Wide Angle

We just came back from an innovation session kindly hosted by W.L. Gore and Associates (best known by consumers for the GORE-TEX fabric).  We spent a half day discussing the challenges of pre-funnel product and service innovation, and we were treated to a tour of Gore’s Capabilities Center.

One of the big lessons for me was the importance of organizing for innovation – but not the way you think.  Yes, one of the big questions we hear is about organizational structure, but what became clear during our session was that changing the way you look at your world, including your existing products and services and assumed customer needs, is a critical step to being more creative — even more than how you organize your people. Read More »

My colleague Aaron dubbed 2010 “Year of the Re-Org” in January – and the member interest we’ve seen in organizational structure bears this out.  As planning season rolls around, we’ve been examining various org designs.  We’ve identified six archetypes that optimize to different benefits: 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 »

So perhaps the title here is a bit harsh, but something needed to catch your eye. We’ve long known retailers to be a unique beast, managing more products than any CPG marketer could imagine, focusing on category-specific merchandising strategies (often to the detriment of cross-sell), and most recently, managing the tradeoffs between brick-and-mortar stores and online sales.

But frankly, this too often turns retailers into myopic, proximity-biased incrementalists in their customer strategy (too harsh again?). Imagine my encouragement when I see retail CMOs begin to tout the very elements of customer-focused strategy their CPG peers have long known. Read More »

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, Concourse D and I’m eating Sbarro, drinking a Coke, and overlooking flag carriers from the Netherlands, France, Italy, and the UK. The voice from above announces flight information in three languages – Dutch, English, and the language of the country’s destination. The passengers next to me are listening to iPods singing American pop, heading for Africa.

Whither globalization? I beg to differ.

There was a bit of consternation at the Davos confab earlier this year as to whether the era of globalization was the root cause of the global financial meltdown, and as a result, perhaps it was time to roll back some of that interconnectedness. Nicolas Sarkozy was particularly pungent in his argument to this effect. Granted, globalization certainly hastened the onset of recessionary tendencies the world over; international capital flows have only increased since the Asia financial crisis of the late 1990s sent a minor shock wave through the system. Read More »

Advance warning: this post will likely open more doors than it closes. But they are important doors that need opening, especially if they aren’t already. Haniel Lynn pushed the first one open with his earlier post, asking if Marketing could foment a corporate cultural revolution through social media. Member conversations I’ve had over the past week have demonstrated there is a root-cause question that must come first – where does Marketing fit in the organization? Better yet, where should it? Read More »

After my gloomy 2009 retrospective, I thought I’d try for a cheery 2010 prognostication. Then I looked at the unemployment rate, continued declines in construction spending, the looming bust of commercial real estate and quickly recalled why I’m a self-described realist (others call it cynic, take your pick).

So how about an even-handed assessment of things to watch for in 2010? Even the cynic can provide that.  Here are three big macroeconomic and marketing-specific trends every marketer should follow in earnest: Read More »

As followers of the Chinese Zodiac prepare to usher in the year of the tiger, marketers appear to be ushering in the year of the re-org.  Having seen their markets soften, crumble, and begin to show signs of life—all in the last 18 months—marketing leaders are rethinking the organizations they’ve built.  Even if the basic structures we’ve built appear to be viable, new segments need to be addressed and  new teams need to be formed to address markets that look very different from the ones that we faced just two or three years ago.    

Unfortunately, many of the marketing reorganizations that will kick off in 2010 will take a year or two to implement.  Right around the time that key players settle into their new roles, teams start to gel, and new processes start to fire on all cylinders, market conditions will have changed, and it will be time to start all over again.  Read More »