Aug 24, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Sales
At an industry round table a short time ago, a general conversation was bouncing around amongst a bunch of relatively senior executives about the uses their businesses had made of the internet as a marketing and communication tool.
Few were vocal advocates of the web, several had examples of fancy programs that yielded little for their businesses.
It became clear after a while that they largely saw the net as a way of avoiding the mailing costs, printing, envelope stuffing, and stamps, associated with “direct mail” and were grateful, but it did not work very well.
Memo:
The net is not just free stamps, it is a whole new way of engaging your market, of attracting and engaging a new bunch of people, probably who were never going to be on a mailing list, because they engage each other, they network with like minded people. The power is taken from you, and given to them.
Seeing this as a version of a snail mail direct mail program is really missing the point completely. The net is nothing like a free mailing service, it is a new way of working with your “tribe” rather than directing them.
Aug 19, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Sales
What happens when you meet someone…? “where do you work” is a common conversation starter.
Someone who responds enthusiastically, extolling the virtues of their employer and the products they produce, will have a positive impact on those they meet, and the “word of mouth” that originates with that conversation can be substantial.
Conversely, an employee who expresses no confidence in their employer and products will create a negative impact, which has the potential to multiply with the telling, and after all, who is in a better position to know the real quality of a product than one who participates in the production process?
Thinking about employee satisfaction in this way puts a new perspective onto now almost standard annual employee satisfaction survey.
Customers are cautious, advertising savvy, and cynical, so getting a message to them is very difficult.
In a networked world, it now requires measures to develop employees as advocates for your business, as the advocacy of one person will have more impact than a 1000 TARP points in a TV advertising schedule.
Aug 18, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
The aim of brand builders is to engage with consumers to the point where they become apostles for the brand, an much effort has gone into developing measures that use this notion as a measure of brand strength.
On the other side of the coin are the detractors of your brand, and the damage they can do.
The development of a brand therefore also has the two dimensions. Powerful brands encourage powerful emotions, and some of those are very likely to be negative, it almost goes with the territory, anything capable of arousing powerful positive emotions is just as capable of arousing negative ones. An overlooked, but key challenge is how you manage the detractors, and the things they use as hooks for adverse comment.
Recently a measure “net promoter score” has become the favorite or marketers, as it appears to offer a methodology of collecting quantitative data on the behavior of your customers. Introduced in a 2003 HBR article by Fred Reicheld it has quickly become accepted as almost gospel.
However, experience suggests we should be pretty careful when someone has all the answers to all our previously intractable questions, and it is no different here. NPS is a great start to measure those who use, or have used your product, but relying on it solely to save the day is a big ask.
Aug 12, 2009 | Marketing, Sales, Strategy
Brands take years, often decades of work, investment, and insight to develop, but they can be destroyed in the blink of an eye.
In channels where there is an imbalance of power between links in the supply chain, such as FMCG retail, the retailers short term best interests are often maximised by attracting consumers to their stores with deep discounts (funded at least partly by the manufacturer) of well branded products. Often they are able to persuade the marketers that their best interests are also served by the promotional activity, and if they fail to persuade, their power to delete and manage shelf placement is usually sufficient to swing a deal.
The advent of scan data has lifted the veil on some of the decision making that occurs at point of sale, and it has become clear that long term sales of solid proprietary brands are not maximised by short term price promotional activity, it simply diverts resources from the long term to the short term, reducing average purchase price by the retailer, and enabling pantry stocking by the consumer, eating away over time at the brand equity so challenging to build.
What we need is more marketers, people who understand the psychology and dynamics of the relationship a consumer has with a brand, and we need those people to be sufficiently supported by their organisations to be able to tell retailers where to stick their short term price promotions, and continue to invest in the brand, in order to be able to continue to harvest it over the long term.
Aug 10, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Sales
As a senior marketing executive in a previous life, in a business with a highly seasonal FMCG product range, I used to force the marketing department to spend substantial amounts of time in the field with our field sales force in the critical pre Christmas period.
The November and December period was critical to the achievement of the years budget, a miss by more than a couple of percentage points would never be made up before the June 30 year end.
This provided a great excuse to get desk bound marketing staff into stores, interacting with the consumers, products and brands in the categories where they had responsability. “All hands on deck” speeches were common, to overcome the reluctance, after all, they consistently told me, they looked after the brands, and the long term interests of the business, and stacking shelves in Woolworths was a waste of their time.
The underlying motivation, much more important than a few extra relatively unskilled (in that environment) people in the field, was the opportunity to gain the first hand views of the “coal face” which were much more directly connected to our consumers in a competitive market than a research report ever will be, albeit at a qualitative level. It also offered the front line personnel a chance to get stuff off their chest, very useful feedback for office bound marketers.
Interestingly, the marketing staff who enjoyed the experience were also generally good at the marketing job, and those who resisted, only went out reluctantly (usually with my boot up their clacker) were also not the best marketers, and so the process offered me another measure of the potential of an employee to make a worthwhile contribution to the marketing and brand building challenges we faced.
Aug 6, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Marketing, Sales
Every business has in some form a process for generating, qualifying, and allocating resources to sales leads. In many businesses, it is a very expensive, resource hungry exercise, so finding a way to short circuit the process, would be offer the potential for a major increase in productivity.
One Australian business, Cormack Packaging has evolved an Innovation Award over a number of years that is a collaboration between Cormack, and a number of universities offering design degrees. Cormack coordinates a competitive process judged by industry experts, that offers final year design students a project that carries a monetary prize, a commercial design assignment, and increasing prestige for those who do well, as well as royalties on anything that is commercialized. Cormack offers technical support, and access to its facilities to the students, providing valuable real world experience for the participants.
Importantly, for a modest investment, Cormack is creating a “bank” of ideas that address real world problems, and a forum for the ideas to be given a commercial airing. Apart from contributing to the “design gene pool” in a substantial manner, they are able to identify emerging design talent and harness it, as well as providing a reason for their customers and potential customers to shop with Cormack for solutions to their problems.
This is a massive short circuit of the lead generation and qualification processes their competitors engage in. How much better to engage with the decision-makers from existing and potential customers in a forum whose objective is the development of innovative solutions to a specific set of packaging challenges, rather than having reps cold call potential customers in an attempt to get an audience with someone who cares.
