Miro Slodki

Miro is passionate about brands, marketing and building customer affinity with a bias toward street-level execution. He describes himself as a brand mechanic, tinkering under the hood, ripping things out, adjusting this, retooling that, then jumping into the driver seat to see how well it runs and competes with the others.

His career, spanning 20+ years has included tenures for companies such as Kraft Canada, Lysol, The NPD Group, Budget Car Rental, Gold Points Rewards improving key links in the brand value-chain while delivering bottom-line results.

Career milestones to date include:

• Managing brand productivity gains, cost reductions/reconfigurations, new revenue and value enhancements to help drive brand value with FMCG, retail service and service brands.
• Directing national start-ups of a channel continuity program and a channel marketing platform.
• Introducing multiple brand re-launches, line extensions and new products.
• Developing and introducing direct marketing, integrated multi-media and email campaigns.
• Developing and nurturing strategic partnerships to help extend brand value propositions.
• Improving customer service delivery and complaint resolution processes.

Miro is a graduate of McGill's MBA and BA(Psychology) programs.

When not at work, Miro enjoys spending time with his wife and pets, many outdoor activities and experimenting in the kitchen. He is an eclectic movie and music buff, science geek and follows developments in realm of marketing 2.0.

With the opportunity to contribute to the CMA community, Miro is seeking to engage in a dialogue on the topics and issues raised.

The New Normal

By any measure, the growth of the economy in the last decade can be likened to the roaring 20's-30's, consumers (and American ones at that) fueled a consumption binge that unleashed a wave of cashflow and optimism which was then leveraged by various financial instruments until finally the bubble burst.

Today we have a relatively more modest/humbled marketplace in the developed economies, and the hope/anticipation that emerging (BRIC) economies can help pickup the slack.

To make things even more interesting, we can add in the pending pricing of carbon into our goods and services, digital and the power of social resulting in a new landscape where the benefits of scale are no longer predictable. This alignment of forces raises questions about how one competes, builds value and differentiates.

I recently came across this conversation at McKinsey where a number of CSO's (Chief Strategy Officers) discuss their views of the "new normal". Click here for a video link to the conversation (you will need to complete a free registration) or here for pdf transcript.

Go ahead, we'll wait.

So what do you think?
What are the indisputables in your sector?
Do you think the long tail is going to replace the normal distribution curve as our underlying view of the world?
How about speed and nimbleness. Does that portend an eventual shift to smaller business units?
What of the shift to adaptive planning/budgeting/programing. No doubt it's necessary when the groundshift is severe..but what of the longer term, and more importantly are we the cause of it?
What about brands, are they more or less relevant in this environment? Will we see the rise of new regional brands or global?

Lots of points for discussion.
I hope to hear your thoughts. Just what is the New Normal?

The other side of I AM PC

With everything going on, I thought you would enjoy having a look at a vision Microsoft has for the future featuring electronic newspapers, transparent walls, real time translators, floor displays, digital shopping, electronic boarding cards, tactile displays....

This is a montage:
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

A retail perspective:
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:8d7a2ef7-84cf-4daf-9a4d-2531c273f756&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Retail Future Vision">Video: Retail Future Vision</a>

these clips come via istartedsomething.com;
where you will find a longer 5 minute video clip

Puts a new perspective on Microsoft's I Am PC strategy doesn't it?
Personally I'm a little disappointed that we don't have more speech recognition enhancements come down the pipe. Fascinating none the less.

cheers

Paradigm Shift in Aisle 4

Recently I had an opportunity to observe consumers make purchases at retail. Their behavior wasn’t different from the norm...it’s just that I never stopped for a couple of hours to study, compare and contrast the behavior of my fellow shoppers. It brought home a number of realizations:

• The CRM/forecasting models we work with to estimate (ROI) impact are a pale abstract of what happens in the real world.
• Consumers are much more tactile with our products than we recognize.
• Consumers are getting older and can't read mouse type copy anymore...but they sure spend a lot of time trying to read ingredient and nutritional labels.
• The cognitive selection process of picking brand A vs. brand B or C is far from being an either/or choice, its more like a billiard ball careening on a pool table (A to B to F to B to C) even ‘jumping tables’ to adjacent categories/brands instead. Who we think our brand buyers are and the buying process they go through is likely to amaze, confound and humble you.

This last point is perhaps the most important I wanted to highlight, as it brings to focus the need to rapidly evolve from push-based thinking if we hope to survive. Trying to compete in a world filled with an ever increasing number of options can only become more expensive and less effective. And in that environment trying to tweak the efficiency of offer push-based CRM programs is ….well, quaint.

If we ever hope to constrain the competitive set and thrive we need to shift our paradigms to pull-based thinking and programs. Because try as we might there always seems to be something a little less expensive or with a little more 'bling' that pops out of nowhere to carve out yet another slice from our pie.

To get there we will need to expand and challenge our thinking on what the numerators and denominators need to be in our metrics. And for those who truly want to be humbled, examine and understand the stickiness of our results. We need to be honest with ourselves and develop confidence intervals in our campaign metrics and come to reconsider whether the DNA of customer profit was ever encoded in our CRM formulas.

A starting point might be to estimate/measure the share of requirements our brands were under consideration for at the time of our various initiatives. It’s not the fact that “10%” of those who received our offer(s) and responded that’s of ultimate importance. But that our programs were able to tap into “30%” of the category purchase activity at the time AND made value added connections with 100% of the customers we reached out to, whether they purchased or not.

That change in perspective alone will send you down a new path. To recognize those who understand the strategic superiority of pull-based programs you will only need to look at the font size of their nutritional labels.

Cheers

TV Commercials 2.0

For some time now parts of the marketing world have been wondering if the growing problem advertisers are having getting their commercials seen by their intended targets is not a problem of their own making.

One only needs to look at the Clio awards to see some great commercials being produced that stop traffic (and drive sales?), but these are the showcase creative executions that do not reflect the main stream advertising that is broadcast day in and day out. And that’s part of the problem, its push based advertising and some of it is not as good as it could/should be. This started me to wonder if we might see greater success (on many levels) if we adopted a google customer voting approach to TV commercials.

So here’s the idea:
What if we allowed consumers to come to the program/station website to preview and select which commercials they would like to see? They’ld have an opportunity to pick from a pool of let's say 10 commercials from which they select their final 5. The “Top 5” commercials with the most votes get aired, the rest…

Now the financial model for the networks would be based on 3 streams.
1. A fee from advertisers who wish to be submitted into the pool, plus a second fee for each commercial viewed and voted on.
2. A subsequent fee for the airing of the winning commercials.
3. Free analytics for the winners while losers would have to pay.

The station/program have an opportunity to wrap a contest around the voting event, spike program interest with teasers and get important viewer data in advance of the airing. Those ads that don’t make the cut, can try again – but if it fails to solicit a customer following then the advertiser has learned something about their commercial execution. Consumers could be encouraged to watch the aired commercials by participating in some on-screen promo/QR code event.

If you think this is a little far fetched – have a read of a similar approach being taken by Pepsi for the Super Bowl as they seek to get consumer input on which spots consumers will get to see. Pepsi Tries Super Bowl Spot Selection 2.0

So what do you think?
If consumers could pick which commercial they would see, would that:
1) Raise the level of commercial entertainment/communication value of the ads
2) Provide additional value to advertisers and revenue for broadcasters
3) Increase the % of viewers that watch and retain the messages being broadcast to them
4) Give consumers a sense of 'programming control' that would help broadcasters 'engage' their audience

Or do you feel it's too little, too late.

A Call to Action

My great thanks to Pat for bringing this video to my attention. I’ld like to share it with you as it's an amazing tour-de-force crafted to mobilize the Obama vote on election day. I think marketers can learn much from it.
Have a look...

Is it any wonder the 2008 US presidential campaign will be studied for years?

In case you weren't counting, there were 12 spots totaling 47 seconds out of this 97 second video devoted to delivering a 'personalized' message based on the input of three pieces of information, my first/last name and my email address. For anyone still sitting on the fence about the power of social media...

It showcases a highly sophisticated level of on-the-fly personalization that just a few years ago we were touting as major capability enhancements in the lettershop and email trades. I wonder how many months before we have the capability to stitch together a complete narrative (opening #1, Paragraph #3, offer #5, call to action #2, closing #8) tuned to what the CRM profiles or BT algorithms indicate our customers are most receptive to seeing/hearing - the birth of video messaging beyond the mass messaging video banner ads. But that's a discussion for another day.

What REALLY excites me about this video is its powerful “Your choice makes a difference" message.

That call to action got me to thinking of what success might be had if we applied a similar personal video tactic directed to brand purchases and major retail events. For example:

Christmas: Because you shopped at HBC(Sears), the cherished Christmas morning family moment will be perfect.
Valentine’s Day: Women around the world rally in protest against the 'inadequacy', some even call it a mockery of the Valentine's day gift from their significant other.
RRSP season: This is what your retirement life may look like if you plan today.

Obviously I'm not a copy writer - but I hope you get the point I’m trying to make. We are so busy promoting the price point and the "buy now" call to action, that we forget to communicate the impact of our customer’s decision to buy or not buy the brand in concrete "Visualize the End Result or Benefit"
(VERB) ways.

Taking this up a couple of notches, we can infuse an even stronger call to action by linking brand purchase events with trickle down community benefits, in what I call “Share of Life” marketing. Perhaps it’s a perception bias, but I truly think with the interconnectedness brought about by social media and the economic fallout from “Wall Street” onto “Main Street” - that consumers are looking for more community leadership from our brands.

Whichever path you choose, I hope you appreciate the power this personalized video/call to action approach can have in adding relevancy to brand purchase events ....and if you decide against it at least you've gained a peek into the near future.

Cheers
Miro