executive Guidance: Avoiding Mistakes in an Economic Crisis highlights research showing that downturns radically re-shuffle the competitive landscape, and that ‘firms that make it into the top quartile during a downturn sustain their market premium for an average of three years.’

However, it is mainly large firms and market leaders that are positioned to capitalize on these opportunities. Taking the most recent recession, MLC’s benchmarks show that the typical play is to cut the marketing budget with only the largest firms bucking the trend (see graph below). Similarly, McKinsey’s 2009 Marketing Survey found that only 20% of companies planned to increase marketing investment with B2C firms and firms with more robust marketing metrics more likely to increase spend.

The rationale for boosting marketing spend is various: in uncertain economic times the consumer needs reassurance from their brands; when the competition is contracting aggressors will have strong bargaining power when buying advertising space and can secure favorable long-term deals; in a recession it is cheaper to win market share (albeit of a contracting market) through marketing than in growth periods. Enthusiastic support of this theoretical position can be found on the HBR blogspot (one post recommends that ‘in a recession, everyone should be in marketing’). As Mike Ganey of Howard, Merrell and Partners puts it ‘market leaders market their way through a recession; all other companies try to save their way through a recession.’

Labor Day marked the unofficial close of summer.  And sadly, it also marks the unofficial end to reasonable procrastination when it comes to planning for 2011.

We’ve done our best at Wide Angle to provide inspiration across the dog days of summer, highlighting best practices to link marketing activity to strategic priorities, select meaningful metrics, and make the case for additional marketing dollars.  You’re out of the woods … almost.

In most companies, much of the planning occurs in a bottom-up fashion, with a number of separate plans created even within the marketing organization.  We’ll see marketers with a plan from the Promotions team, a plan from the Web team, a plan from the Social Media team, etc.  This kind of planning process is too disjointed, too disconnected, and—with so many pages of individual planning documents—too cumbersome to support any consistent, integrated execution across the broader marketing team.

Enter one of my favorite planning tools: the “Plan on a Page” from MasterCard.  This is literally one page that explicitly ties marketing activities back to higher-level objectives, serving as a roadmap for Marketing but then also helping peer functions understand the role they play in achieving those objectives.  In addition to its sheer brevity, there are a few principles necessary to make this approach work:

• Limit the scope. MasterCard ruthlessly distills its goal for the year down to just one thing.  Admittedly easier said than done, but really the foundation for building all the later steps in the “Plan on a Page”.
• Keep it focused. Choose a small number of objectives that directly drive the stated business goal.  Then detail those strategies that present the most effective way to achieve the stated objectives.
• Make it count. Select metrics that, if achieved, mean we executed on the strategies … which means we should also hit our objectives and the goal.  Focus on marketing activities that will drive these metrics up, and weed out those that don’t actually help us achieve desired business outcomes.

A big complaint we hear from the membership about planning is how hard it is to make 10, 20, sometimes 100+ page documents come alive for peer functions (like Sales or New Product Development) or for outside stakeholders (like ad agencies).  With the “Plan on a Page” it’s here for the entire world to see—not buried on page 37 behind all the market research and financials.

MLC members: check out the full case from MasterCard for a more detailed look at developing the “Plan on a Page”.

And with planning season in full swing, be sure to check out our upgraded marketing planning solution. MarkPlan™ 2010 is a software suite that leads you through a series of well defined steps and proven templates for building strategic marketing plans that fit your organization.  Think of it as a TurboTax wizard that will help you generate your marketing plan.  Learn More.

Questions about organization structure are very popular in our recently-launched Marketing Org & Ops Forum, where one executive question asks, “What type of communications get what type of approval?”

Based on member responses, much of the approval process is typically based on budget and risk.  This comes as little surprise—the CMO probably ought to sign off on that Superbowl ad.  Legal probably ought to review that spot making comparative claims against named competitors.

Some members have rightly targeted approval queue “dead time” for streamlining.  We’ve seen cases where marketers can remove weeks of cycle time to complete a campaign by moving their approval process online and establishing escalation criteria that kick in when creative sits on an approver’s doorstep for more than 24 hours.  These sound like small ideas, but they add up.  Time is money.

Read through member verbatim on the Q&A forum here.  If you’re interested in approval streamlining, take a look at how one CPG company applied lean principles to cut its print labor costs by over 45%.

120 years!  That’s 1.2 centuries.  Or, a decent-sized-fraction of a millennium.

Awe-inspiring, no doubt.  But what is particularly remarkable is that the basilica planners had to answer some extremely important questions before construction even began: would the building accommodate the size of the community in 120 years?  Would the design meet the aesthetic tastes of our grandchildren?  To answer these questions without the luxury of Excel, Stata or dartboards (created 100’s of years later by our friends in England) must have required luck—and prayer.

In many ways, it’s the equivalent of a modern-day, consumer product development cycle.  In a sea of shifting segments, who will purchase my product when it finally hits store shelves?  Not an easy question to answer, even with modern, predictive tools we now have at our disposal.

This long product development cycle is nothing new to the automotive industry, and is captured in the bowing of two new vehicles: the Chevy Volt and the redesigned Jeep Grand Cherokee (the two ‘poster-cars’ for the rebirth of the American auto industry).  Both are generating lots of media attention.  But which one will appeal more to buyers?  The gas hog or the gasless?  Two years ago, consumers joined a waitlist for a hybrid.  Now, the US government is declaring a slightly different message: Americans like big cars.  The shifting target phenomenon is nothing new to marketers.  Besides the obvious myriad of segments, volatile externalities like gas prices significantly impact the buying patterns of the US auto consumer.  So, someone’s Volt preference today very well could be a Grand Cherokee tomorrow.

The current crop of American autos is being hailed as fitting for the public’s taste.  Will it match consumption patterns tomorrow?  No one knows.

But within many of our manufacturing members’ organizations, the debates rage. Despite sophisticated models and scenario planning tools, most of these organizations struggle to reach adequate confidence levels around the likelihood and impact of each potential future state to take any decisive action.

The trick seems to be to avoid the endless discussion of probabilities, and focus on prioritizing the right focus for action by identifying the most certain changes to the environment and to business capabilities over relevant time frames—the goal being not to develop a more accurate model, but to ensure that the actions you are taking will guarantee success under the circumstances of the top three most probable scenarios. MLC members can click here for a case study of how an automaker did just that (beginning at page 31).

After that, of course – pray.

MLC members, for more on innovation and managing cross-functional teams in new product development, please visit our organizational management and innovation topic centers.

Qwest Communications really struggled with this.  In certain markets, up to 50% of Qwest’s prospects request a customer reference before agreeing to purchase.  With no systematic approach to sourcing references, sales reps would spend an average of 4 hours (across 2 or 3 weeks) to find each reference.  Not only did this slow down the sales cycle, but reps would also burn out happy customers by over-contacting them or turn to less satisfied customers and get poor references.  Then Qwest found a creative new approach to references.

Qwest decided to record video testimonials and store them on an online database, so that sales reps could find and share a reference within minutes.  To ensure relevance, the references can be filtered by client industry, size, geography, business need, benefit achieved etc.  Qwest also cut each testimonial into bite-sized 60-second clips to encourage customers to click through.  Reps receive an automatic notification each time a customer clicks through, which enables effective follow-up.

The program has cut the time it takes reps to find a reference by 40%, leading to a sales cycle reduction of 4 days and an equivalent cost saving of 20 full time employees per year.  Beyond those benefits, soundbites from the testimonials have also enhanced a range of marcomms and reference interviews have actually boosted customer loyalty and retention.

Tom Robson – the program’s manager – has shared a few tips on how to get effective customer references:

1. Get expert, unbiased third parties to conduct the reference interviews.

2. Aim for around 85% positive comments, but publish the negative too.

3. Don’t provide incentives for participation, but do provide thanks and a nominal gift on the back-end.

Tom will be providing more tips on how to make the most of references on April 6^th, including how to identify and recruit happy customers for interviews and how to organize a reference portal.

MLC members, register here to hear Tom Robson share more on Qwest’s work on April 6^th at 11am ET (4pm UK time).

The Council’s work on marketing communications has always stressed the primacy of client-side creative brief writing. Many heads of advertising will tell us they can ascertain the relative success of a campaign in advance simply by reading the creative brief sent to the agency. Our research shows that the best briefs contain three can’t-miss elements:

1. A precise target audience beyond demographics, including behavior and psychographic traits

2. A core insight that synthesizes the motivations behind consumer behavior (or non-behavior, as the case may be)

3. A single communications task that will move the audience from their current attitude/behavior to the desired attitude/behavior.

Knowing these, it’s difficult not to look at odd-ball television ads and reverse engineer them back to the brief that started it all, wondering if the ad’s ’success’ will merely win it a Cleo or truly accomplish the communications task. Given the marketing and advertising know-how of this blog’s readers, I’d like to start a series designed to get your take on exactly these types of ads, using the key elements of a creative brief as grading criteria. The first ad that came to mind is Old Spice’s ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’ video that debuted on YouTube in February, made it to television shortly thereafter, and now has nearly six million YouTube views.

The ad is deliberately provocative, and at times, utterly illogical. The actor is speaking directly to females in the commercial, yet the target audience – as stated publicly by Procter & Gamble over the past few years – is teenage males. This audience overlaps tremendously with Unilever’s hyper-sexualized Axe brand. Perhaps the distinction between the two is the addition of the female secondary audience and the impact of that audience on the teenage male purchaser.

So I ask of our readers: does the campaign work? What is the insight behind the campaign that makes it distinct from Axe? Does the associated campaign have a single communications task? Hone your responses by adding a comment above; I’ll add further MLC perspective as the comments expand.There’s no right answer, but this type of thinking can sharpen your saw for the creative briefs you write – ensuring that catchy campaigns also translate to business results.

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!

What was their secret?  Building platforms and content around customer needs – not their own product launch. 

National Instruments had a large base of enthusiastic customers, but realized these customers needed both the means and motivation to connect with each other.  Analysis of customers’ networking patterns revealed two core motivations: 1) building credibility with peers and 2) finding technical resources.  These key insights shaped the entire campaign’s choice of channel and message, both on and offline. 

Conferences for leading engineers offered opportunities for networking, training seminars kept customers up-to-date with cutting-edge technologies, and social media platforms enabled customers to collaborate and promote their professional successes.  National Instruments also generated extra chatter by bridging social media networks with real-world communities.  At the start of the campaign, keynote speakers at conferences educated attendees on ways to stay connected online; later, key online contributors received recognition at offline “Breakfast of Champions” events.

By designing networking tools to help customers achieve their own professional goals, National Instruments successfully boosted word of mouth, which increased awareness and sales.

MLC Members, check out our recent webinar discussion with  Deirdre Walsh, National Instruments’ Social Media lead, to learn more about National Instruments’ social media strategy and successes.

In an age when brands are identified by an icon like a duck or gecko, a recognizable sound like the deep voiceover of Morgan Freeman, or a celebrity spokesperson, I found it refreshing to see an ad that relied on none of those but still made a lasting and memorable impression.

It also left me wondering, “How many brands could do that?”  Instead of testing recall or being sure your logo/spokesperson/icon appears within the first magic number of seconds, could your advertising hold up to the “I can name that commercial in 3 seconds” test?  As I visit with members, the common response I get is “no”, immediately followed by “what are the best ways to get our marketing efforts to resonate at such a deep and emotional level?”

We blogged earlier on Shared Values, and the “secret sauce” to compelling marcomm is rooted in that research.  It starts with understanding that loyalty comes from an emotional bond you create with your consumer.  Sure, you need to have a great segmentation strategy and a smart value proposition.  But you also have to hit your consumer with messages that tie into deeper held beliefs and universal needs.

Our most recent work profiled an example from Clorox’s Kingsford Charcoal, a story that really resonates with Council members.  The brand team for Kingsford did an outstanding job of organizing the brand’s communications around the idea of “bringing the tailgate home”, which enables emotional connection to friends and family around the brand.  As a result, the Kingsford team dramatically boosted performance of a mature brand in a mature category.  MLC members, click the case link below for more details.

So, can consumers identify your marcomm in less than 3 seconds without the benefit of icons, spokespeople, or brand images?  If not consider the universal need that your brand fulfills – that “higher order” connection you can make with your consumer – and then filter your possible marcomm “hooks” against that universal need.

MLC Members, check out the Kingsford case study or watch this brief video on how to use these universal needs and cultural shortcuts.  And if you do pass the 3 second test, what is your secret sauce?