If you found an oracle and could ask it anything, what would you want to know?  Most of us would go right to life’s great questions, like “What happens when we die?” and “Is that Donald Trump’s real hair?”  But I’ll bet a lot of marketers would also reserve a little time to unlock a few mysteries that hit a little closer to home, namely, “What do my customers want/need/expect from me as a supplier?” and “How can I convince my customers that I am providing something more than just goods or services – and that they should pay more for it?”

In our recent conversations with B2B marketers, we’ve heard a lot about these very questions.  Many feel that there is a competitive edge to be gained through superior customer understanding, but most haven’t yet seen those efforts translate into bottom line results.  Ultimately, the goal is not learning more about customers just for the sake of knowing it, but figuring out those key insights that can shape and inform Marketing and Sales strategy, approaches, and collateral.

From our early work, there seem to be two key elements: Read More »

Marketing has some basic rules no matter what is being sold, and some might argue that successful political campaigns are waged along many of the same lines and the battles for dish soap dominance or soda superiority.  While there are definitely some commonalities, there are also key differences in the marketing of consumer products and presidential hopefuls.  First let’s look at what is the same: Read More »

When it comes to small budget items, people usually shop in one of two ways: they buy what they always buy because they’re used to it (shampoo, coffee) or they buy whatever is on sale because they can’t tell the difference (toilet paper, sandwich bag). In fact, our Decision Simplicity work from last year would show that a whopping 51% of consumers only consider one brand when buying items under $10 and 37% are buying more store brand items than they did a year ago. The room for substantive differentiation is often so small that all one can do is changing how consumers perceive your wares – like the hugely successful Miller Lite vortex bottle (> 1.4 million results when I search for “does it work?”). Fluid dynamics doesn’t usually get this exciting.

Recently, we’ve been doing our own bit of probing of what’s on consumers’ minds when making small purchases. We used salad dressing as the stand-in for all things CPG – the assumption being that you buy most of these items with a similar mindset. Through a conjoint exercise, we test consumers’ implicit preferences on several different dimensions, from price to taste, to brand, to who recommended the item to them. Read More »

As consumers begin to tentatively emerge from the recession, we expect lots of brands to begin repositioning to capture additional wallet share in the coming months and years. There are countless examples of rebrands that haven’t gone well.  Brands find their current personality and values to be tired, outdated, or no longer accurate, so they go to extreme lengths to get back in the game (and back in the hands of consumers).  Sometimes, though, these efforts pay off.

In looking at successful rebrandings, we’ve found four keys to making a rebrand successful.  MLC members, visit our branding topic center to access more resources. Read More »

Sometimes life made simple trumps life made fabulous – when you’d rather come home to a clean sink and kids in bed instead of to a candle light dinner. I suspect the same goes with banking. Personally, I’d prefer a bill with no surprise charges that gives a clear, categorized view of my spending to a new app allowing me to bank via iPad. Stack the frustration of spending an hour getting bounced around customer service against the joys of a new reward program and no wonder “Bank Dumping Day” exists.

What I want in a bank essentially comes down to the good old KISS -“Keep It Simple, Stupid”- and the 1000 or so banking customers we recently surveyed agree. To tease out their real preferences, we had them go through a conjoint exercise in which they are presented sets of banking products with different attributes and asked to choose their favorite one from each set. We then ran market simulation based on that information to see which offerings will sink or swim. Turns out that consumers flock to “straight up”, clean and hassle free banking solutions that make their lives easier. MLC’s Decision Simplicity research from last year would also suggest longer banking relationships and higher recommendation rates as a result.

Yet simple is easier said than done, because the highest form of simplicity is letting others do things their own way, some call it “Natural Pathing”, others call it following “Desire Lines”.  It is the idea that instead of designing paths as you see fit and tell people to stay off the grass, you build paths where the grass is worn by footfall. You’ve got to go with the flow because if you don’t, customers will circumnavigate, or worse yet, quit.

If you look at the chart above, most traditional banks are only scratching the surface when it comes to achieving “simplicity”, sometimes going no deeper than changing the tag line. Bank of America launched a 40 million ad effort in 2009 touting “simple, clear banking”, which Adweek considered to be “rather generic — educational, almost” and could just as easily have the names of other big banks like Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase slapped on it. Bottom line is, customers don’t care how much effort you expanded, they care about how much effort you’ve saved them.

Compare that to the likes of Mint or Simple.com. Mint positions itself as “Your financial life, all in one place” which I personally like for the fact that it gives me nice little pie charts of where I’ve spent my money. On my regular bank accounts I’d have to do that by downloading my transactions into Excel and doing the summation myself which is a drag. Simple.com lets you ask questions in normal English like “How much did I spent on taxis in New York last month?” and have real people (often the same one) answer your call at first try instead of tossing you around making selections. That’s almost Zappos-ish. I’d like to see real banks make customer service the bedrock of their business, but they seem to lack the vision, the will, or both.

Does simplicity make you invincible? No, but getting there will put you a long shot ahead of competitors. The only thing that kills simplicity in our simulation is fees – even if it’s just $3 or $5 a month. Customers said no to debit card fees, I think they mean no to basically any kind of fee.

Chances are that most of us have been to an IKEA store at least once in our lives.  And if you have been to an IKEA store, there’s probably a better chance that you have gotten lost in an IKEA store. But with over 12,000 products (and growing!) and some of the cheapest costs for furniture and home goods in the world, it is no surprise that this Swedish retail powerhouse has developed somewhat of a cult following.

One of IKEA’s main tools for advertising is its annual catalog, which consumes an unbelievable 70% of its total marketing budget.  In fact, in 2010, IKEA printed over 197 million copies in twenty languages.  While these catalogs offer vivid images of the company’s products, it can be very difficult to imagine how a piece of furniture will look and fit into a certain space based on dimensions alone.  This is why, in 2010, IKEA Spain launched a free Interactive Catalog iPhone app in addition to its print catalog.

In this mobile app, users could choose from over 40 novelties to virtually place in a room of their choice.  Consumers were able to adjust the size of the novelty, and then snap a picture with the iPhone camera to see how it would look.  This enabled consumers to test how IKEA’s products fit and looked in a designated room before actually buying the piece of furniture, which eliminated the hassle of returning a product if it turned out to be an ill fit.  Short quizzes also helped users discover their “style” by asking them to choose their preference between two items, while at the same time helping IKEA monitor and learn about its customers based on their selection.

As with any mobile marketing initiative, however, IKEA Spain also faced risks in implementing its Interactive Catalog.  To see these risks, along with the final results of the campaign, visit our mobile marketing showcase.

Around Valentine’s Day, what could be worse than unreciprocated love? For many marketers, this seems to be a year-round pain – the leads they so painstakingly manage to generate do not convert to actual purchases. MLC research shows, on an average only 25% of marketing-generated leads result in desired follow up and results. It is but natural that marketers would try to enhance the quantity and quality of leads they generate, to result in higher conversion.

MLC’s resource center on Lead Generation is a rich source of resources on lead generation for marketers. I’ve collated a couple of best-in-class lead generation strategies that can help you generate more and better qualified leads: Read More »

Marketing leaders are grappling with some tricky questions these days. They need to adapt to a more digitized, fragmented and faster-changing consumer landscape, but with limited budgets they have to make a lot of trade-offs.

The CMOs we’ve been speaking to lately are asking 3 big questions, and they all can be boiled down to building agile organizations. Our Marketing Agility Diagnostic compares nimbler vs. clunkier marketing teams to see which trade-offs seem pay off – or if there are ways to break the trade-offs.  To learn more, email abird@executiveboard.com – or, if you’re a CMO, take the survey now.

But for now, here are the conclusions that the smartest CMOs are making: Read More »

Consumers’ lives are changing faster than ever due to new technologies, economic realities, and family structures.  Consequently, marketers are struggling to keep their offerings relevant and timely.  Many are mining data to better track and understand consumer behavior and preferences.  However, they often are portrayed as big bad wolves threatening customer privacy.

It’s the ultimate catch-22 for marketers: consumers are annoyed by irrelevant targeting, so marketers dig for more information to improve relevance.  But consumers get creeped out when offers are too relevant, and usually don’t want to share much anyways.  So what’s the key to finding a balance?

Here at the MLC, we recently surveyed over 6,000 consumers about various factors – including privacy – that drive their decision-making across several industries.  The results revealed some interesting patterns that might make the privacy problem a little less scary.  I’d like to share some highlights with you here.  Important to note: price was almost always more important to consumers than any other consideration, including privacy. Read More »

This year’s crop of ads was among the best in recent memory. Only a few absolute clunkers, and a lot that were just plain enjoyable – bringing some life to a game between two teams I don’t particularly care for (sorry, Pats and Giants fans).

Here’s our best and worst of 2012. MLC members, for more on advertising, check out our findings on getting the most out of agency relationships as well as our Creative and Content topic center.

Best Ads

Acura – “Transactions”

Jerry Seinfeld has been somewhat absent from the spotlight since his eponymous TV show ended in 1998 – I think he’s done a few standup tours, Bee Movie, and that show where couples argue on television – but this is a neat return in support of what looks to be a pretty nifty car. My favorite transaction? Making small talk with the omelet guy – always the most awkward part of a Sunday brunch buffet.

Honda – “Matthew’s Day Off”

Folks who were in high school in 1986 – the year Ferris Bueller’s Day Off perfectly captured the delight of playing hooky on a beautiful spring day – are now a good way into the “responsible adult” phase of their lives; running kids to soccer practice, going grocery shopping, that kind of thing. So good for Honda for matching up this old cultural touchstone to new circumstances. As a sidenote, one has to feel for Matthew Broderick: to many (including me) he’ll never be anyone other than Ferris Bueller.

Dannon/Oikos – “The Tease”

A dark horse choice, I know. But there’s just something viscerally satisfying about this ad, from Dannon’s Oikos brand, locked in a tough battle with Fage for Greek yogurt supremacy. I think Shelley put it best: last night, she e-mailed me and said “Who among us hasn’t wanted to head butt John Stamos at one time or another?” Who among us, indeed.

Worst Ads

GoDaddy – All of Them

We don’t have the space to post every GoDaddy ad, but here’s a fairly representative one. They deliver a pretty commodified web service, and as such are pretty marketing and advertising-driven – so I’m assuming they know something I don’t, and that these titillating ads actually work on some level. I suppose, then, that my disappointment is more that they dowork, and what that says about my fellow men.

Chrysler – Halftime in America

I have two gripes with this ad. The first is the same as the complaint I had about last year’s similar spot, featuring Eminiem: I don’t think the ad is properly targeted to anyone; while I admire the sentiment, I don’t like the chip-on-the-shoulder tone; and I don’t think people buy big, expensive things like cars – especially in this economic environment – on sentiment alone. I think folks have it pretty hard in most places, and the “we have it harder than you” stuff is off-putting. I understand that others feel differently (as our Iconoculture colleagues do) and that Chrysler must have some good data supporting their decision to buy another extended spot this year; they certainly got great mileage out of the last campaign. In other words: as a piece of dramatic film, it’s quite good; but as a vehicle for selling cars – I’m not so sure.

The second gripe is more operational: notice how we haven’t embedded the video? The company must not have gotten its permissions straight beforehand, as the video was taken down from YouTube earlier this morning. They knew they were going to get massive post-game play for the ad, and I’m shocked that all the legal ducks weren’t in a row so that folks could play it again this morning.

H&M – David Beckham Bodywear

So much wrong with this one. First, who thought it would be appropriate to feature a near-naked Beckham as a pitchman in a male-dominated event like this one? Second, why is H&M – a fairly niche brand focused on affordable hipster clothes – advertising during the Super Bowl, anyway? The reaction at the Super Bowl party I attended was one of palpable awkwardness, and we were a pretty well-balanced crowd from a gender perspective.