It seemed that branding was either the most compelling and complicated topic in marketing, or it was a load of crap.
Now an insight: Brands are like human beings. They exist as a mirror of our motivations, reflecting our ideals and dreams, fears and frailties. Nothing can exist in branding that doesn’t already exist in our everyday lives. In fact, if we want to better understand brands, we don’t need more complicated metrics, we need to better understand ourselves.
So how can we gain a better understanding? We need to go back to basics and re-consider the psychological and biological parallels between human beings and human brands.
Just like people, brands are born. Where a brand is born and to whom, are important factors in determining its development. A brand may have great nature (visual appeal or personality) but without the right nurture (parental support and security) it may never survive. As marketers, what type of parent are you and how will that affect the development of your brand?
Just like people, brands go through adolescence. Very few brands can become an overnight success; indeed it takes time to establish an identity and become independent. Attempting to circumvent this process can be as detrimental for a brand as it is for a person; the childhood stars of today are the forgotten failures of tomorrow (think Macaulay Culkin or Extreme Football League). What was your brand’s adolescence like; did it experiment and gain experience?
Just like people, brands need the right environment. As Prof. Richard Florida found in his study of cities, “the place we choose to live affects every aspect of our being. It can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose.” The same can be said for a brand. A brand must pick a place that will help it build relationships and earn the income it needs to survive. Is your brand in the right environment, an environment that matches its motivations?
Just like people, brands can get sick. We like to believe that we, and the things we create, are invincible - but nothing could be further from the truth. Human beings and brands are fragile and prone to illness. Even the strongest leaders can get sick (Bill Clinton or Toyota) and without proper treatment they may die (Michael Jackson or Pontiac). When was your last brand check-up, do you have insurance, or are you working your golden goose to death?
Just like people, brands must reproduce. Reproduction isn’t just fun, it’s fundamental to our survival. By reproducing we allow our species to adapt to the environment and evolve. A brand must also reproduce; it must adapt and evolve itself in order to maintain relevance and to respond to changes in the environment. Is your brand ready to reproduce?
As a brand strategist, having worked across three continents with many multinational clients, I believe there is something missing in our understanding of branding. As a morphological researcher, I believe what’s missing is an understanding of their humanity. Because brands are more than a metric or a model, they are a mirror of our psychological and biological motivations; and to properly understand them, we must better understand ourselves.
By Nick Black, Vice-President of Strategic Insight, Concerto Marketing Group
]]>About 47 percent of online boomers maintain a profile on at least one social network, according to several sources. Their contacts include family, friends and co-workers of all ages. Burst Media reported that 47.5 percent of online boomer respondents had a social network profile in June 2009. Last September, Deloitte found 46 percent of boomer respondents said they maintained a social network profile. Both comScore and Anderson Analytics data show that Facebook is the favourite social network for boomers.
And the numbers keep growing. While millennials’ use of social profile remained fairly steady, boomers’ social network presence has actually grown since a 2007 survey, when only 30 percent said they maintained a profile on a social network. Boomers are expanding their networking efforts to include both online and offline connections. They will be interested in online marketing messages that help them build on their connections and make new friends.
]]>The eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit (April 6 – 9) is a good place to go to really understand how far eMetrics has come. One of the panel presentations, that includes Lisa Lloyd of Microsoft (who will also be wearing her CMA hat) will address this very issue.
On a related panel, named Predictive Analytics and Digital Marketing - Paul Tyndall of RBC (also wearing his CMA hat), will be discussing how RBC and other marketers are utilizing predictive modeling in the online space.
Full disclosure – CMA is one of the association sponsors of the Summit.
.... if you are a member of CMA, you can save an additional 15% off the regular attendee rate by using discount code CMAPARTNER15 when registering for the conference.
Elizabeth Harvey, Manager of Councils and Self Regulatory Programs, CMA
One of the first rules is you can’t be all things to all people. In the session Marty talked about knowing your “tribe”. I caught up with Marty to get further clarity on why the tribe matters. “You have said the emphasis today needs to be on the Unique Buying Tribe rather than the Unique Selling Proposition. Can you explain that?”
Marty Neumeier: The Unique Selling Proposition was the brainchild of Rosser Reeves, an advertising genius from the "Mad Men" days. He worked for the Ted Bates agency and wrote a bestseller called, "Reality in Advertising." His thesis was simple: Advertisers need to focus all their energy on one strong claim or one strong concept. In a time when the industry believed "the more you tell, the more you sell," this was a refreshing idea that caught on almost immediately. It was so powerful, in fact, that to this day advertisers search high and low for "the big idea" to hang their campaigns on.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this inclination, as far as it goes. Without a unique value proposition, your campaign---and your business---will lose focus and have no compelling point of differentiation. The problem is that the principle now seems dated. Customers today don't like to be sold. What they like to do is buy, and they buy in tribes. Every brand has a tribe that supports it. If you talk WITH your tribe, they may well continue to support it. If you talk AT your tribe-using manipulative one-way conversations-they'll tune out in a New York second.
So rather than focusing on a Unique Selling Proposition, focus on a Unique Buying Tribe. If you find the right tribe and give it the right stuff, you'll get enough love to sustain your brand. People crave tribal identity. What they want to know is, "If I buy this product, what will this make me?"
Thanks Marty for sharing your insights. Marty is currently Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency.
The study’s executive summary will be freely available as a download, and the full report available only to respondents.
You can link to take the survey here - takes about 15 minutes to complete.
Survey closes end of day on March 4th.
]]>Wharton marketing professors David Reibstein and John Zhang have explored the topic and say that a company could experience a backlash as early adopters move on to other new products. An example is Porsche, a successful brand for sports car enthusiasts. The brand saw a decline in sports car sales after it entered the SUV mass market. The backlash was significant.
In fact, as The New York Times points out, teenagers would rather text their friends a message rather than post it on Twitter. Instead, Twitter has been embraced by an older demographic. Twitter’s success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations. The brand has proved that an offering can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular. Twitter is defying the traditional model.
So why do marketers assume that success with early adopters will lead to quick adoption by the mass market? The "early adopter" concept is flawed because they aren’t always a good indicator of the growth potential of a brand nor do they have an extended Customer Lifetime Value. Most early adopters move on to the next big thing and may not be loyal to brands.
What is more important is to identify your most profitable potential customers. These profitable customers will eventually be the core of your growth strategy and profitability. The important indicator is the rate of adoption - the relative speed with which the most profitable consumers adopt an innovation. Success depends on an organization's ability to build and maintain loyal and valued customer relationships. Therefore, it is essential to build refined strategies for customers based on their value to the organization. The best marketing strategies pursue long-term relationships with profitable customers.
Two questions for you: (1) Who is your most profitable customer? (2) What is their lifetime value to your organization?
Please email me for our "View from the Top" series on best practices in customer satisfaction strategies.
Like many businesses today, brokerages know they need to have an online presence but often lack the technical know-how. As a result, our marketing department has put together a series of marketing best practices for our brokerages to help them get started. To compliment Jim Estill’s blog post here late last month, SEO - Search Engine Optimization Basics , I thought I would share one such piece that attempts to demystify Search Engine Marketing. In our Introduction to Search Engine Marketing we tried to simplify SEM and provide some tangible tips for businesses trying to get started in the SEM space.
What SEM strategies and tactics have worked for your business, and which have not?
Martha Turner, AVP Marketing Services and Campaign Management, Aviva Canada Inc.
& member of CMA’s Direct Marketing Council
During the past 24 months, SiriusDecisions has collected data and insight about the evolution of social media in b-to-b as related to awareness, adoption, measurement and much more. In this post, we review a few findings from our 2009 Social Media in Business survey.
A cross-section of b-to-b organizations that sell complex, enterprise b-to-b products and services participated in the quantitative portion of the survey, which was co-sponsored by social media vendor Visible Technologies. Appropriate data and insight from SiriusDecisions benchmarking activities, consulting engagements and client inquiries were added to the sample as appropriate. As observed in prior surveys, all phases of marketing – including reputation initiatives – are now being more closely evaluated to determine return on investment. While there is a general understanding that social media is not necessarily the most efficient direct demand creation engine (especially in the short term), leading-edge organizations are increasingly testing new ways of integrating social media initiatives with other key marketing activities. Once organizations have gained working knowledge of how various social media activities can impact their prospects and customers at which particular points in the buying cycle, they can better align social media content to demand creation and sales enablement.
Our survey tracked the behaviors of b-to-b organizations around a number of social media activities. Specific observations in two areas include:
One: Usage and Objectives. We asked organizations to rank order how they are using social media, with the most important objectives listed first. While there was no dominant consensus, generating awareness ranked highest (26% of respondents) followed by engaging with customers to promote loyalty and retention (18%), and interfacing with analysts and other influencers (16%). Marketing specific products finished fourth in the rankings (15%). Each of the top four responses points to active, information-to-the-market type activities; monitoring and responding to customer support issues finished immediately behind the group. Perhaps this information feedback use is assumed to be part of all social media initiatives; however, the value of social media to constantly take the pulse of the market and its perception of your organization’s reputation should not be underestimated. Without a formal process or dedicated resources to monitor market perception, a company can be easily overwhelmed by misunderstandings or misinformation, hindering its ability to make any headway in the social media space at all.
Two: Demand Generation Support and Alignment. Studies by SiriusDecisions of broader reputation activities during the past 24 months have revealed a growing trend toward integrating reputation and demand creation. In our last survey, 33% of organizations reported that more than half the time, they linked their reputation with demand creation activities. In our social media survey, only 15% of respondents reported that more than half the time, they use social media to support their demand creation efforts. More than two-thirds of respondents reported that 25% of the time or less, they align social media with their demand creation activities. Clearly, organizations are still in need of a strategy to best leverage social media within the demand creation process. Organizations must begin to consider the ways that social media tactics can be applied beyond the top of the demand waterfall, such as for pipeline acceleration efforts and more comprehensive, just-in-time sales readiness.
Slowly but surely, social media technologies and systems are emerging from their initial perception as just a shiny new toy to be played with, then discarded. As organizations identify and recognize the risks and rewards of social media, they have begun to clarify best usages and objectives for specific initiatives, as well as to learn both the nuances and positioning of various social media properties such as Twitter and Facebook. Knowing which watering holes are frequented by which audiences – and what types of content can best influence them – can help marketing and sales organizations better customize messages. All of this guidance and information helps organizations understand the optimal role of social media for supporting broader demand creation and sales initiatives.
]]>In order to sell, it helps to get to know people. It helps to stay in touch with them. It helps to connect with them. People like to buy from friends. More friends - more sales.
In the old days, one of the ways to do this was by playing golf or hitting the links. So at one time (some people would still say that time has not passed and insist this is the only way even now) golf links were very important.
Then came the era of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an awesome tool for staying in touch with people. Mostly because many people are increasingly changing jobs and it's tough to keep in touch with everybody. LinkedIn has your friends maintain their contact information rather than you having to keep current.
Essentially it allows you to stay in touch whenever you want to. LinkedIn also allows you to send updates, similar to Twitter of Facebook, which are a good, soft way of staying in touch with people.
LinkedIn is also a great tool for connecting to people whom you don't yet know because you can see who is connected to and ask for a warm introduction.
The third link is about links to your website and blog. Increasingly people are finding business partners and suppliers on the Internet and the most common way to do this is through Internet searching. In order to rank high on the Internet searches (you really want to be on the first page), you need to have what's called a high PageRank. PageRank is determined by the number of quality inbound links coming to your page.
As you can see, it's all about the links.
]]>Most companies have a renewed focus on their business plans for 2010 and are considering strategies and overall customer centric processes that might not have been a significant part of their thinking in the past.
In the world of customer service, retention is an active buzz word. The focus appears to have switched slightly from that of sell sell sell, to one of nurturing and keeping that valued customer of yesterday.
Amidst all of the latest and greatest technology and the various ways that call centers are positioning themselves for success, one fundamental element continues to reappear in the language of what a customer is looking for: The ability to have an intelligent conversation with an agent who is able to assess and resolve their issue on that first call.
While the notion of First Call Resolution (FCR) is not new, nor has it lost its importance in the world of call center metrics, what is getting more attention today is the whole notion of Employee Empowerment. In a true call center space, what this means is arming an agent with the right training and support to be able to make decisions. It seems simple enough, however in the past, agent tasks were seen as more transactional in nature, and void of the ability to truly communicate with the customer in a meaningful and productive way.
There is a common thread throughout the call center space these days, beckoning the agent to have a true “conversation” with the customer, and not worry so much about Average Handle Time (AHT). Call centers traditionally have more metrics and an abundance of measurements that will supposedly, at the end of the long mathematical equation, tell companies how the overall service delivery was and what improvements can be made.
Steering away from these metrics and empowering the agent was historically, not an option. I recently attended a Call Center Conference wherein two very large corporations spoke of the challenges of transitioning the belief that their respective call centers were not cost centers but in fact revenue generating centers. They both highlighted the adaptation of structured Employee Empowerment strategies as keys to their recent successes in this area.
Today, with the implementation of solid Employee Empowerment initiatives, many call centers have transitioned from being viewed as true cost centers, to powerful centers of service delivery with the potential to generate substantial revenue.
Effective service delivery = retention, recommendations and a willingness on behalf of the customer to purchase additional product. Therefore with an enhanced focus on just the service piece alone, call centers now have front line customer service agents who are also skilled at retention and sales if they are able to deliver effective service.
If given the proper training and support, empowered agents, for the most part, are trustworthy, effective and happier at their daily task. They make better decisions and show a more genuine interest in a customer concern when armed with the ability to make a difference without the need to escalate the issue. It bodes well for a company to demonstrate as much trust, faith and empowerment to their own employees as they do with their direct customer base.
For the most part, front line agents want to succeed in their function, and when given the ability to make decisions, take that very seriously and don’t give away the farm. For example, when a huge appliance company decided to make the policy shift to empower their front line agents, internally some feared that the company could lose millions of dollars through agents giving away free product. Of course, the total opposite occurred. Metrics showed that empowering their front line contact centre agents resulted in large savings and improved customer retention. Improved call centre experiences gave customers a whole new reason to remain loyal to the brand.
The message needs to be clear: Employee Empowerment isn’t about “giving up power” but more about “sharing power” with those who have the ability to make a difference in the organization. Agents will feel that a bigger investment is being made and that their contributions really do matter. The end result is a more motivated and skilled front line, and no doubt both the company and the customer will benefit from that!
Customer service most often is the differentiator in this highly competitive market. Companies need to re-engineer their service platform in such as a way as to consistently exceed customer expectations. No doubt adopting, training and continually supporting employee empowerment initiatives will be a key component in this planning effort.
Jennifer McLeod, VP, Business Development at VOXDATA Solutions Inc.
& member of CMA’s Contact Centre Council
The discussion linked to a WebWire article written by Gartner (an information technology research company). Gartner defines TLM as: the giving — for free or at a nominal charge — of information or advice that a client will value so as to create awareness of the outcome that a company’s product or service can deliver, in order to position and differentiate that offering and stimulate demand for it.
Their VP elaborated: "The principle of TLM is simple enough: You give away a little valuable intellectual property to establish your potential usefulness to the client, in the expectation that the client will use your expertise and services. Its essence is to show, rather than tell what a company can do, and to do so in a way that positions and differentiates that company’s offering for the chosen target audience".
The article went on to give some interesting B2B examples, and of course, to link to their own thought leadership, a Gartner report called "Marketing Essentials: How to Use Thought Leadership Marketing for IT Services Providers".
While I am not sure that the definition above is not a bit too narrow (I would argue that thought leadership is about more than sharing whitepapers, just like PR is about more than press releases), I am certainly interested that thought leadership is being considered an “organized discipline” of marketing.
Are your B2B marketing departments consciously using TLM in your marketing plans?
Elizabeth Harvey, Manager of Councils and Self Regulatory Programs at Canadian Marketing Association
]]>Right, back on track… Needless to say, many sponsors who didn’t fully understand what they were getting into fled from their advertising blocks upon seeing the controversial first episodes – including one that originally documented a female cast members getting punched in the face by a man at a club. The likes of Dell, Burger King, Nivea, Unico, and many more decided they had had enough and removed their ads from the Jersey Shore timeslot. But is this the right decision? This is where we must question our mindset as marketers. Our knee-jerk reaction is very simple: write-off Jersey Shore because it represents bad values that we don’t want consumers to attach our brand to.
Make sense right? Or does it? Maybe we are over-analyzing. After all, we’re not talking about branded content here. We weren’t directly a part of the show – we simply advertised during its timeslot. The show’s characters weren’t actually endorsing our brand and there was no product-placement. So why are we presuming that viewers are making a connection?
Let’s take this theory one step further. If company x advertises during a program like FOX’s 24, in which renegade secret agent Jack Bauer ruthlessly slaughters countless enemies in every episode. Does this mean company x now endorses murder? What if they advertised during Desperate Housewives - does this mean their brand represents and supports promiscuous sex and infidelity? Absolutely not. That would be a ridiculous assumption to make. …sort of like saying that anyone who advertises during Jersey Shore endorses the abuse of women?
What I’m about to say goes against a lot of traditional marketing theory, but the truth is this: consumers don’t judge your brand on every little thing you do. We’re not talking about a company whose main representative and the face of a franchise went off the deep end (a la the Tiger Woods debacle). We’re talking about timeslots. You should be selecting programs to advertise with based on ratings, demographics, and cost. In many cases, you can’t waste time worrying about content - because let’s be honest, consumers usually don’t care enough to make that connection.
As the inaugural season of Jersey Shore came to a close, their ratings reached close to 5 million viewers per episode, mostly comprised of young adults and teens. How could you possibly ignore this opportunity just because you’re scared that over-analytical consumers will make an obscure and stretched connection between your brand and the show’s content?
Never be too careful. Step back from your pie charts and focus groups, and get real. Your analysis of a consumer’s perception is likely far beyond what is reality. Read too much into issues like this, and you may miss out on a huge opportunity.
Too often marketers are willing to turn over any quantitative assessment of marketing initiatives to the data geeks or finance and take the answer at face value, without questioning the results (unless of course they are positive). There are usually many ways to skin the proverbial cat, including such things as definitions of test and control cells, definitions of success and what costs are included in profitability calculations. And depending on how these various factors are defined you could come up with very different results. Since these calculations are used to support decisions about potentially significant major marketing investments, you need to be completely confident in how these calculations were done and what was, or wasn’t, included. I strongly encourage marketers to get more involved in the analysis and understand the definitions being used, how the results are calculated and what other factors could influence the outcomes instead of simply going along with an answer because it was calculated to 6 decimal places.
By Paul Tyndall, Senior Manager, Predictive Modelling & Segmentation at RBC. Paul is also a member of CMA’s Marketing Technology and Database Intelligence Council.
]]>However, the Superbowl is the most watched televised event of the year with some 100 Million people expected to watch. According to a recently televised report, a 30 second spot on American TV during the Superbowl will go for between $2.5 and $2.8 Million. That's about $80,000 a second!
But the larger question being asked these days, especially by a lot of young people I know, is whether that money could be better spent. Especially with everything that's going on in the world right now.
Now after years of producing some of the most memorable Superbowl ads in history, PEPSI is asking the same question and has decided not to run an ad. Instead, they're going online with "The Pepsi Refresh Project". http://www.refresheverything.com/
According to their "refresh everything" site, they're looking for people, businesses, and non-profits with ideas that will have a positive impact. "Look around your community and think about how you want to change it." Submit your ideas and vote on your favourites. Those chosen will be awarded up to $250,000 in grants in categories ranging from Health, Arts & Culture, and Food & Shelter to the Planet, Neighbourhoods and Education.
And the so-called Pepsi Generation is eating it up. This is just one example of what's going on right now. We saw the impact the internet and social media had and is having post-Haiti. This is more of the same great trend. The NetGeneration is getting involved and looking for something more fulfilling than a gratuitous 30-second spot where the money spent to buy the media could eradicate so many issues affecting Haiti, Cambodia and the Congo to name a few -- and those affecting us right here at home. Pepsi is on to something and other brands ignore the trend at their peril.
]]>Gentry described a series of tests that his organization had conducted to learn how to design the optimal knowledge sharing system that can be implemented at companies. Much of this learning can be applied to the selection of social media programs and strategy development. Note that he cited as key to consider openness of company culture to collaboration.
Assuming that this is in place, he described the following top 5 considerations in designing the optimal knowledge sharing system as the following:
1. Building pointers to people, different from old school systems management. Service capability companies find this especially valuable. Shared people database
• Similar to facebook people like sharing about themselves
• Integrate available systems, like HR systems for office location and contact information
• Include your personal interests and your external blogs
• Tell your story in no more than 3 bullet points
• Upload documents related to your recent projects
• Team can share what they liked or not about their projects
2. Build rewarding systems, reward individuals - How to build rich people and project pages
• Three main sociological motivators
• Recognition: human nature
• Project staffing: help build better teams
• Career development: connect feedback through the system
• Able to look at individuals in the context of their peers.
• Compliance is not mentioned but included with an animated character in the system named Milton. This animated character appears as a man dressed in a suit and tie; he pops-up on the user’s screen if inappropriate information is being shared or vulgar language etc. The appearance of this character is almost comical as he waves his finger at the system user. In keeping with the intent of increased collaboration and sharing; Milton serves as a reminder rather than a harsh admonishment.
3. Design Intuitive interface, for example, iphone
• Must be really easy to use
• Reduce blocks to usability
• People already had account in system, did not have to set it up
• No training, not set-up, no hand holding->make it as easy as possible
• Information already existed and just needed to be bought together in an easy-to-use format
4. Take the road more travelled - Integrate with existing work flows
• Bring information to people through their in-box
• Public gathering place, in-office cafes now include large wall screens with the 20 most recent people page status updates. People paid attention to people pages and felt more connected. This encouraged passive and ambient connection between offices
5. Iterate early and often - Try lots of stuff and see what sticks
• Learn early and change fast
• For clients, develop software prototypes
• Social software is complicated the human factor is added to the computer interaction. Intuitive and understandable but appropriate social preferences integrated. Social software is in its early stages. Computer and human interaction integration is challenging.
Interesting, at the end of the presentation, the speaker reminded us that none of these on-line collaboration or social networking tools replace face-to-face communication. This may appear obvious, but we really do have to remind ourselves of this.
Patricia McQuillan
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