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Category: Communications

Vertical Marketing Strategy – Are you Barking (Up the wrong tree) ?

Owen Ashby hit it on the head with this, we’ve seen this happen in bigger companies who are finding they need to spur new growth to keep up with the curve. Too perfect, no need for me to paraphrase, so here’s the original post in it’s entirety . . . enjoy!

November 30 owenashby

There was a time when all B2B marketing was horizontal and I don’t mean at the Christmas party (!). Companies designed their value propositions to address needs they had identified in organisations of a certain size in a certain geography. There it stopped.

Then someone sold the product or service to a Bank (for example). Everyone was delighted but not surprised because that particular bank had the exact needs the company had identified its product or service could address.

Then some bright spark suggested that actually if they had one bank as a customer, surely other banks would “peer reference” (follow one another) and so the company should now try to sell to all banks. To do that they would need a “Bank’s” sales force (and P&L) and probably a “Bank’s” proposition too. Of course with that would go a “Bank’s” sales target and the hope and dreams of the shareholders as the company would surely be “the number 1 provider to Banks” before the year was out.

Only it didn’t work out like that, by year two they had still only had one bank. The sales team had, had to focus elsewhere and the marketing team were at a loss. Which was annoying because the company had built its entire organisation like this. Now as well as a “bank” sales team it had a “retail” team (because they’d previously won a high street travel agent) and a “transport” team because they’d won a haulage company.

Over the course of a period of three years they’d “gone vertical”. It sounded great and each quarter they’d meet and discuss which new customers and prospects would sit in which of the new vertical teams they’d created. It was always a bit of a bun fight because they didn’t win any more banks or any more travel agents or any more hauliers. So they either created new vertical teams to accommodate each new win, or they stretched their definition of a vertical so wide ( to accommodate each new account) that the vertical became a horizontal again.

Mmmm….

Sounds implausible doesn’t it…?

It is happening right now and if it’s not happening in your organization then you can bet your bottom Dollar it’s happening in the company across the street and the one next to them too. In the rush pull all the focus into a vertical market, companies are losing sight of the value of their proposition.

One bank does not a banking vertical make.

So what’s the point?

Start by understanding the business issue your product or service addresses, then look for the kind of operational model that generates that kind of issue, then look for the organisations that fit that profile. You may find that large numbers of these organisations all sit in small number of market sectors in which case going vertical will be appropriate. However, there’s a really good chance they won’t and “going vertical” will make you irrelevant to the vast majority of the companies in that sector.

If you’re not careful, you end up stretching your offering and value proposition to fit the vertical market strategy you’ve imposed…that way lies oblivion…margin and market erosion and a slow and painful death. Ironic really, when you consider you went “vertical” to allow you to focus in on a niche.

For more on segmentation and niche marketing, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”

February 11, 2015
How to Assess and Enhance Membership Value

There are many areas of common interest among member-based organizations, especially now, but the largest and longest running area of concern is certainly finding and keeping members for the long term. Its the bread and butter, the engine of any organization, forming the reason for being, driving strategic direction, drawing stable revenue, and creating the nucleus of the organization that gives it its ideological center. But how do you present that value proposition to both new and existing members in a way that keeps them engaged and involved, year after year?

It is a question that is raised constantly in roundtable discussions among non-profit executives, and one we see in our practice perennially, as new budgets are set, statistics from the prior year are examined and goals are derived. Unfortunately, there is no single easy answer, as each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, there are some common areas that can be reviewed and measured, and some relatively easy fixes that can be put in place at minimal cost that will yield results both short and long term.

The most obvious area in which to start your retention effort is an investigation into what you really know about your members. Almost to a man, if you interview senior executives at a non-profit, they will tell you know they “know” their members well, know what they want and what they need, what will attract them to the organization. Yet if you delve a little deeper, ask when they last surveyed their members about the organization itself, about how their individual lives and businesses have changed, how their needs have shifted, how they’d like to receive information, you’ll almost invariably find that the executives view and the reality do not connect completely. There’s general agreement, surely, for any good Executive Director knows the basics of their members and their respective businesses. However, the speed with which things change, not only in the members’ lives and business circumstances, but in the media and communications arena, regarding content delivery and outreach methods, make it necessary to accelerate your rate of member surveys and research by nearly double the typical rate, in order to stay current. Flexibility and adaptation are the keys to survival, and to make the right moves, you have to have good recent data.

[pullquote align=”left or right”]…each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.[/pullquote]

Once you’ve decided to craft an updated survey, creating the most revealing questions, limiting them in number and complexity to reduce abandonment and boost response, and deciding the most reasonable and appropriate delivery method are some issues that must be dealt with. There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant. Too few questions and too little data and its a wasted effort. Too long a survey to get the most data yields too few responses and the reliability of the data suffers.

Most surveys on a single issue or two are kept to ten questions to boost response. More in-depth total member surveys can be double or triple that, but at that length, delivery methods must be considered, as does the question of incentives. A short survey can be delivered in an e-mail, posted on a website, or set up via an independent web-based services, like Zoomerang. Longer, multi-page surveys don’t pull as well using online methods, and the incentives typically delivered through online surveys, including coupons and links to other sites etc, are typically not powerful enough to drive the response levels you’ll need to make good decisions. The abandonment rate is too high on a long online survey, and you might burn a bridge to your members or customers if you insist on delivering such a document in this manner. More lengthy surveys are often best delivered by old-fashioned snail mail, and include a more valuable incentive to spur response.

Your list of recipients is also important. It may seem obvious that you include all current members on such a survey, to get a sizable enough number of responses, but there are other constituents that should also receive a survey, and in some cases the questions should be tailored to their status. Expired members who didn’t renew, those in arrears, a sampling of prospects, those with no participation in a committee, project or who haven’t purchased anything from the organization in over two years, each should have a slightly different coded survey, one that collects information about the value to the organization, their current business situation, and their needs and preferences.

[pullquote align=”left or right”]There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant.[/pullquote]

Once these issues are worked out, the survey delivered and the data collected, the results should be analyzed in a number of different ways. With no baseline data to work from if this is the first comprehensive survey in more than two years, this data constitutes the best information you have, but won’t be useful in spotting trends or sensing shifts in perception or preferences. It can still be used to craft strategy and policy, and to present enticing value to current and future members.

One of the more important questions is one regarding communications preferences. If you are trying to communicate value to your members, you have to have a good idea how they’d like to receive that information. This question will also give you a secondary reading on the technology adoption curve location of your members. If a majority of members would prefer e-mail or other web-based vehicles, your members are moving toward the center of the electronic media adoption curve, and is a good indication that they will continue to develop at a pace commensurate with the national average. This metric may correlate well to the average age of your member. Older members are typically behind the curve, both due to lack comfort and educational opportunity, and to the expense associated with high-speed internet access.

Any way you conduct the research, the best policy is to BELIEVE THE DATA. If you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of polling your members and associated constituents as to their needs and preferences, you should at least have faith in the data. If the data goes against your “gut” feeling about members, or trends away from the direction you suspected through anecdotal evidence, it may have been too long since these impressions were formed.

If you found this article valuable and informative, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes“

January 28, 2015
Consultants Offer Flexibility, Hands-Off Productivity
With staff sizes and budgets restricted or diminishing, and top executives up and down the ladder under pressure to do more with less each year, many savvy executives are seeking help among the seeming army of consultants of every stripe to get their companies on the profitability track. Are they finding success down that road?

The idea of the consultant is ancient – Egyptian kings and pharaohs had “consultants” with specialized magical talents to advise them and point them in the right direction when governing the masses. King Tutankhamun had one of the greatest PR consultants ever seen, who told him that to the Egyptian people, big buildings mean big power, big statues mean big power – and Tut and other Pharaohs took this to heart and built the pyramids of Giza and other wonders of the ancient world.

Consultants can be used for a variety of purposes, from adding moral support in difficult or uncomfortable political situations, to adding credibility to pet projects in communicating them to Boards or subordinates. The image of the unfamiliar man with the briefcase and the air of confidence in the boss’s office was born out of some particularly sticky board meetings in the 1960s by top executives at a large conglomerate who’s ideas were not being communicated effectively or credibly, and a CEO who’s head was on the block. Once the Board members heard the same message in a different way coming from the consultant, an expert in such matters, they approved the plan and the CEO was spared. The consultant in that case didn’t come up with the idea, he simply communicated it effectively and lent his credibility to the idea. This practice continues today with great success in companies and organizations across America. Communication by proxy can be used as an effective strategy if a number of conditions are met. One is that the idea or issue must have real merit on its own. A bad idea is a bad idea, no matter who presents it. Another condition is that the consultant be at least as credible as the staffer to the selected audience. He should be a known, or at least vetted, quantity, with the credentials to back it up. Once those two elements are in place, communication by proxy can be effective in getting new ideas implemented.

Short Term Expertise

Consultants have many other functions as well, and most departments within the organization can find a number of consultants that specialize in their particular areas of functionality to assist them. Sometimes consultants can simply be used as additional manpower, fill-ins for key employees on personal leave, plug-ins providing necessary functionality on short notice for the short term. These are not temps you can call in for a day or two while someone is out with the flu. They are highly-trained, experienced executives who have been in many different corporate situations and reached a level of comfort with the commonalities in procedures in their area between companies to be effective quickly. They are typically not used in situations where the term is shorter than a month, as the cost of lost opportunity for a stint that short drives the hourly rate beyond the return value. Expectations in this situation are relatively high, as the consultant is being asked to step into any number of situations already in place and under way, and gather sufficient information from internal sources to keep these projects moving forward effectively, in a very short period of time, but without injecting much of their own influence or changing the direction of the project. This is a tough gig, and successful consultants are to be highly prized and respected for this set of skills that make such performance not only possible but routine. When projects are critical, and the schedule is inflexible for any number of reasons, this may be a good option for mid-size to large organizations.

“Special” Projects

Some organizations use consultants as outboard manpower to plan and implement special projects outside the normal scope of the department or organization, or for projects that are of vital concern to the organization’s success but only come up rarely. Changing membership databases for a non-profit organization is a prime example of this type of consultant use. An IT or Association Consultant who has been through many such changeovers and data conversions can be an invaluable resource for such a critical undertaking that most organizations only face every few years. Hiring a consultant under such circumstances will expand and extend the organization’s scope of expertise for a short period, and take advantage of specialized knowledge that isn’t needed on a regular basis. The expense of the consultant is far outweighed by the savings gained by avoiding a misstep in the process and crippling your organization, however temporarily, while the problem is investigated and fixed. The consultant can prevent you from making a poor purchasing decision, and mitigates buyer’s remorse by making the correct match between user and product.

[pullquote align=”left or right”]King Tutankhamun had one of the greatest PR consultants ever seen, who told him that to the Egyptian people, big buildings mean big power, big statues mean big power – and Tut and other Pharaohs took this to heart and built the pyramids of Giza and other wonders of the ancient world.[/pullquote]

Sometimes that special project requires some specialized expertise in order to allow a “pet” project to be executed properly, and that expertise doesn’t exist in house. If time is a factor, and there’s no time for internal staff to develop that type or level of expertise, a consultant can be an excellent solution. The can work directly with your internal staff, provide the expertise necessary to move the project forward effectively, by-pass the internal chain of command and the inherent internal politics, and propel the project to a successful conclusion quickly and effectively.

Guidelines

There are some guidelines to keep in mind when using a consultant for this purpose.
- When planning to include a consultant in the mix, be sure to make “room” for them both in the budget and in the schedule. There will be some initial ramp up, no matter how short, as they learn to work with the particular in-house players, and assess their individual capabilities. Leave a reasonable time for them to get acclimated and figure out who’s who in your organization.
- Depending on the type of project, the consultant has been hired to provide expertise, advice and specialized services. This often requires change from the status quo, introduction of new ideas, and some assessment of the internal strengths and weaknesses on the team. Take the advice and ideas you’re given and make the most of it. Putting up roadblocks, creating obstacles, withholding information, and rejecting ideas out of hand are all a waste of time and money. You’ve hired him or her as an expert, treat them as such, and listen to them.
- When planning to use a consultant, build into your plan sufficient staff time to manage the consultant, and the money in the budget to implement the ideas they introduce. You’ve hired an expert, but if you don’t leave room in the budget to put into practice the concepts they introduce, you’ve only done half the job. Even if you don’t keep the consultant in the picture during the implementation, you still need to fund the project sufficiently to be successful.
Most good consultants in most fields have learned to work with a bare minimum of supervision or management. If you carefully outline the goals for the project, introduce them effectively to the internal staff, and provide the resources and the communication pathway for them to get accurate, unvarnished answers to questions quickly, they will take the ball and run with it. In order to keep them from veering too far from what you envision a success to be, some check-ins or milestones for approval should be built into the project schedule. That way you can adjust the course at critical junctures before they go too far off the map. Too many of these can erode the effectiveness of the consultant and doom the project, so avoid the temptation to micro manage. You had the foresight to hire them, now let them do their thing. Too few milestones can lead to some surprises, when the end of the project approaches and the final product is not what you envisioned and you don’t know why. A happy medium and a light touch usually lead to a successful outcome.

[pullquote align=”left or right”]When planning to use a consultant, build into your plan sufficient staff time to manage the consultant, and the money in the budget to implement the ideas they introduce.[/pullquote]

Finances

The financial arrangements for consultants vary to some degree, depending upon the industry, the scope and duration of the project, and the nature of the organization. Many work on an hourly rate, which are standardized to some degree based on what the market will bear for the size of the projects, the area of expertise, the reputation of the consultant, and the geographic area. A Human Resources Consultant will likely charge a small company in Tennessee less per hour for a candidate search than a large company in New York City, and the company’s expectations and needs will likely differ as well. The rate can be negotiated up front, before the project starts, and the terms are often outlined in a binding legal contract. Most Boards insist on such a document in one form or another, to help provide the company some recourse and some protection for both parties should outcome turn out to be less than expected.

Some consultants in certain industries work on a fixed project fee. This is negotiated up front as well, once the scope and extent of their involvement and the size of the project has been agreed upon. A contract is often required for this arrangement as well, with some contracts including an incentive bonus for successful or early completion or for staying under established budget guidelines. On rare occasion, a consultant will work on a contingency, similar to a tort or personal injury attorney. Especially in forensic financial work, collections, auditing, or tax work, these arrangements exist where the consultant’s fee or payment is tied either directly or indirectly to the money they are able to recover or save the company.

No matter what the arrangement, no matter what the industry, selecting which consultant to work with is a critical step to a successful outcome. A recommendation from a colleague who has used someone for a similar project is a great start. Other sources include your local Chamber of Commerce, and industry-specific trade publication editors. The local College or University department most closely aligned with your industry is also a good source of “experts” in your selected field. Once you’ve gathered a few names, a brief phone interview is always a good idea. That alone can whittle the field down to two or three suitable candidates. Their availability, and responsiveness will give you an idea as to what they will be like to work with on your project, and you can prepare some industry specific questions to ask, to see how close to your industry and your project they are currently. Once these are complete, a personal interview is in order. This will give you an even better idea as to the character of your candidates and their capabilities. Each candidate should furnish a list of client references, and they should be rigorously checked before making a decision.

Once a decision is made, financial arrangements can be made, and your project can begin.

Consultants can be a vital part of your organization, expanding your capabilities, allowing you flexibility in staffing to meet short term needs, and let you take advantage of expertise beyond the level you are able to train in house. Used wisely and strategically, consultants can help you meet goals, complete new projects, grow your organization and function more efficiently and profitably.

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January 21, 2015
What Is The Worst Marketing Campaign Ever?

5/11/2012 | blur Group, Expertsourcing, Featured | Dorothy | No Comments

We’re all guilty of the occasional bout of marketing Schadenfreude – but we’ve also probably had the odd campaign or two of our own when things didn’t go quite to plan. blur Experts talk about those well-known marketing moments when things don’t quite go to plan.

David Poulos

The worst marketing effort I can recall is a legendary story from quite a while ago, and was really a lack of research and local cultural awareness. When General Motors’ Chevrolet division launched a new mid-sized model called the Nova, after a superfast shooting star, hoping it would resonate with consumers seeking something fast and futuristic. The formulated print ads, mailers, TV commercials and worst of all, bill boards. The car sold very well in the US, but when they wanted to penetrate the Latin American market, no one in the marketing department did their homework. A quick rebadging would have saved the company many heartaches and a boatload of cash. They went ahead and launched the car as the Nova in Spanish speaking countries throughout Latin America, and after six weeks recognized that there might be a problem reflected in their dismal sales reports. It didn’t dawn on anyone at the company that NoVa in Spanish means “doesn’t go!”

Huge billboards lining the roads in Mexico, Panama, Honduras, Costa Rica and El Salvador promoting a car that doesn’t run! Finally someone pointed out their error, and they pulled the car and killed the campaign locally. It pays to do your homework.

We had one fairly significant snafu, but it wasn’t a strategy error, it was a relatively simple technical glitch that cost an awful lot of money. We were launching a new financial publication, aimed at investors, and using a series of direct mail pieces, multi-piece packages mailed in the millions. As you might imagine, a large chunk of the addresses on the target list were linked to the financial industry, centered in Manhattan, NY. One of the largest buildings in New York City at the time was the World Trade Center, which leased office space to hundreds of financial firms, and was so large that there had to be an additional line of address added for a mail stop number, so that the building’s mailroom could deliver efficiently. Someone in the data processing department was tasked with printing off a set of labels for this list, which numbered over a million records. The technician had a tough time fitting the addresses using our standard font, labels and software due to the extra address line – so he took it upon himself to eliminate the third address line – the mail stop. In five days our lobby was filled with commercial laundry carts full of undelivered mail, nearly 50% undeliverable! The entire World Trade Center had denied the mailing as ‘inadequately addressed’ without the mail stop line, and the post office, having a standing order on the account to return ‘undeliverables’ for address correction, returned all the mail to us! We made the technician open all 500,000 packages, salvage the guts, and re-run all the letters and new labels.

The devil is in the details when executing marketing tactics, and it doesn’t take much to reduce your plans to rubble. The best marketers are detail people that stay on top of the small stuff to make the big stuff flourish!

For hundreds of tips on how NOT to make marketing mistakes, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Guide”

January 15, 2015
Is Your Branding Team Thinking Strategically?
Graham Robertson provides us with this week’s opus – brilliantly done, a really good grasp on strategic brand thinking. Gotta love Graham. If so, spread the love . . . graham.robertson@beloved-brands.com

In our marketing careers, we start off in a doing-role and get completely swamped in execution. We think “if only I had a higher level job, I’d actually have time to think, rather than just do”. The problem for many of us, is not only do we get good at the doing, we get so good that we can’t get past it and we never end getting to the real strategic thinking. We just become a do-er at a higher level and drive everyone crazy beneath us.

When I talk to many of the senior Brand Leaders, at the VP and Director level, I hear 3 common things:
1. “I am too busy and I have no time for strategic thinking”
2. “My team lacks the experience so I have to jump in resolve issues myself”
3. “If I didn’t jump in, it just wouldn’t get done right”
Are you really Strategic?

Everyone out there claims to be a strategic thinker, but I would guess that really only half of us really are strategic.
- Strategic Thinkers see “what if” questions before they see solutions. They map out a range of decision trees that intersect and connect by imagining how events will play out. They reflect and plan before they act. They are thinkers and planning who can see connections. This is PLANNING!
- Non Strategic Thinkers see answers before questions. They get to answers quickly, and will get frustrated in the delays of thinking. They think doing something is better then doing nothing. They opt for action over thinking. They are impulsive and doers who see tasks. They are frustrated by strategic thinkers. This is EXECUTING!
As a senior Brand Leader, it is easy to get so wrapped up in the details of the execution that you’re making the non-strategic decisions on behalf of the team. You have just really become the “senior” Senior Brand Manager that really annoys your team. Instead of providing the team with a vision, challenging on strategy or teaching the team, you’re telling them to make the flash bigger and change the sell sheet to purple.

If you speak in a telling voice, you leave your team with one answer: YES. If you speak in an asking voice you leave your team with 3 answers: YES, NO or let me dig in a bit more and find out.

Instead of telling people what to do, why not challenge yourself to sit back slightly and ask the really tough challenging questions. You’ll know you’ve asked a really tough question when you don’t even know the answer. There’s nothing wrong with stumping the team, because you’re even stumping yourself in the process.

So What are the Tough Questions to Ask?

As your team might be at the beginning stage of digging in on analysis, here’s are 10 great questions to ask your team:
1. How do we make money? This focuses them on figuring out the pathway from the activities on the brand to the results in the market and the profitability on the balance sheets. The most beloved brands use the consumer connection to create a source of power that they can use on various areas of the market and then use that power to drive the brand’s profitability. Your team should be able to map this out and use it as a roadmap for the brand’s future. If you’re not focused on power and profit, then you’re not strategic.
2. What is it that makes us different? The best of brands are either better, different or cheaper. Or not around for very long. If you can’t answer this question, then how do you expect your consumer to be able to answer. You’re likely just a me-too brand and once that’s discovered, you’ll be on a downward spiral.
3. Why are we here? How did we get here? Where could we be? It’s great for getting to the vision, without writing the word “vision” up on the board and saying to everyone “ok go”. That gets you no-where. Pick a magical date of 5-10 years from now and say “if you got everything you wanted, what would the brand look like in 5 years?” Push them hard on the where to, because that’s when the brand starts to transform itself.
4. What’s holding us back from being where we want to be? Once you get the team focused on the vision of 5 to 10 years from now. This allows you to start attacking your brand, to find the inhibitors that you can try to unleash or course correct.
5. Which would be easier: getting our most loyal users to use more, moving up those who have already bought into the brand to start using regularly or getting a new user? This is pushing them towards a strategic choice, whether to focus on base users or new users–penetration or usage frequency. It also should start to force you to look at your brand funnel to see where you have strength and where you have gaps. Every brand should be utilizing a brand funnel. It’s almost negligent to not use one.
6. That’s like working out at the gym and not knowing your blood pressure or cholesterol scores. When you layer in What would make us more Money, you might start to see the ROI impact of the same decision.
7. What would our consumer say about our brand? This shifts the focus of the discussion from a myopic brand focus into thinking about the consumer first. Everything you do should be start and end with the consumer in mind. After all, if you figure out how to win over the consumer, you become more powerfully connected and can drive greater growth and profits through that power.
8. For Strategy, what choices are on the table that helps you gain a foothold into the market but also helps to drive the long-term win? A test for any great strategy is whether it has all 4 key elements. FOCUS: all your energy to a particular strategic point or purpose. Match up your brand assets to pressure points you can break through, maximizing your limited resources—either financial resources or effort. Pick a tight target market of those who can love you, and pick a unique position that you can stand behind and win. You want that EARLY WIN, to kick-start of some momentum. Early Wins are about slicing off parts of the business or population where you can build further. Find that connection with your consumer—moving them along the love curve. LEVERAGE everything to gain positional advantage or power that helps exert even greater pressure and gains the tipping point of the business that helps lead to something bigger. Your brand finds a way to turn the consumer connectivity into a source of power the brand can leverage.Seeing beyond the early win, there has to be a GATEWAY point, which is the entrance or a means of access to something even bigger. It could be getting to the masses, changing opinions or behaviours. Return on Investment or Effort, where you can translate all the power you’ve earned into profits and brand value.
9. For any choice related to brand positioning and go-to-market, whether it’s target market, main message, media choices or activities, force their hand by asking a few questions to ask: 1) which one gets us on our way to vision faster? 2) which one helps us grow faster 3) which one makes us more money? Always push your team to focus by making them use the word “or” instead of “and”. If you think you are a strategic decision maker, then whenever you choose both, you’ve failed. When you go into a casino, and put one chip on each of the 38 choices on the roulette wheel, it might be fun, but you’ll never win. By targeting everyone then you’re not making the choice, you’re just depleting your resources. And you run the risk that no consumer ever says “wow, that brand is really speaking to me.”
10. When seeing new creative execution of anything, ask “DO YOU LOVE IT?” and then watch their eyes. Do you think our costumer will love it? Is this connected to personal pride or are they just passing the buck filling in forms. Getting something to market, big or small takes a herculean effort to overcome obstacles. I want to know on day 1, will they fight for it? A great idea that falls on the vine is worth less than an OK idea executed with passion. If we don’t love the work we do, then how do we expect the consumer to love the brand? OK is the enemy of greatness.
11. Why do you want to spend this money? If you are about to spend millions of dollars, I want to hear the reason why you think it’s crucial, why it will pay back even greater than the resources we put forward. Understanding and aligning to one key objective allows everyone to focus on the outcome.
And finally, the most important question of all:

What do your instincts think we should do?

And then listen. You might be surprised by the good thinking on your team and you might be surprised that their answer is better than the one that is in your head.

This might be most obvious of questions, but how many times per week do you ask this? Imagine the responses you might get from that. Imagine how motivated your team would be. As a leader, I want you to start exhibiting more patience. You have to learn the art of questioning that sets up the listening. If you learn this skill you’ll start to realize that you can still control the direction of the brand through questions, even more than through direction. On the plus side, you’ll have a fully engaged, motivated team that’s ready to deliver.

As a Brand Leader at the executive level, you should walk into every meeting telling yourself “I know less about this than anyone in the room” and that puts you in the most powerful position to ask the right strategic questions and listen for the right strategic answers.

About Graham Robertson: I’m a marketer at heart, who loves everything about brands. My background includes 20 years of CPG marketing at companies such as Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer Consumer, General Mills and Coke. The reason why I started Beloved Brands Inc. is to help brands realize their full potential value by generating more love for the brand.   I only do two things: 1) Make Brands Better or 2) Make Brand Leaders Better.

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January 9, 2015
How Do You Know It’s Time To Get Some Expert Help?

Adding a senior employee can bring short-term costs but long-term gains. Here’s how to tell if the time is right for your business.

When you’re the owner of a small business, knowing when to hire a senior employee isn’t always easy — but it is important. By freeing you to focus on high-value activities where you have true expertise, it can help you take your company to the next stage of growth or, in some cases, simply ensure its continued viability.

“Entrepreneurs are accustomed to hiring ancillary employees and pawning off smaller tasks on them,” observes Dave Poulos, chief consultant at Granite Partners LLC in Sparks, Maryland. “But at some point, they discover that they’re working their tails off and still can’t be everywhere they need to be or do everything they need to do. That’s when they need to make a high-level hire.”

While cost can be an issue, Poulos says companies should consider how much they might be able to boost revenues with a new player on the management team. Ideally, it will more than cover the additional salary.

Chuck Cohn, CEO of Varsity Tutors, a Washington, D.C.-based tutoring service, says that over the past several years he’s “fired” himself from various duties and brought in expert replacements to handle, among other things, bookkeeping, sales and advertising. “Each time it’s had a dramatic impact on how effectively that role is done, my happiness, and our ability to grow — because my time became available for higher-level projects,” he says.

Wondering whether your company is a candidate for a high-level hire? Here are five signs it may be time to expand the executive suite:

1. You’re working long hours but missing operational goals or revenue targets. Julie Sue Auslander, president and chief cultural officer at cSubs, a New Jersey-based provider of outsourced subscription services, says a bell tolled for her when she realized that she was doing “a lot of work” but never seemed to have any money.

“I hired cheap, tried to do it all myself, hired multiple part-timers, and, as a result, missed out on growth opportunities,” she says. Taking a new tack, she outsourced payroll and brought in a bookkeeper who discovered that some invoices were being paid twice or in the wrong amount while some of her own clients weren’t being billed at all. “The revenue I realized from her correct work covered her salary,” she says. “In addition, offloading those activities freed me to do work that nobody else could, and in turn helped my company reach the Inc. 5000 list.”

Auslander has since hired a part-time controller, which has helped her secure additional funding for her business, enter comfortably into strategic partnerships, and even plan an exit strategy for herself.

2. Critical parts of your business are proving error-prone or inefficient, and you don’t know how to fix them. Eric Thomasian, head of business development and strategy for Blayze Inc., an online video company, says his firm knew it was time to hire a chief technology officer after its technology systems, which had been outsourced to a third-party developer, turned out to be bug-ridden and not true to their original design.

“As soon as we made the hire, our CTO hired more coders to create an internal technical team,” Thomasian says. The results were impressive. Turnaround time on system changes rose by 800 percent, funding became more easily attainable because investors felt safer when they could actually meet the company’s technical team face-to-face, and customer satisfaction increased by 90 percent.

3. Essential tasks are going unfinished. Brianna Sylver, president of Sylver Consulting, a business consultancy with offices in Chicago and Brazil, says she knew it was time to bring in high-level help when “we got into a situation where I needed to be able to duplicate myself in order to get everything done.” After documenting her specific pain points, she brought in a director of global insights and innovation in May 2011. “The results have been fantastic,” Sylver says. “She’s a great addition to the team in multiple ways and has helped us grow as a company.”

4. Business initiatives yield poor results because you’re not an expert in that facet of your business. Brock Blake, co-founder and CEO of Lendio, an online service that helps small businesses find bank loans, says he decided to hire a vice president of marketing about a year ago after realizing that his own marketing initiatives weren’t helping the company meet its goals. “I wasn’t cut out for that job,” Blake concedes. “We were just going in circles.” After a three-month search, Blake found the right person to take the job, and the results, he says, have been phenomenal. “We’ve doubled in size, both in revenue and in our number of employees.”

5. You’re continually telling customers you can’t meet their needs. “If your customers are constantly asking, ‘Do you have this?’ or ‘Can you do that?’ and the answer is always ‘No, because we don’t have time,’ you’re making a mistake,” Poulos says. One of the advantages of being a small business, he argues, is the ability to act quickly and nimbly to meet customer demand. “The answer to ‘Can we do?’ and ‘Do we make?’” he says, “should almost always be ‘yes.’”

Making a high-level hire can be intimidating, especially if you’re accustomed to doing everything yourself. But it can also make you happier and more productive, and your business more profitable.

For more like this to maximize your business growth curve, pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

December 22, 2014
Empowered Customers: A Direct Result of Technology Adoption?
This was so good I couldn’t resist re-posting it, courtesy of Sourcelink

Rich Brown, Oct 02, 2012

Enlightened marketers are now referencing the “Age of The Customer”, which is defined by consumers holding all the advantages as they have real-time information about pricing, product features and competitors. The “Age of The Customer” has promoted the everyday consumer to the role of an empowered customer where not only consumer shopping behavior has changed, but also the way we market to these consumers. Empowerment, as a direct result of technology adoption, has given a single individual, your customer, the power to choose how, when, and what they desire in terms of marketing.
- How – In which channels does the empowered customer choose to be reached? Email, Social Media, Telephone, Direct Mail, or all of the above?
- When – How often does the empowered customer choose to be reached specifically related to the cadence and frequency of marketing messages? One email per day vs. one per week or one SMS text message per day vs. one per week?
- What – What type of marketing content does the empowered customer choose to receive? Plain text vs. HTML emails, a printed catalog vs. a dynamic online catalog, printed coupons vs. electronic coupons vs. emailed coupons vs. location-based coupons?
While customers have always had choices, it’s never been a more powerful time for the average consumer. The Internet has been around for many years now and personal computers have long been a common household staple for most families. Avenues for customer empowerment have existed for decades since the first online bulletin boards and online chat started to take a grip on our modern computing society. What has specifically evolved us into to the “Age of The Customer” is hands down widespread technology adoption. Without the proliferation of both the Internet and advanced hand-held, always-connected, technology devices such as smartphones and tablets into the hands of nearly every consumer, there would never have been this massive shift of empowerment toward the consumer.

Today we take it for granted that we’re able to sit in front of a computer or better yet, pick up our latest and greatest smartphone or tablet and quickly do just about anything we need. All in the palm of our hands, the empowered consumer can search for a specific product, find retailers who carry that product, research those retailers and their reputation, conduct a price comparison, read product reviews from other consumers and ask specific questions about that product, and finally buy that product. Customers are no longer blinded by false or improper product claims and misleading marketing because they have a global community in which to converse. They can research and determine if a company is not only reputable but also if their product claims are true and if they do right by their customers in the event of a problem.

Additionally, as a direct result of technology adoption, a single consumer, with the power of a mobile device paired with the Internet and the long reach of various social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, YouTube or Google+ for example, now has the ability to create a collective opinion or voice, which rivals even the reach and voice of most commercial organizations and governments.

Customers are indeed empowered and learning to use this power to not only buy exactly what they want, but to force companies, who want their business, to become “customer obsessed” and create an engagement strategy to help build relevant, timely and valuable customer interactions. Continued technology adoption will continue to make the empowered customer the new ‘norm’ and drive marketers to find new and innovative ways of customer interaction.

If you found this insightful or helpful, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog today! Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”
December 17, 2014
Effective Research Critical To Assess Member Perceptions, Boost Enrollment

There are many areas of common interest among member-based organizations, especially now, but the largest and longest running area of concern is certainly finding and keeping members for the long term. Its the bread and butter, the engine of any organization, forming the reason for being, driving strategic direction, drawing stable revenue, and creating the nucleus of the organization that gives it its ideological center. But how do you present that value proposition to both new and existing members in a way that keeps them engaged and involved, year after year?

It is a question that is raised constantly in roundtable discussions among non-profit executives, and one we see in our practice perennially, as new budgets are set, statistics from the prior year are examined and goals are derived. Unfortunately, there is no single easy answer, as each organization has its own unique value proposition, its own character based on the membership in aggregate, and each should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, there are some common areas that can be reviewed and measured, and some relatively easy fixes that can be put in place at minimal cost that will yield results both short and long term.

The most obvious area in which to start your retention effort is an investigation into what you really know about your members. Almost to a man, if you interview senior executives at a non-profit, they will tell you know they “know” their members well, know what they want and what they need, what will attract them to the organization. Yet if you delve a little deeper, ask when they last surveyed their members about the organization itself, about how their individual lives and businesses have changed, how their needs have shifted, how they’d like to receive information, you’ll almost invariably find that the executives view and the reality do not connect completely. There’s general agreement, surely, for any good Executive Director knows the basics of their members and their respective businesses. However, the speed with which things change, not only in the members’ lives and business circumstances, but in the media and communications arena, regarding content delivery and outreach methods, make it necessary to accelerate your rate of member surveys and research by nearly double the typical rate, in order to stay current. Flexibility and adaptation are the keys to survival, and to make the right moves, you have to have good recent data.

Once you’ve decided to craft an updated survey, creating the most revealing questions, limiting them in number and complexity to reduce abandonment and boost response, and deciding the most reasonable and appropriate delivery method are some issues that must be dealt with. There is a balance that must be struck between gathering a comprehensive data set, and gathering enough responses to make the resulting data statistically significant. Too few questions and too little data and its a wasted effort. Too long a survey to get the most data yields too few responses and the reliability of the data suffers.

Most surveys on a single issue or two are kept to ten questions to boost response. More indepth total member surveys can be double or triple that, but at that length, delivery methods must be considered, as does the question of incentives. A short survey can be delivered in an e-mail, posted on a website, or set up via an independent web-based services, like Zoomerang. Longer, multi page surveys don’t pull as well using online methods, and the incentives typically delivered through online surveys, including coupons and links to other sites etc, are typically not powerful enough to drive the response levels you’ll need to make good decisions. The abandonment rate is too high on a long online survey, and you might burn a bridge to your members or customers if you insist on delivering such a document in this manner. More lengthy surveys are often best delivered by old-fashioned snail mail, and include a more valuable incentive to spur response.

Your list of recipients is also important. It may seem obvious that you include a large chunk of your current members on such a survey, to get a sufficient number of responses, but there are other constituents that should also receive a survey, and in some cases the questions should be tailored to their status. Expired members who didn’t renew, those in arrears, a sampling of prospects, those with no participation in a committee, project or who haven’t purchased anything from the organization in over two years, each could have a slightly different coded survey, one that collects information about the value to the organization, their current business situation, and their needs and preferences.

Once these issues are worked out, the survey delivered and the data collected, the results should be analyzed in a number of different ways. With no baseline data to work from if this is the first comprehensive survey in more than two years, this data constitutes the best information you have, but won’t be useful in spotting trends or sensing shifts in perception or preferences. It can still be used to craft strategy and policy, and to present enticing value to current and future members.

One of the more important questions is one regarding communications preferences. If you are trying to communicate value to your members, you have to have a good idea how they’d like to receive that information. This question will also give you a secondary reading on the technology adoption curve location of your members. If a majority of members would prefer e-mail or other web-based vehicles, your members are moving toward the center of the electronic media adoption curve, and is a good indication that they will continue to develop at a pace commensurate with the national average. This metric may correlate well to the average age of your member. Older members are typically behind the curve, both due to lack comfort and educational opportunity, and to the expense associated with high-speed internet access.

Any way you conduct the research, the best policy is to BELIEVE THE DATA. If you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of polling your members and associated constituents as to their needs and preferences, you should at least have faith in the data. If the data goes against your “gut” feeling about members, or trends away from the direction you suspected through anecdotal evidence, it may have been too long since these impressions were formed.

Now that you have some baseline data, you can begin to formulate a strategy to address the needs your membership has expressed, and how to effectively market your approach to meeting those needs as a value statement that will resonate with members and prospects alike.

For more like this, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

December 10, 2014
E-Mail Drives Sales – Duh! HBR Tells The RIGHT Story of E-mail Marketing

Thought you’d find this of interest, so I reposted it in it’s entirety – sums up what I’ve been saying for several years!

by Arthur Middleton Hughes | 9:00 AM August 21, 2012

In a business world obsessed with gaining more customer intelligence, you would think that email marketing would get more respect. But just look at media spending. According to eMarketer, this year U.S. companies are spending about $64 billion per year on TV, $34 billion on print ads, and $39 billion on Internet advertising. And how much are they are spending on email? For that, we have Forrester data: only about $1.5 billion.

Of course, compared to other media, email messages are dirt cheap to send. With TV you are spending on ad agencies, creative studios, and cable channels. With print ads, you are helping to keep newspapers and magazines alive. Direct mail costs more than $600 per thousand pieces. With email, there are almost no costs at all. But its low cost only makes the argument stronger that email marketing is the most cost-effective advertising method available today.

Certainly email beats the competition from a measurability standpoint. With TV you do not know who is watching your ads. Ditto with print. Even with direct mail, you cannot be sure that your mail has been delivered, or that anyone reads it when it gets there. With email, you know within 24 hours exactly which messages have been opened, by whom, what links the openers clicked on, and what part of your message was working.

A properly structured email message provides this benefit to the marketer because it provides benefits to consumers. A TV, print, or direct mail ad is what it is. On email the ad is much more. Because of electronic links, those who open your emails can do their own research: they can explore and see any of the thousands of products that you sell. They can see the colors and sizes. They can, and they do, read ratings and reviews. They can put products in their shopping carts and buy them.

“Fine,” say the TV folks, “but shopping cart sales through emails are seldom more than 5% of total sales. Nothing to write home about.”

What these detractors seem to willfully ignore is that emails create impressions that lead to sales through other routes. Some of these routes can be tracked. The recipient can open it or delete it. If she opens it, she can click on it, perhaps buy something or print out a coupon and take it to a store. Finally, if she puts things in her cart but does not buy, you can send her an abandoned shopping cart email that usually yields 29% of lost sales.

But note that, in many cases, she also does things that are hard to track. She can get in her car and drive to a mall to buy the product. She can pick up her phone and order it. She may be prompted to do research on Google for better prices of similar products, or discuss the offer with her spouse or a friend, leading to a possible purchase later. These are all the behaviors that provide the rationale for TV or print advertising. My point is that emails prompt the same kinds of behaviors. Thus, there is an off-email multiplier. For every purchase in an email shopping cart, we can fairly assume that there are some number of other non-tracked profitable purchases that occur because of the arrival of the email — a number that quantifies all the non-tracked behaviors that email recipients engage in.

If you are going to make a case for investing more heavily in email marketing, you have to determine this off-email multiplier to account for all the sales your emails can be expected to generate. How can that be done? A retailer I’ve worked with which has 900 stores and is very active with email campaigns recently did a great study. It took a group of 105,000 customers in its loyalty club database, divided them into three groups of 35,000, and marketed to the three groups differently, as shown in the chart below (click to see a larger version). Thanks to the loyalty program, it was able to see all subsequent purchases by these customers.

Direct mail has a higher response rate than email. But note that direct mail costs about 100 times as much. Meanwhile, the data collected by the retailer allowed it to calculate its off-email multiplier (a simple matter of dividing the percentage of online sales by the percentage of in-store sales generated by email-only marketing). It is 3.76. In other words, for every email shopping cart sale, this retailer gets 3.76 other, typically non-tracked sales due to the email.

What might your off-email multiplier be? Zero is of course possible, but studies to date suggest that a number between two and three is typical.

Once you factor in your off-email multiplier, it’s a very safe bet that email will beat all your other marketing methods in terms of return on investment. As email marketing gains more respect, marketing intelligence will meet customer intelligence. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” to read more about e-mail Marketing effectiveness.

December 8, 2014
Does Social Media Marketing ACTUALLY Drive Customer Behavior and Convert to Revenue?
Social Media, social media, social media – there, I said it three times into the mirror, now I just have to wait and see what happens . . .

That seems to be the approach many companies are taking to this relatively new phenomenon. The head in the sand approach might have some advantages in the long run, if recent data on the effectiveness of social media in driving customer behavior is to be believed. It seems that despite all the hype, and press, and sturm-und-drang in the digital media, minting new ‘social media gurus’ by the flock, digital media and it’s permutations don’t drive near as much revenue or even shopping behavior individually than they do when used together. Integration seems to be the real strength behind conversation marketing’s mechanics, and when the reams of data generated are used properly ACROSS multiple platforms, it seems to at least have the ability to drive a solid promotional campaign and boost response levels.

That said, here are some interesting tidbits of data, excerpted from a recent Gartner Group study:
- 11% of polled consumers had read a company blog, and only 4% had commented on one.
- Twice that many, or 23% had viewed a company provided video.
- 45% said they planned to purchase based on a combination of brick and mortar, digital ads, and mobile marketing, but only 1% said they planned to do so based on mobile marketing alone.
- Only 26% of consumers said they had clicked on a Search Results page paid ad – irrespective of engine brand.
- Based on data from another similar study, only 6% said they had purchased based on a facebook ad
- 40% said they had registered for a promotion or contest based on an e-mail or social media ad
Clearly, consumers want something for nothing (hence the contest results), but don’t want to work at it (read the blog data, reading a whole blog takes effort)

Also just as clearly, mobile marketing has not reached the level of credibility, trust or penetration it’s purveyors would have you believe, and while it may be the next big thing, it ain’t there yet, not without massive support from other media to reinforce it’s message and bolster its credibility.

Video seems to have made substantial inroads, but anyone who recognizes the level of involvement the TV generation needs to engage will see a clear correlation between the aging of the boomer TV generation and the level of importance video has attained. Add in the near ubiquity and availability of high-speed broadband Internet access allowing for video transmission at better fidelity and faster speeds, and video’s effectiveness becomes less mysterious. The fact that consumers would rather watch a video and have their eyeballs babysat rather than read and understand and digest and analyze a company blog to get their information is less than mysterious as well, when the audience is considered.

The trick with all this is to take the data it generates, and use it to form better customer profiles that can be used to not only drive behavior, but to predict it as well. If you can create a digitally integrated campaign that uses the initial brush with consumers to link to a behavior and transaction based profile, you can then draw that consumer along a continuum toward a purchase after several touch points are hit. That’s how integration beefs up the ROI equation. The development of such campaigns requires broad and detailed knowledge of the target audience, so that it can be set up to account for the wide variety of behaviors possible by consumers. If you can narrow the range of preferences and behaviors, and drive consumers down a narrower funnel, the ROI can be quite lucrative.

According to Gartner, ‘Companies using in-bound and event-triggered marketing techniques to draw consumers will see a 600% higher response rate compared to traditional outbound push campaigns’. That sounds pretty fantastic. I wonder if that will continue to be the case as more firms start to embrace this practice and it becomes more common. Will this type of campaign reduce the level of trust and credibility across the board, making consumers distrustful? Interesting to ponder, but I think not. To paraphrase W.C. Fields, “no one ever went broke underestimating the gullibility of the American public”.

If you found this insightful or controversial, and would like to read more like it, subscribe to this blog today! Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”
November 17, 2014