Last month, Corey blogged about a surprising result from MLC’s  social media opportunity survey—that relying on social media vendors to craft your social media strategy actively harms your ability to drive business results with social media.

Here’s another interesting finding from the social media survey—there is zero correlation between social media resourcing and business results.

That may or may not surprise you when it comes to financial resources.  But the result held true for people resources, as well.  That came as a surprise to us, since social media efforts are often so labor intensive.

How could this be? Read More »

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 »

In my post about MasterCard’s Plan on a Page, I mentioned that a majority of CEOs say that marketers lack credibility.  This inability to prove their worth particularly hounds marketers when economic downturns force companies to tighten their budgets.

The problem is a “bottom-up” approach.  Marketers spend a lot of time collecting data to show progress against marketing-specific targets.  And  they typically start with data that is easy to track.   But the volume of likes and re-tweets isn’t likely to convince a CFO that money is being well-budgeted. Read More »

Marketing is becoming more important and covering much more ground in enterprises than ever before, but many colleagues around our companies have outdated or incorrect assumptions about what the function does and how we bring value to the organization. We’ve compiled some of the biggest misconceptions here.

Have you heard any other good ones? Let us know in comments! Read More »

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 »

As the function responsible for the moment of intersection between markets and products, services, and brands, Marketing is under intense pressure to adapt – not only to the ways consumers and customers want information, but also to the increasing ubiquity of data.

In our conversations with CMOs and marketing leaders around the world, the consistent theme we’re hearing is one of agility – marketers and their teams need to be able to tackle a wider variety of tasks and responsibilities in order to take advantage of fast shifts in the market.

Want to develop a more agile team? Read on for some tips gleaned from our conversations: Read More »

The one truism that seems to have weathered the downturn and on-again, off-again economic “recovery” is that the globalization of markets will continue at a steady forward pace and, therefore, so must our marketing capabilities to reach them. Just this past week, AdAge even proclaimed that a “tipping point” had been reached in the number of CMOs having a true global scope of responsibility.

Whether or not we are in fact at a watershed moment in global marketing leadership is up for debate, but most of us as marketers can agree that the decades-long trend of expanding into new markets is increasingly set against the backdrop of trying to create a more tightly knit global marketing organization. More and more marketer roles with a pan-geographic focus are surfacing in our conversations with members. Marketing processes are incorporating a more diverse range of inputs from across organizations’ geographic footprint. Resource allocation post-credit crisis tends to be more reflective of countries’ future opportunity versus simply our historical habit of investment.

But amid all of this progress, marketers tell us that they still struggle to see substantial gains in global marketing integration. One member recently commented, “the discussion internally has clearly shifted toward capitalizing on the scale of our international marketing operations but, if anything, it seems that we’re moving further and further apart.”

So, what’s getting in the way? Read More »

Senior executives who are effective at talent management generate up to 7% more revenue than their less dedicated peers.  Unfortunately, more than 80% of executives are either uncommitted to talent management, ineffective at it, or worse—both. 

Talent management, though, is not a matter of skill (most executives have the business skills necessary) or time (effective executives and ineffective executives spend roughly the same amount of time on talent management): the issue is focus.  Executives should approach talent management strategically—managing key talent like a corporate asset that is developed and deployed in support of business objectives. 

Becoming a Talent Champion outlines five key activities executives should focus on in place of day-to-day staff management, including building the high potential bench, holding the senior team accountable for talent outcomes, and owning the organization’s talent strategy.  To learn more, download a complimentary copy of this new publication or order the eBook.

MLC Members, check out our best talent management tools and insights in our Talent Management Topic Center

As Jack Welch once said, “The team with the best players wins.”  The expanding global economy and the growing importance of emerging markets make that adage both truer and harder than ever for marketers trying to find the best way to organize and align their departments to facilitate growth.  In MLC’s Q4 work on navigating the trade-offs in structuring global marketing departments, one of the pain points we heard again and again was getting the right players on the increasingly global team. Read More »

You’re now finding your buyers and consumers throwing caution to the wind, opening their wallets eagerly and jumping at the chance to buy your product no matter what it costs, right?

Well, probably not quite.  Even with things looking up slightly from last year, your buyers and consumers are still pulling your cost-value ratio through a fine-toothed comb. Read More »