Wide Angle

(Note: This is Part 4 of our 6-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Part 2, “Selecting Metrics“, can be found here. Part 3, “Marketers Squeezing Productivity“, can be found here. Check back here every Wednesday in August and September for a new installment!)

As you’re preparing for another year of marketing planning, ask yourself these three questions:

• Do our marketing plans reflect our company’s overall strategic objectives?
• Are our marketing plans based primarily on incremental changes to last year’s activities?
• Even if we know that marketing is making progress, can we tie our activities to business objectives?

We all know what the answers here should be, but how many of us actually get it right? Read More »

(Note: This is Part 3 of our 6-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Part 2, “Selecting Metrics“, can be found here.  Check back here every Wednesday in August and September for a new installment!)

Early results from the Council’s ongoing marketing budget and spend survey suggest that Marketers are (understandably) cautious as they look ahead to 2011.  With the cooldown in businesses re-stocking their inventories and consumers continuing to keep pursestrings drawn tight, budgets appear to be flat to marginally up. Read More »

(Note: This is Part 2 of a 4-part series on marketing planning. Part 1, “Making the Case for Higher Spend“,  can be found here. Check back here every Wednesday in August for a new installment!)

B2B marketing organizations today are emphasizing the transfer of ideas to customers (just consider the rise of terms like “thought leadership”, “consultative selling” or “solutions”).  This makes sense – done right, an insight-based approach is one of the few ways suppliers can avert pure price-based competition. Additionally, our research shows that insight is valued by customers in the long term.  “Teaching” activities such as offering unique perspectives on the market or helping the customer navigate alternatives strongly predict loyalty.

It follows that marketing plans this year should have a strong insight orientation.  Naturally the marketing plan will align to broader organizational strategy, but the marketing objectives that support company strategy should be grounded in delivering insight that changes customers’ valuation of your offering. Read More »

Last weekend, I spoke with a friend who just returned from Italy.  He asked: do you know how long it took to build the St. Peter’s basilica?

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. Read More »

(Note: This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on marketing planning. Check back here every Wednesday in August for a new installment!)

Don’t know if it’s time to spend more on marketing?  Unsure how to convince the CFO?  Pat LaPointe – managing partner at NPV Marketing, a leading marketing measurement firm – recently spoke to our members about how to justify spend increases. Read on for a summary of his top tips.

NPV’s research shows that ‘historical spend’ is still the number one means of allocating marketing budget, but lacks both rigor and credibility with the CFO.  What CFOs want isn’t certainty about the ROI of marketing spend (no business investment has a certain ROI, e.g., building a new plant in a developing country), but rather clearly stated assumptions and a sound understanding of risk factors. You can make a solid business case that will pass the CFO ‘sniff test’ by taking the 5 steps below. Read More »

Running a commercial organization is hard – no one denies that. How do we come up with a unique value proposition that will resonate with customers? How do we coach our reps to become commercial teachers? How do we keep our employees focused on their jobs now that the fourth season of Mad Men is on?

But you would think that one of the easier parts of running a commercial organization would be knowing who owns what tasks. You put Employee #1 in charge of voice of the customer, Employee #2 in charge of sales support, Employee #3 in charge of customer portfolio management, and you take care of commercial strategy. Sounds simple enough, right?

Actually, no. The results from MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic show that:

• 67% of companies don’t know who is in charge of Voice of the Customer
• 63% don’t know who is in charge of Commercial Strategy
• 64% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Portfolio Management
• 54% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Segmentation
• 50% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Experience Management. Read More »

Ah, the dog days of summer. The inevitable 90-degree day followed by the unpredictable afternoon thunderstorm and flash flood warning. If you’re lucky, the storm hits at 2pm before the commute; on the one day you absolutely must get home, I guarantee the storm hits at rush hour. The beauty and agony of summer: the uncertainty of late afternoon.

And that is exactly where our manufacturing members find today’s economy – a late summer afternoon, with limited predictive ability as to coming market conditions. They’ve seen the sun peek through the clouds (11 straight months of sector expansion per ISM’s Report on Business) but with markedly slower growth in June’s new orders, that grey cloud seeps back into the picture. With a consumer-driven economy, manufacturers can’t be too pleased that June housing starts also dropped 5.0%, while consumer confidence hit a low not seen since August 2009. 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 »

Einstein proffered that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results is the very definition of insanity.

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?

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 »