I truly enjoyed my CMO 2.0 Influencer conversation with Tom Asacker – who I consider a friend and also admire as an original marketing thinker. Tom is the author of multiple books, including Opportunity Screams: Unlocking Hearts and Minds in Today’s Idea Economy, and also blogs at A Clear Eye. Before becoming a successful author and speaker, Tom started his career at GE, where he participated in a management buyout of an electronics firm. After that he became the founder and CEO for a medical devices company.

The first topic we tackled is that of marketing in a world where everyone, including executives, is increasingly overwhelmed with the amount of information that is coming at them. Tom is convinced that most executives need to pause and rethink their purpose and how they will execute that purpose. While the priorities of marketing have not changed all that much  - drive top line growth and grow marketshare -, those are results that come from understanding and feeding the hungers of your audiences and the customer insights, and from better defining one’s brand and how to deliver a differentiated value proposition. Marketing executives cannot optimize their way to success by measuring everything and everyone to death. They need to care deeply about their audience and create unique value that improves their audience’s lives. You cannot expect results from spreading messages all over the place hoping that somehow you will connect with the feelings of your audience – you have to really care.

Marketers also have to rethink their content, and develop it in a way that it will travel in those circles where buying recommendations are being made. That means that we have to understand what value people will derive from using the content we develop with others. After all, most people only do what they value – and that is true for making recommendations and reusing vendor content. Marketers need to switch from their traditional inside-out perspective and start looking at everything they do through the eyes of their audiences.

People need to realize that everything in the marketplace has changed – the amount of products and services is overwhelming, and the amount of information is overwhelming, buyers’ attitudes about how they filter and process information and how they are making their decisions has changed.

Next we switched to one of Tom’s favorite topics – branding. Branding is of course something that exists in the mind of a customer – it’s an expectation of value that gets created through interactions in the marketplace. Those interactions can include advertising, pricing, social exchanges with other users, packaging, financing options or interactions with company employees. As you can see, many of these interactions are happening with touch points that are somewhat controlled by the company. So to say that the consumer owns the brand is a fallacy. Tom wishes we would have a Deming-like figure in the branding space – someone who could influence how everyone in a company feels responsible for the brand.

About engagement, Tom said: “People at successful companies love what they do, they believe in what it is they get up in the morning and go to work to do every day. Secondly they love who they do it for; the’re interested in in their audience and what they’re all about and how to improve their lives and how to make things better. And the third thing, is which I call engagement, is that they like the process of keeping what they do and what they love connected to others: others’ interest and others’ values. They love the idea of injecting energy into their idea and bringing it to life for everyone’s benefit.” How is that for a definition of engagement? Much better than most definitions being bantered around in the agency space if you ask me.

Continuing on the topic of engagement, Tom described the three steps you need to follow to engage people – three steps that are described in more detail in his latest book “Opportunity Screams: Unlocking Hearts and Minds in Today’s Idea Economy.” The first step is you want to engage people’s conscious attention. How do you get someone to stop and think about what’s being presented? You do that by charming them and by providing some cue to value. Once you feed their hungers and you’re reflective of them and their self-identities, you entice them to participate. All they want to do then is believe, and you can help them believe in what you do by conveying purpose through your actions, by stimulating interaction and sharing like you discuss all the time. But you always have to have value and unfortunately most businesses don’t believe in the distinctive value they add to people’s lives.

You cannot have a conversation with Tom without talking about culture and so we talked about this whole notion that culture trumps strategy, and what that means for older companies that may not have ideal cultures to roll out new strategies. In older companies you often have what Tom calls cultural immune systems that end up blocking new ideas and new perspectives. Leaders need to be aware of this and be willing to take off their cultural glasses and expose themselves to new ideas (Note that we will be conducting a research project on culture and strategy in partnership with the Schulich School of Business at York University, email me if interested).

“Business is about people, it’s about culture, it’s about feelings, it’s a way to help people feel prosperity and well being. It’s not about numbers,” said Tom, and I must say that I could not agree more.

We talked about a lot more things than can be captured in this blog post. I hope you will find the time to listen to the podcast.

Other things we discussed include:

• How Drucker’s moto that business is marketing never materialized
• The importance of the last transaction on the brand perception
• How the expectations that we have from brands has soared
• The role (or lack thereof) of agencies in meaning making
• How engagement is not the same as sustained attention
• The resistance of middle management to cultural changes
• Ways to change corporate cultures that do not involve a near-death experience
• The importance of finding meaning at work and being able to bring passion to work

As usual you can listen to the full conversation at the CMO 2.0 Site.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Tom Nightingale, the CMO at Con-way, a $5B publicly traded transportation and logistics company, was very enlightening to say the least. When I spoke with Tom, he had been the CMO at Con-way for 5 years, where he overlooks public relations, web and digital marketing, product marketing, lead generation, events, direct marketing, new product development, customer satisfaction and voice of the customer – generally what you would expect the responsibilities of a CMO to be. He is also responsible for internal communications and enterprise sales management. One of the things that was intriguing, and that I think we will see more of as part of a CMO’s responsibility in the future, is that he is responsible for recruitment marketing, a major effort as they recruit over 6,000 drivers a year at Con-way (Note: we will be launching a research project on recruitment marketing in partnership with Monster.com — more on that later, email me if you have an interest in participating).

When Tom talks about being in charge of recruitment marketing, he talks about having the responsibility to fill the funnel, which then gets processed by his partners in HR. His role is to bring in quality candidates who align with the Con-way brand and their employment value proposition. Being in charge of employee communications means he communicates with employees from the day after they process through the HR funnel till the day that they leave.

Like most CMO’s, Tom has seen some big changes in marketing over the past few years, with the two most notable being the rise of social media and the decline in effectiveness of TV and print advertising. Another big change is the increase of content curration across all channels.

As in most industries, word-of-mouth is an important vehicle to reach customers, prospects, and prospective employees. At Con-way they make sure that the content they create can easily travel and be used when friends recommend them as a potential vendor or employer. A good example of that is how they share their job feed on their Facebook page for others to see and share with friends.

As said earlier, social media has made a big difference in Tom’s job over the past couple of years. While on the commercial side of their business the use of social media is still in the early stages, they see it playing an increasing role in customer service related inquiries as well as in requests for proposals and quotes. They also use social media internally, one example being the use of twitter to connect truckers with their load boards.

An interesting challenge facing Con-way marketing is that they have thousands of customers with whom they have a pretty shallow relationship, in essence moving freight for them from point A to point B, and which differ from one another on a regional basis. They also have several hundred customers with whom they have very deep relationships – those that outsource their entire supply chain to Con-way, and who have needs that are different based on industry. Tom is convinced that the latter group presents a bigger opportunity to connect customers with one another using social media or social CRM – ensuring that the collective becomes smarter than the individuals. When he thinks about a community for those customers, he also envisions hyper-local and face-to-face components – which is the right way of looking at customer communities when you have that opportunity.

We also talked about accountability and metrics – a topic that is top of mind for many marketers. At Con-way, marketing is accountable for three things – reducing the cost to acquire and retain customers, attracting and retaining the best and brightest employees, and positioning the company for growth. All metrics that are being used at Con-way support those three overarching goals.

The conversation then switched to the role of culture in a services company like Con-way. Con-way has a simple set of values that they truly live by – integrity, commitment, safety, and excellence. With a business where the brand is impacted by lot’s of employees who interact with customers, it’s critical to  the brand to have simple values that everyone can live by.  That is also why the employee brand and the customer brand have to be the same – if employees are the ones that will influence the brand promise in customers’ minds, they need to live that brand promise. The values at Con-way are so important that they are discussed every day during pre-work meetings with 8,000 drivers who interact with an average of 25 customers every day.

We closed the conversation by talking about innovation. At Con-way, they make a distinction between process innovation and product innovation. Process innovation is key when you have to constantly increase efficiency in a low margin industry to maintain profitability, while maintaining very high levels of customer service. Product innovation at Con-way is based partly  on Voice of the Customer and partly on trend spotting to see where the industry is headed. Launching new products in a service company like Con-way can be a tricky proposition. Unlike with product companies, where they can launch a product that is 80% complete and fix it later, in a services company the product has to be 100% perfect when you launch it.

It’s really interesting to see how the issues of a CMO in a more traditional business are not all that different from those in more recent industries, like for example the high tech space.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The importance of alumni  in marketing and new employee training
• More detailed conversation on how the overarching goals drive metrics
• The integration between sales and marketing
• Marketing content co-creation with sales
• The use of social media for internal communications
• The importance of content curration and thought leadership
• How you need to adjust your business practices to the local culture
• The differences in employment marketing in different cultures

As usual, you can listen to the full CMO 2.0 Conversation on the CMO 2.0 site.

I truly enjoyed my CMO 2.0 conversation with Karen Quintos, the CMO at Dell. Karen has somewhat of an unusual background for a CMO at a high tech company. She spent almost half her career in the pharmaceutical industry and did a stint in the financial services industry before landing at Dell 11 years ago – a rich background that was clearly reflected in the conversation. Karen also has a passion for being close to the customer – a good trait for any CMO.

We first talked about social media, a topic we had discussed at length with Erin Nelson, the previous CMO at Dell, and Manish Mehta, the VP of social media and communities, during an earlier CMO 2.0 Conversation. Karen confirmed that social media absolutely has to be built into the fabric of the company and that the (social) customer has to be at the core of everything. In fact, Karen believes that customer centricity is key to win in the marketplace. At Dell, they leverage social media as part of everything they do – product development, sales, marketing, HR, IT, finance, and service and support.

Karen then described the evolution of IdeaStorm, the Dell innovation communities, and how they now include Storm Session – focused and directed customer feedback sessions bound in time. Examples of successful Storm Sessions included discussions with CIO’s around virtualization, sustainability, and data center-type solutions – where customers could discuss how they think about ROI and total cost of ownership rather than just talk about technology deployment issues.

The Dell Social Monitoring Command Center, which was launched last year, is set up for employees to monitor, respond, and trend the conversations that are going on about Dell all over the world. On any given day they get upwards of 25,000 different conversations about Dell. A small team of people triage the conversations  by coding them red, orange or green, and feed them into processes like product development. Karen made the point that when it comes to social media monitoring companies need to realize that it should not be about hearing, but about listening and making sense.

“Leveraging social media cannot be a bolt-on strategy,” said Karen, “it has to be built into the culture…it cannot be someone’s second job, it cannot be something that they think of once a week. It has to be something that’s integrated into their day-to-day operations.” Right on! But amazing to hear that and then realize that more than 60% of those companies that participate in our Tribalization of Business Study (co-sponsored with Deloitte and the Society for New Communications Research) have 1 or less than a full time person associated with these efforts. Those companies need to wake up and listen to truly Hyper-Social organizations like Dell.

There are of course risks associated with social media. One of the early risks that Dell identified was to react too quickly – either latching on to negative comments first or latching on to proposed product ideas that very few people want. Sounds a lot like not giving in to the “tyranny of the minority” and instead reacting to real trends. Another risk they identified early on was around transparency – especially when eager employees don’t disclose that they work for Dell. Karen believes that many of the risks can be mitigated through training and education.

As many other CMO’s at successful Hyper-Social Organizations, Karen pointed to the importance of having simple values to ensure consistency across the multiple employee touch-points that they have with their customers – in their case be open, be transparent, be simple, and be caring.

Next we switched to the topic of culture, which Karen believes is, if not the most important, one of the most important elements in a company’s success. She considers Dell’s culture fairly young at 27 years old, but truly believes that is what guides behavior and brand. She also believes that it is extremely important to link your own culture(s) with that of your customers – especially in the B2B and public sector space, which make up 80% of Dell’s business.

An important part of culture is the culture of innovation. Over the last two years, Dell has fueled innovation not just from within but also through acquisitions. Interestingly enough, but not surprising (the world is not flat after all), Dell sees aquisitions from major innovation centers like Silicon Valley as being totally key to continue to bring the spirit of innovation within the company.

We closed the conversation by talking about a super-cool program that Dell is doing in partnership with the University of Texas – the Dell Social Innovation Competition. It’s open to higher education students around the world who have a passion for taking a social issue that they see within their community and coming up with a plan to address it. They submit ideas, business plans and videos which get voted on. The best ones get to travel to Austin where a finalist gets selected. With kids from India, Nigeria, France and the United States competing with one another, they are able to create a cauldron of diversity of thought necessary for innovation that would be hard to create in any corporate environment.

That is definitely something I would want to tell my 16 year old son about!

Other things we talked about include:

• The recommendation for companies to listen and engage with the both the good and the bad in social media, and how the sooner you engage the more successful you will be
• How Dell has training programs in place to teach people (9,000 people trained so far) how to listen and how to engage
• How to ensure that the proper experts get involved in deeply technical discussions
• The importance of trusting employees to do the right thing
• The importance of being able to trend conversations and launch more in-depth discussions with customers about important topics
• The importance of hiring people with a passion to win
• The importance of tying compensation and rewards to a set of behaviors – not just “what” behaviors, but also “how” behaviors
• The importance of social rewards in fostering the right culture
• The importance of employee rotational programs to foster innovation

As usual, you can listen to the CMO 2.o Conversation at the CMO 2.0 Site.

If you want to meet a truly insightful CMO 2.0, meet Ted Smyth, the Executive Vice President, Corporate Affairs at the McGraw-Hill Companies. Ted has a really interesting background that started with a 15 year long  career as a senior Irish diplomat. He then switched over to the world of business by joining Heinz, where he spent 20 years before joining McGraw-Hill 2 years ago. One of the main lessons learned from this diverse background is that companies have to embrace performance with purpose – you don’t want to achieve profit goals at the exclusion of what’s good for society. Young people especially, will not want to leave their persona’s at the company’s front door, they will want to continue to do good for society while being at work. Another obvious benefit of mixing do-good with company performance  is that as a company you will increase the passion of your employees in the context of their work – which is clearly a win-win proposition.

We quickly delved into the topic of innovation, a hot topic at McGraw-Hill, where many of the industries in which they operate are undergoing tectonic shifts, and many of their businesses are going through the classic innovator’s dilemma. Innovation and customer focus are two major initiatives at McGraw-Hill. They strive to delight customers and prospects, and seek out people who are brilliant, courageous, curious, competitive and driven to do so – both inside and outside the organization. Innovation at McGraw-Hill is both a grass roots as well as a top down initiative, and celebrating wins, benchmarking themselves against other innovators, and developing an understanding of societal needs is all part of their culture of innovation. Ted is a firm believer that innovation needs to be structured and attached to people’s work routine. It needs to be disciplined to succeed and you always have to be on the lookout to not just innovate according to your capabilities, realizing that sometimes you need to upgrade your capabilities to develop what customers want.

Next we talked about education and learning, an important part of McGraw-Hill’s business, and a perfect example of what Ted meant when he talked about achieving business success while also doing good for society. Learning and education are clearly becoming digital activities that can help fix the current system, which is failing our kids – with kids who are slower than average falling behind and those who are faster than average getting bored. Digital courseware helps alleviate these problems. In digital environments, teachers and educators are freed up to become coaches with the ability to provide one-on-one help for the kids. While digital learning can remove some of the social barriers that sometimes inhibit learning (e.g., humiliation for not getting it), digital learning needs to be a very social/collaborative activity in order to succeed.

We then talked about the changes in how people consume content and where they get their buying recommendations from, and how that impacts marketing. The way McGraw-Hill thinks about marketing and advertising has obviously changed, with much more activity shifting towards  thought leadership and relevance in social media. Just like other Hyper-Social Organizations, McGraw-Hill realizes that you can only ensure consistency across all the different touch points that you have with your customers by living your mission and values. They have a very clear mission - need for knowledge, need for capital, need for transparency -, and a set of values that are easy to live by – objectivity, integrity, candor, diversity (especially of thought), and independence.  These simple concepts unite all employees across all divisions and help drive consistent decision-making across different markets with different customers.

Ted finished the conversation with two words of wisdom for marketers – we need to introduce more humor and emotions in communications and better articulate great societal causes. In closing he quoted some lines from an Irish poem by Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney from the Canon of Expectation that got recited at a St. Patrick’s Day event he attended the day before our interview: “I yearn for hammerblows on clinkered planks, the uncompromised report of driven thole-pins, to know there is one among us who never swerved from all his instincts told him was right action,who stood his ground in the indicative, whose boat will lift when the cloudburst happens.” That is where we as individuals, communities and companies need to be, we need to stand our ground in the indicative, and our boat will lift when the cloudburst happen. We need firmness of purpose and be able to express it emotionally, poetically and humorously – that is where communications needs to be in order to be effective in this cluttered world.

What a great way to close a conversation with a truly great human being. Thank you Ted!

Other topics we touched on:

• The importance of the fundamentals of conflict resolution in business
• The role of training in fostering innovation
• The balance between understanding unmet needs and prospects vs existing customers needs
• The importance of serendipity in innovation
• The lessons that can be learned from game designers in education
• The need to bring down silos in stimulating innovation and learning, both in education and businesses, and the importance of social networking in doing so
• Generational differences in learning
• The importance of content curation in the publishing industry
• The dynamics of the current knowledge economy

As usual, you can listen to the full interview at the CMO 2.0 Conversation site.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Erin Nelson, the CMO at Dell, came with a bonus in that Manish Mehta, the VP of Social Media and Community for Dell joined us as well. I hope you will enjoy this CMO 2.0 Conversation as much as I did.

Erin is responsible for Dell’s Global brand strategy, social media, global communication, as well as for the talent development of the Dell marketing teams – where she focuses on reinvigorating the way Dell marketing works. She has been with Dell for 11 years, while Manish has been with them for 15 years. Manish is in charge of social media and communities, including dell.com, their intranet and their extranet.

One of the first things we discussed was the role of social media and communities within Dell’s business strategy – and how they got to become one of the leaders in social media adoption. On the one hand, dealing with customers directly through social media is a natural extension of what the Dell brand has been all about for the past 25 years – having a direct relationship with the customer. On the other hand it was also precipitated by what has come to be known as “Dell Hell”, when prominent blogger Jeff Jarvis and others had some not too flattering things to say about Dell in public forums. The latter incident gave them no choice but to jump full force into embracing the social on a large scale. As Erin said, it wasn’t a question of test, learn, and measure, it was actually a question of survival – with their brand under severe pressure. In hindsight, Erin believes that this has been a huge benefit for Dell, saying that you cannot get into social media by just putting a toe in the water – you are either all in and it becomes part of your culture, or you’re not.

As we argue in our upcoming book, the Hyper-Social organization, we could not agree more. Companies that successfully embrace the social are those, like Dell, that make it part of the fabric or DNA of everything they do – it cannot just be managed as bolt-on programs to existing strategies. It is also interesting to note how companies like Dell and IBM, which have managed to totally transform themselves, were able to do so only after “near death” experiences (and those are my words/observations, not Dell’s). Dell truly rebuilt itself with the customer at the core of everything they do – how they sell, how they market, how they service and support, how they communicate, and how they design new products.

The scale at which Dell interacts with customers online is staggering – with billions of connections every year through the purchase path, the support path, and through the community path of learning how to use technology and achieve more with it. All that cross-functional customer interaction required them to set up a cross functional governance council, with member representatives from across the entire company – business units, marketing teams, service organizations, and product organizations. They meet on a regular basis to share the learnings, and to make sure that the learnings become embedded within all company processes.

Next we talked about the lessons learned from listening to what is being said about the company in the marketplace and from deciding how and when to engage in those conversations. As many other successful Hyper-Social organization CMO’s told us, they do not always engage. Listening is incredibly important, but often times hearing, learning, and acting upon what is being said are the real keys to success – not direct engagement. It is also important to realize that in this new world, notwithstanding that you can have a common brand spirit, you cannot really have a singular voice of the company anymore. At Dell they have 100,000 team members who are experts in what they do and who will speak out in their own voice.

We also spent a fair amount of time talking about how best to measure the impact of social media and community initiatives – especially in view of the recent announcement that Dell sold $6.5M worth of products through their Twitter channel last year. Obvioulsy being engaged in social channels such as Twitter is not all about generating revenue (although that is a nice side effect). At Dell they try to gauge many other things, including level of engagement/connectedness, sentiment, the value that they are adding in the customers’ buying decisions, and whether they add value in how customers utilize their technology better.

Lastly we talked about some of the recent changes that Dell made to their IdeaStorm environment, and how they felt the need to expand their successful online suggestion box concept with directed and time-bound innovation jams called Storm Sessions through which they ask the community questions in real time, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, and sometimes for hours. They have found this real time learning capability, which they use both inside and outside, to be extremely powerful.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The importance of assigning roles to employees who engage in social media – making sure, for example, that technically unqualified employees do not attempt to respond to tech issues
• The challenges associated with integrating acquisitions within your corporate culture (specifically the acquisition of Pro Systems, which increased the number of employees at Dell by 40%).
• How making the social part of the fabric of the way they do business changed the way they think about market segments – thinking more about customer clusters or tribes rather than classic demographically based segments
• The importance of ratings and reviews in leveraging the social as part of your business
• The two types of customer interactions that happen online – disgruntled ones where you need to turn their sentiment from a negative to a positive, and fans, who are brand ambassadors and who you want to engage to influence the influencers
• The importance and risks of status in communities
• How talent acquisition shifted from looking for people with existing expertise to people who can develop new capabilities

As usual, you can listen to the full podcast on the CMO 2.0 site.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Larry Flanagan, the CMO at MasterCard was a good one.

As is usually the case with these interviews, Larry started off by giving us some context to the career that led him to become CMO at MasterCard – in his case a background that includes a stint in the advertising business, as well as client side experiences with Proctor & Gamble and L’Oreal, where he was involved with major acquisitions. He joined MasterCard 13 years ago when the brand was in dire straits, and became CMO 5 years later. Not surprisingly, one of his main yardsticks in managing global marketing campaigns for MasterCard is Marketing ROI.

MasterCard has an interesting and fairly complex business model. On the one hand, they deal with partners, for the most part banks, but also merchant partners and non-financial institutions, who are basically franchisees. On the other hand they deal with consumers, who are the carriers of the cards. That makes for a business that is not just into B2B or B2C, but also into B2C2B and B2B2C – resulting in interesting and unique challenges as it relates to balancing the marketing mix and branding.

We then talked about the challenges associated with delivering a consistent brand experience when you have as many customer touch-points as MasterCard has – most of which are not in the company’s control. Brand is especially important for MasterCard as it is fully intertwined with the value propositions to their partners. At MasterCard, just as is the case with many other companies, branding has undergone dramatic shifts over the last decades. Larry described how branding went from being a process that consisted of a one way dialog in which companies told the consumers how they should think about the brand, how it’s differentiated from competitors, what the key benefits and value proposition are, to a many-to-many process in which the brand exists in the consumer’s daily experience, and is influenced not only by what the company says, but also by what is being said in consumers’ social networks, and what friends are telling them. Larry calls this a consumer inside-out view of the brand – one in which the brand truth lies with the consumer.

What that means for marketers is that they have to think differently about the channels through which they try to influence consumers. Sometimes the best way to have a dialogue with the consumer is through third party influencers and stake-holders who enjoy a high level of trust within their communities and networks.

In Larry’s view, social media and digital technologies have ignited a revolution that has leveled the playing field between individuals and corporations. In a way, it has enabled word of mouth, which has always been one of the most successful means of influence and decision-making, to become word of mouth on steroids, with everything being amplified and traveling much faster than before. That is true in all aspects of business, not just in marketing, but also in the way we recruit and manage talent, and how job applicants select the companies they want to work for. And while we may not fully understand the long term impact of social media on our business – one thing we know for sure is that as companies we have to be part of those conversations.

One of the challenges facing marketers who are investing in these new channels and leveraging these new-found opportunities to engage with consumers, partners, and competitors, is how to measure the impact of those programs, and how to attribute value to all those new behaviors so that we can influence the ones we want. Clearly there are no good models out there to do that and Larry believes that many companies will develop proprietary models.

We then talked about an issue that is very specific to the financial sector, yet applicable to all industries – that of trust. It’s no secret that the last economic downturn have severely damaged the trust that consumers have in their financial institutions. When you are hit with a trust confidence crisis like this – how do you overcome it and how do you regain that trust? According to Larry, the key to overcome this is by first listening to the marketplace and truly understand what is going on. Next is to engage with the marketplace in a manner that is transparent and value driven. Specifically for financial services companies that means convincing consumers that they want to make their lives easier while not hiding the fact that they are for-profit commercial institutions and not charitable organizations.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The changing role of reputation management in a social media world
• The importance of listening to what is being said about your company and how to select the conversations in which you want to engage
• The skill set of people needed to successfully lead you through the current changes
• The importance of mobile applications in the marketing mix
• The role and valuation of impressions and engagement in paid media, earned media, and owned media
• The balance between global/local needs in the marketing mix

As usual, you can listen to the full podcast on the CMO 2.0 Conversation.

I’ve been a long time champion of Don Peppers’ work and so it was especially fun to conduct this CMO 2.0 Influencer Conversation with him. Don is the co-author of eight books, his latest one being Rules to Break and Laws to Follow, and he is also the co-founder of Peppers and Rogers.

We started off by having Don give an overview of his latest book, which came out last year. At a high level, the book deals with the evolving landscape of business competition and the changes that are caused by the rise of social media – with customers increasingly talking with one another.

In it, Don and his co-author Martha Rogers argue that while businesses operate under a set of assumptions that sound logical, they are, in fact, fundamentally flawed. And, as the title of their book advocates for, it’s these rules that need to be broken.

The first one is that the best measure of success for your company is current sales and profits. They think that this is a false assumption because customers don’t just buy things from you today. When they do buy things they also have an experience that changes their impression of you or their affection for you, which in turn changes the likely amount of business you’re going to get (or not get) from that customer in the future. So, the customer lifetime value goes up or down based on current buying experiences, and that is the metric companies should track – not current sales and profits.

The second rule to break, or false assumption that companies operate on, is that with the right sales and marketing efforts you can always get more customers. In reality, they argue, we have a surplus of products and services, and a shortage of customers – customers are the new scarcity and should be thought of as a productive resource the same way we think of capital or labor as productive resources. You cannot just get more customers with more marketing – there is a limit. Note that Don and Martha are not attacking the whole notion of customer acquisition, they just don’t think that it’s the only way to create value. The other side of this coin is that capital is an infinite resource – you can always get more capital.

The third rule to break, also widely accepted as truth by most businesses, is that company value can be created by offering differentiated products and services. Products and services don’t create value – customers do when they buy those products and services. Customers create value in two ways. Short term, by buying products from you now. Long term, by buying more from you later and by creating additional business for you through their referrals. So you should think of customers as productive assets.

Don then talked about a new customer-based metric that companies can use to measure the efficiency with which they are using customers to create value – Return on Customer. Return on Customer is very analogous to Return on Investment. If I have a customer who has a lifetime value of $100 and I make $5 in profit on that customer by selling him stuff during the year, and by the end of the year I’ve been able to increase his lifetime value to $110, then my Return on Customer is 15%.

We also talked about customer acquisition strategies and how you need to evaluate the total customer lifetime value when you prioritize which customers to attract. The least valuable customers come in for the most valuable offers – so having a customer acquisition strategy focused on discounts is not exactly the smartest thing to do. Research that we found as part of research for our own book, about which I will blog about separately, showed that customers who are acquired through word of mouth have not only a higher lifetime value than those acquired through traditional marketing programs, they also bring in more new business through their referrals. So, when you calculate customer lifetime value you need to include the business that will come to you because of a customer’s positive word of mouth. That is especially true in light of other research that Don mentioned, which shows that your highest spenders are not always your highest referrers.

We then talked about another important topic in all of Don’s writing – trust. Customers make most of their buying decisions based on trust, and they think that you are creating the most value for them when they trust you. So if you want to maximize the value your customers create, you need to focus on earning and keeping their trust. And you cannot have a trustworthy business unless you trust your employees.

We closed our conversation with a discussion around the evolution of CRM, and how CRM systems will have to start incorporating people’s social profile, not just their buying history with the company. Don also warned that if companies think of their CRM system as a tool to sell more things, they will fail. CRM systems should be put in place to create more value for the customers – create better offers, better delivery, or whatever will increase value for the customer.

Don had an interesting parting piece of advice for marketers:

…in the era of social media you should always step back from whatever marketing policy you’re considering, whatever kind of new idea you have and ask yourself, ‘Gee, if this became public, would it be an embarrassment to us? Would we be proud of it? Would some of our customers hold it against us?’

Because, you know what? It’s a really good chance it will become public in today’s age and if you want to protect yourself then you really have to have clean hands, not just a good alibi.

Other things we discussed include:

• How trust is a combination of intent and competence
• The impact of technology on corporate hierarchies and processes
• How successful companies of the future will have a high degree of self-organization
• The importance of culture in successful companies
• How the most influential customers don’t want to be sold to

As usual, you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Gail Galuppo, the CMO at Western Union was both fun and refreshing. Talk about the challenge of being in charge of a legacy brand that totally had to transform itself, with the added complexity of serving 15,000 distinct customer communities. Not an easy task, for sure, but one that Gail and her team seem to enjoy thoroughly.

As usual we started off with Gail giving us some context by describing her background. In her case, she learned to put the customer at the center of all decision making while being trained on Six Sigma at GE Capital. She then had a career that took her from financial services to retail and back into financial services and which allowed her to experience various places worldwide. At Western Union, she deals with offices in 202 countries and 400,000 retail locations – six times as many retail locations as McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Citibank combined. Talk about a challenging footprint to deliver a consistent brand experience worldwide. As mentioned earlier, they serve 15,000 distinct customer communities, who behave very differently from one another – from Ghanaians in France, to Kenyans in the UK, Filipinos in Dubai and Guatemalans in the US – just to name a few. Their customers are work emigrants who send money back home.

The first marketing challenge we talked about was that of international marketing – how to operate as a global brand, while being relevant to your local communities. The job gets further complicated by the fact that even within their distinct customer communities, there are fundamental differences in needs, expectations, and lifestyles. A migrant from Puerto Rico who immigrated to the US 30 years ago has a very different lifestyle and other needs than one who’s in the country for 3 months or 3 years. And if you thought that was it – think again. They also need to appeal to both senders and receivers of money. With this many permutations and message requirements, nobody could blame you for having a marketing conniption. The way they resolve this seemingly insurmountable and massively expensive problem is in two ways – through a hyper-national brand campaign based on common consumer tribe attributes for all immigrants worldwide combined with a hyper-local set of programs focused on the separate customer communities within each country. Worldwide, their research found that the common attributes that binds all immigrant customer tribes together are pride, sacrifice, adventurism, dreams for their family members, positivity and can-do spirit. Based on that they created the Yes! campaign, the first global brand campaign for Western Union. At the same time they also continue to celebrate the differences between their consumer tribes by having hyper-local programs (like concerts with bands from their native country) that are led by people from those consumer communities – so for example, they have Chinese, Kenyan, and Togolese employees leading the local marketing efforts for those groups in France.

It would be interesting to see if you could harness this consumer tribal behavior into a true global online community. Members would be attracted to the community by what unites them worldwide and would remain in the community by what makes their own tribes unique. They could hang out in sub-communities with their own people and help one another get adjusted. Western Union could strengthen the relationship with their customers by recommending community-specific products, and services, and by providing advice. From a technology enablement perspective it certainly would work as 90% of their customers have cell phones and are over-indexed on the Internet – the community would have to have a strong SMS component to it.

Another interesting aspect of the Yes! campaign is that the primary audience for the campaign was not the actual customers, but the employees and the Western Union partners who operate the storefronts.The effort, called “Project Galvanize,” was actually meant to change the culture from one where people were thinking of customers in terms of transactions into a much more customer-centric culture. When you have 400,000 customer touch-points worldwide, it’s hard to deliver a consistent brand experience if you focus on the transactions rather than the humans and their motivations.

We also talked about the role of social media in the marketing mix. While Western Union is in the early stages of leveraging social media and communities as part of their marketing – they do have a initiative on FaceBook called World In Motion – they definitely intend on expanding that. They are monitoring what is being said about them in social media, but here too they want to take this to the next level.

Lastly we talked about growth – and whether they focus on expanding the array of services for existing customers, or look for new markets first. The answer for Western Union is both. They are coming out with a series of new mobile applications for existing customers and are also getting into the small business market – not just the generic small business market, but that part of the small business market operated by immigrants. A new consumer tribe that probably would thrive online as well.

I can totally see how Gail thinks she has the best job in the world.

Other things that we talked about include:

• The details of the Yes! campaign and how they measured progress and success
• The importance of a values-based system in managing all the possible agent scenarios worldwide
• The role of customer analytics in marketing
• The importance of integrating marketing with customer service
• The challenges related to recruiting a true diverse workforce worldwide

As usual, you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Ted Gilvar, who is the global CMO at Monster (and also a customer of ours), was a really interesting one as I have a fairly high level of familiarity with their business. It is also fascinating to see how some themes, even though they are sometimes called by different names, are recurring among CMO’s – even when they are operating in very different lines of business.

As is customary with CMO 2.0 Conversations, Ted started off by talking about his background and the business challenges he is facing. In his case he had a life-long career on the agency side before taking on the role of CMO at Monster 2 years ago.

Having come into existence by being a classic business model disruptor, we quickly started talking about where the next disruption might come from and how to leverage innovation to get prepared for it. Not surprisingly, the biggest shift on the horizon is the advent of social media and how this allows “the social” to become part of the talent acquisition and development process again.

When they think of innovation at Monster, they think about it both from a product point of view as well as from a marketing point of view, says Ted. The biggest recent innovation on the product side was to add semantic search to refine searches – and that innovation came to Monster through an acquisition. On the marketing side, one of the more recent innovations was getting people to trial the service – even though Ted did not really call it that. That happened when they organized the “Keep America Working” tour, which offered a a free career fair to any employer who had jobs. In marketing, Ted believes that success cannot be predicted based on what happened in the past – and so you need to be willing to innovate all the time, even when looking at traditional marketing programs.

After this we spent a fair amount of time talking about the impact of social media on the talent acquisition and development process – a process that is inherently social to start with. One of the cornerstones of their social media strategy, community-based talent acquisition and development, happened through the acquisition of Affinity Labs. They host affinity-based communities centered around professions – where members can network with like-minded professionals and get inspiration to help one another further their careers. With this community-based approach, they are transforming the relationship that they have with professionals from an episodic transactional-based relationship, where you interact with them only when you are looking for a job, to an ongoing peer-to-peer community-based relationship. With the most recent recession, and people being forced through painful job/career transitions, the reciprocity that powers those communities – people wanting to help others and be helped – has been very strong. Other benefits of this community-based approach include:

• The fact that people’s profiles will not just have static career/job information but will now also contain some social context – which is very powerful.
• The fact that besides search based-matching, the process of matching people to opportunities now has an added social filter.

Another important lesson that we can take from Monster is that while they have a destination site, they also realized that they need to supplement that by being other placdes job seekers are, and so they syndicate their content to other sites. A federated approach like that allows them to get a larger share of attention from job seekers – and especially from the coveted passive seekers.

Next we talked about the impact of Monster audiences becoming increasingly digital on market segmentation and marketing programs in general. Not surprisingly, most marketing budgets at Monster are focused on digital marketing – giving you a quick and accurate sense of what works and doesn’t. Moving forward, community based marketing is expected to play an increasing role in the marketing mix.

Ted also spoke about the importance of social media monitoring and engagement as part of their marketing strategy. Seeing the fusion of marketing and customer service in social media was one of the most interesting learnings from engaging in those conversations, he said. If done properly they see social media based customer service as an opportunity to diffuse an issue before it becomes one.

We also talked about the importance of content in all aspects of marketing. When peer-to-peer communication is becoming the most important form of communication, companies like Monster need to think differently about content – developing it so that it travels in the networks that matter.

Ted also pointed to the fact that marketers should spend more time monitoring the quality of the content that they put out, not just the strategic fit. People vote on the quality of your content with their time and attention, and that is why you need to produce content worthy of consumption. It will be interesting to see the increasing role of user generated content as they go further into community-based marketing.

Other things that we discussed include:

• How they connect their traditional marketing programs with social media
• The halo effect of social endorsements in the recruiting process
• The potential benefits of adding hyperlocal community activities to their affinity-based communities
• The challenges of segmentation when you have a mass appeal and limited budgets
• The think locally act globally strategy for international markets
• The changing profile of people who staff successful marketing departments
• The dynamics of the emerging Gen Y workforce

As usually you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site and soon we will be publishing a transcript as well.

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Marty St. George, CMO at JetBlue was truly enjoyable – especially since I am intimately familiar with the service they provide and biased in that I am a big fan of the company. JetBlue managed to turn what has essentially been a commoditized service by other airlines into a brand that is far from a commodity.

JetBlue’s original mission was to bring humanity back to the airline industry. So the first topic we tackled was how you can humanize a brand when there are so many employee touch points that can make or break that brand promise. It turns out that for JetBlue, the most important ingredient for success is having a values-based culture – one in which every single employee bases his or her actions on those values. Not surprisingly, the values that drive the JetBlue culture are fairly straightforward and easy to live by:

• Safety (the most important of course)
• Caring
• Integrity
• Fun
• Passion

All employees get screened against those values during the hiring process, go through extensive training on it after they get hired, and get constantly reminded of those values throughout their career. The end result is that everyone at JetBlue feels part of a big team, single-mindedly focused on improving the customer experience and by proxy the JetBlue business. Front line crew members are empowered to make independent decisions based on those values, and because of that values-based approach they end up with a self-enforcing culture that has built-in organizational learning. Off course, and in order to make true empowerment work for a company, you also have to have a tolerance for failure.

Marty further talked about the importance of transparency in forming a cohesive workforce – one that focuses on them (the customers) and not us (the employees). Briefing employees on how the business is doing and addressing their concerns in a timely manner is at least as important to JetBlue executives as it is to deal with investors.

Surprisingly (or maybe not because it is an effective marketing strategy in just about any other industry), one of most effective marketing techniques at JetBlue is getting customers to try the service. I say surprisingly because I would have never expected an airline marketing executive to talk about trials. But if you look at the All You Can Jet program (#aycj on twitter), where people can fly as much as they want during a 30 day period for $599, or their “JetBlue Cheeps” program (@JetBlueCheeps on Twitter), where they announce cheap fares between selected locations every Monday, that is exactly what they are doing – getting people to try the product. The results are very good because they are confident that once they get someone to fly with them, they’ll get them back again.

As usual we touched on the marketing mix impact of the fact that most of their audiences have gone digital. And since 80% of all JetBlue tickets are sold on JetBlue.com, it is not surprising that most of their marketing spend is online – with very strong marketing metrics as a result. Even though I would consider JetBlue a strong adopter of social media-based marketing and customer service, Marty believes that there is still a ton to learn and plenty of unearthed opportunities for them (and others). Twitter is an especially successful channel for them – providing both a window into the brand and as said before a tremendous source for trials and customer service-based interactions. As they engage with disgruntled twitterers they constantly have to make sure that they don’t undermine the decisions made by empowered front line employees – they do not want twitter to become a court of last appeal. Fortunately that is where a values-based culture comes back into play – they can predict 99% of all decisions made by front line employees and reinforce those decisions where needed on twitter without having to check with those decision makers.

Lastly we spend some time talking about the importance of innovation as part of JetBlue’s success. While the innovation process is informal and organic, it is part of everyone’s job to think about innovation. They also have a few avenues for customers to get involved in innovation. According to Marty, one of the key ingredients to make innovation with customers and employees work, is to be a good listener and to always provide a response – positive or negative – to every suggestion. As with many other CMOs we interviewed Marty does not believe that you need a reward system to incentivize innovation – it should all be based on a social contract.

On a closing note, Marty mentioned the simple mission statement that he has for his marketing team, the 3 B’s – “Brand, Buzz, and Butts.” You got to love simplicity when it works like this.

Other things we talked about include:

• The pros and cons of adding social media information as part of your CRM profiles
• The importance of internal review teams to allow for lateral communications and sharing of best and worst practices
• Their social media monitoring and engagement process
• How you have to stay small as you become a big company
• The importance of customer privacy and the impact of social media profiles on that privacy
• How their JD Power award, which they have won for multiple years now, is going on tour to all their local centers, much like you would have a hockey trophy going around
• Other ways through which to create passion for your brand

As usual you can listen to podcast over at the CMO 2.0 Site and soon we will publish a transcript.