Want to get a peek at what B2B marketing leaders are spending their money on in 2012? Look no further than our 2011 Marketing Investment Benchmarks.

Here are the big four headline trends for spend this year:

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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.

Marketers – particularly retail marketers – talk a big game about customer focus. And in our heart of hearts, we think we’re right: we are the internal champions of the customer, the voice of conscience that tries to ensure customer focus throughout all business activities.

But too often, marketers have trouble transitioning from “flash-in-the-pan” customer focus efforts to embedding that focus at the heart of the enterprise. It’s easy to get executive buy-in for one-off customer focus campaigns – and, perhaps, many of them. But without a central process for discovering customer needs and how they align to brand promise and strategic priorities, one-off initiatives are doomed to ineffectiveness.

That’s why Tesco’s Annual Customer Plan is so exciting. The UK-based grocery retailer – faced with declining profit margins, intensifying competition and some evidence of customer dissatisfaction – came up with a way to centralize ongoing consumer focus. In the process, they reversed their slide of the early 1990s, and regained their place as the UK’s dominant grocery chain. 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 »

Consider the following two vignettes:

• In the book “Winning,” Jack Welch describes a tactic he used at GE to force himself to always enter a business situation with a fresh perspective.  Every time he travelled, he got off the plane imagining that the Jack Welch of yesterday had had no idea what he had been doing.  He felt that this ritual of taking a critical eye to past decisions helped him enter every situation as an opportunity for improvement.

• In a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, Laura J. Soave, a marketing executive at Fiat discussed details of Fiat’s ‘Return to North America’ marketing launch, adding that “My ultimate goal would be not to spend one dollar in traditional advertising.”  Instead, she says that she will focus on social media and other grassroots approaches to target likely buyers.

Now, consider the following:  If you were starting the marketing function within your business today, how would you choose to allocate your media mix?  In other words, if you had a zero-based planning process (rather than one based on the previous year’s plans), what would you choose to spend your money on? Read More »

As economies went into freefall roughly two years ago, executives across different functional areas converged on a short set of priorities.  In fact, you might say just one priority – survival.  That meant shedding costs and doing anything possible to drive cash flow, quickly.  But as markets pulled back from the brink, functional heads returned to a (more normal) pursuit of their individual agendas, from social media adoption to staff development.

As we talk to heads of Sales, Marketing and Communications about 2011, I see a swing back to handling a common enemy – this time, ongoing uncertainty.  Uncertainty isn’t terribly attractive to most, but executives seem to be accepting it as part of the new normal and are trying to figure out ways to live alongside it.  That presents a little differently depending on your role in the organization. Read More »

“The single biggest reason companies fail is that they overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.”

–Gary Hamel, Author and Professor, London Business School

Professor Hamel puts his finger on one of the most important undercurrents facing marketing leaders in large enterprises today.  As products, channels, and geographic markets proliferate, marketers will overweight to the familiar (that which “is” today), and fail to account for the size of future opportunity (that which “might be”).  Why?

They certainly won’t do so intentionally.  Rather, the sheer complexity of resource allocation decisions across geographies, products and channels will lead many marketers to settle for incremental changes to last year’s budget allocation.  In the face of overwhelming complexity, this will feel like the safe, smart choice. Read More »

(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 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 »

By Erin Lynch-Klarup

Measuring social media campaign effectiveness is a topic near and dear to the marketers we speak with – and justifiably so.  Experimentation is a key element of social media strategies, and evaluating the impact of experimental campaigns helps marketers maximize future investments.

For marketers who target viral campaigns to the blogosphere or use online PR as a marketing channel, measurement can be especially challenging.  Mentions of a brand can be monitored, but if they don’t link to the brand’s website, it’s hard to tell which mentions are leading to web visits, online purchases, or other objectives.  Certain third party sites might be especially influential in directing traffic to a brand’s website – but without the direct link, how do you know? Read More »