Simplify your finances from American Express!

Home Run but The American Express Marketers! Simplify your finances

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Enroll by February 28, 2009.

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Do we really know ‘Ownership?’

It is one word in the corporate world that’s over exposed and obviously unclear. It is sad when you think about it especially since it is the only thing that really gets things done and makes stuff happen? Anyway some recent experiences motivated me to contemplate on ‘ownership’ and the rest was this essay.... it is funny how that happens.

So what really is ownership? Every organization I have ever consulted with asks its employees to ‘Take OWNERSHIP’, ‘Be a player’, ‘Don’t be a spectator’ and yet… I am not saying anything any further? What does it really mean to be a player, to take ownership? Every day works is getting done, tasks are being completed, we are sending out emails, printing pages of reports, creating billions and billions of bits-bytes of data. I was at dinner recently with some dear friends and in conversations we started to talk about juggling and somehow the concept of OWNERSHIP was loud and clear in my mind.

When the juggler juggles there are many things he or she has to be aware of, anticipate and respond to. Everything from the wind drag if her or she is outside to making sure the object being juggled don’t hit into each other, the synchronicity with which the items are swung up in air, ensuring the receiving hand is in position to accept the descending item and so on. In so many ways similar to how organizations operate. Every task has an element of marketing, sales, product supply, financial control, reporting and logistics and yet when individuals complete their deliverables and hand-off they often miss the coordination of the juggler. Resulting in the items falling to the ground!

Ownership has to be holistic an unfortunate irony of the word itself while still ensuring that there is no power grab and everyone over compensates ensuring a flawless delivery. I am proposing shared ownership but with a grain of salt “a common yard is never swept”!

THE Pepsi Doc!

'Breathtaking' Is One Word for Purported Arnell Pepsi Doc

Great story and even better communicated via the document.

Marketing Strategy: Presenting 25 Years of Marketing Truth and Research

Interesting article on the 25 years anniversary of ISBM (Institute for the Study of Business Markets)-Marketing Truth on Research . The article mentioned B2B truths but they are as relevant to B2C.

My favorite was:

"Integrated" means everything looks the same. Integrated really means everything works in tight concert around your brand to drive toward the same objective.

Key Insights

• Understand, quantify, demonstrate and document customer value. This, the heart of marketing to businesses, continues as a major ISBM issue. When both seller and buyer focus on creating value and sharing its profitable benefits, everyone wins. That should be self-evident, but it isn't when sales organizations still have "stories to tell," sell on the basis of price and fail to listen carefully to what customers say.

• Go beyond what customers say. Business customers often can't (or won't) express what really concerns them or explain the real opportunities they have to add value to their offerings. Finding their hot buttons, and understanding how different purchasing influencers work together on buying teams, are of special importance in business-to-business markets. Some of the techniques enjoying more popularity as business marketers become more sophisticated:

• Studying the customer's business design closely for robust clues.

• Practicing reflexive thinking. You cannot really understand customers, partners and competitors unless you put yourself in their position.

• Visiting customers and examining their processes closely for potential efficiencies their people might have missed—problems that your offering can solve.

• Applying the discipline of Voice of the Customer research.

• Going downstream to the customers of your direct customers value chain—visibility—to learn how your offering adds value that resonates at more than one level of the pipeline.

• Going beyond established research techniques (such as satisfaction studies and conjoint analysis) to probe hidden, intangible factors and deep emotional needs with non-directive tools (such as ZMET).

• Your customers can develop valuable new offerings for you…if you let them. Customer co-development programs and studying how your most innovative and unusual customers actually use your product will spur innovation in market-oriented directions.

• Take a long- as well as a short-term view of markets. Despite constant pressure for short-term results, the truly important marketing initiatives have long-lasting impact. Marketing communications, research, training and other marketing programs create asset values regardless of accounting conventions that expense all marketing costs. Even in times of economic recession, marketing is a necessary investment in the future—even more powerful when competitors fail to invest.

• Implement STP. Following the discipline and logic of "segmenting," "targeting" and "positioning" ensures marketing efficiency and focus. In any market, there's no such thing as the "right" or "best" segmentation. It depends on the firm’s workable options for delivering and promoting customer-specific value drivers.

• Never doubt the power of brands in business markets. A brand name built and nurtured to connote value opens business customer doors and impresses buying decision makers. B2B branding dynamics are complex compared to consumer brands, particularly across value chains as with "ingredient branding." Remember that:

• Attacking a well-entrenched competitive brand head-on is futile.

• Brands belong to customers, not to companies. Brand values live in the mind of the customer and determine how the customer feels about using and "experiencing" the brand.

• "Customer experience engineering," a component of the branding alchemy, speaks to subtle but powerful motivators marketers can associate with their brands.

• Messing around with a successful brand is commercial suicide.

• Keep the right customers, lose the wrong customers. Firing a customer—particularly a large one, or one with a personal relationship to your company's people—is painful but necessary triage in business marketing wars. Customers who do not receive genuine value in the relationship won't stick around for long, anyway. Customers unwilling to pay a fair premium for the value they receive only steal your profit.

• People go where they're led and do what they're paid to do. Staffers do what they are measured on and compensated for, so successful implementation can occur only if you align metrics and compensation with your goals. It's well known that, as the expression goes, "salespeople are coin-operated." Yet respect, empowerment and recognition for people are essential throughout the organization.

Scrap Obsolete Thinking

Fortunately, old-fashioned and dysfunctional notions keep losing ground as business marketers improve their skills, strategies and sophistication. Bid farewell to obsolete "rules" such as:

• Communications are from "us" to "them"—or they're a dialogue initiated by the supplier firm. Marketing communications actually are becoming more of a "pull" experience as customers take the initiative to search for the information they need. Venerable models such as AIDA (attention > interest > desire > action) and DAGMAR (defining advertising goals for measured advertising results) fail to describe the communication dynamics of a digitally networked world.

• Cost and price have a fundamental relationship. They never did. Price should be based on value. Selling on price usually means giving away value and profit.

• Segmentation is easy. It's not. The obvious ways of categorizing customers—e.g., industry, size and location—usually fail to improve marketing efficiency, and often reduce it.

• The 4 Ps. They worked in the 1950s, but cannot describe the communication and value chain processes at work in today's complex business markets.

• Stick to your technical core competence and outsource everything else. Owning and controlling every aspect of your customer's experience should be among your core competencies.

• Six Sigma has an answer for everything. It doesn't, despite what the zealots insist.

• People understand what "marketing" is, and "brand," and "innovation," and… The assumption that anyone in the discipline shares the same definitions and language that you do is almost always wrong. The truth, as George Bernard Shaw once observed: "The greatest danger in communication is the illusion that it's happened."

• "Creative" equals "cute," and drives behavior change. No. People still really want to know, "What's in it for me?"

The disloyalty cards

Since the stellar success of Tesco and their relationship with Dunn & Humby that made the headlines, businesses have gone crazy with loyalty cards, loyalty programs and loyalty hooks for consumers and shoppers. What is the true value of a loyalty card program? Does CRM start with a loyalty card or end with a loyalty card?

Recently I came across an interesting article ‘Rewards that Reward’ in the Journal (may need subscription) that reviewed opportunities with some of the long standing loyalty card programs.

“The biggest problem with loyalty programs, we would argue, is that most retailers adopt a one-size-fits-all approach: They use monetary rewards to encourage repeat purchases. But product discounts won't change buying behavior in the long run in shoppers who value things like personalized service, convenience or shopping pleasure more. These types of consumers may change their behavior to access the price promotion, but they likely will revert back to their regular brands or buying habits shortly thereafter, resulting in, at best, a temporary change in sales and market share.”

The article also identified some obvious issues like, “sameness between programs”; the lack of differentiated from the “me too” syndrome in the retail environment means several loyalty card holders have more than one loyalty card (often competitors)! Rarely do loyalty cards really help develop loyalty?

Is there an issue with the programs or the lack of leadership? Isn’t there someone out there that wants to get in bed with the best shoppers and ignoring all others? I haven’t seen one yet? That’s not to say one wont be ready to step up and deliver!

Chk out these pics of a typical loyalty card holders wallet.

Marketing In a Recession - ANA

Marketing In a Recession time for back to basics - from the ANA Marketing Maestros

1. Insights – Know your customer better than anyone else in your organization. Understand their unarticulated needs, those they cannot tell you about, but formulate how they act, or would act. To discover these hidden gems requires living with your customers, seeing how they act and react. Knowing your customer is the key to making everything else happen.
2. Be a Growth Champion – Elevate the role of marketing; be the force within your organization that turns marketing into a profit generator. Innovate. Find new revenue streams building both top and bottom lines. Marketing has the innate ability to create revenue, but it takes a big idea to do so. And that takes guts, determination and a desire to lead, not just serve. Finally, make sure you are on the same page as your CEO. Too many marketers are still doing stuff versus providing their management with the ideas that will drive the company’s agenda. Be strategic, not tactical. No one gets rewarded today for having completed a number of projects. Did the action you took drive shareholder value, build brand equity, or create a new stream of revenue? If not, don’t do those things any more.
3. Segment – You cannot be everything to everyone. Focus on who your target is, what is your brand DNA, and how your brand can satisfy the target you’ve chosen better than your competitors.
4. Market Internally – Partnerships are critical. Marketers today must bring internal and external teams together. The sum is greater than the whole. First, other team members not only have great ideas, but they also make executing ideas easier if they are on board. Secondly, every member of your organization is in marketing. From the phone operator to the delivery team – if anyone does not put the customer first, then all else will eventually fail.
5. Measure – knowing what’s working and what's not is the only way to ensure we continually put our resources (both money and people) against the right objectives. If you cannot measure your results or are not going to change your direction when you receive feedback, don’t take any action. Only do what you can prove will work. Not sure? Then adopt a test, fail, expand methodology.

White Rainbow

Watched a fantastic foreign film recently by the same name. The essence was there is a rainbow in the sky every single day but it is only visible when it rains; As a man of science I know it is the dispersion of light from the moisture (light refraction) in the air right after the rains that makes the colors visible.

Leadership is much like that!

It is the ability to draw images in sand and then bring them to life; it is the ability to identify talent and develop it; it is the ability to align people, resources against opportunities that will take organizations to the next level!

Yes, it is not much different from moving the prism and place it at the right angle against white light to bring out the colors to the fullest and the best!