Emergence Marketing: marketing Archives

November 15, 2007

Measuring ROI on social media investments

need%20help%20sm.jpg A lot of people and companies are struggling to come up with good ways to define an ROI for social media investments - Patrick Schaber's recent post on the topic is just one of the many thoughtful pieces on the topic.

The key to measuring your investments in social media is to first define what it is you are trying to do - are you trying to increase sales, improve the SEO of your site, get more new product ideas into your new product development funnel, trying to improve customer service, or enhance your PR by getting a bigger share of voice in the social media space? And yes, you can do all that with various social media strategies - we have case studies in each and every one of them.

So once you have defined what it is you want to do - measure it the same way you would measure any other program deployed for that same purpose. If you already track idea sources and various percentages to gauge the success of your new product development pipeline, just add a category for the new social media-based community and measure everything else the same way. If you want to increase sales, just measure the efficacy of the social media based campaign the same way you would measure any other lead generation program. And if PR/awareness in the social media space is your goal, then there are many more tools at your disposal in the social media space to measure progress than there are in traditional media. One bonus of social media-based programs is that they will impact multiple marketing functions much more so than traditional marketing programs. So in effect you might develop an ROI in one area and see the cost of doing business in other areas go down at the same time.

Now, the real problem is that we measure traditional marketing programs the wrong way. Almost everything in traditional measurement programs is customer transaction-based - how much will it cost to get a customer to buy...ONCE. What we really want to measure is how programs affect a customer's life-cycle value - including his/her ability to influence others in making buying decisions. The other problem with most traditional measurement yardsticks - and ROI is perhaps the most famous of them - is that they are trailing indicators, not leading indicators. Not enough companies measure things in ways that give them indications of where their business is going, or how sucessful add-on programs will be.

We are currently working with Deloitte on a research project to uncover how companies are measuring the progress and success of various social media-based external communities. If you would like to help with that or if you have opinions on the subject, feel free to email me at francois [at] emergencemarketing [dot] com.

[Tags: marketingt social media ROI marketing measurement marketing 2.0]

November 14, 2007

Fun Viagra ads

While on the topic of ads - here are a couple of clever Viagra ads :)
(via Ads of the World)

November 13, 2007

The end of advertising as we know it

A new study by the IBM Institute for Business Value predicts that the next 5 years will hold more change for the advertising industry than the previous 50 did (here for executive summary, and here for full pdf report of the study).

Based on a survey of 2,400 consumers and feedback from 80 advertising execs, they see four change drivers that will shift control within the Industry:

Attention - consumers are increasingly in control of where they direct their attention. And not just by using Tivo-like products which enable them to skip ads and watch what they want when they want it, but because of a fundamental shift from TV usage to PC usage. 71% of the survey respondents use the Internet more than 2 hours a day, with only 48% spending equivalent time watching TV. 19% spend six hours or more on a PC with just 9% watching that much TV.

Creativity - consumers now have the tools to create their own user-generated and peer-delivered content. User generated content sites are already the top destinations for viewing online video, attracting 39% of the survey respondents.

Measurement - advertising executives predict that 20% of all advertising dollars will shift from impression-based models to impact-based models within 3 years.

Advertising inventories - ad space is increasingly available through open exchanges instead of proprietary channels that were controlled by broadcasters.

Based on these drivers, and considering that two of them have a high degree of uncertainty - the attention driver and the open inventory driver - the study envisions 4 possible scenarios for 2012:

Continued Evolution: One to many still dominates but thanks to DVR's, increased penetration of CGC and better measurement techniques, a greater portion of direct marketing dollars gets allocated to channels typically used for brand oriented advertising.

Open Exchange: Not much changes in this scenario other than most inventory gets bought through open exchanges.

Consumer Choice: In this scenario the user takes full control of the way ads get viewed and filtered.

Ad Marketplace: In this one the consumer choose preferred ad types as part of self-programming their media choices and are more involved with the creation and distribution of the ads.

Here is how the study predicts advertising spend allocation will evolve over the next 3 years:

[Tags: marketing advertising IBM]

Anti-Hummer campaign

This one is quite funny...

(via Coolz0r)

November 7, 2007

History repeats itself - ad skipping in 1934

This article in the April 4th edition of Modern Mechanix reminds us that many new ideas are...well not so new after all - "Radio listeners who dislike advertising announcements and long speeches will welcome a new invention that automatically shuts off voice programs."

(via MIT's Advertising Lab)

November 1, 2007

Amazing to see how many marketers spam...

Almost 10 years after the ClueTrain you would expect marketing professionals to no longer spam - especially not in social media based marketing networking groups. Yet that is exactly what happens all the time. I must be spending an hour a week cleaning up spam in the Marketing 2.0 group on Facebook which I created a couple of months ago.

Sometimes I just yank the spam, sometimes I write a note to the author, especially when it is somewhat borderline, sometimes I get pissy, especially when there is a lot. Spam ranges from get rich quick schemes and incredible-sounding offers to people just adding a link to their company or blog without engaging in the conversation. Sometime people I write notes to take it well, sometimes I never hear from them and sometimes they get mad. One guy, who kept plastering the group with a link to his blog, sent me emails adding up to almost 1,200 words now - telling me that I did not understand the meaning of the word spam, that he would "interpret (my) note as a stupid act by a guy who's intelligent in at least some respects," and eventually graduating to telling me that "The so-called Web 2.0 world doesn't need another pompous ass." ...he also told me that I should apologize.

Maybe I should follow Chris Anderson's lead and just have a note in the group that lists those people who do not get it.

...but wait, it was the threat of doing exactly that which sent the poor chap over the edge...so this could actually be a dangerous course of action :)

[Tags: marketing social media facebook spam marketing 2.0]

October 10, 2007

Is the customer really in charge?

So in the past couple of years there has been a lot of talk about the democratization of media, citizen marketing, the amateur hour, and other themes & memes pointing to the fact that the customer is now in charge. He owns the message; she decides what happens to the brand, etc.

Fact is – the vendors are no longer is charge. Nobody would argue against that point anymore.

But does that automatically equate with saying that the customer is now in charge?

Academic research about democratic sites like DIGG shows that a majority of what makes it to the front page comes from a very small number of people – in fact, researchers talk about the “tyranny of the minority.” Other research, such as the one done by Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell and reported in their Citizen Marketers book, finds that the percentage of people who actually create and broadcast content is 1%.

So is the customer really in charge? Or is it a small group of non-democratically elected loudmouths who now controls the message?

This is just one of the topics that we will talk about this afternoon during the interview with Jackie Huba.

October 5, 2007

Are the 4 P's still relevant in today's world?

As I was responding to some discussions in the Marketing 2.0 group on Facebook, I started talking about the relevance of the 4 P's in marketing, which of course is one of the cornerstones in marketing education worldwide.

But are they really relevant anymore?

Let's look at them one by one:

Product - I guess this one stays :) - although are you sure that people are always buying your "product"? Or are they buying an experience associated with your product? Or perhaps a "personal identity" that comes with the use of your product?

Place - is amazon.com a place? Is a search engine placement a place?

Promotion - people are not taking your corporate BS anymore...And according to the Strategy and Business article I posted in the Facebook "posted items," 80% of all insurance policies will be bought based on information not provided by the insurance companies! So does promotion in the insurance industry still matter? Maybe - if you think that the company can participate in the creation of the user generated content that people will base their decisions on without hiring corporate "shills."

Price - many new business models have funny pricing schemes - as in "free"

In the late 80's some academics (I cannot remember who they were) came up with a replacement for the 4P's - the 4C's. While not perfect, the 4 C's may sound a little more modern/appropriate for the times:

Customer instead of product
Communication instead of promotion
Cost instead of price
Convenience instead of place...

Using the 4P's as a roadmap for success for new products may not be the best roadmap to use anymore... It is a bit like using north, south, east and west as guides to find your way in deep space.

Thoughts?

[Tags: marketing 4 p's 4 c's marketing death valley marketing 2.0]

October 1, 2007

Comparing Wal-Mart and Target on Facebook

Both Target and Wal-Mart have sponsored groups on Facebook - both of which are targeted at college kids.

Target has over 7,000 members and mostly positive comments in a vibrant set of discussions. The Wal-Mart group on the other hand has a little over 1,200 members, no discussions are allowed, and the wall postings are mostly negative.

What is the difference do you think, except for the fact that a large portion of the population believes that one of the two companies is truly evil?

The Wal-Mart home page looks like another interactive ad.. The Target home page is more inviting and enlists the help of users to co-create the experience. Any other differences that you can think of that would result in such a difference in membership and tone of conversation?

We can take the discussion to Facebook - in fact I started a thread on the subject in the Marketing 2.0 group, where we now have more members than the Wal-Mart Facebook group.

[Tags: marketing social networking facebook wal-mart target]

September 28, 2007

Do we really need a new and more verbose definition of Marketing?

The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) decided that its 30-year old definition of marketing was no longer good and that they needed to come up with a new one (via The Economic Times). The results are depressing.

Here's the old definition:

The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably

The new one:

The strategic business function that creates value by stimulating, facilitating and fulfilling customer demand. It does this by building brands, nurturing innovation, developing relationships, creating good customer service and communicating benefits. By operating customer-centrically, marketing brings positive return on investment, satisfies shareholders and stake-holders from business and the community, and contributes to positive behavioural change and a sustainable business future.

Yikes...the inmates are running the asylum at CIM!

How about something real simple, like Peter Drucker's view on marketing:

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.

[Tags: marketing definition Chartered Institute of Marketing CIM peter+drucker]

September 27, 2007

So you think that message saturation is a new phenomenon?

In prepping for the interview with brand guru Tom Asacker tomorrow I ran across this fabulous quote in one of his thought pieces - this one his visual illumination on how to connect your brand to THEIR lives.

“Psychologists tell us that the mind is under a continual bombardment of ideas, all of which are trying to make an impression on it. The prospect, therefore, does not sit around with his mind a blank, calmly waiting for someone or something to capture his attention without a struggle. The salesman enters a field already well occupied and must fight for the undivided attention that is a successful sale.”

This was written in Modern Man in 1918!

That right 89 years ago...and who said that message overload is a new phenomenon?

Make sure to join us tomorrow - it should be fun.

September 26, 2007

Do the dumbest marketers work for cell phone companies, or is it just T-Mobile?

10/03/07 Update: Somebody from T-Mobile got in touch with me and offered me a Blackberry Curve for less money than what new users buy it for. I took the offer. Thankfully someone at T-Mobile is watching out and taking action - but I still think they would benefit from making this a proactive program instead of a reactive one.

I am a T-Mobile user and yesterday I tried to upgrade to the Blackberry Curve. Even though I am long-time loyal T-Mobile customer, spending $180+/mo on their services, I would have to pay $400 for the new handset instead of the $250 that new customers have to pay. I was furious but the guy in the store could not do anything and recommended that I call customer service - which I did. Half an hour into that call I got the same response.

Obviously I am about to become an iPhone user until those guys screw up - no matter how much it will cost me to break my contract (earth to T-Mobile marketing - it isn't about the money, it's about principles on how you treat your customers).

It is of course not the first time that this has happened to me, as I am sure it has happened to you. This time around, however, I figured I would do some back of the envelope calculations to demonstrate the stupidity of this particular marketing technique/abuse campaign.

I am a very loyal customer and if they would have switched me and not screw up too badly in the future I could have easily been with them for another 4 years. At $180/mo, that is a loss of $8,640. I am also a big recommender when I like a product or service, and can point to many people who switched to T-Mobile because of my recommendations. Let's say that 4 people become subscribers every year based on my recommendations (might be more with a cool toy like the Curve), and let's further assume that 50% of those would have joined through some other marketing outreach program from T-Mobile. For the sake of this exercise let's say that those people who do sign up based on my recommendations would spend half of what I spent. That means that by losing those recommendations they would lose $8,640 in referral business the 1st year, $6,480 the 2nd year, $4,320 the 3rd and $2,160 the 4th year. And supposing that the customer acquisition cost, not including handset subsidies, is around $200/customer, the other 8 referrals who might have joined based on other outreach programs might have saved them another $1,600 in acquisition cost.

So the lost opportunity so far for not giving me the discount is $31,840. I know, it should be converted into its net present value to get the real number - but for a $150 rebate??

Now that is not all. I am sufficiently turned off with this idiotic marketing behavior that I am willing to write about it on my blog. With 18,000 unique visitors/month according to Google Analytics and close to 1,200 RSS subscribers according to Feedburner, I can only assume that a few people will not switch to T-Mobile because of my bad experience. Add to that the number of social networks that I belong to and where this recommendation will get syndicated, and the amount of lost business because of my negative recommendation could actually be far worse than the lost business caused by me no longer being a customer and referrer.

How stupid can this be? And when will the government step up and let us own phones that are no longer locked to a particular service provider?

[Tags: t-mobile social networking word-of-mouth WOM customer lifecycle value customer referral value]

September 25, 2007

The value of word-of-mouth

The latest issue of the Harvard Business Review has an article on how to calculate the value of customer referrals (article not online yet).

They conducted two studies - one in telecom and one in financial services. Some interesting findings from those calculations include:

People refer way less than they say they do

The customer referral value is higher than the customer life-cycle value

The people with the highest customer life-cycle value are not the ones with the highest referral value

The importance of these findings are twofold. First you need to segment your customers along the customer life-cycle value axis, but also along the customer referral value axis. That will enable you to target your incentives to groups to either increase their usage or increase their referrals, or both. Second, this research shows that customers will low customer life-cycle value can in fact have a higher value to your company through referral value than those with high customer life-cycle value.

[Tags: marketing social networking word-of-mouth WOM customer lifecycle value custormer referral value]

September 24, 2007

Two great telephone interviews coming up

On Friday 9/28 at 1pm I will be interviewing branding expert Tom Asacker, the author of the great book "A Clear Eye for Branding," as well as the blog by the same name. You can find out more information about the event and also sign up through the Facebook event page that was created as part of the Marketing 2.0 Group.

On 10/10 @1pm I will be interviewing word-of-mouth expert Jackie Huba, the author of "Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force," and co-author of "Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message." You can find more information about that session and sign up through the Facebook event page created for this interview.

Soon we will be announcing additional interviews, debates and discussions with other marketing thought-leaders - so stay tuned.

September 20, 2007

What is the marketing potential of LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace

Reveries.com conducted a survey on the potential of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Myspace as media for marketing activities (pdf download of survey summary results and analysis are here). The main finding seems to be that marketers are in the very early stages of truly understanding the potential of these new networks - with only 18% of the respondents calling the potential of online social networks as a medium for marketing "huge".

Other interesting tidbits from the survey include the fact that marketers see "word of mouth" as the most promising aspect of social networking sites, and that many pointed out that marketers should participate in the conversations that take place on those sites without interrupting them.

Unfortunately, the reality is that many spammers have already invaded Facebook, Myspace and other similar sites. Go check the walls of the most popular interest groups in Facebook to see for yourself - many are littered with posts that are total sales pitches or with information that is totally irrelevant to the group's conversation.

[Tags: marketing social networking conversational marketing social media facebook myspace linkedin]

September 19, 2007

Marketing Voodoo and Fufu Juice Descend on Conversational Marketing...

Following the phone conversation with David Weinberger last week, during which he expressed doubts about whether marketing can be conversational, I ran across this piece on conversational marketing by Joe Marchese on MediaPost's Online Spin blog.

Talking about best practices in conversational marketing he says:

"The best practice is to imagine your brand’s message as a circle and a community’s conversation as another circle; what you are looking for is the area where the circles overlap. Once you find this overlap, you can begin to look for ways to participate in the conversation and achieve your marketing goals at the same time. Three things to remember: First, speak frankly and understand that each individual you are communicating with is a peer, not a demo. Second, as my friend Rishad Tobaccowala pointed out so succinctly, if your product sucks, don’t bother trying to create conversations. Third, remember, conversation without permission is just interrogation."

Further in the article, he suggests that:

"as a marketer, (you) should be prepared to finish the conversations you start."

I think David was right...marketers will screw it up. For those marketers who even get what Joe is trying to say, I can just see them expanding their "brand message circle" to where it totally overlaps with the "community circle". I bet you some brand message "areas" will be turned into ellipses, squares and other fancy shapes just to make the overlap happen.

The very clever ones will claim that the shape of the "community circle" is not really what it appears to be. Surely some marketers will agree that the "community circle" of the "Empower Patients" group on Facebook overlaps with the "brand message circle" of heart burn medicine; or that the 104,633 people who belong to the "Foundation for the protection of Swedish underwear models" cause on Facebook might be interested in engaging in conversations with cruise organizers.

As for the other recommendations - I am not sure that I agree with any of them. For starters, not everyone you are communicating with is a peer. I know they are not a demo, as they are hopefully human. But what if the community consists of a bunch of doctors, and you engage with them because you have the expertise to help them in an area where they don't - say accounting. They are not your peers. Now this is more than bickering about terminology - being peers implies certain acceptable behaviors in conversations which are not appropriate if you are not peers.

And saying that if your product sucks you should not start a conversation is a potentially a misleading recommendation. For the longest time Google docs may have looked like a product that sucks for high end professional services companies that spend a lot of effort in creating sophisticated proposals, and who would not blink a eye at the money required to get a really high-end collaborative environment. For many of us freelancers on the other hand, it was a product sent from heaven - even if the app would crash periodically. The whole "innovator's dilemma" landscape is littered with products that suck but displaced very successful incumbents.

And can we really not end a conversation? Sigh...

OK - so let's try to summarize this:

Markets = conversations
You either have a legitimate reason to engage in the conversation - or not
In some communities it is ok to talk about "crappy" products - in others it isn't
Sometimes you have to have permission to speak, and sometimes you don't
Communities are not always made up of peers
=> Marketing can be conversational if you can handle it; but most often it can't - either because of you or in spite of you...

See - easy to understand and no Venn diagram required!

I cannot wait until the conversation marketing experts talk to us like humans and not like demos :)

[Tags: marketing marketing 2.0 conversational marketing markets are conversations]

September 18, 2007

The new complete marketer

The latest issue of Strategy+Business has a good article on the new complete marketer (requires registration, but free here)

The article is making very similar points to the McKinsey article that got published earlier. They too talk about the need for broadening the marketing function, saying that : "Once a fairly discrete department within the organization, marketing is more and more often being asked to fulfill a far more significant, strategic role with implications for the entire enterprise."

The article also refers to a research project that they conducted in conjunction with the Association of National Advertisers, in which they distilled six themes that the best CMO's adhere to:

Put the consumer at the heart of marketing

Make marketing accountable

Embrace the challenges of new media

Recognize the new organizational imperative

Live a new agency paradigm

Remain adaptable

Some of these themes may seem simple and mundane, but is in how CMO's execute against them that determines the winners from the losers.

[Tags: CMO marketing strategy+business social media customer needs voice of the customer]

September 17, 2007

Markets are conversations, but should marketing be conversational?

That is the question that David Weinberger tried to answer during a public phone interview I conducted with him last week for the Marketing 2.0 group in Facebook.

His view? Perhaps not - marketing may be not be able to engage in the conversation without corrupting it.

One alternative, which we have implemented for a variety of clients - including the FASTforward conversation on Enterprise 2.0 for FAST Search, and the Mobile Messaging 2.0 conversation sponsored by Airwide - is to host a conversation that is sponsored by that company, but which is editorially independent from the company. We let our clients engage in those conversations, but their engagement is subject to editorial approval. For some of those communities we also started to set up editorial boards who help us make decisions on what is appropriate and what is not.

Of course there are other marketing functions that cannot not be conversational, but more on that later...

[Tags: marketing david weinberger marketing 2.0 conversational marketing markets are conversations]

September 12, 2007

Do not miss the interview with David Weinberger this afternoon

This afternoon I will be interviewing David Weinberger on the future of marketing. The interview will happen over phone and is open to the public. You can register for the event on Facebook, or you can simply dial in 1-605-475-8590, the conference room # is 5785861.

We hope to see you there!

September 4, 2007

Funny Toyota ad in Brazil

(link for RSS subscribers)

August 23, 2007

Advertisers vs. online identity

On NPR last night they were discussing the impact of of the known presence of registered sex offenders on social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook on how advertisers will make their advertising decisions...concluding at one point with an expert opining "well if I were P&G I would worry"...

Should they really worry? Do they worry now whether sexual predators subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times online? Is the importance of identity in marketing really different online then offline?

August 21, 2007

Marketing 2.0 - a discussion group on FaceBook

I have created a new discussion group called Marketing 2.0 on FaceBook. 89 people joined the group since I made it public yesterday afternoon - so it has the potential to become a great conversation on the future of marketing.

Join the Marketing 2.0 conversation - and if you want to help organize stuff, drop me a note!

August 16, 2007

The CMO role is broadening...

McKinsey Quarterly has an interesting article on the evolving role of the CMO (requires subscription). In it they argue that while most CMO's have their hands full, their role should be further expanded - to represent "the voice of the customer" throughout the organization.

(Yes! finally some common sense on the role of the CMO from an authoritative voice ...)

In the face of a rapidly changing customer - ignoring "push" marketing and making buying decisions based on their own research rather than sales recommendations - and with bloggers and other consumer-generated content now determining corporate reputations, companies need to change the way they meet customer needs, the way they innovate, and the way they behave in the marketplace. That will require change efforts across the entire corporation, and who is better positioned to lead those charge than the CMO?

You don't buy the fact that "push" marketing is dead? Then consider this: in consumer electronics more than half of the buyers buy products based on their own research rather than advice from sales staff. More than 60% of baby boomers use the Internet to supplement their doctor's advice (so pharma marketers have to rethink the pitch to doctors). And by 2010, it is expected that 80% of all insurance purchases will be based on consumer research rather than information supplied by insurance agents.

You are not worried about consumer generated content? McKinsey Quarterly says" "User-generated media account for almost one-third of all the time individuals spend on the 100 most visited US Web sites, up from roughly 3 percent just two years ago."

The change in consumer buying habits is broader than some may expect. It is not just that the number of customer touch points with a company has increased dramatically, there is also a more rapid growth of the low and high ends of the the market at the expense of the middle.

So a marketer does not just need to understand the changing customer need as it relates to their product or service, they also need to understand the changing buying needs of those same customers and adapt the whole company to deal with those changes.

[Tags: CMO marketing corporate reputation buying habits customer needs voice of the customer]

August 13, 2007

Leveraging social media to deal with a corporate public affair's nightmare

Johnson & Johnson is suing the Red Cross and other parties over the use of the Red Cross. Talk about one heck of a juicy story. The reality is that J&J is suing the Red Cross because it is licensing the use of the Red Cross symbol to for-profit organizations, while J&J holds trademarks to the Red Cross symbol since before the Red Cross actually existed.

So what is a VP of corporate communications at J&J to do in response to such a corporate public affair's nightmare? Send out press releases, hold press conferences, use all the traditional tools available to corporate communicators in crisis management mode? Not so for the J&J corporate com VP, Ray Jordan, who took his story to the J&J corporate blog, where he wrote up J&J's point of view in an everyday and personal voice.

The result? A large number of comments and stories generally providing broad support for J&J's point of view. While there are negative comments, the blog achieved what no other crisis communication's vehicle would have delivered.

(via Johnnie Moore)

[Tags: Red Cross Johnson & Johnson J&J corporate communication crisis management]

July 27, 2007

Interesting research on online video usage

The Pew Internet & American Life Project released some interesting research about online video usage. It was especially interesting to see those results in light of a project that we are working on (work in progress at www.crappybills.com - feedback welcome!).

57% of online adults have used the Internet to watch or download videos, and 19% do so on a daily basis. More than half (57%) of online video viewers share links with others, and 75% say they receive links to online videos from others!

For young adults (18-29) comedy is the biggest draw, with 56% watching humorous videos.

[Tags: online marketing online video youtube]

July 25, 2007

64% of emails get read on mobile devices...

...and chances are that your email campaigns look like crap on those devices.

New research from MarketingSherpa indeed shows that 64% of all emails get read on mobile devices (available for free for a period of time here). The article has some recommendations on what to do if you are a heavy email marketer, and also contains some interesting stats on mobile email usage.

[Tags: email marketing mobile email direct marketing]

July 24, 2007

In New Product Introduction - more is less

The Executive Corporate Board has a great white paper entitled "Boosting the Impact of Innovation and New Product Launch Processes." In it they have some mini case studies of how companies who try to achieve top line growth by introducing an increasing number of product/service extensions often times end up with reduced revenues instead.

They also recommend that companies focus on "market segment" innovation rather than pure product innovation - which has traditionally been used to help differentiate products. With the advent of fast followers becoming increasingly faster, product innovation no longer helps with product differentiation. They describe the case studies of P&G and Best Buy as good examples of "market segment" innovation - where you look at product innovation based on the insights gained from well defined market segments.

[Tags: innovation product introduction market insight]

July 23, 2007

What do you do when the old foundations are no longer there - attention, differentiation, and loyalty...

Many of today’s companies are realizing that traditional marketing no longer works – they are finding it increasingly difficult to reach their target audience and to differentiate their offering in ever more overcrowded markets, as well as finding that with commoditization becoming the norm rather than the exception, customer loyalty is becoming a thing of the past.

And while many of today’s agencies are catching up to the new market realities, most of them have yet to make the shift and help their customers in ways that deliver quantifiable ROI’s – which is why many companies are turning for help to alternative sources.

The key to success these days is a company's ability to tap into communities - existing or created ones. Communities can help with everything - from getting the word out, to gaining insight from the market on product requirements to market research and innovation.

As a few of us are embarking on a project to quantify how companies are leveraging communities within their business practices and how they measure success, we would love to hear from anyone involved with business communities. If you have a story to tell, please contact me at francois [at] emergencemarketing [dot] com

[Tags: innovation marketing community]

July 19, 2007

When large companies buy innovative startups - a case study: HP buying LogoWorks

[warning: rant coming] I have used LogoWorks for 4 projects now. The first two experiences were so delightful that I could not stop talking about them - resulting in more than one referral customer. The third experience had a little problem, but they addressed it by giving me a change, which I would have had to pay for, for free - so I was still a champion.

Then came my last experience. I ordered a logo last Wednesday, which was supposed to be ready this past Monday at 4:37pm Mountain time. When that time came and went and nothing happened I emailed support - getting a machine generated response. The next day came and went and nothing happened again, so I emailed support and got that same machine generated response. On Wednesday I took a closer look at that email only to find out that it listed the email for my project manager and that I should contact that person (for some obscure reason the system could not do that I guess...). So I did - sent an irate email to my project manager.

She simply responded: "Sir, you must complete your billing informatin for us to continue." After a quick check, I found that not only had I received a receipt, my credit card had been charged. So I sent back all the supporting information with a closing saying: "Now what? This is RIDICULOUS..."

Now at some point in time I did create another account by accident, but that one had no projects in it - all four of my projects were in the same account that kept showing me:

My project manager sent me another saying: "Ok Sir I am so sorry about this I was looking up your project under your gmail address...I can see that the problem with your logo is that we do not have enough information about the company to get started." Now, just like any other time I created a project with them, I followed the instructions and filled out the whole creative brief. But I never received an email asking me for more info...not at my main account nor at the other account, which had an email that I also use. In addition, I could not even access the brief to add more info...it was closed and telling me that designers were working on my project. I complained to my project manager about the fact that no one ever contacted me and that there was no way for me to add info to the profile.

My project manager responded by explaining that they never contacted me because they were looking at the other account - the one that has no active projects in it! And that I could email her the additional information about my company.

What are they thinking? That their customers are stupid or something?

So I responded: "That makes no sense (and note that in my experience as a marketer it is never a good idea to BS a customer – especially not an irate one)...But even if your system would have gotten confused, as you are, then I should have received a email there and that did not happen either...I am still not sure what info you require to continue….when you say you can email, what do you need? Address, telephone number, number of employees, color of my eyes? I am pretty sure that I said that this was a marketing services company – providing marketing consulting services. What else do you need???? When you are the one that is screwing up and aggravating the customer beyond belief, don’t you think you should be a little more helpful in trying to get the customer somewhat satisfied again?"

That was yesterday afternoon....I have not heard from them since - and my dashboard still says "Designers are working on design concepts....Check back Jul 16, 2007 4:37 PM Mountain Standard Time to view design concepts."

Is this a case of a large company screwing up a gem by integrating it with their customer prevention processes? Or is this just a case of a team that made money on the acquisition and lost their passion around the business? Obviously I cannot tell, but having done 4 projects now, I could clearly see the downhill trend in this case.

[Tags: customer support logoworks customer+service ]

What do you do when a customer insists on a standalone ROI?

So you have developed a project which enhances PR, improves the amount of feedback you gain into the new product development process, helps with lead generation and which perhaps impacts a few other business areas. Yet your customer or your manager insists that you measure ROI on the project as a standalone project - not including how it positively impacts other business areas for which you are not responsible for.

What do you do?

Quit?

Modify your project so that it can be measured as a standalone project - perhaps at the expense of positively impacting other business areas

Wait until they shut down your project

Obviously, none of those options are beneficial to the company as a whole, yet considering that it is unlikely that you can change the manager or the customer, those seem like the only options. One way or the other your project will end up being crippled at the ROI altar...

Measuring ROI can hurt companies if not done properly - badly!

July 2, 2007

Cool PSP ad

Sony came out with a fake book - including fake hands - to let you play with your PSP while looking seriously busy with your book. Too bad it's in Italy or I would definitely try to get one of those :)

[via engadget]

May 17, 2007

Companies need to add "Customer UI" expertise to their talent pool

And I am not talking about product UI (User Interface) - I am talking about the "company" UI from the customer's point of view. After all my poor buying experiences with companies that have very bright and dedicated people working for them, it became clear to me that most companies should hire or staff a group of independent customer advocates with UI experiences to ensure that all the touch-points through which a customer can interact with the company are all compatible with one another and are all delivering against the same promise that is being made during the pre-sale cycle. That includes packaging, in-store support/returns/etc, phone support/billing/etc., web support/shops/registration/etc, and any other way through which a customer could interact with the company after they first buy a product.

The fact that HP as a company has multiple logins for different shops, and that a "customer" case manager for one division can not handle problems the customer has with another division would go away if you would have a customer-centric company UI group who would police this stuff. The fact that my insurance company sends me statements with a different look and feel, different information in the same places, and different content for the various policies I have would go away as well. The fact that most corporate web sites are organized around the companies' divisions instead of being customer-centric would also go away...you get the point.

A good example of a company doing this right is Apple. I recently bought a new iMac for my son, as well as a new Airport Extreme to upgrade my home office network. I registered those products online, and required some support for setting up disk and printer sharing with the new Airport. I have also been using iTunes to buy my music for years. At Apple, all the touch-points reinforce the same message - we are easy and fun to work with. From the store interactions to the packaging, to the online support and registration systems, all the touch-points are perfectly tuned to one another and they all have "me" at the center.

[Tags: company UI customer service customer-centricity wom apple marketing]

May 14, 2007

Being in "HP Hell" - the PC Manufacturer's Hell Sequel!

[UPDATE 05/16/07] After spending between 15-20 hours on the new computer in the last week, HP fixed their telephone lines and I got in touch with my case manager - who was very efficient. They are going to replace the whole computer. Fedex is picking up the old one today and I should have the new one next week.

[UPDATE 05/17/07] Someone from the small & medium business division emailed me to apologize for sending me two monitors - apparently this error occurred due to a system issue. She wanted to know if I "would like to keep the monitor or return it; this would be at no charge of course." I assume the return would be at no charge and not the "keep" option...sigh

Depending on how you look at it, this could be the funniest or saddest buying experience - I will let you be the judge of that. This is my story of trying to buy an HP media center PC - a fairly high end machine by desktop standards. Unfortunately there are so many "Colbert-esque" twists and turns to this story that it became really long - so I apologize for the length of this marketing horror story...but I am sure you will relate to some parts of it.

First was the actual buying experience - I decided to buy an HP Media Center from the Home Office division but did not like the monitor choices from that online store. In looking around I found what I wanted in their small and medium business division's store. Trying to buy that monitor did not exactly go as smooth as expected. Not only did I need a different account with different rules to be able to buy this product, which all by itself caused some problems as I described last week, but they shipped me two monitors - even though all my records and confirmations show that I only purchased one. You might think that was a good thing - getting a spare monitor for free. Not so, they also charged me twice (not right away, mind you, but a few days after I received the order)!

Hmmm...come to think of it, I may have stumbled across the secret HP formula for success...just send duplicate orders to your customers, charge them for it only a few days after someone accepted the order, and hope that nobody will notice :)

The real story started when I got my brand new machine on Tuesday of last week. Somehow I could not get the sound to work. I tinkered with it for a few nights thinking that it must be a classic case of "stupid user errors," but no, I could not get it to work. On Friday I finally got in touch with their support department and spend a long time online with the first technician, who took me through all her possible help screens to debug my problem. She finally told me that the system was somehow not recognizing the Soundblaster card, which her system showed as having shipped with my new computer, and that I should shut off the computer, open up the tower and re-seat the Soundblaster card. And if that did not work I should reload the drivers. ..easy, that should solve my problem.

So I did that, but never found the Soundblaster card. Thinking that perhaps Soundblaster had stopped branding their product, I decided to re-seat all the boards I could find. When that did not work I reloaded some audio drivers but not the Soundblaster drivers, as I could not find them. So I got back in touch with the award winning HP support department.

The second tech took me through many of the same steps and also some new ones. After what seemed like an eternity she finally gave up, sending me a link to all the help screens she was going through to troubleshoot my system and saying: "Francois, Please try the steps from the article if that does not resolve the issue we will take the PC for physical evaluation. This will get your issue resolved" (in quotes taken from the actual chat transcript) I thought she had not noticed that besides buying a PC with all the bells and whistles, I had also bought an in-house support plan - the type that promises to send a technician to your house or office if something does not work. So I mentioned that to her and also said that her proposed resolution was unacceptable. I also asked her how I could return the PC and inquired about further escalation possibilities. By now, the only thing she was concerned about was: "Are you ready to send the PC to our factory, so that we would physically evaluate the PC and get the issue resolved." When I asked what was included as part of the in-house service plan she answered "The in-home service would cover replacement of hardware component if any.." How she decided that this was not a hardware issue is a mystery to me - after all the first tech rep told me that it sounded like the system was not recognizing a piece of hardware....was it even there? When I asked for a manager she told me that a "quality manager" would call me back within 48 hours - which BTW still has not happened.

I can assure you that it was a lovely way to spend 3 hours on a Friday night - thank you HP!

On Saturday I took a closer look at the in-house plan that I bought, only to realize that you have to register that thing within 10 days or else it becomes null and void. I opted for the online registration. The system prompted me for some personal information and then for my products' serial numbers and product numbers. At first it would not accept the product numbers which were listed on both the computer itself and on the invoice. It presented me instead with a series of numbers that did not resemble anything that I had received from HP. I picked one anyway but then the system told me that it could not register my computer's serial number as it did not exist. Thankfully there was a human-based backup system reachable by fax which figured it out based on the numbers that the online process had rejected.

...another hour well spent on a beautiful Saturday - thank you again HP.

As you can imagine, by now I was livid...

I got a sliver of hope when I discovered the HP Marketing Excellence Blog authored by an HP VP of Marketing Strategy & Excellence who had just received some award by Brandweek for being a marketing exec who "gets it." Hooray, someone at HP was engaging in the market conversation. I left a comment on his blog saying that I wished I could congratulate him for his new award, but that while he might "get it," he had obviously not been able to instill that "getting it" into his company's culture. Since marketing is all about making sure that all the customer touch points reinforce the same marketing promise you make at the point of sale, I told him that I could not consider HP's marketing successful and worthy of an award. He approved the comment really fast and sent me an email explaining that he would see what he could do to help me. I thanked him with some additional details of my ordeal so he would have all the ammunition to get this resolved. I also lefr a message on their customer experience blog - pointing out some the problems with site incompatibilities which I had encountered and the form that did not work, but that comment has yet to be approved.

Unfortunately things did not improve after that...

When by 3pm yesterday I did not get a call from anyone, I sent the VP a quick note letting him know that I had not heard from anyone. Shortly afterwards I got a call from a senior case manager who introduced herself and gave me a phone number with two extensions, one for my case and one her personal extension - unfortunately I was on the phone when she called and so that information came to me via my voice mail box. When I called back and dialed her extension, I got a message that this extension was an invalid extension. When I dialed the extension for my case the system would hang up on me. Thinking that perhaps it had to do with my VoIP service I tried repeatedly from my cell (T-Mobile) as well as from my home phone (Verizon) - but in each case the system would keep hanging up on me. I recorded this experience, so you can listen to what it sounds like to call HP support if interested.

Not believing that this award-winning support department would do this sort of thing I kept trying, finally entering a random set of numbers which got me to by-pass the IVR and put me into the general queue for their case management service. When I finally got a live person I asked to be connected with the extension of my case manager - only to be told that he could not connect me to that extension. He asked me for all sorts of information to identify myself and subsequently transferred me to someone else who asked me for all the same information - and also unwilling to connect me to my case manager. 45 minutes later I got transferred to a third person who first asked me "how" he could help me, but then quickly sensed the mood and tried to connect me with my case manager. When that failed he asked for my number and proceeded to give me the "right" number for me to call back - which was the same number I had tried all along. I asked him to use his cell phone or some other phone to call that number himself and verify that it kept hanging up on me. He said he would, put me on hold and NEVER came back. I did receive an email from my case manager saying that she was unsuccessful in reaching me via phone (1 try!), but that I could call her back at her personal extension - that same defunct number. I tried to reply to the message but it was one of the mailboxes you cannot reply to...

...another 2 hours well spent - thank you HP!

If anyone at HP is listening, here are a couple of recommendations:

Stop your marketing - if your post-sale processes are set up to destroy your brand promise as it did for me, then all your marketing dollars are wasted resources. They will not buy customer loyalty, which is where your long term profitability will come from

Stop focusing on optimizing mind-less processes. Empower some humans to by-pass the processes and get the customer the help they deserve. Build escalation steps within your support infrastructure that includes real techies - not telephone operators who are following a set of screenshots to debug a system

Fix my problem or send someone to pack up and pick up this machine - as a small business owner I cannot afford to spend any more time on your problems, and I certainly do not want to inherit them

Buying and supporting PCs is getting worse than dealing with airlines. Even my $4-7 (for full fault tolerance) a month ISP is offering me better service.

Hopefully someone at Lenovo is paying attention - if this is how their competition deals with customers it cannot be that hard to capture all those lost souls and turn them into life-long loyal customers.

Click to hear the sound of HP support hanging up on you...

[Tags: HP customer service hp hell wom hp problems marketing]

Beyond Buzz - the next generation of word-of-mouth marketing

I have been remiss at writing about a few good books I read in the past few months. My reading list is also desperately out of date...

One book which definitely should interest any marketing practitioner is a book by my good friend Lois Kelly, who also blogs on the Foghound blog.

The book - called Beyond Buzz, The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing - is a great "how to" book with a ton of actionable ideas. The author does a great job clarifying the distinction between making meaning and making buzz. She also teaches you how to uncover interesting things about your company or product and turn them into "point of views" that people will want to talk to you about, she tells you how to organize customer listening tours, and much more. The book also provides some great frameworks and questionnaires to help you turn word-of-mouth strategies into actionable plans that will work, and not fizzle out or backfire, as many of them do.

Definitely a great book to have on your office bookshelf.

[Tags: marketing wom word of mouth marketing beyond buzz word of mouth lois kelly]

May 11, 2007

Sony delivers the worst ROI yet!

customer service hell sm.jpg [rant coming] OK, so I am in a complaining mood this week, but as a passionate marketing person it is so depressing to see how large companies deal with their customers. My last mind-bending experience is with Sony.

I bought a Viao laptop from their online store last week and picked a model/color that was in stock and that was going to ship this past Tuesday - May 8th. I even paid for the 2 day shipping upgrade as I wanted it for the weekend. On May 8 I went online to check on my order and their system now showed that my order was now not scheduled to ship until May 9th. So on May 9th I went and checked and the system showed that my brand new toy would ship that day. When I checked on May 10th I was shocked to find the system now yelling at me: "CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK, ship date unknown". Never did I receive a notice from Sony explaining what was happening. The only thing I got from them was a useless dock that I had ordered with the PC. So I emailed them to complain about my 2 day shipping surcharge which was now meaningless and also to ask them for clarification on what was going to happen and how I could potentially cancel my order and return the dock.

36 hours later, the system is still yelling: "CURRENTLY OUT OF STOCK, Ship date unknown" and I still have to receive my first email or phone call from Sony. What did I do wrong?

Companies operating in the consumer electronics space have to know that as long as they do not screw up, people will continue to buy their brands when it's time for an upgrade. That is true for PC's, printers, cameras, you name it - heck - I bought 7 Dells before they screwed up. So how can a company, who is currently not doing that well to begin with, first screw up on their supply chain management so than a product that showed in stock suddenly goes out of stock with an unknown ship date, and secondly screw up even more by not communicating with a customer who not only paid extra for expedited shipping, but who also took the time to alert them about the fact that he was becoming irate? And did I mention that I usually buy top of the line, or should I say with tons of options that you don't really need - so over a lifetime this could mean tens of thousands of dollars to Sony just from this one customer - me.

These are the basics...this is not sophisticated management theory:
a) make sure you have a reliable supply chain
b) have an impeccable customer service process - especially when a) fails

My Return on Information with Sony is close to zero...

sigh...

[end of rant]

[Tags: customer service supply chain sony viao roi return on information]

May 2, 2007

Are you ready for "bigseed" marketing?

Even though most viral marketing campaigns fail - many companies are jumping on the bandwagon based on the few well-documented case studies that keep being recycled. The same Harvard Business Review quoted yesterday has another interesting forethought on the mechanics of viral marketing campaigns and how to increase their success ratios - this one by Columbia University Prof. Duncan Watts and Jonah Peretti, co-founder of the Huffington Post.

Standard viral marketing is based on an analogy with the spread of infectious diseases. If you start with a seed of individuals who spread the message by "infecting" their friends, the expected number of new infectious people generated by each one is called the "reproduction rate," or R. If R is larger than 1 then you have a successful viral marketing campaign, if it is smaller than 1 then your campaign will fizzle out.

The point that the authors are making is that unlike infectious diseases marketers have a few more controls than diseases. First they can start with a much bigger seed. And with some of the new social networking/sharing tools that enable people to more easily forward messages to friends, they can also improve their message reproduction rate. And both those factors add up. Say that you have a reproduction rate of 0.5 in your campaign and that you send it to 10,000 people, then those people would pass it on to 5,000 and those would pass it on to 2,500 and so on - eventually reaching 20,000 people, twice your original seed. By having the ability to tweak both the size of the seed and the reproduction rate, you can optimize your campaigns - even when they are not totally "viral."

One interesting piece of software that they mention is ForewardTrack, an open source applications originally designed to promote online activism. The system tracks and maps the diffusion of email forwards, political calls-to-action, and online petitions. It can trace email forwards, map the impact of blogs, and facilitate web-based sign-ups and social networking. Many commercial entities, including P&G, are now using ForwardTrack as part of their email campaigns.

Fascinating...

[Tags: viral marketing bigseed]

April 12, 2007

Artificially creating barriers to adoption...

I have been looking for a group "to-do" list for a long time, and never really found what I was looking for. Most to-do lists are for individual usage - which is not what I am looking for. And unless you are Google, I do not even get why people bother developing those apps as there are a ton of applications on people's desktop that already have that service integrated - for free.

But as far as a simple group task list for truly distributed teams....there isn't much available. I finally found a solution that looked promising....integrating/synchronizing with Google calendar, etc. - all for $15. So I bought it thinking that would solve my problem. Except that when I tried to invite one of my closest associates, it required that he too buy that same application. That was almost a week ago, and of course that has not happened yet.

How can people do that? Group applications already have plenty of barriers to adoption to overcome - so why a company would artificially add one extra barrier in the mix is a mystery to me. I bet you that most "potential" users of this app would use it with teams of 2-3 people. So if that is the case, charge the buyer of the app $30-50 instead of trying to get $15 from all the users. That way you may end up with some real users instead of frustrated buyers.

Elementary...my dear Watson...

[Tags: barrier to adoption group application]

April 11, 2007

Leveraging envy to generate demand

This past Sunday, the Boston Globe reported on new research that shows that giving preferential treatment to a few can generate demand from everyone. The research was part of doctoral dissertation by Allison K.C. Lo.

As part of the research she did some amazing experiments. Some which were somewhat predictable - like the fact that by giving away swimsuits to the Olympic swimmers Speedo increased its sales of swimwear, or that by hosting free tastings exclusively for bartenders, Belvedere Vodka became one of the most successful Vodka launches. It is a known fact in marketing that people want to be associated with the "experts."

Other experiments were less evident, such as the one that showed that you do not even need an expert endorsement to convey that expert comparison. In one of those experiments, people were offered a camcorder with a $30 gift certificate to either Wal-Mart of for a for a Seagate external hard drive, which a tech-savvy buyer might use to store digital photos or video. What they found is that people preferred the Wal-Mart gift certificate over the Seagate because it gave them more flexibility. When they repeated the experiment with comparable camcorders that each came with just one offer, the researchers found that whichever camcorder came with the Seagate coupon won. The reason was because the hard drive promotion was perceived as something that high end camcorder buyers would buy. And people wanted to be associated with the high end guys.

So leveraging envy as part of your marketing works...probably just like leveraging people's ego, avarice and ambition...

What's next?

[Tags: marketing envy]

April 9, 2007

Doing market research differently

The Enterprise 2.0 RAVE that I described last Friday is not just another event. It came about as a market research project to increase the understanding around everything Enterprise 2.0 - product requirements, maturity of the market, success of pilot programs, etc. But instead of spending hours on the phone or in person doing interviews with willing candidates we decided to do something fun and get them all together at once for a giant brainstorming session.

The benefits of doing it this way are quite clear. Instead of having a one way delivery of value we created an environment in which there is a two way exchange of value - as every practitioner who is involved with Enterprise 2.0 projects is dying to meet other people who are going through the same pains. And the value to the market researcher is much higher as well - if we get 80 people to attend that means a minimum of 30 focused conversations with 8 people each on specific issues surrounding Enterprise 2.0 deployments.

[Tags: future of work enterprise 2.0 web 2.0 wiki tag blog]

March 29, 2007

Perceived quality loss lags actual quality loss by years

New research published in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review (available for free here) shows that changes in product quality do not immediately get perceived as such by customers - in fact it can take years for perceptions to catch up with actual changes.

The study, which covered 241 products in 46 categories over a period of 12 years, and which involved over 30,000 consumers, found that most of the perception catch-up happens after the second year following the quality change. Full adjustment to the changes takes 5 to 7 years. Those numbers vary depending on the brand, frequency and purchase and other factors, but even with products where consumers were quick to gauge the change, like toothpaste, it took 3.9 years.

This has some far reaching implications. Not only does it explain other research that shows that it takes 5 to 10 years for product quality improvements to result in higher profits, it also means that companies have a long time to course-correct when something bad happens with their product (assuming they do not get hammered in the blogosphere that is).

[Tags: product quality customer perception]

March 27, 2007

Think beyond the product itself when identifying customer needs

Many products in the marketplace have reached or surpassed their functionality saturation point - that point where new features largely go unused and are no longer used as a competitive differentiator. Phones, many software applications, copiers, watches, cars, baby products and many other product categories have reached that point.

When trying to uncover customer needs for those product categories, product managers need to think beyond the product itself because it isn't the product itself that customers are buying anymore.

Take cell phones - some people are buying and using them as ultra-lightweight computing devices, comparing them to small notebooks when making a buying decision. Others are buying them as a fashion statement. In both cases it's not the phone needs that will lead to successful new products, it's all about understanding the current fashion trends and a user's mobile computing needs .

Or take the copier market - most copiers will have the same feature set as most other copiers in that price range and most will have a similar lifespan and lifetime maintenance cost. A small business owner may make her buying decision based on the financing options and upgrade plans that are available - in essence turning the copier selection and buying process into a financial product selection and buying process.

And how many people do you think buy baby products for their "product" features? Most are basing their decisions on safety factors - essentially buying safety products with a twist of fashion.

When looking around at product offerings in these categories, there is evidence that some companies are getting it. But there is also a ton of evidence that many product managers are still operating in the dark ages of "feature-itis."

[Tags: innovation product management new product development product innovations new products customer needs]

March 26, 2007

A world without the 30 second spot or the glossy spread?

Bob Garfield's Chaos Scenario 2.0 is a great read in the online section of AdAge today.

Interrupt marketing is dead! Traditional media and traditional advertisers are locked into a death spiral...word of mouth and social networking are in...agencies are out...

Good stuff.

[Tags: advertisement new media]

March 19, 2007

Marketing shift: from 'one->to->many' to 'many<->to<->one'

At last week's Community 2.0 conference, an interesting discussion developed after John Hagel's keynote address, in which he said that customers do not want 1:1 marketing, but that they instead want to be put in touch with many connections and resources.

In a way, that is like describing marketing evolution from the one->to->many, to the 1<->to<->1 to the many<->to<->one, with the vendor having the opportunity to facilitate the connections between customers and other people and resources - also called community building. Despite a wave of excitement about the potential of 1to1 marketing in the 90's, popularized by the success of the One to One books by Rogers and Peppers, one attendee argued that we were never able to successfully achieve 1to1 and that therefore many-to-one may be an elusive goal as well.

But is this true? Is this truly an evolutionary process in which we cannot skip a step until the previous one is complete? Or did we missread the need for many-to-one as the need for one-to-one and launched on another marketing fad that never materialized? Could community-based marketing be like that as well?

It could be argued that this time we are dealing with the genuine article - and that some companies have known that for a very long time - skipping the 1to1 marketing wave all together in favor of many<->to<->one, and in the process reaping tremendous competitive advantages (note the bi-directionality of the arrows - a key ingredient to make it work!).

What do you think? Community-based marketing: another fad or a real competitive differentiator?

[Tags: community2.0 community 2.0 1to1 marketing community+marketing one-to-one]

February 16, 2007

Time shifting and skipping ads on DVR's is not as prevalent as previously believed

While data from Tivo showed that 70% of what TiVo owners watch is time shifted and that TiVo owners tend to fast forward about 70% of the ads when viewing pre-recorded content (see also Thomas Hawk for written report on the iMedia podcast where a Tivo representative discloses that data), new data released by Nielsen now shows that people who own DVR's still watch 2/3 of the ads and that 50% of them watch their shows in real time.

That is quite a shift in less than one year...or could it just be that Tivo owners are more geeky than other DVR owners so that their data is skewed compared to the market averages?

February 15, 2007

You can no longer hold on to your brands...

Last week I moderated a webinar panel on the role of communities in B2B marketing with Rob Leavitt from ITSMA and also with Mike Smith from BMC Software (recording can be found here - requires registration). It was a great conversation with good lessons learned from BMC Software.

As part of my opening comments I harped on one of my favorite topics again - that the field of marketing is undergoing tectonic shifts and that the old rules no longer apply. The old techniques of interrupt marketing that involved interrupting people to show them product or company messages or as Alan Moore, one of the co-authors of Communities Dominate Brands, calls it - the just in case marketing techniques - do not work anymore!

You can no longer broadcast messages to individuals and hope that they will get it and retell your story. Funding traditional communication programs like that is like pouring water into a sinking ship. Not only are people fed up with it, you are also competing with an exponentially growing number of companies who are trying to reach the same people. Plus you now compete across multiple media - many of them always-on and where prime time is between 9-5.

As a marketer you really need to solve the ambient findability problem - be there when people need you and where they need you. Madison Avenue calls it "engagement" - although most agencies are very confused about what engagement means. No it does not mean engagement with the ad...

One way of solving this riddle is to engage with communities who are already communicating amongst themselves about topics that you want to talk about. If your message resonates with them then it will automatically get amplified within the community before being "retold" outside the community. In some cases they may not like your message, but still like what you do and simply replace your message with something else before retelling the story. And then there will always be the case where they really don't like what your doing, will reject your message and talk back and in the process expose flaws with your company or product in public.

This is of course the end of control. This will happen whether you like it or not. You have to give up your brand to your communities to succeed. And if you do it right you will once again reach your customers and do it with budgets that are dramatically lower than what you are spending today.

[Tags: communities community management marketing community marketing]

February 14, 2007

New Real Beauty Campaign by Dove

This one from the UK...(via 50 plus marketing)

Link here for RSS subscribers.

February 12, 2007

Alaska Airlines Sucks! (WARNING: DO NOT FLY!)

Last Friday afternoon I was supposed to fly from San Diego to San Francisco on Alaska Airlines. We all know that the airline industry as a whole has gone down the tubes lately, but the 7 hour ordeal I went through was just a little over the top - talk about a business that could not care less about their customers.

It first started with weather and air traffic control delays - a problem which seemed unique to them as 3 United Airlines flights for San Francisco left with no problems. They then boarded us and announced that we had one additional delay. When our time to leave came up they told us that one of the air-conditioning packs was on the fritz - even though I could swear that we were still getting fresh air through the vents. When that was fixed, a circuit breaker tripped, and we all had to deplane. We each got a $6 meal voucher which got you a small pizza with no toppings and no drink - pepperoni or anything else had to be paid for by the customer.

We were then told/lied to that we would leave on an airplane that was parked at the gate next door with the same crew except for a new pilot. In the meantime I noticed that they had changed the flight number at the gate with the supposedly broken plane to a later San Fran flight.

When we finally boarded our flight one guy from the later flight tried to get on ours and was told that his flight would board momentarily at the gate next door. Knowing that the plane was broken, and having been lied to all night, I felt bad for him - thinking he would not see San Fran that night.

Our new plane had no power, since power could only be turned on by the pilot who had not yet arrived - a new twist in the story as I was led to believe that we had a new pilot who was already in the San Diego airport. No power means that it really gets hot, and it also means that the toilets do not flush, so it really gets stinky too. After being in there for awhile we saw the other airplane - the one we were on originally - take off for San Francisco! Once that flight was gone we were told that our pilot had arrived but that he was so ill that he had to be taken away by paramedics...so they cancelled the flight.

Couldn't they come up with a better story?

Obviously they decided that since we were so delayed already they were better off canceling our flight and having the next flight be an on-time departure. Instead of telling us that, they kept us at the airport for another few unnecessary hours and then made us board an empty plane so that we would not rebel when the later flight took off...

...of course, there was no budget for overnight accommodations...you were on your own - they would not even make suggestions on where to stay. There was an Alaska Airlines manager at the airport but he was not available to speak with customers - I bet he was fearing for his safety at that point.

When I tried to leave for San Francisco the next day, the only thing they could do for me was to get me there by 10:30pm through Portland. When I asked if they could put me on another airline they rudely told me that they could not do that and that I had to buy another ticket from another airline directly if I wanted to see San Francisco before 10:30 that night...

Note to self - never even think of flying Alaska Air again. They are rude and they don't even try to pretend that they are not lying to their customers.

[Tags: Alaska Air Alaska Airlines customer service worse practices airlines]

February 2, 2007

A day in the life of a product manager

The Pragmatic Marketer recently released their 2006 Annual Product Management and Marketing Survey (hmmm...maybe they should have called it the 2007 survey...)

Some interesting findings include:

on average companies have 5 developers for each product manager

about 10% of PM spend more than one day a week blogging

more than 80% of PM spend less than 1 hour a week measuring marketing programs

19% work in product management, 21% in marketing, and 10% in development

I wish I could get my hands on the names of the 7% companies where product management works in sales. That would make for some good stocks to short!

[Tags: product management marketing]

January 30, 2007

More research on viral marketing - and supporting the limited role of "influentials"

Right on the heels of learning that the influentials may in fact not be all that influential in causing trends and other social "epidemics", here comes more research (pdf) confirming the limited role of the influentials and heeding marketers that some viral marketing techniques could easily backfire on them.

Jure Leskoved from Carnegie Mellon, Lada Adamic from the University of Michigan and Bernardo Huberman from HP Labs collaborated on this research project where they looked at the dynamics of viral marketing.

Here are some of their findings:

We find that most recommendation chains do not grow very large, often terminating with the initial purchase of a product.

Marketers should take heed that providing excessive incentives for customers to recommend
product purchases are not far from usual 80-20 rule (the top twenty percent of the products account for 20 percent of the sales), with the top 20% of the products contributing to about half the sales

individuals' likelihood of purchasing a product initially increases as they receive additional recommendations for it, but a saturation point is quickly reached. Interestingly, as more recommendations are sent between the same two individuals, the likelihood that they will be heeded decreases

Marketers should take heed that providing excessive incentives for customers to recommend products could backfire by weakening the credibility of the very same links they are trying to take advantage of.

...we find that the probability of purchasing a product increases with the number of recommendations received, but quickly saturates to a constant and relatively low probability. This means individuals are often impervious to the recommendations of their friends, and resist buying items that they do not want.

we find that there are limits to how influential high degree nodes are in the recommendation network. As a person sends out more and more recommendations past a certain number for a product, the success per recommendation declines. This would seem to indicate that individuals have influence over a few of their friends, but not everybody they know.

Finally, we presented a model which shows that smaller and more tightly knit groups tend to be more conducive to viral marketing.

This paper also exposes the potential long term negative effects of commercializing relationships on the value of personal recommendations and word of mouth in general - a practice used aggressively by some well known marketers.

[Tags: influentials viral marketing trends social networks word-of-mouth WOM]

January 27, 2007

Size does not matter

This is a great ad for the new Golf GTI with its tiny engine that still produces plenty of horsepower...(via the thinking blog)

January 24, 2007

Online word of mouth is much more powerful (or dangerous) than offline word of mouth

customer service hell sm.jpg The latest issue of Revenue magazine has an article on the impact of online research on off-line purchases. Quoting from comScore Networks research they found that in the "toy and hobby" category, 42% of people who did online research bought a product directly related to that research - except that 88% of those people made their purchase off-line and only 12% made their purchase online. In the Consumer electronics space, 18% bought based on online research - but 93% of those bought off-line.

Quoting from Opinion Research, they found that "77% of people who do online research before buying a product purchase something when they went to the store the last time they did online research," with "over half (52%) purchased just the item they did research on, while another 18% purchased that item and additional items."

Another Research paper, this one from Perfomics is quoted as saying that "the majority of consumers conduct research online during his year's holiday season and 43% plan to make both online and offline purchases based on that research." It goes further to say that "the majority of consumers become more brand- sensitive after conducting online research."

That pretty much confirms that unlike what some analyst firms pretend, online word of mouth has the potential of being much more effective or dangerous than off-line word of mouth.

Take the personal example of Mercedes Benz which was well documented on this site (Mercedes - a case study on how to squander a great brand, Mercedes says that cars fail in the first 50K miles - after that it's the fault driver, Mercedes Benz does not care about its customers, and Mercedes Benz - poor customer service ROI). For a long while, those rants came out on the top of a variety of Google searches. So if half of the potential buyers do online research before buying, a disproportionate number of them will run into my online rants and at least pause, if not decide against buying this product. The online negative word of mouth reaches a much larger audience than any off-line word of mouth recommendation would have, plus it spans over a much longer period of time, and it also attracts additional negative word of mouth, which only makes the case stronger!

As an example, witness some of the comment excerpts that are still being made on those stories on a regular basis:

"Just read your blog, Just decided not to purchase a 60K Mercedes I was looking to buy." (01/04/07)

"I drive a C180 classic kompressor 52 plate with 35K on the clock. Since day of purchase in Feb 06 the colland warning light comes on every few days. The feeder hose has been replaced, the cap and the head gaskett and still the coolant light comes on every few days. My local MB dealership are at a loss what else to do." (11/21/06)

"I for one will never buy a Mercedes Car again and will continue to discourage others from doing so" (11/07/06)

"I PURCHASED MERCEDES ML 350, 2006 IN APRIL 2006. FROM DRIVER'S SEAT, THE LEFT SIDE VIEW MIRROR IS ONLY PARTIALLY VISIBLE! I SHOWED THIS TO HBL DEALERSHIP IN TYSONS CORNER VIRGINIA, AND THEY AGREED TO THIS DESIGN ISSUE, WHIC CANNOT BE FIXED, EVEN IF IT IS A SAFETY HAZARD...THE BEST REMEDY IS TO SHUT OFF THE AC DUCTS ON BOTH DRIVER AND PASSGENGER SIDE! THIS IS THE RESPONSE I GOT, FOR PAYING HIGH PRICE FOR THIS EXPENSIVE CAR " (11/03/06)

"I like most people who feel badly let down by MB will never buy another car from them, I thought I was buying quality and reliabilty." (07/27/06)

"Like some other people, I decided I shall never buy or even hire a Mercedes car again." (06/22/06)

"Funny that I stumbled on your site googling MZB's home office customer service...I should have learned my lesson the first time. I will never lease/own a Mercedes again. They do not stand behind their quality, or service. I hope people read this and take notes." (05/26/06)

"I've run an independent MB repair shop for over 20 years & believed in the quality of their cars...until now. I'm loosing customers left & right. I can't, in good concious, recommend a new merecedes to my loyal customers, some have been with me since I started & wish to keep me as their mechanic.I am seriously thinking of switching to Lexus,since Mercedes stated this is the car it will try to get as good as by 2009." (04/22/06)

There is no way that these stories could have affected that many people over such a long period of time in the off-line world.

[Tags: Mercedes Mercedes customer satisfaction consumer generated content word of mouth wom customer service]

January 22, 2007

The community-driven marketing department - a romantic notion or a possible reality?

In a couple of different discussions (on this blog as well as on the Future of Communities blog) I was taken to task over the suggestion that a company could eliminate their marketing department and replace it with customer communities much like what happened at Ducati.

Over at the Future of Communities blog I looked at what it would take to replace a traditional marketing department with a more lightweight community-based group - concluding that while you may not want to get rid of your marketing department, you should definitely look into making it much more community-driven.

[Tags: communities community management marketing community marketing]

January 20, 2007

Interesting Oticon ad

January 16, 2007

Escaping the middle-market trap

The latest McKinsey Quarterly (requires subscription) has an interview with Electolux CEO Hans Straberg in which he describes how Electrolux escaped the middle-market trap.

The middle-market trap happens when a market gets polarized with low cost Asian brands taking the low end of the market and premium brands growing at the high end of the market at the expense of the middle-of-the-road brands. This is a common occurrence in markets, a threat to which most companies respond by cutting costs. History is littered with companies - some well known icons - that have cut themselves into oblivion.

One of the main changes implemented in marketing was the way they segmented customers. Instead of using the traditional industry segmentation based on price and a "good-better-best" hierarchy they started segmenting customers by lifestyle - ending up with more than 20 different product positions. Amazing how companies are only now discovering the power of actual customer scenarios as a basis to segment markets - a technique described by Tom Peters in his very early books.

Another change they implemented - which allowed them to play at both ends of the market - was to set up two different business models, with separate sales forces, to serve the value end of the market differently than the premium end of the market.

Mass-segmentation does not work anymore, except perhaps for some commodity products - like gas, or corn. Most mass markets, however, behave like collections of micro-niches and benefit from being served the same way you would serve customers in the long tail.

[Tags: long tail mass market middle market trap community marketing]

January 11, 2007

"Thin-slicing" marketing plans

bulbs & gridsm.jpg There is a new 5 "things" meme going around and I have just been tagged for it by Mary Schmidt. This time the idea is "thin-slice" a particular topic - a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his latest book Blink, and described as follows:

"Thin-slicing is a neat cognitive trick that involves taking a narrow slice of data, just what you can capture in the blink of an eye, and letting your intuition do the work for you."

My task was to thin-slice a marketing plan - so here we go:

1) Do you really need a marketing "plan"?
Very often people just need to get out and engage with customers, prospects, influencers and connectors. There is no need for a marketing plan to do that. Often times marketing plans are just produced by marketing luddites as a CYA document. Granted, for some very large projects that involve large teams of people a plan can be useful - but more as a check-list than as a marketing roadmap.

2) Does the marketing plan show the addressable market being in the billions of dollars?
Any VC will scoff at these numbers - yet they won't invest if it is not true. Don't talk about the total addressable market, tell me how you will get your next 10 or 100 customers. Who are they, what do they do, where do they live, how will you reach them? Give me real life scenarios of potential customers and how you will help them solve their problem. Don't give aggregate figures that have zero meaning.

3) Are you pretending or intending on being a leader in a category that nobody ever heard of?
Most companies I have worked with consider themselves the category leader in a category with one player - themselves. A category is recognized by others as a category and has other players in it. You can "create" a category, but you need help to create a new one - including help from competitors. Show me how you will create a new category, and who you will enlist to help with the creation? Show me how you will change the rules of the game in that category, how you will change the players or change their respective value as you enter the category - now that's interesting!

4) Does your competitive review result in your company or product being in the upper right hand corner of some diagram?
Do I need to elaborate? You and everybody else lives there...it must be pretty tough to compete there. Show me where you are on the BS curve compared to others - that would be much more interesting...

5) What part of the plan deals with how you will deal with change?
The biggest danger with plans is that they become "bibles" - and once they are approved nobody can deviate from the chosen path. Yet most successful marketing programs are emergent in nature, they are like a jamming sessions...and so back to point 1) do you really need a marketing plan?

And now my turn to tag:

Tara - how about engaging communities as part of your marketing plan?

Pito - what about product plans?

Jackie - how about word of mouth marketing plans?

Chris - what about customer service strategies?

Tom - what about brand strategies?

[updated] I decided to add a 6th one as I care about PR and Europeans :) - Neville, what do you think?

[Tags: thin-slicing thin-slice marketing plan blink]

January 10, 2007

The "Inter" Personal Enterprise

As part of a client project I ran across a set speeches that former Oracle COO Ray Lane has been making on the "inter" Personal Enterprise (you can find a slide deck used at a Sandhill conference here).

In his recorded keynote presentation, which can be found at IT conversations, Lane reminds us that eighty percent of the enterprise software industry profits currently go to just three companies, while seven thousand companies fight over the remainder. In order to succeed in this environment, he recommends that enterprise software vendors focus on ease of adoption, instantaneous value and a minimum IT footprint. He also says that "...vendors need to make it easy for users to get started and provide real value to the customer before she is required to pay. The user experience should be personalized and contextualized and the product should spread through the enterprise organically, via user recommendation, rather than by management edict."

That is in fact how we built eRoom Technology to become a profitable $40M company in the early 2000's. We provided easy ways for individuals and small teams to get started after which the solution would spread organically throughout the enterprise through user recommendations. By the time the CIO at KPMG decided to standardize on eRoom as their collaboration platform, there were already over 2,000 happy eRoom users in the company. We then tried to scale the ease of adoption process by releasing an ASP version of the product. While I still believe that was a good idea, that strategy was not widely successful as the ASP offering never fully got embraced by our "enterprise" sales force. The shift from big upfront payments and fat commission checks to a more predictable pay-as-you go scheme was just too much of a culture shock.

In a lot of ways, that is also what is happening with Enterprise 2.0 tools - the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise. But as Harvard Business Professor Andrew McAfee, who coined the Enterprise 2.0 term, predicts, most Enterprise 2.0 tools will remain confined to geek-heavy groups, companies or industries, or at best they may find spotty mainstream penetration.

Part of the reason here is that while the tools do spread organically, they still have a long way to go in terms of user friendliness, depth of features, and seamless integration. Without those aspects, non-geeky users and innovators will have a hard time finding value in the tools.

[Tags: web 2.0 enterprise 2.0 innovation technology adoption]

January 3, 2007

You are your context

Try tapping a song for someone else – chances that the person you are tapping it for gets it right is 2.5%. What makes a lot of sense to you, because you have the song playing in your head – sounds like total gibberish to others. The same is true when you meet someone online for the first time – their chosen handle may symbolize some imagery for you that was totally unintended by that person.

The difference here is that we all interpret signals based on the context we have. And when our context is different, we interpret things differently. A different context is also the main cause for friction and conflict between people.

In the past, there was a higher likelihood that people’s context in a particular geographic region was somewhat similar – there were only a limited amount of TV programs and radio shows, people had a much more limited supply of books and newspapers, music preferences were more uniform, there were fewer options for schooling and there were less churches to choose from. Now on the other hand, much of the popular culture is consumed through 100’s of cable channels or through the internet, you can read books that are self-published and reach audiences in the 100’s of people, you can read any newspaper in the world online or get your news from specialized blogs, you can pick from music bands that self-publish their music on social networking sites and have fan clubs in the tens or hundreds of people, and you can come up with educational programs that are totally unique to you. Add to that the increased mobility of people and the ongoing trend towards more extreme and fractioned faith-based groups – and you have a world when there is almost no shared context anymore. It’s what Wired Editor Chris Anderson calls the long tail…except that perhaps there are more people moving into the long tail now that it can be served.

Marketers, advertisers, communicators and politicians have been struggling with this phenomenon for a few years now – mostly because the old ways of “framing” issues does not work in a world where people’s context or “world-view” is so vastly different from one another.

A world populated with people that have very different contexts should also be a world where innovation explodes – or is Kathy Sierra right when she says that the “wisdom of crowds” mostly results in safe, well-balanced and non-offensive solutions?

What do you think?

[Tags: long tail wisdom of crowds innovation world view]

December 8, 2006

A Brand Loyalty Hierarchy

cool dudessm.jpg When you think about the affinity that you have for different brands, you quickly realize that they fall into different categories - you may not have the as much brand affinity and loyalty to your soap vendor as you do to your favorite shirt manufacturer, or your car manufacturer.

Could there be such a thing as a universal brand loyalty hierarchy - akin to Maslow's needs hierarchy? And if so, would it help marketers in determining what marketing program might work better to promote and position their products?

Let's try this out and see where it leads...

At the highest level of the brand loyalty hierarchy are products that help define who you are and what you stand for. They are the products that define your personal brands - let's call them Image Defining Brands. Brands that fall in this category in the consumer space include your clothes- you might want to wear only Nautica shirts because you are a sailor, or a sailor wanna be. Another product that probably falls in this category is the car you drive - with some people driving all wheel drive vehicles to indicate their love for the rugged outdoors and adventure travel, and others swearing by the Toyota Prius to indicate their dedication to a cleaner planet. In the corporate world, products that fall into this category are products that can affect a person's image or career. Early adopters of Lotus Notes collaboration software or Linux servers come to mind. Being early in buying VoIP solutions would probably fall into this category as well. The key is that those brands define who I am or who I want others to think I am.

Next ring down are products that do not necessarily define your image, but they make you feel good - let's call them Feel Good Brands. You may not really have much brand loyalty to a soap vendor who's product you use, but you buy the same soap over and over again because it smells good and makes you feel good when you step out of the shower. Another example in this category could be Fair Trade Coffee - it really does not make a difference to your image whether you drink Fair Trade Coffee or not - after all it is not written on your cup. But it makes you feel good that the laborers that brought you this coffee were treated fairly. In the business world, products that fall in this category are products in well established and mature product categories. If you are in charge of deciding which CRM system to bring into your company, it is no longer a career defining decision, or even an image defining decision - it is very much a "feel good" decision. You will choose a solution that will make you feel good about your decision.

One ring further down are the products for which you have little brand affinity. They don't define you, nor do they make you feel much different than if you were using another brand - let's call them Commodity Brands. Low end pens and pencils come to mind. You may buy a pen from Bic because you know that they have a reputation to last long and not leak on planes, but in reality you might be just as satisfied and feel just as good with a Papermate pen. The same is true for the gas you put in your car, you may have a slight preference for Mobil because it has a reputation of being a cleaner gas, but you really would not feel much different after filling up your tank with with cheap LuKoil gas. In the business world, brands that fall into this category would be office supplies, or snack/vending machine service providers. The key buying decisions for these brands are reputation and trust.

Of course, product vendors can create products in certain product categories that allows them to move up (or down) the hierarchy. Luxury pens are perceived by some buyers as image defining products. And while Fair Trade Coffee in your own cup may not help define your image, being a Starbucks vs. a Dunkin' Donuts kind of coffee buyer may do just that.

More on this later...what are your thoughts?

[Tags: brand image brand affinity brand loyalty]

December 5, 2006

Corante is sponsoring the WOMMA Summit this coming week

If you have anything to do with Word of Mouth Marketing, you should attend the WOMMA Summit next week!

As they say about the conference:

Have you heard of word of mouth? If you haven't yet, you will. It's the new way to market, and more and more companies are getting on board every day. Just ask the Inc. 500 (82% of their CEOs use word of mouth) and their customers (2/3 of consumer purchases are influenced by word of mouth).

Word of mouth is already happening TO you. Do you know how to make it work FOR you? Learn at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association's Word of Mouth Marketing Summit, Dec. 12-13 in Washington, D.C. It's the only conference that will give you a hands-on, advanced understanding of how to build truly deep, two-way relationships with your customers.

The Summit features:
- Lessons from 70+ experts
- Big questions, important issues, and straight answers
- Practical "how-to" instructions
- Everyone you need to know

Register today at www.womma.org/summit2.

They have a great line-up of speakers as well as many interesting people in attendance - making for great networking with!

November 29, 2006

People don't get your marketing speak, nor do they get your strategic executive gibberish...

Chip Heath and Dan Heath wrote an interesting article in the Harvard Business review this month about the "curse of knowledge" (requires subscription).

The curse of knowledge happens when your language, which is based on your level of knowledge, cannot be understood by others. So an executive who uses language like "achieving customer delight!", or "unlocking shareholder value", phrases that have real meaning to him based on his years of immersion in the logic and conventions of business, will sound like a person who has a love affair with vague strategy statements to frontline employees who may not be privy to the underlying meanings.

An interesting experiment done at Stanford University in the early 90's proves that point rather nicely. In the experiment they assigned people one of two roles - "tapper" and "listener." The tapper would pick a well known song, such as "Happy Birthday" and tap it out on the table. The listener had to guess what the song was. Before tapping the song the tapper was asked to predict the probability that the listener would get it right - and they predicted 50%. When they actually tapped the songs, the success ratio was a whopping 2.5% - out of 120 songs, only three songs were guessed correctly. So what sounded like the perfect tune for the tapper actually sounded like some kind of weird tapping code for the listener.

One way to avoid this is by "translating" your message in very simple language, and one company that does this right according to the article is Trader's Joe. They actually develop their messages for the imaginary unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.

This is a great reminder of the power of using real and actual scenarios in doing business. Not only can real detailed scenarios with real people help you with messaging, they will also help you with the design of better products and and the development of better customer interaction processes.

[Tags: messaging corporate speak marketing]

November 28, 2006

Bruegger's is listening! I am a fan now...

As many of you will have noticed, I have had my fair share of mishaps with my local Bruegger's. The last time I wrote about my experiences, Scott Hughes, the VP of marketing posted a comment on my blog asking for more information so that they could address the problem.

We went back and forth on email a few times and then two weeks ago I noticed that they put a new general manager in charge of the store. Not only has the service improved considerably, the whole mood of the store has brightened somehow. And then yesterday I get an email from Scott to inform me that they had made some management changes at the store and asking for my business, saying: "I hope you give us another opportunity."

WOW - Scott thank you for listening! You just turned me into a big Bruegger's fan!

And btw - your new Ciabatta's are great too!

[Tags: bruegger's customer service bagels]

November 14, 2006

Advertising to spur demand

Slate has an interesting take on the HeadOn ads - they give you headaches and create demand! (via MIT Advertising Lab)

Using an executive blog to "control" the message...

Nick Car over at Rough Type has an interesting post on how AOL Ted Leonsis used his blog to control his message. He calls it defensive blogging - a blogger who's main goal is not to engage in a conversation but to gain more control over the results that show up when people Google you.

[Tags: blogging conversation messaging]

November 13, 2006

Increasing customer loyalty by creating deep-soul connections

Reveries.com released a survey and white paper on increasing loyalty by creating deep-soul connections, Harley style (pdf here).

Dori Molitor, the author of the report starts off by talking about the incredible levels of brand loyalty that Harley-Davidson bikers have - attributing it to a deep-soul connection between Harley-Davidson and those who love their motorcycle, and claiming that this is the highest level relationship a brand can have with its consumers.

Companies like Apple, BMW, or Nike can easily be used as other examples of companies that have achieved deep-soul connections with their customers, but can other companies in less "sexy" industries develop deep-soul connections with their customers? The white paper takes us through the stories of less obvious candidates that have achieved that same level of customer connection - including General Mills, Serta, the mattress company and Trader Joe's.

One of the things to remember, says Dori Molitor, is: "A deep-soul connection is not the exclusive purview of ostensibly “sexy” brands like Harley and Nike, nor does it require spending enormous sums of money. It is about transcending those kinds of considerations and connecting with consumers based on a higher purpose than a sterile, financial transaction." And a higher purpose does not mean a "good cause" or a charity - something many marketers will try to use and fail miserably. Finding a higher purpose is all "about the connections that brands can provide to other people (their relationships) or the ways in which they help consumers lead happier, more purposeful lives."

Well said! At the end of the day branding is all about how people feel about themselves...

[Tags: loyalty customer loyalty deep soul connection harley]

November 10, 2006

Email marketing delivers best ROI - but do you buy that?

According to a new study by the Direct Marketing Association, and as reported in DIRECT, email marketing delivers the highest ROI of all media available to marketers. Having just finished reading a pre-release version of WOMMA president Andy Sernovitz' new book - Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking - he would probably argue that word of mouth marketing would have the highest ROI as you can get that going with no investments.

The DMA research shows that the return on email marketing in 2005 was $57.25 for every dollar spent, compared to $7.09 for catalog marketing and $22.52 for non-email Internet marketing. The study also projects that all the ROI's for the different media marketing options are headed down-ward.

The same research also estimates that the commercial email market in the US was $16.5B in 2005, while the direct marketing-driven sales hit $1.806 trillion in 2005 - projected to hit $2.627 trillion in 2011!

Ouch...that sounds like a lot of wasted dollars...there should be better ways to reach people. And no matter what Set Godin says about messaging frequency vs. "being full ," there ought to be better solutions out there to resolve the ambient findability problem in marketing!

The DIRECT article did not mention anything about the methodology used by DMA - but it is assumed that the study looked at investments vs. "new" customers and "new" revenues - which is a really bad transaction-based metric in marketing.

A more interesting metric would have been to understand how email direct marketing impacts long term customer-relationship-based revenue streams for companies. Isn't that where the real profitability lies?

MARKETING - it's not the transaction anymore, it's the relationship, dummy!

[Tags: direct marketing ambient findability marketing innovation email marketing word of mouth marketing WOM]

November 9, 2006

Peer pressure in Social Media

Giovanni Rodriguez found that the business benefits of social media are becoming quite apparent, but the pressure to stand out -- and do something different -- is mounting (disclosure - I am on the advisory board of Hubbub PR). He starts his excellent post by saying that: “There’s no question – the early success of peer-driven, social-media programs will put pressure on businesses to both adapt and adopt. But, for some leaders, there’s another question: in a world where everyone participates, what does it mean to lead?”

In their rush to stand out, companies and people will screw it up - let's just hope that they don't break it for the rest of us.

November 3, 2006

The winners will be determined because of marketing

$fract sm.jpg$ In a recent roundtable discussion at Wharton, C. Robert Henrikson, the CEO of Metlife said "In our industry, the winners will be determined because of marketing. By that I mean true marketing, not sales support, which is what the insurance industry is about in the United States" (here via a pre reading documents from the Innovation & Corporate Entrepreneurship Research Center at Babson for their upcoming Idea-to-profit event which will cover the intersections of marketing and innovation).

Henrickson went on to say that most insurance firms have no marketing plan other than to be a fast follower of innovations developed by competing firms.

Now isn't that true for most industries. Marketers mimic their competitors, they go after the same customers with the same offerings, and they end up killing the market with price-wars...

The panel which also included an executive from a major drug manufacturer, a major real estate developer, a major bank CEO, a retired partner from a major investment bank, and a few Wharton Professors, were then asked if they saw major innovations coming from India and China.

Almost all said no, which is rather surprising even though there were no high tech players on the panel. After all, Muhammed Yunus just won the Nobel Price for Peace for Grameen Bank - which is not just a do-good organization, but a very profitable one at that. Does this not count as a major innovation in the financial services sector?

The health care experts saw little innovation coming from India because of their weak patent system, which they claim is holding innovation back. They also see the biggest opportunity in India being with clinical trials, saying that "there are massive patient populations there that have not been tapped in any major way."

Ouch! Is this perhaps a case of real-time marketing myopia? Perhaps those experts should take a look at open source business models - especially the ones that have been applied to non-technology products - and their potential for traditional business model destruction (or is it disruption?). And instead of looking at India as a massive source of (probably largely unprotected) people available for early clinical trials or cheap labor, they should look at it as a test bed for new business models. After all, it is because of Indian generic drug manufacturers that the price of Aids treatment came down from $15,000 a patient to less than $200 in 10 years time - and that Indian generics are now being used to treat half of the aids patients in the developing world. Does this not count as innovation in health care?

[Tags: innovation marketing marketing innovation india china]

October 31, 2006

Customer communities do pay off!

The most recent Harvard Business Review reports on a study (requires subscription) that was done on the impact of customer communities on customer behavior at eBay in Germany (disclosure - I have an active interest in this topic as I have agreed to chair a conference on the business of communities - Community 2.0 - but more on that later).

The numbers are quite interesting. The experiment involved 140,120 eBay customers who had bought or sold on eBay but who had not participated in the eBay customer communities before. 79.242 were invited to join the online customer community, while the remaining 60,878 were used as a control group. Of the people who were asked to join the community, 3,299 became active participants and 11,242 became lurkers. Over the course of a year they compared the behavior of the active participants and lurkers to that of the control group and found that:

Lurkers and active participants won up to 25% more auctions

Lurkers and participants paid prices that were as much as 24% higher

Lurkers and participants spent up to 54% more money in total

Active participants listed up to 4 times as many items

Active participants earned up up 6 times as much monthly sales revenue

For first time sellers who were lurkers and participants, 10 times as many of them started selling on eBay after joining the community

All in all the activities of the lurkers and participants resulted in 56% more sales during the year of the study - bringing in millions of additional dollars into eBay's bottom line.

So can the results of this experiment be replicated in more traditional businesses?

Some people clearly think so, while others who used to be very enthusiastic about the business of communities are starting to become very skeptical.

Communities require a certain critical mass to get going - and not all companies have a large enough customer base to get to that point. They also require a lot more work and resources than most companies are willing to invest - to set up the infrastructure, to nurture the communities, to acquire content, etc.

Active communities of employees, customers and partners are clearly powerful management instruments that can dramatically improve core business processes like innovation, product development and marketing & sales. They can also backfire and have very negative impact if they are not managed properly, or set up wrongly. Before embarking on this path, companies have to truly understand the dynamics as well as the pros and cons of communities. They also need to find out if they have the resources and wherewithal to create their own communities or whether they should play in someone else's sandbox.

Unfortunately, many will start the process by throwing technology at the problem - let's just hope that those ignorants won't destroy the market for the rest of us like email spammers destroyed email marketing and (un)ethical zealots are slowly destroying word of mouth marketing.

[Tags: community management customer community community marketing wom word of mouth marketing]

October 23, 2006

A new agency in town...

I got a message this weekend from Shel Holtz that he and Neville Hobson are joining Joe Jaffe to found a new type of marketing agency, called crayon. Their stated goal is to "integrate the best of the consulting, agency, advisory, thought leadership and education worlds."

The new gig will launch Thursday - with a press release and a party in their new offices - in 2nd Life!

Best of luck to you!

October 19, 2006

Is this what brands are all about?

Advertising Age just came out with their top 200 brands report - in which they measure brands by their ad spending on "measured' media. As can be expected when you measure brands by their ad spending, the top 25 list is littered with losers - including Verizon, in the top spot, Ford (#3), AT&T, Dell, etc.

Verizon spent almost $1B in "measured" media in the first half of 2006, while Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge combined spent over $1.2B on "measured" media in the first six months. Ford spent 3X as much as General Motors Corp. on "measured" media. And when looking at the top 200 brand spending by media, they allocated a whopping 6.7% of their "measured" media spending on the Internet - with the rest spent on TV, Radio, Newspapers and Magazines.

What the heck are they thinking? And what are they "measuring"? Do you think that if Ford were to stop spending on traditional advertising for six month or even a year and instead invest $1 B in a clean energy research they would lose a ton of marketshare? And what if they were to spend their marketing dollars more wisely - like use the information that they already have about their existing customers to market more effectively to their existing base. If you have a Ford, how many times did you hear directly from the company since you purchased your car? Or what would happen if Verizon were to spent 1/2 as much as they did in the first six months - and by doing so still spend as much as their nearest competitors - and instead spend the other $1/2 B on customer service and customer retention programs?

Economist Steven Levitt - from Freakonomics fame - found that money spent by candidates in political races hardly mattered at all. In fact he found that a candidate could cut his spending in half and lose only 1% of the vote. The same research found that a losing candidate could double his spending and expect to shift the vote in his favor by only that same 1%.

Verizon - are you listening?

There is no question that advertising plays a role in marketing - but those numbers prove that a majority of ad dollars are being wasted and miss-prioritized!

First you need a product that will WOW your customers. And while Geoffrey Moore will tell you and Apple prove to you that you should not care about customer service while your product is in the Tornado, when you have mature products like Verizon and Ford, customer service and retention are key to your success. In fact, they can lead to a ton of free advertising - generated by your very own consumers and delivered with much higher precision than TV advertising!

[Tags: advertising branding brands customer service]

October 12, 2006

[rant] Why are companies thinking that it's OK to trick their customers?

My PC has been sluggish lately. Since I do not have an IT department I looked for some online solutions to help me figure out what might be wrong with my system (I know that it is partly my fault as I keep downloading beta software that is really pre-alpha software)...

After (very little) research I decided to download the Uniblue Wintask Pro - which seemed to have received good reviews from sites that I trust (i.e., CNET). On top of that it came with free software that promised to speed up my PC - exactly what I was looking for. When I tried the Wintask Pro it did not seem to offer me much more than the Windows Task Manager - so I went for the free software that promised to solve my problem. The minute I launched the application it told me that there was an upgrade available, which I eagerly downloaded (yeah, yeah, in my multitasking way of doing things I am sure I missed some legal "fine print" in the process somewhere). After running the application's diagnostic it came back with a whole bunch of issues related to my computer that needed to be "optimized" - which of course resulted in much optimism on my part that I would finally be able to solve my problem...

...except...the new version can only do diagnostics. If I want a version that actually fixes the problem I need to buy that one too...

How is that for misleading a newly minted customer who just dropped $50 on your solution?

I may spend another nanosecond or so to see how I can get my money back - since they have a big sign on their site claiming a money back guarantee - but do you think that I would ever recommend this company or buy from them again?

Marketing and customer service is not so complicated - it starts with common sense!

Do not trick your customers

Do not lie to you customers

Do not mislead your customers

Do not blame your customers - even if it is their fault

Do not treat your customers as if they were stupid - even if they are

Don't assume that customers do not talk about their experiences with others

And please, do not assume that customers have no memory

Oh, one more thing - Everett Rogers laid out a scientific approach to the principles of adoption of innovations (same as new products) back 40 years ago - this is not rocket science - it's almost antique!

[/rant]

[Tags: customer service uniblue]

October 7, 2006

Bruegger's Wins Award for Worst Customer Service

[update 11/28/06] See also related article on how Bruegger's gets it and fixed the problem.

For awhile I was refraining myself from writing negative things about Bruegger's as my previous rants (here is one) got a pretty high ranking on Google. But the absurdness of their practices is so flagrant that is has become too hard not to write about it.

A few weeks back I went to Bruegger's only to find out that they had no bagels - you heard that right - on a Sunday at 8:30 am they had NO bagels. Apparently the baker had overslept. If you are a bagel shop and for some reason you have no bagels, why even bother to open up shop???

Then a week later I got a bagel with hair in it. We tried to convince ourselves that it was hair from a cleaning brush so that we could at least continue eating the others - but even that is unacceptable!

When I walked into the store last week, there was a huge line...and one very sloooow server. When a guy ordered 36 assorted bagels I thought I was going to die - the misunderstandings and the recounts that took place as part of that transaction were like a caricature on how to really piss off your customers. The thing is, even that server probably should not have been there. She most likely missed the memo that said that there was a team meeting on the back porch of the store. Indeed, after waiting in line for 15 minutes, a team of 4 Bruegger employees - including the top store manager (a very grumpy man), and the assistant manager (who clearly lacks respect for the top dog) - all came in chatting from the back porch - oblivious to the collective negative energy that was about to turn violent in their store.

And then there was this morning. I was early and there was only one server again, who evidently had forgotten (or never was given) the log-ins for the cash registers. She was using a little hand calculator to figure out how much customers should pay. I had three bagels and even though there is a special price for a three-pack, that little calculator did not have an option to enter a three-pack - the only option on that calculator was 3X the price of a single bagel. For awhile it thought it might be an operator error, but after a few minutes of arguments I realized that it must have been a calculator limitation (arrggghhhh!).

If you are in management at Bruegger's and happen to read this post (although I bet you nobody is listening) - the next time you are in my town, go take a look across the hall to Starbucks. The place is humming, employees add to the vibrancy of the atmosphere, I have never seen them run out of coffee, and I have never had hair in my coffee or in their pastries!

And if you are wondering why I continue to put up with this nonsense - you have just encountered a case where the buyer and the actual customer/consumer are two different people. I don't usually eat bagels - my son does. And yes, I have thought about taking him with me a few times so that he would get fed up with this whole thing and allow me to buy bagels elsewhere...

[Tags: bruegger's customer service bagels]

September 27, 2006

97% of IP addresses should be blocked!

According to ReturnPath, fewer than 1% of sending IP addresses are not sending SPAM (full research brief here via revenue)

Could any self-governance guidelines from an industry association or government regulations have prevented this total distruction of email marketing? Are other popular marketing techniques going to end in the same boat?

[Tags: direct marketing email marketing spam wom]

September 21, 2006

Commercial buddies and friends on MySpace

ClickZ Experts has an interesting article on Social Network Marketing by Sean Carton. In it he lists some of the profiles of advertisers on MySpace.

Helga - for Volkswagen, a 25 year old female from Germany has 9144 friends

The Original MySpace Burger King King - male, 52yo - has 3255 friends (he's probably too old for MySpace)

Smart - the Wendy's Square - a 28 yo single male (and with an unsure orientation) - has 79,840 friends

It all looks pretty cheesy - surely there must be better ways to promote products to the youth market.

[Tags: social networking myspace advertising online advertising]

The difference between perception and reality in shopping

Cool News has an interesting article today - Costco Confusion. In it, Tim Manners explains how what looks like a good deal at your local Costco or Sam's Club, may in fact be cheaper elsewhere.

Even though we now have the ability to compare prices across channels - something economists call "perfect information" - we still make stupid buying decisions and overpay for products. Quoting from an article on the same topic in the NYT, he says it is because "we can only focus on one thing, and that one thing tends to be a distraction. At Costco, “the very size of the product is the distraction.” If it’s that big at that price it must be a bargain, right?"

While it is easy to agree with that, another possible factor is that we tend to buy things that we did not research or even intended to buy when going on our weekly or monthly trip to Costco or Sam's. And once we're there, it is really hard to start comparative shopping from your cell phone - even if you have an Internet enabled phone with a larger screen. And besides the bulk size of the items - which indeed implies a bargain - some retailers like Staples will have signs promoting their price match policy - giving you another false sense of "security" when you buy an item.

Buying at a higher price than what might be available elsewhere happens probably more often when a buyer is making multiple purchases at once - as is the case with groceries or office supplies. When a buyer is buying a single item, say a car or a camera, they are probably more likely to go where the best bargain is.

Well, as pointed out in the article, and based on interesting research done by Hahn Lee from Stanford and Ulrike Malmemndier from UC Berkeley, this may not be the case. They studied auctions at eBay and found that "in a majority of auctions, the final price is higher than a fixed price at which the same good is available for immediate purchase on the same web page." The longer the listing period, the more overbidding occurs, and the most experience bidders are most likely to bid sub-optimally (download pdf here)! It is like gambling. The funny thing is that overbidding has been a known side-effect of auctions for a long time.

So all in all it seems like there are still many ways left in which to get an premium price for an item which is widely promoted with a lower price elsewhere...

[Tags: shopping marketing perfect information buying behavior]

September 18, 2006

Integrating "status skills" into your offering

Trendwatching.com has an interesting article on the importance of integrating "status skills" into your offerings.

No matter what you market, people will consume your offering based on how the product or service makes them feel about themselves in the presence of that product or service. The authors of the article refer to this as "providing your customers and clients with status" - perhaps a little too consumer-focused, but true for all industry segments nonetheless. As the authors rightfully point out: "there is little that consumers do that isn't consciously or subconsciously influenced by a desire for recognition from family, friends, and any fellow consumers they come into contact with."

In consumer goods, providing status may be conveyed through luxury, smart-buying, or eco-friendly symbols - symbols that will often be based on "too expensive," "too scarce," "too inaccessible," or other physical and experience based status symbols that will impress others. In the B2B space, status symbols could be conveyed through smart-buying, well negotiated, achieving results - symbols that are often based on the characteristics that make for a model employee in a particular business culture, and which would likely result in career advancement or increased reputation amongst peers.

According to the authors, consumers increasingly value creativity over passive consumption - a trend that originated in the online world - where your fighting skills may not be what is most valued anymore, but perhaps the originality of your avatar, the number of friends in your tribe, or the uniqueness of your home page. They call it "status skills," and define it as follows: "In economies that increasingly depend on (and thus value) creative thinking and acting, well-known status symbols tied to owning and consuming goods and services will find worthy competition from 'STATUS SKILLS': those skills that consumers are mastering to make the most of those same goods and services, bringing them status by being good at something, and the story telling that comes with it."

Several brands are already incorporating "status skills" into their customer interactions - including
Craft, Switch, BMW, Volkswagen, Nikon, Home Depot, Lego, and many other companies which are described in the article. Another example recently covered is the open source beer, which combines a new business model with the belief that many people will want to brew their own beer and improve their reputation as beer connoisseurs through the widespread adoption of their recipe enhancements.

With sites like Flickr and YouTube, where consumers can easily show off their creativity, it shouldn't be that hard for brands to embed at least some basic "status skills" into their offerings.

[Tags: status skills marketing marketing creativity buying behavior]

September 13, 2006

You cannot always control the context of your brand

(via perspective)

September 7, 2006

What happens when consumers really do not like you?

This is apparently what is happening to Hummer H2 - with a few people setting up the web site FUH2.com and hundreds of others sending in their own FUH2 pictures - which led to the creation of a poster as well as the video below (via John Winsor).

[Tags: word of mouth wom viral marketing consumer+generated+content cgm]

Social marketing vs. social marketing

As you probably will have noticed, the "social marketing" terminology has been popping up left and right lately.

Nedra Weinreich from Spare Change and others, who had been using "social marketing" for decades to refer to the use of marketing to address health and social issues, took issue with the new usage of the terminology - especially when Forrester launched a "Social Marketing Bootcamp" and Jupiter launched a "Social Marketing" practice. Forrester backed down and renamed their bootcamp "Social Computing Boot Camp," while Jupiter refused to rename it's practice - fueling the ongoing feud over the use of the terminology.

While it is unclear to me how good a term "social marketing" is to refer to the marketing of social issues - I disliked the new usage of the terminology from the get go.

Using "social marketing" as a catch-all category for the (not-so-new) marketing techniques which include viral marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, community marketing, consumer-generated-content-based marketing, and other social media-based marketing "techniques," not only "hypes up" the value of those methods unnecessarily - it also engenders the danger for misuse, abuse and the ultimate destruction of those marketing techniques for everyone.

Many clueless and panicky marketers, who have witnessed the decline of marketing programs like email marketing and other interrupt-based marketing methods - which incidentally they destroyed in the first place - will now jump on this latest craze and screw it all up! As usual, they will throw dollars and especially technology at the issue without understanding the underlying fundamentals and ethical considerations that allow those methods work in the first place.

You don't believe it? By now, the value of word-of-mouth marketing is being threatened by the lack of disclosure by very large and respected marketers like P&G and others. And with so much "fake" consumer-generated content going around, some people are already asking for some sort of "organic labeling" before it is too late. When it comes to "community marketing," the jury is still out as it is one of the younger hot new marketing memes - but history shows that it will only take time for some clueless marketers to latch on to that one as well and potentially spoil it for the rest of us.

I really hope that Jupiter and other industry analysts and industry associations will show leadership in this space and try to create some sort of self-governance amongst their clients and members - but somehow, and based on the descriptions of those new services, I am not so sure that is part of the agenda.

Hopefully I am wrong!

[Tags: social marketing marketing word of mouth wom cgm community marketing]

September 6, 2006

Some cool shopping bags

Here are some interesting shopping bags...

September 5, 2006

If we cannot predict hurricanes - how are we to predict buying behavior?

David Wolfe over at Ageless Marketing has a great post on the difficulties associated with predicting consumer behavior. Comparing the process to our inability to predict hurricane paths with the help of supercomputers he says: "I have to believe that human behavior reflects more variables and is significantly more complex than weather behavior."

The good news according to David is that customers will tell you what they want - but in order to get that information, you need to get it in "real life context" - as opposed to research environments where customers tend to behave differently than in real life.

[Tags: market research customer research ]

August 30, 2006

Adoption is always slower than you think...

combo subscribe.png According to a recent report from emarketer reported in Dead 2.0, only 2% of US employees subscribe to RSS feeds. 88% do not even know what it means! Other stats show that only 13% have a good idea of what podcasting is. You can actually see the bell curve of adoption at work, with 12% of people still not knowing what spam is (via Business 2.0).

The RSS numbers also jibe with the numbers mentioned by Martin Nisenholtz from the New York Times in another Business 2.0 article (not online yet). RSS feeds at the NYT only generate 12.2 million pageviews out of a US total of 295 million.

[Tags: rss syndication ]

August 29, 2006

What happens when you "manipulate" buzz

Pete Blackshaw over at CGM picks up on a post by the Freakonomics guys in which they argue that the fact that there was such a discrepancy between the pre-release Internet buzz for the movie "Snakes on a Plane," and the actual success of the movie at the box office, may be attributed to "manufactured buzz."

One conclusion which Steven Levitt at Freakonomics comes to when answering the question "what does or does not make Internet buzz translate into commercial success" is "One reasonable answer to that question may be that when the buzz is faked/manufactured, commercial success will not follow."

Whether intentional or not, "manufactured buzz," along with other viral "gaming-the-system" marketing strategies are just another threat to the future credibility of word of mouth marketing - another one being the lack of disclosure policy which some companies refuse to endorse.

[Tags: wom word of mouth marketing buzz marketing viral marketing ]

August 28, 2006

CMO tenure keeps going down...

According to Spencer Stuart (via Brand Republic), the average CMO tenure keeps going down. A painful side effect is that marketing agencies have to defend their business sooner as well.

The changes are not that dramatic - with the new average tenure for CMO's being 23.2 months in 2006, down from 23.5 months in 2005 and 23.6 months in 2004.

The whole shortening in tenure is likely due to a combination of things: the fundamentals of marketing going through a dramatic shift - leaving many CMO's who are not permanent students of the industry in the dust - and the accountability of the CMO on the executive team being miss-aligned with what their real role should be.

[Tags: cmo tenure marketing accountability CMO marketing+changes ]

August 23, 2006

T-Mobile is the next worst practice

When I saw the efforts of this T-Mobile user on the Church of the Customer blog I could so relate to it... I am a big T-Mobile user and when I thought about upgrading my BlackBerry the last time around they told me that it came with a $150 mail-in rebate - which swayed me into signing up with them again for a year and get the latest gadget.

Well months later (I still cannot figure out why they cannot speed up the rebate process) I get a notice saying that my phone did not qualify for that rebate...and that I am welcome to call them to discuss that issue.

Seriously now, who has the time to do this...and while spending $175/mo with them for a few years, wouldn't you think that they should call me to discuss this miss-understanding?

Oh well, only a few months left and then....goodbye T-Mobile!

[Tags: t-mobile tmobile customer service cgm ]

August 18, 2006

Is there no arbitrage in online retail?

When Ritz Camera told me it would cost a flat $250 to fix my Canon 10D digital camera without even looking at it, it caused me to pause and look at what my options might be.

Since I bought the camera a few years back Canon came out with new models that seem to deal with the issues I was having with my early digital SLR - especially those related to focus and sharpness. Switching brands isn't really an option, as I have generally been happy with my EOS cameras and assembled 4 different lenses for it so far.

Instead of fixing my existing camera (which one day started to develop a dark band on the bottom of my pictures - indicating some sort of miss-alignment of the mirror system as far as I can tell) - I decided to look at the alternative of buying the new 30D.

My surprise came when I started looking for the best price for the 30D. If you look around you can see prices as low as $639 for the body without shipping charges. When you look at 3rd party sellers on Amazon.com or if you check eBay, prices do not seem to go below $1,000 for a new Canon 30D body.

Is there no arbitrage in online retail? Or am I missing something? Could someone actually make $500 per camera by buying and reselling online?

It is not a business I want to get in, but unless I am missing something (which I often do), then the theory that online retail, with all of its online-transaction "data exhaust," would "even out" the power balance between buyers and sellers does not hold true...

What is it that I am overlooking??

[Tags: arbitrage buyer power ads online commerce ]

August 17, 2006

Another bad interrupt marketing example...

AdAge reports that some marketing dinosaur has found another 100 square feet of "wasted" ad space in supermarkets - the conveyor belts at the check-out lines! Worse - he is holding a patent on the damn interrupt marketing technique and besides selling ad space, he is also offering advertisers a "chance" to shut out competitors for the modest price of $182,800 for 55 stores!

Hey - why stop there? Why not advertise on the check-out clerk's forehead? Or at the very least on their clothes.

Like Adrants says - soon we'll have grocery baggers and check-out clerks flooding our hospitals for dizziness and our mental institutions for insanity! And what about the consumers?

Isn't interrupt marketing dead? Maybe it's time to start a wiki with the worst interrupt marketers around.

[Tags: interrupt marketing advertising ads consumer abuse ]

77% of online shoppers read consumer reviews...

According to a new studies released by Jupiter Research, "77 percent of online shoppers use consumer generated product reviews/ratings and those who find them useful are more loyal to stores with reviews/ratings featured." Other research reveals that "consumers who post feedback on forums, positive or negative, spend 22 percent more online than do consumers who have not posted on forums." And somewhat surprisingly, "90 percent of large companies believe that consumer recommendations are important in influencing other consumers' purchase decisions."

The issue for many companies is how to consistently track consumer generated reviews and incorporate that voice of the customer component into their product innovation processes. There are literally hundreds of sites where people leave their feedback. Amazon provides product-specific searchable consumer generated reviews, but many other popular online stores, like NewEgg do not enable that level of searchability.

(Via Customer Listening Blog)

[Tags: online marketing voice of the customer consumer reviews cgm ]

August 16, 2006

Advertisers on social networking sites

Nellie Lide over at New Persuasion has the following to say about advertisers on social networking sites (via social customer manifesto):

I think brands will have to go beyond a conversation - though that's a good start - they have to be willing to develop and maintain a relationship/friendship with their customers over the long-term. And I think companies are looking at these sites all wrong. Advertisers, marketers, product-makers are trying to figure out how to exploit and use all the people on these sites - when they should be studying what these folks are doing and try to figure out how they can help these social sites be better for their users. Not more cluttered with their ads. If your product and brand don't really fit in - stay out. Know your customer and respect your customer - that's it.

Amen

At the risk of being repetitive - marketing is not about interrupting or intercepting people, it's about assisting them!

[Tags: marketing advertising brands social networking ]

August 15, 2006

The role of customer feedback in innovation

chicken or egg sm.jpg Over at the Fast Company blogjam, Dave Pollard looks at whether great product innovation really starts with the customer - and describes the whole issue as a chicken or egg question.

Involving the customer in product innovation is not an either or proposition - it is something that should always be done - but done in the right context. And when listening to customers companies need to realize that their mileage will vary depending on the type of product or the phase within the product life cycle.

In some product categories, people could care less about the products or the companies that manufacture them - making customer feedback useless at the least, or potentially dangerous if given too much weight.

Newer products that are still primarily appealing to innovators and early adopters have a different problem with potentially similar consequences. Assuming the product is successful, customers probably care about the product in this case. But their ability to innovate ahead of what is available will likely be several steps behind the ability of the team that came up with the innovation - and giving too much weight to customer feedback may limit the future product potential and give the competition an opportunity to catch up and out-innovate the incumbent.

Then you have more mature product categories where people care - probably the area that yields the most valuable customer feedback. Except that here too you have to be careful about how much weight you are giving to that customer feedback. If your goal is to grow your product revenue by 80% in the future, then you have to realize that "all" current customers only make up a fraction of your future customer base. Attaching too much weight to their feedback may eliminate a large number of future customers that do not share their profile. And according to Harvard Prof. Clayton Christensen's disruptive innovation theory, your trajectory of product improvement will eventually cross the mainstream trajectory of customer need - limiting your potential future customer base, and opening yourself up for a disruptive innovation.

All that being said, and according to MIT Professor Eric Von Hippel, in some fields there are a small number of "lead users" who invent new products out of necessity and who can be an important source of new product concepts. The kind of customer listening that is required in this case is very different from what most people think of when talking about customer involvement in product innovation!

[Tags: customer feedback marketing product innovation innovation customer listening marketing innovation]

August 9, 2006

The revenge of the longtail...

This is a great video from YouTube explaining what happened to popular media and marketing...(via Chris Baggot)

[Tags: marketing advertising long tail media]

August 7, 2006

Are You in Marketing Death Valley?

Have you been in marketing for awhile? Were you trained in marketing? If so, chances are that you’ve been wondering what happened to the “traditional” marketing rules (if there ever was such a thing) - and what replaced them.

There is no question that tectonic shifts have redefined the fundamentals of marketing as we knew it – leaving many marketers feeling like they are in the midst of crossing the equivalent of “Marketing Death Valley.”

At the very least – take a look at one of the fundamental concepts of marketing - the 4P’s of the marketing mix (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion). In the early 90's Prof Robert F. Lauterborn suggested that the 4 P’s should be replaced with the 4C’s (Consumer needs, consumer Cost, Convenience to buy, and Communications). Either way, do you believe that those are still useful as fundamental concepts for defining the marketing mix? How much can you tweak "price" in your marketing mix if some of your competitors came out with free products? What can you do about "place," now that it has become mostly ubiquitous and almost free? And how much should you spend on "promotion," when the new marketing scarcity is "customer attention" instead of shelf space, and where "findability" is the new name of the game? Sure, in some spaces you can still gain some differentiation by changing some aspects of the "product" mix - but most of those are very short-lived differentiations.

In a series of posts during the next couple of months we will be looking at what happened to the traditional rules of marketing – and try to understand what the new fundamentals are. Feel free to join this conversation and help us to make this series of posts worthwhile.

[Tags: marketing death valley marketing marketing rules attention scarcity 4 P's marketing innovation]

August 3, 2006

You cannot outsource innovation to your users!

Kathy Sierra over at Creating Passionate Users has a great post on why you cannot count on customers/users to innovate for you.

Quoting from her post, she says:

In this Web 2.0-ish world we're supposed to be all about the users being in control. Where the "community" drives the product. But the user community can't create art. (And I use "art" with a lowercase "a" as in software, books, just about anything we might design and craft.) That's up to us...

Our users will tell us where the pain is. Our users will drive incremental improvements. But the user community can't do the revolutionary innovation for us. That's up to us.

Bingo!

Of course you need to listen to your customers, and of course the customer is in control of many things that used to be controlled by the companies marketing their products and services - i.e., information about the product or service that levels/changes the balance of power in buying situations.

But that does not mean that your customers are in control of designing your next breakthrough innovation! It will never happen...and those companies that try to "outsource" their product innovation to their customers will inevitably condemn themselves to a slow dead by innovation monotony and product insipidness.

In an interview with Peter Drucker many years ago in Context Magazine - Drucker adds a few reasons why you cannot or should not outsource your product innovation to your customers:

99.9% of your customers couldn’t care less about your product or service.
70% of the people or organizations that should be your customers are not yet (and therefore by letting the existing customers dictate what your next generation product should be - you might very well never be able to meet the needs of those 70% who will make up your needed growth)
customers never buy what we sell

[Tags: customer control innovation product innovation outsourced innovation]

Where will your killer competition come from?

It is a fairly well documented fact that some breakthrough innovations come from spaces that are not originally considered to be competitive. Nevertheless, it is still fun to witness one of those shifts firsthand.

If you have done any traveling in densely populated areas lately you may have witnessed a few of them. Have you noticed how fewer people seem to be wearing wristwatches - especially young people? Where did the competition come from? Cell phones...A quick online check indeed validates that the worldwide market for wristwatches is down by 10-18%.

So what else is happening? Are there fewer people carrying laptops in favor of web-enabled cell phones with email capability? Are more people using their phone to take snapshots instead of compact cameras? A quick online check does not offer any validation of these trends yet - if indeed they are real trends. But could the cell phone disrupt the wristwatch industry, the laptop market and the digital camera space?

Do you know if your industry may be under siege by stealth competition like this? Are you even looking outside your space?

[Tags: innovation disruptive innovation competition cell phone]

August 1, 2006

Mastering the new marketing practices

One of the great sessions at last month's CMO summit, which was organized by Corante and the Center on Global Brand Leadership, was moderated by Johh Hagel. While the session has been summarized in a variety of places, John now summarized his points on his own blog. At the risk of being somewhat repetitive I will summarize/paraphrase the post here as it has a ton of great insight...

So where does John think marketing is going?

For starters, he thinks that the current shift in the economics of business will force major changes in marketing. With attention being the new scarcity and customer acquisition and retention costs being on the rise - business will have to start focusing on economies of scope instead of economies of scale. In customer relationships it will come down to getting the largest share of wallet of any single customer rather than a fix share of wallet across a large number of customers. This whole trend is reinforced by the fact that the cost of interaction and the ability for customers to find information about vendors and products is steadily declining as well.

According to John, this all leads to the need for fundamental changes in the areas of marketing strategy, branding and performance metrics.

In the area of marketing strategy, we need to move from the 3I's (intercept, Inhibit, isolate) to the 3A's (attract, assist, and affiliate). Another way of looking at it is that we have to move from a "one to one" marketing to a "many to one" marketing mindset.

From a brand promise point of view - we need to move from a "buy this product because I am great" mindset to one closer to "buy this product because I know you and you can trust that I will configure it properly for you."

As for the new metrics, try these on for a change: average life time value of the customer (customer service execs - are you listening!), 80/20 segmentation of customers based on profitability, ROA (return on attention), ROI (return on information).

And so what are vendors doing?

As John says, they are...well...acting like vendors!

In response to attention being the new scarcity - they are bombarding us with intrusive ads on animals, in urinals, in the sky, and with other desperate moves to "grab" our attention. John has it right when he says "Rather than just focusing on how to get attention, vendors might also want to consider how they can help their customers receive attention that is important to them and not just from the vendor, but from others that matter to the customers."

And as is typical with any new wave of tools, they are also jumping on the new social media technology bandwagon - deploying blogs, communities, wikis and other network-enabled marketing tools without really asking themselves how this will help the customer, or how "it will increase return of information for customers."

John finishes his article with some recommended actions for CMO's to take: affiliate with partners to create more useful solutions for your best customers, change organizational roles so execs are in charge of the total customer experience, and adopt performance metrics that measure and reward the increase of the lifetime value of the customer.

As usual - a post chock-full of great insights for marketers.

July 31, 2006

Old brand logos "web2.0-ified"

Here is another great example of what CGM can do to your brand. This thread is one where they are adding a web.20 twist to old brand logos (Via JupiterResearch)

Here are some good ones:

Pfizer beta - Yikes

[Tags: brands consumer generated content cgm web2.0]

July 27, 2006

Whatever marketing becomes...

marketing brain sm.jpg Doc replied to those who disagreed with him on Hugh's blog - concluding that whatever marketing becomes will start as a technology trend.

I do agree with many of the assertions in his reply regarding the poor state of marketing and especially product management in the Linux World and the Tech world in general. I would not, as he does, differentiate between marketing technology products versus marketing consumer electronics or consumer packaged goods. The role of marketing and the skill set requirement are very much the same across all industries. Having deep industry experience is an additional requirement layered on top of that.

Across all industries, marketers must play the role of "cultural anthropologist" to distinguish the real needs from the short term annoyances that people will find workarounds for by the time you can address them with either a new product or a new feature. They must also be able to interact, negotiate, and mediate with R&D, engineering, suppliers, competitors, partners, and other groups, to finalize "feasible" product plans that will meet the customer needs and include all the "relevant" innovations coming from those groups. And they need to be able to do that without being a gatekeeper or information traffic cop. In an age of rapid development and co-creation, they need to be comfortable in an environment where everyone can and should talk to everyone - regardless of organizational boundaries. Because, and within the constrains of not aggravating the customer, all of those groups need to have direct access to the customer to test and validate certain assumptions. Again, there is no difference in those fundamentals across industries.

Next they need to find ways to communicate with customers about the new products and services in the face of "attention" being the new scarcity. And while the solutions will differ from market to market, the range of options that need to be evaluated are the same across all industries. As part of that they also need to make sure that they set up the proper infrastructure to "listen" to market feedback on an ongoing basis instead of in episodic waves as they currently do.

Whatever marketing becomes will be enabled by technology. Wiki's, blogs, social bookmarking, technology enabled CGM, and many other new technologies are very powerful tools for companies to execute all the marketing functions - including all the customer touch-points - in different and better ways. Hopefully marketing will not become "defined" by technology, as that would make things much worse. Just take a look at what CRM did to sales and marketing...

Lastly, it is important to keep all things in perspective. What marketing becomes is not all that different from what it should have been all along...just take a look at what Peter Drucker said during the last three quarter century:

"Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two--and only two--basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business."

"The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself. "

"The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said."

"Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it."

And hopefully, what marketing becomes will also be heavily influenced by other disciplines besides technology - including sociology, anthropology, politics, economics, science, and others. Some of the best "field-specific" innovations have come from seemingly unrelated fields. Again, Drucker has a good example of that: "The new approaches to the study of history have, for instance, come out of economics, psychology and archeology all disciplines that historians never considered relevant to their field and to which they had rarely before been exposed....... By itself, specialized knowledge yields no performance."

Marketing: The View from Silicon Valley vs. Madisson Avenue

[Tags: doc searls marketing peter drucker attention scarcity co-creation innovation]

July 25, 2006

Markets without marketing?

hung to dry sm.jpg
Doc Searls has an interesting, albeit provocative, article in the Linux Journal, tiled "Markets without Marketing" (via Horse:Pig:Cow, which has a great follow-up post on it, as does Hugh, who also disagrees).

The article has a number of sweeping market observations, predictions and recommendations - many of which are fairly controversial :

One of the biggest problems with marketing is that it all too often focuses on "capturing and holding customers, rather than "finding and satisfying customer needs".

As markets are becoming truly free, we do not have much, if any, need for marketing. Marketing should get out of the way and let engineers talk directly with the customers who will be using the product.

Advertising is going to die and PR is already dead

Markets have evolved from conversations to relationships - which will require new skills and will get supported by the new tools

Marketing needs to get out of the website construction business - it should all get replaced with wikis, blogs, and other direct linkage between information about the products and the customer

Trade shows can be useful, but please do not send marketing folks
Nothing is worse that vaporware and yet that is what marketing pushes
Marketing does not know how you make money with technology or products - but engineering does. And besides, the real question is to understand how you will make money "because" of the technology... not "with" it.

Wow - Doc must have been seriously hit over the head by an old-school marketing spin-meister :)

It is true that many marketers are clueless and deserve the bad rap that they are getting. But more often than not, that behavior comes from the very top - with CEO's, CFO's and other VP's expecting marketing folks to do unnatural acts, and getting rid of them if they do not deliver the same old stuff.

Of course, marketing needs to get out of the way. It cannot be a bureaucratic wall between the customer and the company. But there is a huge gap between hearing what the customer says, and building successful products. Engineering has to have first line of communications with the customer. But while that may bring many advantages - ranging from a better understanding of customer needs by the people who are actually building the product, to better morale in the engineering team - this by itself will not lead to great product plans! You need very special skills and training to be able to turn market opportunities into successful product strategies.

And of course, we need to get rid of no-value web sites and replace them with linkages to the information sources that matter and enhance them with tools to enable various people inside and outside the company to talk and communicate with one another. But shouldn't you have someone in charge of that? Or do you believe that a free-for-all environment will result in an infrastructure where the customer will find what they need in a timely fashion?

And yes - marketing is too often focused on "capturing and holding customers, rather than "finding and satisfying customer needs"." As John Hagel says, they need to move from the 3I's (intercept, insulate, and inhibit) to the 3 A's (attract, assist, and affiliate) - no question about it! But shouldn't you have someone take the lead in that?

Look, you can argue that you do not really need a marketing department - and for practical reasons, I think you do. But you cannot argue that a company should have no marketing. Marketing is what a company should do. Everyone within the company should wear a marketing hat!

And yes, neo was right - "the problem is choice!"

[Tags: marketing marketing department marketing strategy marketing role]

2 and 3 word key-phrases make up more than 50% of search-engine queries

According to Onestat, only 11.4% of all search queries are one-word phrases. 3 and 4 word phrases make up more than 50% of all queries (via Blog SEO). Surprisingly, even 4 word phrases surpass 1 word phrases by almost 50%.

It is also interesting to notice the cultural differences in the research - Canadians top search queries are 4 word phrases (24.02% of all queries) followed by 3 word phrases, while Germans clearly prefer 2 word phrases (making up 40.05% of all queries) followed by one word phrases.

All in all pretty strong proof that search engine marketers should invest primarily into multi-keyword phrases instead of standalone keywords.

[Tags: sem seo search engine marketing online marketing]

July 24, 2006

More good cgm examples

From the latest Worth 1000 contest (via coolz0r)

July 18, 2006

Successful formulas do not always work for others - especially when you miss the key ingredients

Whenever a company finds a new and successful way to reach a goal, or to reach a hard-to-get-to audience - many others follow quickly - copycatting the original company, often times with dismal results. In some cases, as is the case with word-of-mouth marketing, new entrants screw up the whole playing field for everyone.

There are three main reasons why copycatting does not always work. First off, many companies who copy others do so without really understanding what the real ingredients for success are. The second reason, which took down email marketing and potentially could take down word of mouth marketing for all of us is related to ethics and industry self-regulation in the absence of government guidelines. And the third one is that best practices are not always portable from one company to another.

The entry of Wal-Mart with a Myspace-like offering clearly falls into the first category (via adage - may require subscription). In an attempt to appeal to teens with something else than pencils and backpacks, Wal-Mart launched a social networking site called The Hub. The site is designed to allow teens (hubsters) to "express their individuality." They can create their own page to show it to the world, and they can post hot-lists of songs and movies. They can even shoot and submit Wal-Mart related video clips and have a chance that it will be picked up as part of their TV advertising.

So far so good.

Except that they screen all content, email all parents requiring their consent for teens to put up a page, and forbid users to email with one another. Oh, and they reserve the right to modify the commercial created with the winning video...

And they call that a "GENIUS WEB DESTINATION?"

It is web alright, but where are the genius and the destination parts? If all goes well, they may win the top price for the "most uncool" social networking site!

[Tags: myspace wal-mart social networking community marketing]

July 17, 2006

Would you buy eggs with advertising on them?

The New York Times has an article on how CBS is planning to advertise their fall line-up right in your refrigerator (via Freakonomics blog)...

That is almost as bad as advertising on sheep along the highway...

Isn't interrupt marketing dead?

Or perhaps this is how people interpret Ambient Findability... if I can see what is on TV when cooking breakfast, then maybe I will program my VCR or Tivo to record it...

nah...

[Tags: advertising marketing interrupt marketing cbs]

July 12, 2006

Comcast - a tale of poor customer service and screwed up management decisions

So a guy has problems with his cable modem and spends time in Comcast's online customer service hell (he also happens to be the biggest champion for the movie snakes on a plane, even though the movie makers newer acknowledged that). Then Comcasts decides to send a technician out to have the modem swapped out. When the technician calls Comcast to activate the modem, he ends up in the same customer service hell hole as most customers end up in and spends an hour on hold - and falls asleep on the customer's couch. The customer videotapes the incident and puts it on YouTube. Next thing you know it gets picked up by mainstream media outfits like the NYT, Forbes, and even airs on MSNBC's "Countdown" program, just to name a few. More than 300,000 people view the video on YouTube.

Another good customer service story - right? This must have been a great wake-up call for Comcast management to start fixing their problems...

What do you think happened next?

Comcast FIRED the technician!

...now talk about a wrong-headed management decision.

What do you think?

(For more info - check out Mary Schmidt's blog)

[Tags: customer service comcast customer satisfaction]

Can you actually get marketing and sales to stop fighting?

According to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review (requires subscription or can be purchased), you could and you should strive towards integrated sales and marketing departments as the benefits of having both groups work in harmony are plentiful.

Stop marketing departments who spend on advertising without tying the results to sales, stop sales departments that only fulfill demand instead of (co)creating it, and stop managers for whom marketing is nothing more than selling and sales support... p.l.e.a.s.e!

The authors see two main sources of friction between sales and marketing - one economic and one cultural. The economic one has to do with the power distribution between sales and marketing in three of the four P's - promotion, pricing, and product. The cultural one, which may be even more entrenched, has to do with the fact that the two departments attract vastly different types of people - with different educational backgrounds, skill sets, etc.

The article offers a few suggestions to better align the marketing and sales departments:

Encourage disciplined communication - and that does not mean more communication, which is expensive.
Create joint assignments and rotate jobs

Improve sales force feedback

Once you have your sales and marketing departments aligned you can go a step further and work towards achieving an integrated relationship. The authors suggest the following actions to achieve integrated departments:

Appoint a chief revenue or chief customer officer - a CRO or a CCO
Define the steps in the marketing and sales funnels
Split marketing into two groups - strategic and tactical groups
Set shared revenue targets and reward systems
Integrate sales and marketing metrics

While some of the advise and terminology may seem a little staid or even passé (after all, is marketing still about the 4 P's? and is the buying process still a funnel?), the advise is solid and practical and should benefit any company with dysfunctional marketing and sales departments.

[Tags: sales marketing hr organizational behavior]

July 11, 2006

Marketing software tools just don't cut it yet...

A new study released by the Business Performance Management Forum (via ClickZ Stats) found that despite continued investments in CRM and other market/company tracking data software solutions, most product marketing and product management executives use spreadsheets and gut instinct to make key business-changing decisions.

While the study implies that this is a refection of the current state of the marketing software solutions, one should not discount the possibility that it could also be an indication that marketing execs do not believe that you can extract business-changing decisions from existing company data.

There is no doubt that the current state of marketing software solutions are woefully inadequate (siloed, too hard to use, etc.). That being said, it could be that the solutions that will find the widest adoption are not those that increase complexity while enhancing usability, but rather simpler tools.

Look what wikis are doing to the collaboration space...

[Tags: crm marketing software solution collaboration wiki]

Fear of social networking sites like MySpace may be overblown...

According to a new study conducted by California University Psychology Professor Dr. Larry Rosen (download press release here), the MySpace sexual predator reports in the media are widely overblown/unfounded (via apophenia)

Rosen's study included interviews with 1,500 MySpacers and 250 parents and found that (partial list of findings - for full findings download pdf here):

Only 7% of those teens interviewed were ever approached by anyone with a sexual intent and nearly all of them simply ignored the person and blocked him from their page.
Two-thirds of the parents were sure that there were many sexual predators on MySpace, while only one-third of the teenagers shared this concern.
Teenagers spend an average of 15 hours per week on MySpace.
One in three admits their MySpace activity has negatively affected their schoolwork, family life, or both.
Only one-third of the parents have seen their child’s MySpace page and only 16% check it on a regular basis.
However, 70% of the adolescents said they would feel comfortable with their parents looking at their MySpace page.

Rosen makes an interesting point when he says "MySpace is the 13th largest country in the world. Teens live in this virtual world and parents need to pay attention. It is not a fad. It is not going away. And it is not a scary place. Teenagers can live and grow there with help from their parents.”

Meanwhile, the social networking space continues to heat up, with Bebo (a MySpace competitor especially popular in the UK) rejecting a $550M acquisition offer from British Telecom (apparently they are looking for offers north of $1b).

While there is no doubt that sites with that many users should be able to monetize their traffic, it is will be interesting to follow the emerging new marketing models that will make these sites truly scalable and predictable from a revenue point of view.

[Tags: myspace bebo social networking web 2.0]

July 6, 2006

Eager sellers and stony buyers - why sellers always overvalue their products

The June issue of the Harvard Business Review has an interesting article describing some of the latest findings in the psychology of new-product adoption (here - can be purchased or requires subscription).

According to the author, Prof. John Gourville, there are a few psychological biases in decision making that need to be considered when using Everett Rogers' "relative advantage" as a measure for successful product adoption.

Gains and losses:
First off, people evaluate attractiveness of new products and services not on an objective scale, but on a subjective/perceived scale which is based on products they already own. Every benefit of the new product compared to the new one is considered a gain, and every shortcoming is considered a loss. The kicker is that potential buyers give losses a much bigger weight than gains in their decision making process. In fact, multiple studies have shown that gains have to outweigh losses 3:1 before customers will adopt the new product or service.

The endowment effect:
Because of this loss aversion, people value what they have more than what they don't have. In fact, multiple studies have shown that people demand 2-4 times more compensation to give up products that they already possess than they are willing to pay for those same items in the first place!

Status quo bias:
The status quo bias explains why people tend to stick with what they already have, even when a better alternative exists. Studies have shown that the extend of loss aversion grows over time from a factor 2 to 4 - meaning that people's pain perception of giving up something increases over time and reduces their willingness to trade up.

But that is not all! Not only are consumers overvaluing losses and existing benefits of entrenched products by a factor 3, sellers are also overvaluing the benefits of their innovations by a factor 3. That makes the mismatch between what innovators think consumers desire and what consumers really want 9 to one!

So what is one to do? The author has a few suggestions. Come up with products that contain few product changes and require little behavioral changes and you will end up with an "easy sell." If your new product has considerable product changes compared to the incumbents - make sure that they require little behavioral changes. By doing so you may end up with a "smash hit." A high degree of product change combined with a high degree of behavioral change is much like the TIVO and those innovations are "long hauls." Doomed out of the gate are those new products with little product changes that require a high degree of behavioral change.

[Tags: buying behavior product adoption innovation adoption of innovation]

July 1, 2006

Affiliate marketing run amok...

This site just got spammed by affiliate marketing sites promoting some new Nokia phone...which led to the ban of Nokia as a keyword on comments. Somehow it is hard to believe that Nokia would benefit from such tactics...and even harder to believe that their marketers would have condoned this...

But is there really nothing they can do to stop this behavior?

June 29, 2006

Customer entropy partially to blame for poor customer service

Come to think about it, customer entropy (or customer apathy) is partly to blame for the state of customer service. The reason most companies deliver bad customer service is because they can - not enough customers complain or abandon brands after a bad customer service experience.

If more people were to talk back to companies or report customer service abuse to their local local consumer affairs departments, the overall state of customer service would improve.

What do you think? Is there a way to foster consumer activism so that we can finally get the service that we deserve, the right return on providing our personal information as part of buying transactions, and intelligent humans to interact with when facing post sale issues? Or is it like voting - enough people are generally happy enough so that the only thing we can expect is status-quo?

You would expect that a new entrant who delivers outstanding customer service would change the playing field in that sector - but is that really happening?

[Tags: customer service customer delight customer satisfaction]

June 25, 2006

The bar to deliver customer service "delight" is ridiculously low

airline sm.jpg In the last week I joined an army of people who recently had bad experiences with airlines. It is fascinating to see how low the bar to "delight" customers through customer service has gone in the airline industry (and many other industries) in North America.

My story started with a trip to the West Coast on American Airlines. Since I had ordered my ticket late and had no seat assignment, I went to the airport extra early to get a good seat. When I checked in they gave me a center seat and said that the gate agent would be able to switch me (customer service tip #1: pass the buck). Next I sat in an airport security line for 45 minutes. They had one security line servicing at least 30 gates. First class passengers had their own, and much shorter security line, which ticked off many passengers as TSA (Transportation Security Agency) employees who manage airport security are not American Airlines employees but government employees paid with our tax money. When I finally got to the gate, the agent did not even faint trying to help me - she rudely told me to take a seat as the flight was full (customer service tip #2: screw the customer).

What happened next is the best part. I boarded and realized that my seat was broken. I promptly informed the flight attendant of my problem - after all, who would want to be on a six hour full flight in a broken seat that cannot be locked in its upward position? The aggressive and non-friendly response from the agent was: "I am not sure that they can fix it, and because YOU now reported this problem they may have to take you off the plane and not fly you to California today!" So she was implying that it was my problem, since I had reported one of their defective seats (customer service tip #3: blame the customer). If only I would have sat up-straight and pretended that nothing was wrong with the damn seat, that would have been a much better solution for HER! I put up a stink and they reluctantly gave me another center seat so that I could make it to California.

Then came the weekend, when I had to fly United Airlines to Vancouver. 3 hours prior to my flight I get a call from one of their automated machines informing me that my flight segment from Chicago to Vancouver was cancelled and that perhaps other arrangements had been made for us. When selecting the option to speak with a representative I got a fast busy tone, so I called the main United 800#. After being in a queue for 35 minutes, during which I discovered that my flight was the last one out of Chicago to Vancouver that day and that there was another alternative flight route through Toronto, I finally got a "somewhat" live person on the phone:

United: may I help you?
Me: your automated service just called me to inform me that my flight segment from Chicago to Vancouver has been cancelled and that other arrangements may have been made
United: they did call you and told you that?
Me: yes
United: well, they tell you stuff before they tell us, I see no such thing in my record...
Me: well, can you at least see that the Chicago to Vancouver was canceled?
United: hold on...oh yes, you are right, the flight was canceled
Me: so what should I do?
United: fly to Chicago and see what they say
Me: but it is the last flight out of Chicago today, it makes no sense for me to go there...
United: hold on...oh, yes, it is the last flight out of Chicago
Me: so
United: you should go to Chicago and they will help you there...
Me: there is an alternative through Toronto on Air Canada - your partner
United: oh I see...let me check
United: there is no flight out of Chicago to Toronto that will get you to Vancouver...
Me: no, but there is one out of Boston that will get me there
United: oh, I see...let me check...this was the last flight out of Chicago..
Me: yeah...but this is Boston...
United: oh I see...I can "protect' that flight for you
Me: great! So you are confirming that I know will fly from Boston to Toronto and then on to Vancouver
United: yes.
Me: do I just check in at United or do I go to Air Canada?
United: that I do not know...try both...
Me: thank you very much

This was not an exchange on Saturday Night Live or some other comedy channel...this was real (customer service tip #4: hire real cheap labor and try cutting cost on training and IT!

No wonder JetBlue has such high praises from customers. In a market where the bar is so low, it does not require much to delight customers!

[Tags: customer service airlines united american airlines jetblue customer delight customer+satisfcation]

June 22, 2006

Marketing: The View from Silicon Valley vs. Madisson Avenue

After participating on a panel on customer conversations at SuperNova yesterday I was asked to prepare a thought for the open mic attendee round table - which, while not new and totally original, I thought would make sense to put up here as well...

Following the organization of our marketing innovation conference a few weeks ago, and after seeing sessions at WOMMA and SuperNova related to marketing, advertising and customer relationships, it dawned on me (probably late - I know that others, like Max Kalehoff, have already made that observation), that there is a huge chasm between the way Silicon Valley/Web 2.0 type people look at marketing and the way Madison Avenue looks at it.

There is more than one difference, but one that deserves particular focus is how Web 2.0-centric people look at "attention" vs. Madison Avenue advertising types focus on "engagement" - and the difference is deeper than just one of perspective - i.e., customer-centric view vs. a marketer-centric view of marketing.

We look at attention as the new scarcity in the marketing value chain - and we analyze how that impacts marketing, brands, and metrics. John Hagel talks about how attention scarcity forces us to shift from the current way of doing marketing, which he summarizes by the 3I's (intercept, insulate and inhibit), to a new way of doing marketing, which he captures in the 3A's (attract, assist, and affiliate). With attention scarcity, many people agree that we need to move from product/company-centric brands to customer-centric brands. And with all that comes a call for new metrics based on attention and customer information. Some, like the AttentionTrust, even call for better protection and customer control of their own attention data. All cool and cutting edge stuff when it comes to marketing...

Madison Avenue types on the other hand have finally realized that the eyeballs have gone, that their current metrics are worthless (impressions, CTR, reach, frequency, etc.), and that the new prime time is 9-5. In an effort to create new relevancy they have come up with a new, if somewhat vague, metric - "engagement" (defined by ARF as: "turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context.")

Of course, there is no way to discount Madison Avenue just yet! While Larry Weber may be right when he says that spending money on traditional media is like pouring water into a sinking boat, instead of out of the boat, the reality is that many marketers are lazy and clueless and continue to operate in their comfort zone - increasing TV advertising in the face of declining viewership, just to name one example.

Remember - change hurts!

[Tags: supernova2006 attention engagement marketing web2.0 madison ave advertising]

June 20, 2006

Conferences this week...

Today I am at WOMMA's 2nd WOMBAT (word of mouth marketing association). So far, and with few exceptions, the sessions have been pretty useful and interesting, and if you are interested in seeing live blogging from the sessions, check out Olivier Blanchard's blog, who is one of the few official bloggers for the conference.

Troubling was the fact that many people speak of WOM as if it were yet another department or function (some even look at it as a new medium ?) in the marketing department. Unless marketing becomes totally integrated and tied together with other company functions like sales and customer service, just to name a few, most marketing people will fail. The same is true for WOM if it is to succeed.

The metrics sessions left many people asking for more. Sure 92% of people consider wom as their best information source, and positive wom outperforms negative wom 6 to 1. And a great majority of wom happens offline instead of online. But we were not able to get an answer on how they actually measure online word of mouth. So for example, if Jeff Jarvis complains about his Dell, do they count that as one negative story, or do they count it as 100's of thousands of negative stories - which is probably the right number considering that this many people actually read the story (and continue to read it because it gets a high ranking in Google searches).

More later...

[Tags: womma wom wombat ]

June 19, 2006

Hello Verizon, is anyone there?

This from the company whose motto is : We never stop working for you. Last week I, along with what must be thousands of other Verizon customers, got a direct mail piece offering to cut my phone bill by $17 a month with a new calling plan called Freedom Essentials. All I had to do was call 1-888-671-2466 today to switch. So foolish me, I call the number and instead of reaching an operator, or even being placed in a waiting queue, I get the following message: " Due to the overwhelming demand we are unable to take your call so please hang up and try again later." This is clearly not my idea of a company that never stops working for me. This is a company that simply stopped working. Since my first unsuccessful attempt at reaching Verizon I have tried nine more times. The last few attempts didn't even get me as far as the call-back-later message. I got a busy signal instead. So I wonder what, if any coordination, took place between the marketing geniuses who thought up this promotion, and the call center that was to handle the calls. This makes me think of Lilly Tomlin's Ernestine the phone operator, reminding me that when dealing with the phone company, they're the phone company, and I'm not. Hang up and call back later.

June 16, 2006

Do you believe in CGM research?

Laurent over at the customer listening blog takes exception with the views of an old-guard marketing tweak on the importance of cgm research...and is hosting an interesting discussion on the subject.

[Tags: word of mouth wom viral marketing consumer+generated+content cgm]

Best practices are meaningless - but worst practices are to be avoided

Based on some comments made during last week's Innovative Marketing Conference, Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ ponders whether best practices even exist.

Bryan Eisenberg said that best practices are often times achieved under very specific conditions and can therefore not always be generalized. Len Ellis said, give me emerging practices, best practices are so yesterday!

All this rings so true. If a practice becomes a best practice that is replicable across other companies or industries, you have to assume that most of your competitors will have adopted that practice - thus giving your company no competitive advantage from embracing it.

What companies really should do is to avoid replicating "worst practices" - a practice which if you were from another planet observing what earth companies do you might conclude they do on purpose:

Screw customers after they purchase products by treating call centers as a cost centers instead of customer relationship based economical centers

Continuously interrupt prospects with rude and mostly out-of-context messages

Treat employees as disposable cost centers instead of valuable customer interfaces

Insult customers' intelligence with stupid messaging or by blaming them for product failures.

Grab a ton of information about prospects and customers and give them nothing in return - or worse - asking them for the same info over and over again

...and so much more

Let's ban the worst practices first, then let's worry about best and emerging practices!

[Tags: customer information marketing customer service worst practices best practices]

June 15, 2006

$50M ad campaign for newspaper advertising...

Check out this new $50M advertising campaign by the Newspaper Association of America. Maybe I am missing something...but what does "in an opt-out world, consumers opt in to newspaper advertising" really mean? Would it get you to buy more newspaper ads?

[Tags: advertising newspapers]

Pitching cars to tweens - buy a virtual Toyota Scion online

adco[1].600

The New York Times yesterday reported how Toyota is selling virtual Scions in an online game frequented by tweens and teens. Players can buy the car, modify it, pick up friends that don't have the cool car yet, and join a club - which was visited over 33K times so far!

Talk about influencing brand image early!

[Tags: word of mouth wom viral marketing advertising branding]

June 14, 2006

Is the need for higher customer transparency really new?

Many people talk about the increased need for customer and employee transparency, or about the fact that people do not trust what companies have to say "anymore." But are those really new? Or are they being hyped up by consultants who are trying to create the next hype-wave to ride on?

if you look at the most recent brain research, it would show that this trait has been with us forever. If the brain is hardwired to detect "errors," and when it finds them it turns our brain into a 2 year old child's brain who will resist anything coming from that source - then we should have been rejecting and mistrusting all "marketing hype" ever since it existed. People have always expected "error-free" (=true) messages! There is nothing new here, we are hardwired for it.

Maybe what happens is that with the exponential increase of phony sounding marketing messages, more people have started focusing on associating them with BS and have developed new subconscious neural pathways or mental maps to discard them all. Or maybe the messages have just become more phony and exaggerated in companies' quests to differentiate themselves within an increasingly cluttered marketplace.

And maybe the fact that some studies show that an increasing number of people distrust companies can be explained by the fact that it has become more socially acceptable and definitely more doable for consumers to fight back and publicly expose the "marketing untruths," - thus changing the collective (un)consciousness which associates corporate messages with mistrust or untruth. Or maybe it is just a cyclical anomaly, and two years from now we will be back up.

Another important consequence of all this is in the area of word of mouth recommendations and consumer generated content. As more and more companies start to "manage" that channel, often times without full disclosure, more and more "errors" will seep into the word of mouth recommendations - over time causing the effectiveness and trustworthiness of word of mouth to erode as well.

One thing is for sure - the customer has more ways to retaliate against a company than ever before - making the "customer is increasingly in charge" statement a true statement.

[Tags: neuroscience cgm change management hr wom word of mouth trust]

June 13, 2006

Execs only read 9 blogs?

I just got an email from MarketingSherpa saying that: "According to 2006 study data, a typical business exec reads nine (9) blogs regularly."

Unfortunately, the source of the study is not revealed. But then again, the email was not announcing the results of some new study study - it was a call for nominations for your favorite marketing blog and podcast.

The deadline for nominations is Friday the 16th, and voting will start on the 20th.

[Tags: marketing blogs customer service marketingsherpa]

June 12, 2006

Why is customer service at Starbucks consistently great - while the service at most other take-out joints sucks?

You go to Starbucks and the energy is positive, the service friendly, and experience somewhat consistent from store to store. You go to Bruegger's and there is no energy to speak of, the service is chaotic at best, and the consistency - let's say non-existent.

Now if you think that that is bad, and happen to live in a town like mine - try placing an order with Papa Gino's or Domino's - it will not only be the chaotic service and low energy or the "I don't care" attitude you will have to deal with - it's pure stupidity! Never do I know whether I will fall within their delivery zone or whether some new driver will decide that I am just outside of it, and usually I do not find out until well after I placed my order and have a house full of hungry/angry kids.

So what do you think makes up the difference between those outfits?

One theory, put forth by management consulting guru John Hagel says that too many companies focus on the transactional view of economics instead of the relationship view of economics. Makes sense! The fact that Starbucks employees get more benefits, stock options, and promotional opportunities not only makes them happier employees - it results in an energy that can be "experienced" by most customers who visit their stores.

Another reason is that the marketing execs at those companies who cut corners in customer service are probably not grokking marketing the way Burger King's CMO Russ Klein does - where every "out of home food dollar" is considered to have a "social component" to it!

[Tags: marketing social currency customer service hr relationship view> transaction view economics]

Coverage from the 2006 Innovative marketing Conference

While wearing the many different hats of MC, coordinator, wifi guy, podcast traffic cop, and many others at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference, I was not able to take good notes of the great discussions that took place at the conference. Thankfully, many others did, and I will try to capture most of them here. I will also elaborate on specific sessions/discussions in future posts.

Overall I believe that we delivered against the promises that were made ahead of the Innovative Marketing Conference. We promised that it would be a conversation about the new marketing foundations that need to be built in the face of the ongoing breakdown of the old rules, and we delivered just that - few slides and one way presentations and many deeply insightful discussions. We also promised that this conference would be a conference about marketing as a whole – as one of the main premises for the event was that unless all aspects of marketing are tied together, marketers will fail! Here too, I believe we delivered against that promise - with many sessions focused on tying all the conversations together.

But enough bragging - here goes the summary and associated links to interesting posts from across the blogosphere.

Day 1 - CMO Summit

We started both days with a CMO telling us what it is like to be in the trenches. The first day's keynote, delivered by Russ Klein, CMO at Burger King, was insightful and surprising for its degree of innovation. He spoke of how they started looking at Burger King as a "social brand" in order to revive it, introduced their social currency strategy and much more. You can listen to a podcast interview with Russ here, and you can find some good summaries of the speech at:

Chris Carfi's blog - the Social Customer Manifesto

The product review site, which also has a good summary of the session - capturing a few of the "a-ha" moments

Next up was a discussion about the creation process of products and services, and the role of innovation, co-creation and many other new factors on that process. The discussion was led by David Sutherland and you can find some good summaries at:

The Fast Company Blogjam, which has a number of entries on this session including this entry on co-creation, this one on the challenges of co-creation within and outside organizations, and this one reflecting one of the live discussion groups led by John Winsor
Johnnie Moore's blog, where he has a great entry on the co-creation discussion
David Weinberger's blog, Joho, where he has a good write-up on this session

John Hagel's fabulous session on attention scarcity and what that means to brands, marketing and metrics is summarized at:

The Fast Company marketing BlogJam, which has a number of entries on this session, including the following summary posts this one, this one and this one, this one on choosing what business you are in, this one on what it is we can learn from evangelists, and this one on how companies have to change their marketing from the 3I's to the 3A's
David Weinberger's blog, Joho, where he has an excellent write-up on the session
Johnnie Moore's blog, where he has a great entry on moving from the 3I's to the 3 A's
Mario Sundar's Marketing Nirvana, where he also has a good summary of John's session.
Chris Carfi's Social Customer Manifesto, where he has a good summary of the session as well
Jason Chen's Blog

Next came David Weinberger, who led a discussion on the future marketing department. Good summaries for that session can be found at:

The Fast Company marketing BlogJam, which has a number of entries on it, including this summary, this post on whether the CEO should be the CMO, this one on the repair tools to fix the marketing department, and this one on whether a marketing department should manufacture demand
Johnnie Moore's blog, where he summarizes one important point of David's session, how blogs are complexifying messages

Prof Bernd Schmitt wrapped up the day by summarizing what we discussed that day and by attempting to tie it all back together. We have recorded this session and will post the audio transcript online shortly. For now you can listen to a podcast interview with Bernd Schmitt here..

Day 2 - Marketer's Forum

The CMO who kicked off the second day was Deepak Advani, CMO at Lenovo. He spoke of the challenges to build a new brand across national and cultural barriers and also touched on what it means when your brand comes under attack by xenophobes. You can listen to a podcast interview with Deepak here, and you can find summaries of his speech at:

The Fast Company Marketing BlogJam, which has a number of posts on it Including this summary of the session, this entry on innovation, and this post on where design should reside in a company

Heath Row's Squidoo lens on a new marketing foundation

Judy Breck's Golden Swam, where she has a good summary of that part of the speech where he talked about sponsoring a non-profit to help students with used computers

Bill Tancer's blog at Hitwise, where he reports on the session and ads some Hitwise stats in the process

Next up was a panel discussion on models for innovation, where David Sutherland from the Launch Institute, Gwen Ishmael from Decision Analysts, Tony Ullwyck from Strategyn and Paul Zarookian from AIG debated all the different angles of innovation. You can find summaries of this discussion at:

Joseph Jaffe's Jaffejuice, where he talks about the importance of the 1 percenters...
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on models for innovation
The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam, which has a post on this session here on innovation = creating things your customers will value

After that we had a great session on the new marketing tools that are available to marketers, which was ably moderated by Johnnie Moore, and included Kevin Lee from Did-it.com, Heidi Lehman from Third Screen Media, Max Lenderman from GMR Marketing, Bill Tancer from Hitwise and Diane Hessson from Communispace. You can find some summaries at:

Joseph Jaffe's Jaffe Juice, which has some interesting snippets from the session here
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the new toolbox
The fast Company Marketing BlogJam, which has multiple entries on it - here and here, here for an interesting quote from Dianne Hessan, and here on the role of trust.

A particularly hot topic - the pros and cons of online marketing in the context of consumer generated content - was debated in the next session. The session was moderated by David Rogers from the Center on Global Brand Leadership, and included John Hiler from Xanga, Craig Newmark from Craigslist.org, and Chris Tolles from Topix.net. Good summaries of that session can be found at:

The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on CGM
ClickZ News, which has a great entry on the discussion about where the money is in CGM, as well as an entry on Craig Newmark's plea on net neutrality

You can also listen to a Skypecast we did on the subject ahead of the conference

I was told that you could not have a marketing conference without a session on metrics and measurement, and so we put a great session together with Max Kalehoff from BuzzMetrics, Bryan Eisenberg of Future Now, and Ruth Stevens from eMarketing Strategy. Summaries of the session can be found here:

Joseph Jaffe's JaffeJuice, where he has a summary of the session.
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on what's working
The Fast Company Marketing BlogJam

Kicking off the afternoon sessions were Larry Weber from the W2 Group and Lois Kelly from Foghound, talking about the future marketing department - a lively and provocative session to say the least - and which is summarized at:

The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam, where there are a few articles on this session (here on compensation for spreading wom, here on contributing to communities, here and here from some great quotes from the conversationhere for the answers to the 10 questions that Lois asked him, and finally here for a rough transcript of the whole session)
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the changing face of marketing

You can also find a podcast interview with Larry here and listen to a Skypecast that he and Lois did ahead of the conference here.

After that we had a session on the future of advertising - led by Joseph Jaffe from Jaffejuice and including Chris Hoyt from 141 Marketing, Lee Johnson from McCann, Rick Klau from Feedburner and Len Ellis, most recently with Wonderman. A set of summaries for this session can be found at:

The Fast Company BlogJam
Heath Row's Squidoo lens on the changing face of advertising
Johnnie Moore's blog, where he comments on the mood and energy level of the session.

The last session before the wrap-up was a discussion on the future of PR - which consisted of a lively panel with Neville Hobson from Nevon, Lois Kelly from FogHound, Shel Holtz from Holtz Communication + Technology, and John Moore from Brand Autopsy. A good summary for this session can be found at:

The Fast Company BlogJam

Professor Bernd Schmitt then closed it all up and you can find the summary of his closing remarks at:

The Fast Company Marketing Blogjam site

Other, overall conference commentary can be found at

John Moore's Brand Autopsy
Max Kalehoff's blog - AttentionMax on how you can have great conversations without PowerPoint presentations.
John Winsor's "under the radar" has some good things to say about the event in which he participated
Max Lenderman's blog, where he talks about blogging for the sake of blogging
Lois Kelly's blog, where she has a great post on the takeaways from the conference

A photo stream of the event can be found on Flickr.

You can also listen to tens of podcast interviews which Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson did during the event - including interviews with Craig Newmark from Criagslist.org, Dianne Hessan from Communispace, Max Lenderman from Axe fame, Johnnie Moore and John Winsor on co-creation, David Sutherland from the Launch Institute, Eric Mankin from the Center on Enterpreneurship at the Babson University, in addition to the ones listed above with Russ Klein, Deepak

Emergence Marketing

Thoughts on marketing, innovation, social networking, new products and the impact of technology on all those thingies

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