By Ana Lapter

A deepening debt crisis in Europe is making “austerity” the word du jour. To avoid budget cuts, many executives are under increasing pressure to demonstrate the ROI on marketing expenditure.  Historically, this was never an easy thing to demonstrate; many marketing activities are designed to build brand awareness or engage customers, things that are hard to quantify in a strict ROI framework.  But continued economic softness heightens the need to increase marketing productivity – the amount of value we get for the work we do.

How can a marketing organization become more productive while avoiding unnecessary costs?

The easiest approach is to cut staff and expect the remaining employees to do more with less. This, however, is not a good solution from the perspective of staff engagement and retention.  As one MLC member put it: “We’ve freed up a lot of money by streamlining staffing expenses already; there’s nothing left to gain from further cutting.” In addition, hiring has become a difficult proposition. In fact, many organizations design hard-to-fill-jobs that require an individual to master multiple skill sets that were traditionally split among multiple employees or were built in- house via extensive training programs.

Redefining marketing productivity in this recessionary climate calls for different actions. Here are three ways to boost productivity – without cutting staff: Read More »

Clear, aligned, succinct – not the words typically associated with marketing plans.  In fact, 57% of MLC members think strategic planning is the marketing activity with the greatest chance for improvement.

Marketing plans are often 20 to 100 page documents that cover every team’s goals and strategies, from the promotions team to the social media team.   Though comprehensive, these longwinded plans are too confusing to help individuals understand how their goals align with those of the broader organization.  Without alignment, marketers cannot create results, even when all the right elements are in place.

To tackle this problem, Marketing at MasterCard ruthlessly streamlined its annual marketing plan to one single page – the “Plan on a Page.”  MLC members, see an example of a completed Plan on a Page here or download this customizable marketing plan template.

Keep it sweet and simple.

We took a look at how MasterCard built their “Plan on a Page.”  A sampling of the Plan’s key traits:

Simplicity –the single-page rule limits the plan to the few goals that matter most.

Clarity – the plan links day-to-day tactics to high-level strategies (to help marketers understand how to achieve strategic goals).

Measurability – each goal, strategy, and tactic is tied to a clear measure of success.

The “Plan on a Page” not only saves planning time but also improves cross-functional understanding and alignment around strategic goals.  It also lends legitimacy and discipline to the marketing division, which is great because 73% of CEOs say marketers lack credibility!

All of that makes this simple marketing plan pretty sweet.

MLC members, read more about how a “Plan on a Page” can help marketing deliver greater bottom-line value.

The NFL is back, and, for much of America, not a moment too soon. I’m a hockey guy myself, but I’ve played a fair amount of (American) football in my life, and last Thursday, as I watched the season kick off, I realized that football coaches and marketing planners have pretty similar jobs.

Coaches and planners go into intensely competitive situations (football stadiums and market economies, respectively), lead teams with certain strengths, certain weaknesses, and a limited ability to change those things, adapt a “game plan” without knowing much about how the other side will react, and end up being judged on things that may or may not be their responsibility. They have to be meticulous enough to draw up most of the game in advance, but flexible and agile enough to call new plays should conditions warrant them. Most of all, they have to have the ability to get everyone on the same page, and motivate and marshal their teams to execute on the plan.

Football teaches, I think, 3 big things to marketing planners and managers: Read More »

57% of MLC members think strategic planning is the marketing activity with the greatest chance for improvement.  It’s no secret why: marketing planning is notoriously siloed, confusing, and difficult to evaluate. And it’s harder than ever in today’s volatile environment.

MLC’s collection of best practices in marketing planning all have one thing in common: reducing complexity.  These best practices all involve stakeholders from outside Marketing, keep detail to a minimum, and make evaluation metrics explicit.

For more, check out our insights on Avoiding the Pitfalls of Marketing Planning. Read More »

As you may have heard, there was a little dust-up today on the East Coast. MLC headquarters, located in lovely Arlington, VA, was the scene of several overturned trash cans and a mildly anxious evacuation (yes, West Coast folks, we know it wasn’t that bad – but we don’t gloat when you complain about the humidity). After safely making it to the bottom floor of our building, the team, taking advantage of the resulting structural check, decamped to the nearest watering hole – where we found the scene to your right. At 2:00 PM.

Having worked in the restaurant industry, I can tell you that most bars and restaurants have a staffing plan that basically calls for more staff when there’s more likelihood of high demand. Depending on the place, restaurants staff up for weekends, happy hours, Mother’s Day, Christmas – the list goes on. But I doubt there’s a single restaurant on earth ready for that kind of foot traffic at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday.

Now, we can’t fault a restaurant for not guessing – or even having the capacity to handle – the inevitable surge of office workers evacuated after the second-strongest earthquake in the history of the East Coast. After all, with limited resources and the vanishingly-tiny likelihood of an unexpected surge in customers at that hour of the day, it would be uneconomic to have extra bartenders and waiters on hand.

But the bigger your organization is, the more products you sell, and the larger your geographic footprint is, the greater the likelihood of some kind of unexpected exogenous shock – whether the literal one we experienced in the DC area today, or something as innocuous as a rap lyric that mentions your product – can present an opportunity to serve more customers, strengthen your brand, or gain market share. And here’s the thing about shocks: they very often present an opportunity for breakout growth, as opposed to the more mundane linear variety – just look at the interest in Moscato before and after the rap lyric that brought it to renewed fame.

To me, shocks help explain why a lot of what marketers go through in the planning process is silly, wasteful and even dangerous. Geologists can’t predict earthquakes, weathermen don’t do terribly well with the weather, and marketers and executives aren’t going to be able to truly, repeatably identify and prepare for the kinds of shocks that can deliver huge returns to a brand – and that makes planning, at least as its traditionally done, an exercise out of touch with the real, unpredictable world.

So what can you do to prepare for earthquakes, literal and metaphorical? First, build agility into your organization and processes – my colleague Ana actually wrote about that very thing this week. Invest in staff – like our New Media Ringmaster – with proven records of accelerating organizational responsiveness; they won’t help you predict the future, but they’ll make you a whole lot better at reacting to the present as it happens. Consider strengthening your social listening capabilities; these can help you pick up on trends before they hit the mainstream. As you plan, keep it simple: members love Mastercard’s Plan on a Page for a reason. Most of all, stay loose and ready to tackle opportunities as they come – even if they aren’t “in the plan”.

MLC members, for more on marketing planning, please visit our topic center, and consider registering for our upcoming webinar on Agent-Based Modeling – one tool that can help remove some of the uncertainty around the future.

By Ana Lapter

Dealing with the future is a difficult task by nature, but this year’s planning process is further complicated by the tremendously uncertain global economy.  Recession fears, slow economic growth, lower consumer spending, feeble employment rates and depressed housing markets across much of the developed world are some of the factors that are weighing on executives, adding a new layer of volatility to any strategic planning exercise.

Uncertainty was the main modus operandi for marketers during the 2007-2009 recession. But even though the recession is technically over, recent stock market swings exemplify the uncertainty that is quickly becoming part of the new norm.  From a strategic planning perspective, dealing with uncertainty means allocating resources for two critical human capital capabilities: organizational flexibility to cope with unexpected challenges and opportunities, and change management.

To cope with uncertainty, a great human capital strategy should consider the following ten principles: Read More »

Summer, for most of us, is a time to recharge our batteries, to relax, to enjoy some calm before the demands of life pick up again.  Unfortunately, investors have made that a good deal harder recently as they collectively removed over a trillion dollars in value from financial markets over the course of a few days.

Why the sudden volatility?  Consumers haven’t suddenly changed spending behaviors, nor have business customers. And suppliers look healthier than in some time, beating earnings estimates and sitting on plenty of cash. Credit availability has drastically improved. Inflation is hardly threatening.

The answer seems to lie in the health of developed economies. While many appeared to be on the mend for the past year (albeit slowly), it’s become clear the recovery is far more fragile than was thought, especially in the US.  We’re not in a recession, but we’re also not in a recovery that is self-sustaining.

In such an unstable place, most signals (economic data) are too weak or confusing for investors to proceed with confidence.  Even small pieces of information have outsized impact and prices gyrate.  Markets, after all, are just groups of people trying to discern future value and in this case they are struggling.

So, what are executives doing in the face of this volatility?  Some are being tougher on discretionary spending.  Many are revisiting assumptions for 2012 planning.  But the executives we’ve spoken with are not deviating from the strategies and tactics they put in place following the recession.

There is one thing all executives should be doing right now – getting used to operating in an uncertain environment.  Fortunately, that doesn’t require telling the future.  It does require, however, a structured exploration of what could be, and flexibility to respond regardless what becomes.

Most companies can stand to improve in this area.  Want to learn more? Join your peers in our upcoming webinar, Taming Uncertainty, on 25 August at 11:00 am EDT.  We’ll clarify why volatility has become “normal” and how the best companies are working around it.

Remember “The Sims”? My personal favorite game in college, it asks players to control a virtual human being. These “Sims”, as they’re called, are plopped into a virtual neighborhood with certain rules (such as gravity, aging, and an economy) and are left to their own devices to interact with the objects in their world and one another. The result is a functioning model of a human suburban neighborhood – one that undersimplifies things a bit, but is recognizably human. But what if marketers had a version of the Sims especially for them – one where they could put a marketing message into the environment, and watch how the “Sims” interacted with it?

One of the coolest parts of this year’s research into consumer process was getting to speak with a number of vendors and companies that do just that, using a process called agent-based modeling. Agent-based models are mathematically-created worlds populated by mathematically-created people, who are then exposed to a certain stimulus. In marketing, that stimulus is usually a message or marcom effort; other disciplines use diseases or changes in the economy.

The end result is a plausible estimate of the effects of a marketing campaign on a customer base – something that can be used to test proposed marketing plans to see which delivers the highest returns. For B2Cs, the “agents” can be consumers, for B2Bs, agent-based models can estimate the effect of marketing campaigns on corporate buying centers and within broad discipline areas.

MLC members, to learn how agent-based modeling works in marketing planning, please visit the members-only insight page we’ve put together on the subject, and register for our September 15 webinar, featuring MLC researchers and ThinkVine, a vendor in the modeling space.

It’s that time of year again, when many marketers are making the strategic choices that will carry them through the coming fiscal year. That’s right, it’s planning season. (Members: it’s not too late to register for the August 3^rd webinar, “Avoiding Pitfalls in Marketing Planning.” If you’re reading this after the 3^rd, the registration link will take you to the replay.) Inevitably, some planning discussions will result in decisions to bring a new brand to market, strengthen a brand’s current positioning, or redefine what a brand stands for.

In the highly matrixed, geographically dispersed marketing world that many of us operate in, ensuring that a brand’s positioning is consistent across a multitude of stakeholders and geographies is a significant challenge. Too often the positioning suffers from a “lost in translation” problem as it transitions from one functional owner to the next (e.g., from product development to communications) or between global and local marketing teams. As in the classic “telephone game,” multiple handoffs over time result in a fractured brand positioning that bear little resemblance to the original.

Volvo faced the same hurdle when it was looking to evolve its brand positioning to represent attributes desired by consumers: “excitement” and “desirability.” After initial attempts failed to influence consumer perceptions, Volvo realized that marketing stakeholders were unintentionally altering the brand’s positioning by overlooking important details and misinterpreting others. A more robust approach to protecting the brand’s positioning was needed.

To prevent distortion of the brand’s positioning as it made its way around the organization, the brand team at Volvo decided to introduce the following simple, but highly effective, tools to be used by all internal stakeholders at key moments in the product and communications development processes: Read More »

The worldwide recession has changed the value set for a significant portion of your customer base.  By the day, we’re hearing of more members recasting their segmentation models to reflect new realities.  But updating segments is only half the battle.  To see frontline impact with new segmentation, marketers must get the new segments to “stick” with internal stakeholders.

Not long ago, LG Mobile developed a new segmentation model.  Marketing leaders at LG Mobile quickly realized that to engage consumer segments more effectively, they needed to embed these segments into everything that LG’s employees do. Marketing leaders began by asking themselves the question- Is the segmentation understandable, relatable and relevant? Taking this as a starting point, LG worked to sell the segmentation internally. LG followed a 5-step process to create an internal buy-in of the segmentation. Read More »