(this is a guest post by Taylor Mitchell of our sister program for Sales executives, the Sales Executive Council. It originally appeared on their blog.)

A fundamental shift in customer buying behavior has created a rift where Sales and Marketing have traditionally engaged customers. This void in the purchase process where customers are free from supplier engagement, a “no-man’s land” so to speak, has several implications on what successful selling looks like in today’s environment, but one of the more immediate concerns is that most suppliers haven’t fully recognized the shift has even occurred

This lack of awareness could partly be blamed on the fact that there is significant internal confusion in supplier organizations over the ownership of certain commercial responsibilities. Data from the MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic illustrates that companies don’t have a good sense of which function, Sales or Marketing, owns some of the most important commercial activities—almost 70% of the member companies surveyed were unsure of who owned the insight generation responsibility, for instance.

As such, many sales organizations lack the scalable organizational support reps need to successfully sell in today’s environment, and are therefore leaving individual reps to do much of the heavy lifting themselves.

What makes matters even more difficult for sellers, and sales organizations alike, is the fact that buyers are not contacting suppliers until they are, on average, 57% of the way through their purchase process —meaning they have already determined their needs, completed due diligence, and have even begun to do some comparison shopping.

Given that this emerging commercial rift or “no-man’s land” is essentially enabling customers to make purchase decisions without supplier influence, it is all the more important that suppliers alter their strategies to drive customer engagement at the earliest, most formative stages of a sale and shape customer demand.

The SEC is focusing on just this in our forthcoming 2012 research. Initial findings suggest that the best companies are developing an organizational capability spanning both marketing and sales to generate unique insight, develop scalable commercial messaging based of that insight, and to generate leads/select opportunities based on customer receptiveness to that insight. By doing so, these companies are able to successfully support their sellers in engaging customers early and shaping their demand.

What is your organization doing to tackle no-man’s land and increasing buyer sophistication? Does developing an organizational capability to generate unique insight and support sellers sound like the right approach to you?

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.

So we’re currently trying to tease out, exactly, what people are using analytics for, and what ultimate goals those actions feed into. When we’re on the phone with members, overwhelmingly we’re hearing that data brings enterprises closer to the consumer, leading to all sorts of better outcomes: more resonant marcomms, higher margins through more effective price discrimination, and, for some companies, better products that arise through access to protected, proprietary data assets (like Nike+).

I could imagine two ways that data might feed into customer centricity (whether it’s helping or hurting). Story number one more or less goes: we as a company had very little idea who our customers were, what they liked, how they socialized and what kind of products they bought from others that they could be buying from us. When we integrated advanced marketing analytics and unstructured data, the numbers told us more about our customers than we already knew, and we became more customer-centric.

The other story goes: we as a company had very little idea who our customers were, and therefore we integrated big data and advanced analytics. But we couldn’t choose which data to use, and our analysts and marketers got caught up in a never-ending cycle of analysis paralysis. Moreover, thinking about the consumer as an abstract concept in data led to people forgetting the importance of experience and observation. In the process, we lost sight of the softer, qualitative ways that we learned about customers, and ended up becoming less customer-centric.

Which of these is more plausible? I’m not sure, but my gut says it’s the second story. I can count the number of companies with great, consumer-apparent uses of data on my fingers and toes, and analytics vendors have bigger appetites than that; there are surely hundreds of companies out there with data on their hands of varying effectiveness.

So, we thought we’d bring the question to you. Answer the poll below to let us know how you feel about data and analytics’ role in customer-centricity. Want to add some details? Let us know in the comments section.

These factors are creating the “no-man’s land” facing Marketing and Sales, one that we told you about last summer in our annual B2B research project. But they’re also making Sales’ job harder by making the process more complex: when buyers have ideas in their head that they get from internet research, or when a committee makes a purchase, rather than an individual, complex contingencies quickly develop, ones that can be hard to manage for individual reps.

Johnson Controls, an industrial controls and facilities management company, sells complex products and solutions. Its reps ran into the problem described above, and had trouble making complex sales. The company’s solution was to embrace game elements to help reps unearth critical, unarticulated customer needs that aren’t being met effectively – and, in turn, reconcile competing priorities among multiple stakeholders.

Johnson Controls first gets all the stakeholders into a room and asks them to fill out two kinds of cards: “needs cards” represent key priorities for each participant in the buying process, and “practice cards” represent the organizational actions needed to meet the needs.

Cards are then mapped onto a special gameboard developed by Johnson Controls, that graphically represents where the customer thinks critical needs are going unmet. Armed with data and benchmarks from across the customer’s segment, reps can challenge customers in the moment by comparing them to competitors.

For more, including how Johnson Controls reps balance multiple priorities among stakeholders, check out the full case, or listen to this webinar replay to see how this and other companies have revamped their needs assessment process.

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.

Part of this has to do with greater information availability – customers are educating themselves about products and solutions before they ever see a rep, and, as such, are in a better place to make more thorough and deliberate decisions about what they buy. Time pressures have led business leaders to spend less time with reps, as well, reducing the amount of messaging purchasers absorb prior to the buying decision.

But one important element of buyer scrutiny is fear: fear that the solution will fail or not work as advertised, and that their key metrics – or, even worse, their careers – will take the hit. And who can blame them? In today’s networked world, the cost of failure is a lot higher than it once was.

Autodesk, a 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software company, solved the problem using a purpose-built online community that connects credible customers to qualified leads, enabling customers to assuage the risk-oriented fears of the prospects. Using a variety of incentives for existing customers, the online forum enables conversations across customer groups. The best conversations are converted to product messaging – helping bring “social proof” into the company’s marcomm efforts.

MLC members, for more on this solution, check out the full case.

This list was eerily reminiscent of the results from MLC’s Marketer Quick Poll from a couple of months ago.  Only in our case, we had asked marketers about their top challenges on the data management frontier.  If these challenges are so similar between such different subjects, then perhaps it’s time to reposition and take a step back to look at the broader marketing environment.

The easiest big-picture framework that came to me was the traditional supply-and-demand curves.  For simplicity’s sake, we can consider the consumer market for baby food.

Assume we hold the supply curve constant.  To increase the amount of consumer surplus under the demand curve, we can do one of two things:

1. Try to make our captured demand hug the full consumer demand closer.  (Gerber battles Baby’s Best!)
2. Attempt to shift both demand curves further out along the supply curve.  (Expand the economic pie – for instance: Gerber using analytics to discover that older adults without teeth were an underserved market)

Most marketers would agree that achieving both would be ideal, and if they had to pick, they’d aim for the latter.  But if we look at actual practices, most marketing departments are focusing their social media and analytics efforts in the first one.

Their thought process might go something like this:

Sure I’d like to just burst through the innovation bubble and find a whole new untouched consumer population…

But we don’t have the innovative power, and it certainly won’t be easy justifying riskier, creative ventures to the rest of the organization.

Besides, the consumer landscape is changing so fast, I’m having a hard-enough time just keeping up with my competitors!

So let’s just work on speeding up current activities and getting as much consumer information as possible.  Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and come across something that will push innovation forward!

However, while aiming for “real-time” relevance has its merits, it may not be the smartest way to secure customer value and loyalty.  Consider the following: are marginal increases in market share sustainable?  Are consumer preferences really changing so quickly, or does it just seem that way with recent technological/analytical advances?

We’ve recently been thinking that focusing on speed may lead to smaller marketing improvements with fleeting market advantage.   Keep an eye out for our survey in February, when we’ll be gauging Marketing Agility (speed, flexibility, and all the factors that represent entrepreneurial readiness).  Participating companies will get a benchmarking report.  Email me if you’re interested in taking the survey or learning more: yzhang@executiveboard.com

Thinking, Fast and Slow. Just when you thought the cognitive-science fad in business circles was wearing out, Nobel winner Daniel Kahneman releases what is likely to be considered his magnum opus on the way people think and make decisions, particularly commercial ones.

In general, I think marketers intellectually know that consumers are not rational and will often make unexpected choices, but our models often assume a rational or quasi-rational consumer. I think that, in some respects, this book will help folks truly re-think what drives commercial behavior.

The Filter Bubble. Here’s one that describes a phenomenon marketers are (in part) responsible for: the splintering of society made possible by long-tail affiliations and the internet, and the resulting “bubble” most people find themselves in when it comes to news, information and products.

This is an important phenomenon that really does limit the kind of serendipity that drives a lot of product adoption and preference switching, and it’s worth looking in-depth at author Eli Pariser’s argument. His examples are primarily from the world of politics, but the parallels are clear: when algorithms and social circles control what one is exposed to, serendipity dies.

Steve Jobs. I’ll be honest – I’ve only just picked this one up, and I’m not quite sure I have well-developed thoughts on what the book has to offer folks. I have read a number of excerpts from the book, around the time it was released – and I can say that they paint a picture of an incredibly enigmatic leader, the kind whom we’re not likely to see again any time soon.

I think, if anything, the big takeaway from this book will be just how reliant Apple was in its early days on Jobs’ genius, and how other companies that compare their innovation and design acumen to Apple’s are likely chasing unicorns.

The Challenger Sale. You know we couldn’t write a post about the best recent business books without plugging our own. Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson, both of our sister program for sales executives, have a great new book out explaining how the relationship sales approach is becoming less effective, and how the best sales reps for the new environment are those that don’t acquiesce to the customer’s every demand, and who push back and remain in control of the sale.

The book teaches executives how to implement a Challenger sales strategy in their organization, and even includes great information on how marketers can help enable Challenger selling. Definitely worth a look.

2011 Marketing Investment Benchmarks. Review select marketing, marcomm and digital spend and budget allocation benchmarks from our 2011 benchmarking initiative, including previews by business model, revenue size and marketing priority.

Marketing Automation: Lessons from the Front. In recent years, Marketing Automation has grown in prominence but as with any new technology, many marketers are struggling to separate fact from fiction when it comes to what these software-based tools can really help them accomplish.

Help Your Consumers Become Better Advocates. As many marketers know, word of mouth is one of the most trusted forms of marketing. However, even when consumers do advocate for a product or service, their recommendations often provide too little context and detail to convince shoppers to buy. Learn How to improve the quality of your advocates’ recommendations.

Managing the Transition to Head of Marketing. As marketing organizations take on a greater role in the functioning of the enterprise, and as enterprises themselves become more global in scope, the role of the CMO has become much more complex. Heads of marketing must now assume responsibility for a bigger basket of activities, from customer understanding to analytics to creative development, and are under even more pressure to show returns on those activities.

Improve NPD Opportunities: Know Your Customers’ Goals. Too often, customer understanding efforts end up yielding only incremental improvements in product and service. Here’s how one member company sought to understand what really drove their customers, super-charging their innovation efforts in the process.

Know What Your End-To-End Customer Experience Looks Like. Product and media proliferation make it harder than ever to maintain a consistent customer experience. Well-intentioned efforts to improve individual touchpoints based on customer feedback often sum to a disjointed experience for the customer. Moreover, even when acting on the same insights, independent functions’ approaches can clash with one another.

Citrix’s “Anti-Newsletter” Nurture Program. Citrix’s automated quarterly newsletter—a content catch-all including multiple calls to action—was not generating the quality or quantity of leads that Marketing or Sales needed. The solution was an “anti-newsletter”—a system of targeted, timely e-mails with discrete calls to action.

Teach Customers with Your Sales Pitch. Are your customers paying attention to your differentiators, or are they focusing on price and forcing you into the commodity bucket? Here’s how Volvo brings the conversation back to unique supplier benefits.

Make Your Touchpoints Resonate: Reverse Your Marketing Plan. In an age of media oversaturation, brands without principled touchpoint selection strategies risk irrelevance – or worse.

First, some background, if you’re not knee deep in health-related social media circles. The US Food and Drug Administration, in addition to determining which pharmaceutical products should and shouldn’t be allowed in America’s pharmacies, also regulates the ways in which pharma companies are allowed to market to doctors and patients. Sounds smart, right? After all, we’re talking about potentially-dangerous drugs, here.

As such, they’ve developed guidelines and rules for the use of electronic marketing in a pharmaceutical setting. The only problem is, they haven’t been seriously updated since the late 1990s – and do not account for social media at all. This has put pharma companies in the weird position of being able to use social to broadcast certain messages but unable to have meaningful conversations with their customers, lest a side effect or adverse event is reported, setting off a chain of regulatory red tape.

The FDA listened and, in November 2009, held two days of hearings where pharma marketers, consultancies, doctors and scientific groups testified and gave suggestions on adapting the agency’s guidelines for a shifted communications landscape. And then, we waited – until Christmas Day 2011, when the FDA published this – entitled “Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information About Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices” - in the Federal Register, without even issuing a press release. This particular issue is one small facet of the pharma/social media problem, and it looks as though that the agency, rather than issuing sweeping guideline shifts that acknowledge a new communications landscape, is going to attack issues piecemeal.

But this specific guidance gives very little evidence that the FDA is thinking about social media as a systemic phenomenon, as opposed to a special case, capable of being dealt with with one-off regulations. First, the basic assumption is that marketers will be using social channels to “disseminate product information”, i.e., to advertise. That’s a given, but social offers organizations a lot more than just more space to plaster messages; we’ve talked about how social media trends mirror those in real life, and presumably the ability to listen to consumers better might lead to better health outcomes.

So here’s what I’d like out of future FDA guidances: an acknowledgement that social is a conversational medium, not a broadcast one; that it has benefits for pharmaceutical companies and broader public health outcomes beyond providing a place for Pharma to advertise; and that rigid rules on what Pharma can and can’t discuss in certain circumstances is bound to fail in a landscape where drugs are prescribed for all kinds of purposes.

Maybe we’ll get it, but I’m not hopeful.

Now that I’ve tempered expectations a bit, I will say that one thing in particular is making me tremendously excited about this suite of technology: the idea that long-tail purchase motivations and special cases can be targeted with much greater ease than is capable with traditional marketing staffs and technologies. In the real world, that means a gradual replacement of general-purpose marcomms with increasingly-tailored communications.

That’s a process that’s well underway at Citrix, a networking and connectivity software company. Marketing noticed that the firm’s quarterly newsletter – a content catch-all that included multiple calls to action and spoke to many different kinds of current and potential customers – was underperforming expectations.

In order to extract the most value out of their marketing communications, the company turned to the best of automation and human judgment to create a lead nurturing program – one that starts with pre-programmed, automated content, but transitions to more tailored, targeted e-mails to convert prospects into sales-ready, qualified leads.

MLC members, want to learn more about how Citrix used automation and judgment to get more from their marcomms? Be sure to check out the full case, as well as the rest of our work on marketing automation.

If there’s one thing the past few years have been notable for, for marketers, it’s instability and uncertainty. Core assumptions of the craft are being called into question by technological shifts, a growing impetus on globalization is running into geography-specific challenges, and it’s unclear whether consumers and business buyers will re-learn pre-recession habits.

A lot of these are longer-term issues, ones that we might not get clarity on for a few years. But some might be decided in 2012. Here are some things to look out for:

B2B social/digital media.In the B2B space, we think this might be the year that marketers gain a bit more visibility into how best to use social media in the business buying environment. A number of variables are falling into place: for instance, marketing automation technologies are helping marketers use social data and platforms more effectively and a greater percentage of buyers are becoming more comfortable with social media.

I’m not suggesting that we’ll learn “the answer” to all B2B social media related questions, but I think we’ll get quite a bit closer.

Geograhpic uncertainties.A number of the major markets big firms have invested in across the last 10 years are showing signs that idiosyncratic issues might affect consumer and business outcomes in the next year. In the United States, the November presidential election is very important for – among others – the finance and healthcare industries, as legislation passed under President Obama may be rolled back in the event a Republican unseats him. In Europe, the ongoing sovereign debt crisis still threatens big consequences for the Eurozone, and if the situation isn’t resolved well (and soon), consumers could feel the pain even worse than they do now.

In India, the government has begun to show signs of wariness towards Western business, such as shelving a plan to allow foreign retailers to open stores in the country. And in China, there are some signs that phenomenal economic growth may be slowing.

In general, firms have done a great job of hedging their bets geographically, but significant challenges in each of those geographies remain – challenges that may shake out between now and December 31.

Erosion of sticky recession habits. We’ve talked about it here before, but there’s significant evidence that it takes consumers and businesses quite some time to retreat from frugal habits learned in recessionary times – even if those habits aren’t strictly necessary anymore.

Those habits have created some pretty tough times for marketers, as margins have decreased, price comparison and individual research blunt the impact of messaging, and budget contractions have shrunken the spending pie.

We know that habits shift through some combination of changing economic circumstances and time. Will 2012 be the year your customers loosen the strings a bit?

Mobile and e-commerce. Pretty much everyone buys some things online these days, but in recent years, we’ve seen a vanguard of early adopters shift to doing most or all of their shopping online or with their phones (you can count me as one; I hate malls). With Amazon Prime and a subscription to a grocery delivery service like Peapod or FreshDirect, one can just about get away with never stepping into a retail store again.

Now, clearly, there are benefits to the retail environment that, for some, make up for the hassle of having to actually enter the store. I think this may be the year where brands and retailers figure out exactly what those things are, and find a limit on consumers’ willingness to shift their shopping online.

What have we missed? Let us know in the comments.

Outside of the gameshow arena, consumers are arguably just as obsessed with price, and this attitude has become a pain point for many a sales representative.  How does a sales rep keep the conversation away from price when that’s all that a customer is thinking about?

Teach them something else that’s right.

Let’s look at a case on truck driver engagement and retention to see how Marketing at Volvo was able to deal with this issue.

Initially, no matter what sales reps went in with…

“We have a better product!  We have more features!  We can address your needs!”

… the customer always brought the conversation back to price.

“Well… a truck is a truck, but hey maybe you can throw in some free chrome bumpers!”

Volvo convened a small group of mid- to upper-level directors in a workshop to brainstorm and develop a new message for the sales reps.  MLC members, read more about the key elements to this workshop here.

They recognized an opportunity to improve driver management for their customers…

“Customers are underestimating how much unsatisfied drivers are costing them.”

… and crafted a pitch that teaches customers the value of Volvo solutions.

“Instead of telling them how our 2,092 square inch windshield will reduce the likelihood of an accident, let’s talk to them about the costs associated with driver turnover.”

Notice that instead of leading with the value of product features and focusing on known customer needs, the new approach leads with issue(s) costing customers money and telling them something they don’t already know about themselves.

And voila, you’ve shown your customers that the price is not the only thing that’s right when it comes to your business!

MLC members, read the full case study here.

Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative research we discovered a few key lessons that everyone considering, implementing, or optimizing marketing automation tools should know.  Our findings, ideas, tips, and best practices (including data from a benchmarking survey of 161 B2B marketers) are all collected on a dedicated Marketing Automation Key Findings page on our website.  Top takeaways include:

• Marketing automation success is a long, hard road.  Just 31% of those we surveyed said they had seen positive, measurable ROI from marketing automation that met or exceeded their expectations.  One of the things that distinguished those folks from the rest of the crowd was the length of time they had been using marketing automation – the overwhelming majority had been at it for a year or more.

• Have reasonable expectations for returns.  The most commonly realized returns included things like better alignment between Marketing and Sales, better qualified leads (and a higher volume of leads), and more engagement with marketing collateral (in the form of higher email click-through-rates, more thought piece downloads, and improved website metrics).  Very few respondents had seen things like bigger or faster deals or higher close rates.

• Put people first.  While the majority of marketing-automation-related angst we heard was about which software vendor to select, it is the people and processes that plug into and overlay the software that are going to lead to success or failure.  One of the best practices featured on the Key Findings page is a great profile of Sutherland about Marketing and Sales collaboratively hammering out a lead hand-off process.

Marketing automation is not a magic solution to all that ails B2B marketers, but it can enable those who use it smartly and strategically to accomplish some great things.  Check out our profile of Telus for what can happen when marketing automation is firing on all cylinders.

MLC Members – find all this and more on our Marketing Automation Key Findings page and share your marketing automation thoughts, opinions, and experiences in the comments section below.

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.

Below are six of the bigger and edgier hypotheses we’re testing.  If you have any other suggestions/thoughts, please email me soon and we’ll try to add them to the survey.

Consumers value personalized products and service more than personalized product recommendations and discounts. We’re pretty confident that consumers value personalization in some areas of the 4Ps more than others, but we’re not really sure which.  I won’t be surprised if the survey shows the opposite of the hypothesis above, but will be interested either way!  (We’re also comparing the impact of personalization in other areas, e.g., category-related advice and brand values).

Implication if true: Focus on measuring and optimizing parts of the experience that customers want to be more personalized.

Boosting loyalty and willingness to pay requires a step change in relevance, not just small increases. Take messaging as an example. Most brands’ currently personalize messages based on at least a few criteria (e.g., gender and region) and reach a reasonable level of relevance for a good portion of customers. As a result, increased investment in personalization (e.g., adding age and neighborhood to gender and region) may not result in noticeably more relevant messages for a good portion of customers, despite adding complexity internally.  As another example, we’ll compare the impact of product recommendations from a) any consumer, b) a consumer of your age/gender, c) a consumer with similar taste to you, d) a friend whose opinions/taste you trust.

Implication if true: Focus personalization efforts on elements of the experience in which small increases in relevance count most.

Consumers value decreased irrelevance (i.e., less irritation) more than increased relevance. We’re hoping to compare the impact of email frequency and email relevance. Instead of using data to send more relevant messages, the best first step may be to reduce low-relevance messages.

Implication if true: Stop trying to make your email subject line more eye-catching and start cutting the number of emails you send altogether.

Demographics are the least effective means of personalizing; aspirations are the most effective. We hypothesize that the easiest data to capture (demographics) is also the least valuable for personalization.  We also hypothesize that the hardest data to capture – aspirations – is the most effective.  We’d guess that contextual data (place, time of day/week) is in between in terms of both ease of capture and impact.

Implication if true: Beware of over-valuing data just because you have it and consider using unstructured social media data to understand aspirations.

Most consumers don’t realize how much data brands have on them, but those who know are more protective of their data. We’re going to test consumers’ “personal information IQ” and also ask about any steps they’ve taken to restrict brands’ access to their data. We expect that most consumers aren’t aware of how they’re data’s used (although it may turn out that many know when prompted, but forget).  We also expect a weak correlation between privacy understanding and privacy protection, but not a strong one (given what we know about ourselves from Facebook).

Implication if true: As privacy concerns get more press, more people will take steps to protect their information.  This could stymie brands’ personalization efforts.

Shoppers who like variety, but don’t have much time to shop will value personalization more than others and privacy less. We’ll be testing a range of demographic, behavioral, and psychographic factors to see what (if anything) correlates with lower concerns about privacy and higher demand for personalization.

Implication if true: Target data collection and personalization at certain segments that value it most.

Watch this space to find out which of these hypotheses prove true (results early next year!).

Three of this year’s best hit those buttons, we think. As for the other two: a little levity never hurt anyone. Here are our thoughts – let us know what you think in comments!

1) Volkswagen – “The Force”

Here’s what we said about this one in this year’s Super Bowl Roundup:

As someone who dreamed of Force-like powers as a child (and who didn’t?) this commercial was my favorite of the night. The kid in the comically oversized Darth Vader helmet will be, I think, this year’s E-Trade baby – the iconic, lasting image of what was, overall, a pretty good crop of ads. The commercial works, I think, because of the juxtaposition of the car and magical, supernatural abilities; the Passat shown in the commercial is a luxury model. The dramatic camerawork doesn’t hurt, either. Great job, VW!

Yep, all that still holds true. Best ad of the year, by far.

2) Google Chrome – “Dear Sophie”

I’m about as skeptical as they come when it comes to companies pulling at peoples’ heartstrings in ads, but this one is stunningly well done. The pace of the ad – which picks up as Sophie gets older – reminds of parents’ lament that childhood slips away quickly, and the memories the father shares – a combination of the mundane, absurd, and poignant – mimic real life. The best thing this ad does, that I’ve never seen any other technology company do as well, is cut through the hype and show customers exactly how technology can help them lead better lives. I’d kill to have a GMail account full of stories from my early life, and I bet a lot of others would, too.

3) Chipotle – “Back to the Start”

Shared values? Check. Visual homages to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”? Check. One of the best Coldplay songs? Check. Covered by Willie Nelson? Check. This ad is a great, poignant reminder to customers that Chipotle isn’t just a purveyor of delicious burritos and rice bowls; they’re a bringer of wholesomeness into the community.

4) Nissan Leaf – “Gas Powered Everything”

Chalk another one up to the “shared values” category. This ad for Nissan’s all-electric Leaf, which creatively imagines a world in which all our electronic gadgets were powered by gasoline, tugs at our inner environmentalist while taking a not-so-subtle jab at a competitor, the Chevy Volt.

I’m a longtime fan of the steampunk genre, which, in a similar way, asks readers to imagine an alternate future in which steam – not electricity – became the dominant power source for most things in our lives. It’s pretty clear that the directors of this spot took some inspiration from that world – which speaks to the geeks in all of us, as well.

5) DirecTV – “I Am Epic Win”

This one’s a personal favorite. It checks so many boxes for me, it’s almost as if the directors read my mind. Nerd humor (“epic win”) in the title character’s name? Miniature giraffes? Lampooning Russian oligarchs? Love it all.

The best part about this campaign, though, is the web component, most notably the Petite Lap Giraffe website, which fooled a number of friends and family this year. Thanks, DirecTV, for that.

Readers familiar with the outer reaches of the social media space may have heard of a concept called “the quantified self“, an ethos and accompanying suite of technologies designed to give average people data and insights into one of the most mysterious things in the world – the workings of their own bodies. Nike+, which we wrote about a few months ago, is a “quantified self” technology, as are more comprehensive solutions like the Jawbone Up, which – in addition to physical activity – can track daily calories burned and sleep quality.

Part of the value of quantified self technologies is ease of comparison – you can easily figure out if something that’s going on with your body is normal or cause for concern. But in order to get enough data for comparison, you have to have a critical mass of users – and quantified self stuff is probably not mainstream enough for statistically-significant sample sizes for any given question.

Well, what if there were organizations with hundreds of thousands of health consumers – enough to provide adequate sample sizes for just about any “is this normal” question, with a vested interest in those consumers taking preventative health measures? Oh, wait, there is!

Snark aside, I know that there are serious regulations around patient data, although I won’t pretend to know the finer points about what can be shared, and what can’t, as well as how patient consent changes that calculus. If HIPAA won’t allow reporting of aggregate data with patient opt-in, then HIPAA should be changed to allow it given the clear health benefits it would make available to customers.

But it kills me that this general idea – take data from the giant mass of health consumers under insurance plans, and give patients better insight into what good looks like for people of their rough demographic – is being pioneered by startups, established tech companies, and athletic shoe manufacturers, not health companies. We know, for instance, that providing insight into what others have done reduces consumer stress appreciably. It’s not a giant leap to think that consumers would appreciate the same from their health insurers.

As a health insurance consumer myself, the feeling I most want to have upon thinking about my insurance company is “they’re on my side”. Sometimes that means a trusted adviser, working one-on-one to solve a problem, but other times it means the strength of a corporate behemoth, knocking down walls to improve my health. Health marketers have little problem doing the first; I’d like to see a lot more of the second.

That’s one of the questions Sales is asking itself, as recessionary habits persist in the buying centers of big organizations. The dynamics of internal buying centers are too complicated to be solved with a single solution, but one way Marketing can help is to make sure those buyers that love you – the ones still receptive to “relationship selling” – are equipped to make the case around the organization.

That’s exactly what Iron Mountain, the document management company, did when presented with a similar problem. They noted that typical Iron Mountain buyers – typically too junior to engage in strategic-level relationships – faced three obstacles that stood in the way of advocating for their solutions internally:

• Lack of appreciation for the strategic relationship. The company’s advocates loved the way Iron Mountain served their needs, but didn’t understand the broader, more strategic ways Iron Mountain could help their business.
• Minimal personal gain for advocates. Simply put, what’s in it for them?
• Fear of risking personal reputation. Potential advocates were wary – and who wouldn’t be – of sharing sharing overly-commercial resources and information with senior stakeholders, and secondarily were concerned about bringing a commercial proposal in front of decision-makers without a holistic understanding of Iron Mountain’s offering.

To teach these buyers how to advocate for Iron Mountain to senior staff, and leverage the company’s insights to raise their own profile at work, Marketing designs materials to do three things:

• Engage the heart. Iron Mountain highlights links between the advocate’s job, the solutions offer, and the value at stake for the broader organization. Doing this sells the advocate on pitching the solution internally.
• Motivate the mind. To get the advocate over the hump of pitching the solution internally, Marketing designs materials to reveal similarities between the advocate’s document management challenges and the pain points of senior decision-makers. This helps the advocate make a credible case to those stakeholders.
• Equip the hands. Finally, Marketing creates tools that the advocate can use to actually make the case to peers and senior leadership.

Want to learn more about Iron Mountain’s process, including the tools they armed their advocates with to make the case internally? You can read the full case here, or listen to Laura McDaniel, Iron Mountain’s director of marketing, talk through the approach.