I’m in Boston this week attending the Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference, billed as “The Global Event for Real Time Marketers”.  There’s certainly no shortage of hype and hyperbole. My early observation, about four days into the five day conference, is that marketers may be getting a bit ahead of themselves in terms of their ability to evolve in the direction of real-time.

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: Read More »

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 consumer 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: Read More »

As social media, mobile marketing, and word of mouth become a bigger part of the marketing mix, traditional measurement approaches struggle to keep up. Traditional mix modeling approaches can’t effectively measure new touchpoints due to insufficient historical spend/sales data.  And in-market testing is tricky for social media and word-of-mouth, since you can’t effectively control for exposure to messages that spread virally.  Marketers have added new metrics for emerging media, but these don’t look at the mix holistically or take touchpoint interactions into account.

Enter Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) – a technique best known for predicting disease outbreaks by simulating interactions between individuals and organizations. This approach tests different marcomm mixes using computer simulations.  The “Agent” is the simulated consumer – programmed to act like the brand’s target population in terms of media consumption and purchase habits. By simulating the likely impact of various touchpoints on consumer purchase behavior (rather than relying purely on historical spend/sales data), ABM can predict the influence of emerging touchpoints.  And since ABM takes all touchpoints into account, it can shed light on cross-touchpoint synergies.  Further, by modeling the behavior of individual consumers, ABM can account for differences between segments. Read More »

Consider the following two vignettes:

• 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? Read More »

Do you feel like the biggest change to your 2011 marketing plan is changing the title from “Marketing Plan – 2010” to “Marketing Plan – 2011”?

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. Read More »

When it comes to loyalty program enhancement, most marketers are squeezing basis points of response out of email marketing or are micro-tweaking status tiers and reward levels.  Of late, however, we’re noticing a handful of brands pursing discontinuous innovation, which seems to fall into one of three categories: Read More »

Marketers are awash in data.  Digital, social and (increasingly) mobile marketing are spinning off data streams faster than we can humanly manage.  Analysis-paralysis ensues, and for some of us, data drowning shortly thereafter.

Few marketing organizations today have the analytical chops and creativity to squeeze gamebreaking insight from these increasingly rich data streams (see this prior post on coping with information richness).   Most marketing leaders will settle for a life preserver—they’ll outsource analytics to vendors or shunt it off to an analytics team buried inside of market research.

By contrast, sage marketing leaders will build surfboards to ride the data waves.  How? Read More »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

Measuring social media campaign effectiveness is a topic near and dear to the marketers we speak with – and justifiably so.  Experimentation is a key element of social media strategies, and evaluating the impact of experimental campaigns helps marketers maximize future investments.

For marketers who target viral campaigns to the blogosphere or use online PR as a marketing channel, measurement can be especially challenging.  Mentions of a brand can be monitored, but if they don’t link to the brand’s website, it’s hard to tell which mentions are leading to web visits, online purchases, or other objectives.  Certain third party sites might be especially influential in directing traffic to a brand’s website – but without the direct link, how do you know? Read More »

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

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

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

Plenty of Council members are asking us questions about social media ROI.  As our research team scans all that’s been written on the topic, we occasionally come across little gems.  One that may have escaped your attention is a section of a larger 2007 study, Never Ending Friending, which may provide some valuable rules of thumb and benchmarks for those of you diving into social media ROI.

The study was commissioned by MySpace which, at the time, was on the top of the social networking heap.  You’ll likely want to skip the first 34 pages (unless you have a keen interest in MySpace circa 2007), and get right to the meat.  Read More »