Reading Your Mind - CBS 60 mins

Neuromarketing is a rapidly growing area, CBS ran a segment on Jan 5th during the 60 minutes episode that evening.



What is more interesting is the area of Neuroeconomics!

Another viral... for positioning

It was Bud that was the 'Best friend' & now it is Jim Bean... that is the 'Best Girlfriend'

The Customer Service Disconnect!

A recent survey conducted by the CMO council found some disconnects between the role of the CMO and the focus on Customer Service -

The most critical role a CMO can play in an organization: to own every facet of listening, learning, interacting, engaging, and optimizing the relationship with the customer, and understanding where the attrition, pain and aggravation is, and doing this in real time.

Top lines from the article:

• 23% of the Marketers said their companies track or measure customer emails
• 17% use that feedback to identify potential customer advocates.
• 59% of marketing officers said their companies do not compensate any employees or executives based on customer loyalty, satisfaction improvements or analytics.
• Majority of respondents' companies have no programs in place to track or propagate positive word of mouth among customers.
• 16% of those surveyed monitor online message boards and social networking sites.
• Most companies don't even have systems in place to monitor feedback or engage consumers
• 37% of companies surveyed gather customer insight from customer engagement situations
• 15% use such situations to identify and cultivate potential customer champions and advocates
• A third reported that they look for ways to turn problems into new sales opportunities
• 16% introduce new products or services to further monetize the relationship
• "It's all about leveraging the touchpoints, or engagement with customers--more than just taking an order and introducing another offer"

My first hand experience seeing, doing and living this says things are a lot worse than what the survey found?

Viral - Viral - Viral & Funny!

From DUREX...

Driving change with history

Have worked for an academy company I know the power of a strong culture! There is no denying the power of its distinctiveness and the resilience from its indoctrination. That being said like everything else history and culture is a two edged sword! The size and scale of the Titanic caused its demise so also with history and culture. The inertia of culture and history can help gain momentum for change or create the resistance from change.

Drawing on principles from ‘Just In Time’ production of driving down the water level to the point of being able to see the rocks that obstruct the streamlining of the flow? Using history and culture to drive the change itself? I think,YES! A compelling vision a relevant and unifying mission combined with the right strategy; organizational structure; staff; recognition/rewards; work and communication processes can result in right behaviors. Lastly communication through metaphors that bring concepts and ideas to life can not be underestimated!

The most compelling change starts from within and what better than history to drive it!

Truspect in organizations

The other day I was wondering if trust flow from bottom to top or top to bottom in an organization? So also respect, does respect flow top to bottom or bottom to top?

The team has to respect its leadership! Leadership, not just for their openness to learn, honesty, transparency, speed to action, judicious risk taking, as organizational figureheads and their industry knowledge but more importantly as humans! The same is true of the leadership’s respect for the team particularly when entrusting them with authority and accountability. Way too many will supposedly ‘entrust’ and ‘empower’ their teams only to stifle them with a constant need to track progress and micro manage. Respect and trust to are the two sides of the same coin!

What is the most logical flow of trust in organizations? Can respect help influence and enable the direction of this flow? Given the relationship between trust and respect one can not survive without the other! Trust can certainly help develop respect so also respect can help build trust. Are there traits necessary for the genesis of trust some visible and some invisible like - Career experiences, education, intellect, persona, title, etc. or can trust stand for itself? Respect can sometimes be misinterpreted for fear but trust is rarely misconstrued.

Respect can start with a positive base but trust clearly needs to be invested into from zero, leadership cannot withdraw from the trust capital without having created a base.

A Dimensional View of Experiential Marketing - Brandchannel.com

Interesting article in Experiential Marketing, but the question remains:

• Is it all about Experiences?
• What happens to the traditional channels of awareness building?
• Is more the merrier, where and how to prioritize?

Top line from the article:

• Keeping the message consistent is challenging, particularly across sales teams, channel partners, online and offline venues, and sometimes over long sales cycles.
• Today customers expect to interact with products in such a manner as to reveal their behavior, features and advantages.
• Interactivity is a bi-directional process involving the actions of one participant, and the responses to those actions, in a continuous feedback loop. (Think of an interactive experience as a conversation. Action equals reaction.)
• Interactivity is a key ingredient in building an emotional connection between a customer and a product.
• Digital focus:

Delivering realism: making the digital product look as close to the actual product as possible

Mimicking behavior: making the digital product behave in the same way the actual product does (e.g., doors open, batteries are removed)

Maximizing performance: making the digital product experience fluid and natural

I am Spartacus!

Interesting article on shared leadership! Here is the top line.

TO LEAD, CREATE A SHARED VISION

• An attribute that most distinguishes leaders from nonleaders: Being forward-looking—envisioning exciting possibilities and enlisting others in a shared view of the future.
• Constituents want visions of the future that reflect their own aspirations. They want to hear how their dreams will come true and their hopes will be fulfilled.
• The only visions that take hold are shared visions

Innovation in the Middle Ranks

I never really believed the wisdom in the HBR articles that said innovation comes through the middle ranks of most organizations. I did not refute it either but maintained a certain level of skepticism. Then couple days ago while participating in a corporations strategy development session, I became obvious. The leaders exuded a passion for the future, it was visible but sadly the vision was stale. The mission was not much more than one that read like the nearest competitor's and worthy of not a whole lot more than being framed and placed in the hallways to to get anyone really excited about. What was most alarming was how generic the strategies for the next fiscal year ended-up being.

Strangely enough the strategies were being confused to opportunities.

The data supported the strategies but there were too broad, lacked prioritization, lacked measures associated (the idea was to revisit the strategies and assign measures at some point in the future). As a consultant I experience more than my fair share of such organizations. In my understanding the result is mediocrity in performance of the organization, mediocrity of the results and a constant need to change to improve on performance while focusing on the symptoms and not the root cause. The strangest thing is that leadership is unable to connect the dots and see the cause. Some how in many cases these same organizations will hit a home run but at most times when the ball reaches the ropes it is merely based on the middle managers and the executors who internalize the strategies into creative expression and innovative engagements with the consumer, the shopper and their ecology.

In closing I thought this quote by Peter Drucker sums it up!

"No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings." - Peter Drucker

Inspiring quotes

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
- Joseph Heller

The hope and stress strategy

Peter Drucker said “What gets measured gets done!”; Truer words were never said and yet nothing was said about the kind of measures. To make things ever more confusing and complex not all results are measurable and results can be soft and best relayed as benefits. I was recently involved with a branding effort that had more to do with mannerism and attitudes as a foundational element to the strategy than any real economic deliverable.

Metrics can be manipulated, it is not difficult to make things look rosy when they really are not. Substituting quantity for quality can easily confuse the most discerning of judges. Stress and hope are two emotions that people often use as a metric of effort. As a matter of metrics hope and stress cannot be a strategy. Although success of brands is deeply rooted in emotions and sometimes fears and so the success is a matter of how deep you can reach to sow the seed.