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.

The only attribute where everyone agrees on ownership? Sales productivity.

As you would expect, if you don’t know who is in charge of an activity, it becomes very hard to succeed at it. When we divided the survey population into two groups – those who knew who owned an attribute and those who didn’t, there was a clear correlation between clarity of ownership and effectiveness at the given activity. Indeed, even if the group agreed that an attribute was very important, the organization found it hard to succeed with that attribute unless they also knew who owned it.

That relationship makes our last finding even scarier: there is a close relationship between how important an attribute is to the success of the organization and whether there is clarity of ownership, and it isn’t what you’d hope. The more important an attribute is, the MORE likely it is that the organization is unsure who is in charge.

Let’s look at the graph above again.  The top five attributes with lack of clarity around ownership are voice of the customer, commercial strategy, customer portfolio management and customer segmentation (we exclude channel management because many participants did not deal with channel partners). The bottom five are sales productivity, customer-focused sales process, role design, brand development, and coaching. Excluding brand development, the top five were universally agreed to be more important than the bottom five. Would you rather have clarity of ownership around commercial strategy or role design?

The problem here isn’t necessarily that companies haven’t assigned ownership, it’s that they’re not communicating that ownership effectively to the organization as a whole. Many of the CMOs we spoke to could immediately identify who they had put in charge of each attribute, but they hadn’t communicated those ownership decisions to their teams.

Of course, in the hurly burly whirl of implementing a plan, things can change, and ownership of attributes may transition over time as the needs of various projects change. But making sure that you are clearly communicating ownership decisions, and making one person accountable for each attribute (so the organization at least knows who is generally in charge) can go a long way towards resolving ownership uncertainty in your organization.

MLC members, contact your account manager to take the Commercial Integration Diagnostic and find out what ownership looks like in your company.

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.

I’ve harped on uncertainty in markets since the genesis of Wide Angle (see here and here, shameless promotion, I know), yet it continues to dominate the mind of forward-thinking B2B marketers, manufacturers in particular. Manufacturing to a high degree is based on certainty and predictability – large capital requirements force long-term assumptions that must hold true for profitability to result. Senior marketers’ assumptions as to projected customer inventory levels, market size, and overarching GDP growth rates can make or break a company.

But with uncertainty comes opportunity for those manufacturing marketers savvy enough to push forward. Just because the market halts for the occasional thunderstorm doesn’t mean the marketing discipline required to produce growth stops as well. Manufacturing has never been the sexiest of marketing industries (for better or worse), but it does provide opportunities for incredible experimentation to assist in leapfrogging the competition:

1. Utilize social media to develop deeper individual customer relationships – Too often, manufacturers internalize the business-to-business aspect of industrial marketing. Social media offers the chance to build individual advocates on a 1-to-1 basis, rallying support across the customer organization. At the core of every B2B sale is a collective group of B2C customers, all with different motivations; social media can quickly shine a light on how to use those differences to your advantage in the sale.

2. Experiment with Discovery-Driven Planning – Designed to drive certainty from uncertainty, this planning methodology enables constant assumption testing, moving forward with projects only as data collection turns known unknowns into facts. Our sister program, the Corporate Strategy Board, has published some great research from Air Products utilizing this method.

3. Refine your Insight Marketing strategy – Markets may be uncertain, but members still control their ability to teach customers new insights that link explicitly to their differentiators. Learn more about how to embed this strategy in your organization.

Perhaps one day in the not too distant future the skies will fully clear. But until then, the cloud of uncertainty will reign supreme. And I promise, no more bad metaphors in subsequent posts.

(photo courtesy of mikebaird)

1. Centralized structures optimize to efficiencies of scale.  Marketing activities are handled by a central team and scaled across many divisions.  Unlike other structures, decision-making power is concentrated with this central team, which reports up to a CMO.
2. Decentralized Center of Excellence structures optimize customization to a division (product, business unit or geography).  Unique marketing teams report up to heads of divisional marketing; a central team of experts act as internal consultants.  Reporting lines are clear and simple, and there is no company-wide CMO.
3. Decentralized Shared Service structures similarly optimize to divisional customization.  The balance of marketing power lies in divisions, but a central team handles easily-scalable activities.
4. Hybrid structures ideally balance central scale with divisional customization.  Divisional marketing teams report jointly to a central marketing function and to divisions.  This complex structure is increasingly common in large organizations, as it reflects the highly–matrixed constituencies Marketing works with.
5. Segment-Aligned structures optimize customer understanding.  The majority of marketers sit within segment teams while a central team coordinates and handles scalable activities.
6. Project-Based structures optimize flexibility.  In this rare configuration, marketers are deployed to flexible, cross-functional project teams as needed.  Teams are typically temporary, designed to form, deploy and dissolve with the projects they address.

MLC members: Are you contemplating reorganization?  If so, check out our in-depth analysis of each structure including benefits, drawbacks, questions to ask and tests to run.

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?

There are two near-constant mistakes that prevent most organizations from building successful marketing plans:

1. They replicate the previous year’s marketing plan, subtly tweaking resource allocation and marketing activities from the previous year, which was only slightly different from the year before that, and so forth.

2. Interim changes to plans are either made with little regard to the original strategy, or not made at all. In layman’s terms, some call this tactic the ‘stick-it-in-a-drawer’ method of planning.

Taken together, these mistakes yield plans that are unresponsive to changing market conditions, miss shifts in customer needs, and produce tactical plans reliant on ‘traditional’ media.  With continued uncertainty in today’s economy and social media shifting the communications landscape daily, an incremental, unadaptable marketing plan is the surest path to wasted effort and misguided strategy.

So rather than simply expecting different results, how can marketer do planning differently?  For starters, marketing plans must link to corporate strategy – it’s the only way to demonstrate the function’s contribution to the ultimate arbiter: shareholder value.  Marketers should implement metrics immediately after settling on strategy – not after selecting tactics. Cross-functional leaders don’t much care how many Facebook fans you have; they want to know whether your strategy worked … which most CFOs measure in dollars. The closer your metrics are to financial outcomes, the stronger the case for marketing investment becomes.

With linkage to corporate priorities, Marketing’s performance is inextricably linked to the performance of peer functions. Harness that cross-functional input during planning – solicit input from Sales (particularly B2B companies); understand how the R&D pipeline will impact future sales; make sure Market Research provides the best customer insight. Lastly, practice integrated marketing communications, with each medium and touchpoint serving a clear purpose toward the achievement of marketing objectives.

Implementing these principles will at least break the insanity habit, but by no means will they alone yield long-term success. There remains a need to build a repeatable process embedded in daily workflow, where the plan is a living document referenced throughout the year.

MLC Members, if you’re struggling with planning, we’d love to understand your specific challenges so we can build better resources to support you on this perennial pain point.  Please take this two-minute survey about the state of your organization’s marketing planning process or e-mail my colleague Abhaya Menon, and we’ll be sure to follow up!

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.

Yet it stands to reason that with the right safeguards, globalization can again be a force for good.  In fact, many Western companies look to the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) to provide the next wave of business growth. Success in those nations requires continued flows of money, goods, and labor around the world; protectionist measures would only make re-investment more difficult.

As a result, marketing executives must actively consider and act on the consequences of globalization, the recent economic meltdown, and the structural changes that may be required to optimize a global marketing function. To steal the cliché, what is the best mechanism to think globally and act locally?  Members are taking stabs at this from all angles – some pursuing greater centralization, others pursuing regional strategies. Then you have the Goldilocks approach (a compliment here) of HSBC – an amazingly consistent brand image worldwide, yet similarly strong local resonance.

To come out of the recession stronger than before, companies must rebalance their global portfolios to better adapt to emerging market opportunities and capitalize on untapped segments in the developed world. The way marketing structurally supports that global portfolio will have a large impact on company success. Substantive discussions should precede any structural changes to ensure the selected model best meets global business needs.

Personally, I think globalization will do a world of good for everyone, if pursued properly. It certainly makes sitting in an Amsterdam airport more interesting. And there’s my boarding call for BA 8456 to London City…

Political affiliations aside, government touches more elements of our consumer-driven economy than ever before. One policy change here, another there, ripples through the system with unprecedented speed (like perhaps, an unintended consequence). If banks feel less wealthy as a result of taxation and more limited mortgage support, the less likely they are to expand credit. Tighter credit, as we saw vividly in the fourth quarter of 2008, leads to lower business investment and greater consumer savings – starting another cycle of money removed from our economy exactly at the time it needs capital injected.

Senior leadership teams don’t want excuses, though. After two years of stumbles, most executives look to 2010 for growth. Yet the number of extraneous variables affecting that potential growth is incredibly high, hence marketers’ collective uncertainty. Just take several possible scenarios that could happen across 2010:

• The U-shaped recovery currently underway transitions quickly to V-shaped as the government spends the bulk of stimulus bill dollars
• Health care reform passes with an individual mandate to buy insurance, changing the corporate benefits landscape and take-home pay
• Certain state governments can’t balance their budgets, leading to heavy cuts in government contracting

Will any of these come to pass? I don’t know. Should we be thinking about what happens if they do? Absolutely. Two major solutions come to mind to stave off the adverse affects of market unpredictability:

1)      Build an agile planning process that includes short-term scenario planning. Specifically in 2010 as the U.S. electorate gears up for midterm elections, be sure to include government action (or lack thereof) as a critical variable.

2)      Determine the jobs and outcomes your customers are trying to achieve and invest smartly in forecasting how those jobs may change under each scenario.

The 2010 winners won’t be those that wrote a plan in January and followed it unwaveringly all year. The winners will be those who understand how the market changes and can react fast enough before it changes again.

What do you think?  Any other shifts you’d add to the list? 

If you’re a predictions junky (like me), check out Jay Baer’s “Colossal List of Social Media Predictions” for 285+ more items of fun.   

MLC members, stay ahead of the curve:  Join us for an upcoming “Profiles in Social Media Success” event to learn more about how social’s going to shake things up in 2010.  We’ll be in London on February 9th and in Chicago on February 23rd  to share our latest findings — I’d love to see you there!

Also, I’m heading up to New York next week for BDI’s “Social Integration” conference on January 13th.  They’ve got a great group of marketers lined up from companies like Pepsi, HP, and Intuit to share their social media “lessons learned” — and MLC will be there to facilitate a roundtable discussion on scaling social media across the enterprise.  If you’re in the area, join us!   

Click Image to Enlarge Sample "Plan on a Page"

Almost every member I speak to is in throes of planning season, and many are struggling to build plans that reflect a growth agenda as budgets edge closer to pre-recession levels.  In many cases, we see marketers try to make up for lost time, sprinkling in a little bit of everything that they couldn’t afford to do last year.

To help members, we’ve been presenting a tried and true best practice more than ever. MasterCard’s Plan on a Page is about getting back to the basics – mapping your planned marketing activities to your company’s strategic objectives – and scrapping the ones that don’t help meet them.  Easier said than done, especially when your internal partners are grilling you about not being on Twitter or not sponsoring that golf tournament the CEO really likes.

Beyond activities, the other big part of the budget is obviously people. Over the last year, we saw a flurry of restructuring as companies shed workers and centralized resources to drive efficiency. There doesn’t seem to be a drive to add more people except in one area – social media. MLC benchmarking data shows – and anecdotal evidence confirms – that many companies plan to hire at least one FTE to manage social media initiatives.

MLC Members: We have a whole host of planning and budgeting tools and insights to help you through this busy time, including the full “MasterCard Plan on a Page” case study. And if you’re planning to hire that Social Media Manager, check out job descriptions here.

After meeting with a regional retail bank, a Fortune 500 CPG company, and a host of planning executives last week, I’m almost frightened by the sense of stability I see in 2010 plans.  The picture is not rosy, certainly, but it assumes stability.  We seem to have checked any Black Swan thinking at the door.  How the economy recovers, its precise trajectory, and changes in consumer behavior are far more volatile than the stability many marketers are putting into their plans.  And let’s be honest – too many of us leave those plans on the shelf for 12 months without revision.

Early in 2009, scenario planning – the closest real world applicability to Black Swan thinking – was back in vogue.  We need it now too.  I can think of two questions that could fundamentally change nearly every marketer’s current plan: 

1. What if the economy recovers faster than expected, leading to rampant inflation as bank bailout and stimulus money makes its way into the ‘real’ economy?

2.  What if consumers never return to pre-recession levels of spending?  What will your market look like in 12 months if either of these comes to pass?

MLC Members: check out Sabre’s quick-fire version of scenario planning to help you through what will likely be another tumultuous year.  You can also get our take on how demand has been (and will continue to be) reshaped by the economic conditions of the day.  I’m trying hard not to channel my inner Nouriel Roubini here, but we should at least be prepared for whatever the economy throws at us.

One of the open questions for marketers: How should one go about identifying the right social experience?

Answer: Identify an imprinting experience that best highlights your brand’s differentiating attributes or benefits.

That’s a mouthful.  Let’s unpack it.  An “imprinting experience” is one that is likely to stick with a consumer.  The best experiences therefore should be meaningful—they would help a consumer solve a problem or connect with others around a shared passion or challenge.  (MLC Members: for help finding these opportunities for your brand, see our work on emotional differentiation and Shared Values)

So far, so good.  But how do you choose amongst multiple social experience options?

Ultimately, you’d want to filter the list of potential experiences to choose one that best highlights your brand’s differentiators.  If you can spur these kinds of social experiences for your consumers, you’re much more likely to create lasting advantage in the marketplace.

Let’s go back to Best Buy and Twelpforce.  Against its prime competitors—Amazon and Walmart—Best Buy has a unique differentiator: an army of Blue Shirts who have a passion for electronics and are social media savvy.  Perfect!

The experience that Best Buy would love to create for its target audience, then, is a strong service interaction with a Blue Shirt via Twelpforce.  And Best Buy would want that interaction to help its customers solve a problem—maybe setting up a new home theater system or identifying a compatible backup mobile phone battery. 

Why put a Twelpforce experience and not an in-store experience at the center of a communications strategy?  In-store isn’t a bad idea, but think about the Twelpforce experience for a minute:

• It’s novel to have a great support experience via social media, and
• It’s easy to pass that interaction virally, and
• The interaction is captured digitally for all to see on Twitter, whereas a good in-store interaction is seen by the customer himself, and maybe a few others around him.

Very tough for Amazon or Walmart to mimic that kind of experience.

Once you’ve identified the experience, you want to scale it with your integrated communications.  You can do that by assigning specific roles to each touchpoint in the mix.  I’ll explain how in my next post.

MLC members can take a look at an illustrative example of a beer brand applying this sort of thinking to choose its social experience in our case on Experience Driven Touchpoint Planning.