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Category: Vision

Time . . . The Scarcest Commodity Executives Have

When we asked 150 senior executives from Marketing, Sales, Operations, Administration, and Human Resources, what one thing they wanted to make their day more manageable, the vast majority answered with the same response. It wasn’t great software or IT support, it wasn’t higher salary, it wasn’t free sodas or a ping pong table in the break room, or T-shirt day, or birthday cake for all . . . the most popular answer was just one word – Time.

Executives are starved for time – time to think, to contemplate, time to digest and cogitate, time to reflect, time to delegate, to mentor, to research, to connect on more than a cursory level with their colleagues. Prioritizing of their schedules, maximizing time efficiency, finding ways to do more than one thing at a time or to parallel schedule so that multiple tasks coincide, are the number one mental activity on a daily basis for senior leaders.

Their plates are more than full.

Between their own business responsibilities, outside Board affiliations, community and charitable organizations, sponsorship obligations, professional association activities, speaking engagements, family commitments and personal networking, the 18-hour day is becoming standard for senior leaders of national and global firms. While many would intone “That’s why they get the big bucks,” and “should have known before they took the job,” no amount of money or foreknowledge would have compensated or prepared the normal individual for that level of constant activity and commitment. It’s a grinding pace, and it can only be sustained for so long before their personal health and often the health of the firm suffer as a result. The average tenure of a global level, publicly held firm CEO is less than three years, and it stands to reason that the schedule, and the hunt for unscheduled time, might have a great deal to do with that. While capricious boards, fickle investors, vague and punishing financial markets add their own land mines to an already dangerous traverse, the level of personal energy required is virtually unsustainable by the average human.

For those who need access to, and engagement from, these top C-Suite officers, this insight could mean the difference between productive contact and being put in the “pay no mind” column. Long, rambling voice mails, five-page e-mails, 9-lb promotional brochure bombs, 40-page white papers, are just not in these guys’ future, and will not only deny you the attention you need, but irritate the recipient for not respecting the limited time they have available for such activities. It’s not that they don’t want to engage with you, or that they’re ignoring you, it’s just that you’ve come in at the end of a very long priority string, and have to wait your turn. The more hurdles you place in the way of that turn being productive, the lower your odds of connecting in a meaningful way.

Short, sweet, decisive, get-to-the-point type communications win the day for these guys – strong, direct images, simple, direct language, compelling offers, real business cases that apply directly, and have relevance to them, are the key to success. Think about it: if you have a line of people waiting outside your office, a full calendar, a charity dinner and speech to prepare, and are flying to a board meeting later in the week, the last thing you want to do is wade through a long, rambling memo, a multi-page brochure with a barely comprehensible letter, with a tentative, limp offer that barely fits within the company’s “needs” basket. Poor choice of activities at best, when there are that many other, potentially more lucrative things waiting in the wings. A short e-mail promising a viable alternative and offering lunch next week, a few sentences at best, is more likely to get some attention.

Time is one of the few elements of a person’s job that they have limited control over. Time can’t be manufactured, can’t be augmented, can’t be stopped or delayed, bought, coerced, finagled, negotiated or bullied. It marches onward, unbidden and unaffected by your need for more, or to speed up or slow down to make room for more tasks. So, the main goal is usually just to prioritize the time you do have, to maximize the return on effort expended, and meet as many obligations as possible. Where those priorities are allocated, how they are parsed and balanced, is often the difference between success and not, over the long haul. A famous executive has been quoted as saying “I have time for the important things. The questions is, what is important at the time?” Pick the things that are important to you long term, and prioritize them above the rest – success can’t be far behind, however you define it.

August 4, 2016
How To Think Like Designers

This is What We Do – Thought this was interesting . . .

IBM hires hundreds of these workers to shake up clients — including Vodafone — and figure out what customers want

JUSTIN TALLIS/GETTY-AFP

What do your customers want? That’s not a skill that comes naturally to the engineers who build software for big corporations. But in a world filled with user-friendly smartphone apps, clunky enterprise software is no longer tenable.

So to shake up the status quo, IBM, Cognizant, Infosys and others have been racing to hire thousands of designers who once would have taken more specialized jobs-at an ad agency, say, or an industrial-design shop.

At IBM, they team up with engineers and consultants and embed with a multiplicity of clients. Besides providing customer i nsights, t he t eams encourage constant feedback and tweak products as they’re built — a process aimed at getting them out faster. It’s how successful Silicon Valley startups operate but radical for the IT services industry.

IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty has bet the future of the services division on design thinking. She badly needs the strategy to work if her company is to reverse 17 consecutive quarters of falling revenue and adapt to a cloud-based world. In the past few years, the company has recruited about 1,250 designers, built a global network of design studios and is training employees to incorporate design thinking into almost everything they do.

By the end of this year, the company says, about a third of the 377,000-strong workforce will have been retrained. The goal is to build a customer-centric, startup-esque culture — and then persuade clients to do the same.

Brian Corish never planned on joining a big corporation like Vodafone; the serial entrepreneur was used to working at startups where knowing what the customer wanted was baked into the DNA. But when the head of Vodafone’s Irish operations came calling for help enhancing the company’s online pres- ence, Corish saw an opportunity to teach the startup ethos to a company with lots of unused information about its customers.

His new bosses didn’t say precisely what they meant by the digital transformation, but Corish soon concluded he needed to reorganize the entire culture around its customers.

As a big, established company, he says, Vodafone hadn’t bothered providing the best consumer experience because it already had a massive customer base and was making money building and selling products the way it always had.

Corish decided to bring in outside help but was underwhelmed when all the consulting firms talked up previous projects rather than focusing on the challenge at hand. IBM sent its team back for a second try. This time they ran design thinking exercises with 30 or so attendees.

A lot of the discussions centered on actual customers, what they didn’t want and what they wanted more of. Darren Gerry, an IBM designer, says Vodafone attendees were shocked at the revelations, having never thought about customer needs and desires in those ways.

To start, IBM was asked to build a self-service portal that would let employees working for Vodafone’s enterprise clients order phones and other workrelated gadgets themselves.

Gerry says his team developed a close relationship with the client, keeping the project transparent and demonstrating to Vodafone how design thinking works. Corish, keen to teach as many people as possible about design thinking, helped facilitate the indoctrination, starting at the top; that’s when senior management met the Snapchatobsessed teenager.

Traditional enterprise software projects can drag on for years before bearing fruit. IBM delivered the first version of Vodafone’s self-service portal in six weeks. Corish says his colleagues were astounded how quickly the job got done. “The rest of the organization went, ‘ Oh, you really can do this,’ ” he says. “It doesn’t have to take five years.”

Before the self-service portal was built, enterprise clients had to call Vodafone to order a new device, often spending days getting it configured. Now they can use their own logins to order a phone or tablet, which arrives in a couple of days and works right out of the box. “If we don’t focus on the customer,” Corish says, “we’ll be irrelevant.” Much the same could be said about IBM.

August 2, 2016
How To Become Customer-Centric . . .

Whether its B2B, B2C, global enterprise or local start-up, commercial or non-for-profit, all types of business can benefit from becoming more customer-centric. But what does that mean, what does that look like, and how can you achieve it without recreating your business from the ground up?

True customer centrism is as much an attitude, an approach, as it is a model or structure, which means if companies want to take advantage of all the positives derived from knowing and treating your customers better, it all starts at the top, it’s built into your corporate or organizational culture, deeply interwoven into your corporate DNA. It’s one of several facets of business where you can’t just “talk the talk,” you HAVE to “walk the walk” every day, day after day, from all employees, customer-facing or not.

OK, so now that you have the attitude adjusted, it’s time to check the altitude. That requires some real, trusted, correctly executed research data. But where do you start? One aspect of research data is that it’s like lettuce, it needs to be fresh to be at it’s best. Which means you need to develop a way of gathering data from your customers that you can rely on to be accurate, to pull from a high-confidence sample size, and can be put in place relatively quickly and can be relaunched on a regular basis, once a baseline is established. Surveys can be used in some instances, depending upon what you’re trying to accomplish. Our preferred methodology is the IDI, or In-Depth Interview. It’s a semi-scripted conversation, 30-60 minutes in length, guided by a pre-written discussion guide, executed by trained researchers, NOT telemarketers, who can hold an intelligent conversation with a wide range of professionals and consumers. That conversation is geared toward gathering not only facts about your customers buying habits and purchase patterns, but about their attitudes, feelings, preferences, and moods regarding your products, services or brand. Many of those will be driven by their most recent experience with your company, usually an interaction with either billing or customer service representatives. Keep this in mind when doing the data analysis later, its one of the reasons why research data needs to be fresh.

Each IDI is recorded, transcripts made, each question response is then tabulated, and the responses segmented into positive and negative piles, or into a range of “buckets” based on type of response, severity of feeling, and prevalence among respondents. Those data points are given to three analysists (in our practice, anyway), and three independent analyses are written up based on the same data, to mitigate bias and skew. That’s the basic methodology, but the key to using these successfully comes in the performance of the questions themselves – if you don’t ask the “right” questions, you can’t act appropriately on the answers and achieve the desired result. That’s where the magic happens.

Now that you have your data, and have done the analysis, now what? Data is just dumb numbers and words unless it leads to, or can be converted into, some positive action with respect to your customers. Some of the data will be most useful in making adjustments operationally to customer-facing processes. Is your fulfillment process causing problems, is the return policy too restrictive or difficult, is your phone tree routing system too complex or directing people insufficiently or are the menu options wrong – those are things that can be adjusted and shifted based on the data in a very direct way. They make a big difference in the customer experience, and can certainly affect their attitudes and emotions toward the company in the short term. It gets a bit more complex when you start examining some of the deeper attitudes and preferences about the company and its brand, what the company and it’s products mean to them emotionally, what feelings does the brand bring out in them, and why. Those are brand-linked attitudes and emotions, formed after repeated interactions and touch points with the company, its outreach materials and products. It’s much tougher to pin down the cause of these aggregate attitudes, but worth the time if you can make a correction that rights the brand’s direction going forward.

At this point, many of the smaller B2B companies and service firms are thinking, ”isn’t that up to our sales people to assess those things and listen to their customers and shape their offer and interaction accordingly?” Even if your transaction volume is very low and your client number correspondingly low, there is still much to learn about your customers by doing research, and to be able to adjust your marketing to find more of them as a result. In fact, smaller, lower volume firms can make a bigger impact by paying attention to brand influence and making customer-centric adjustments than a larger firm can – small changes make a bigger difference in their bottom line, and a small increase in customer volume makes a bigger difference financially as a percentage of overall revenue.

It’s said in the psychiatric profession that admitting you need help puts you half way to a cure. Becoming customer centric as a business is a similar situation – by discovering that you can improve your growth, meet objectives, increase revenue and profit by knowing your customer better and serving their needs more directly, you’ve already planted the seeds of that first attitude adjustment step, a big move forward in the process. Communicating that attitude down through the rank and file so that it becomes pervasive throughout the firm is the next step. Strong belief, direct simple communication, and a solid, positive example shown in every corporate action is the key to building a more customer-centric organization. No time like the present to get started. If you don’t know where to start, we’d be happy to help.

July 28, 2016
Legacy VS Longevity – Brand Makes The Difference
Some brands seem to become well known, some nearly ubiquitous, in a short period of time, relatively speaking. Some businesses that have names that are around for decades and decades, and for generations, and their brand reach is only a few miles from their location with virtually no recognition beyond that, aside from existing customers, which only number in the hundreds. What makes the difference between the long-time brand, and the real legacy brand, that gains national exposure and stays in the forefront for years and years?

Clearly just sticking around for decades should count for something, right? Growing a business is not for the faint of heart, and it’s a lot of hard work over years to become established and known for what you do. Yet some seem to climb that mountain fairly quickly and become almost household names in just a short period, taking a large stake in market share for their category, while others simply continue day by day, seemingly doing a good job, gaining customers, but they never reach prominence either in their category or industry beyond the small local area.

The difference can likely be attributed to three factors:
- Paid or Earned Exposure – is there an advertising program on a large scale, is there some press and PR activity on the schedule, have you told the story to the media and let their network and their imagination do some work for you in spreading the word? If not, that may be a significant determiner of your reach and market share – someone once said that “a business that doesn’t advertise is like a nerd kissing a girl in the dark – you know it’s happening, but no one else knows you’re there.” Craft a credible, succinct brand story, and amplify it as far as wide as possible.
- Industry Participation – Are you a member in good standing of the business and professional trade associations that cover your vertical and your business activities? Are you active and engaged in those groups? If not you’re missing a huge opportunity. Those organizations not only represent you and the other members to the general public, but they allow you to be known within your industry as an expert, a specialist, a provider of solid standing and credible ability – they all publish multiple vehicles, from websites, to magazines and newsletters and blogs that can be used to showcase your business to industry colleagues.
- Differentiation – what is it that you do better, faster, cheaper, differently than your competitors? Do you use different or better procedures, superior materials, alternate parts or components, better product designs, respond to customers in a spectacular way, do you offer a full refund no questions asked no matter what? Free shipping on returns, multiple access points, 24/7 service, faster turnaround? Something gives you distance from your competitors. Use that to stand out from the pack, and spread the word nationally that you’re the one that can provide “X” when no other can.
With those three pillars in place, if the product is of good quality, if you’re telling the right people, at the right time, often enough to “stick” in their minds when purchasing time comes, then your brand should be established, and spread as far as you can push it out.

None of the three things listed above are terribly expensive, from a business standpoint. It is certainly possible to spend yourself into a sizeable hole on advertising that doesn’t work or that is misplaced, but there are scores of professionals out there to assist you in determining the appropriate spending levels and media selections so that this doesn’t happen. The industry participation is relatively inexpensive but can be time-consuming – almost always well worth the time to establish yourself as an industry player, which brings dividends for years. Differentiation is more an introspective exercise, and should be part of all your marketing planning, along with reiterating your brand characteristics and pillars of internal strength for the brand, to help keep the brand story consistent and on track over the years.

Are you a local presence, or a national brand on the rise? The choice is really yours to make . . .
July 14, 2016
Doing The New Client Dance . . .
As consultants, we’re constantly receiving client requests for information, meeting new people at events and meetings, receiving RFPs, creating proposals for potential work, when we’re not creating new research projects, analyzing data or meeting with existing clients – in short, there’s a constant cycle of clients in an out, all of which need attention of various kinds. This is normally a good problem to have, but there’s a trap in there that can and should be avoided.

Even with top-notch marketing, a full sales funnel, and great clients, there are many prospects who solicit our attention that should not ever become actual clients. Unfortunately, they look on the surface just like the one’s that should! How to tell the difference? Of course, tighter lead screening, higher vetting standards, and other preliminary processes will cut down on the tire-kickers and time wasters. But what about those who seem earnest, sincere and clearly need help, but that end up wasting a lot of time and asking lots of questions, but don’t ever really have the wherewithal or ability to engage at the stated fee level or project scope? You’ve gotten to know them, you’ve adjusted timelines to allow for lower budget milestones, they’ve stated their desire, but either can’t or don’t act, sign the contract and start gathering information to engage the service.

Were there signs of this type of behavior earlier in the process, flags that were missed or ignored? My guess is yes, but without a high level of transaction volume, they can each be explained away as an anomaly or one-off problem, so that no trend or pattern develops. This kind of activity negatively affects productivity and profitability, so it’s worth a little time to track down the commonalities and causes for this type of behavior on the part of the prospect. Here’s a few additional flags we’ve uncovered:
- Have they ever worked with a consultant or freelancer before? Unless their corporate culture and structure and budget type allow for the use of freelance labor, especially hourly or open ended contracts, beware. It’s not something to enter into lightly, and their ability to work with you largely depends on them being comfortable with the arrangement, both ideologically and financially. If it’s a new thing, you’re the guinea pig in the experiment, and the risk is extremely high for you as the consultant.
- Have they set aside the management time and the access that comes with it, to give you the real story? Many first time consulting clients think that once we’re signed on, it’s all on us, and they just circle back around at the end for the report. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially for marketing – we need some time and interaction to download all the info we need to do the job, and it’s got to come from the top.
- Have they set aside enough budget to not only cover the consulting fees and time, but to pay to enact and execute the activity the consultant recommends? If not, your work simply becomes another binder on a shelf, and the opportunity to actually move the needle and grow that company in a meaningful way is likely lost. Not to mention your ability to capitalize on that relationship with further billable hours or additional projects.
Most of the above can be squared away with a very direct, frank conversation at the beginning of the relationship, to set expectations on both sides, assess suitability of both structure and finances, and to set some goals that everyone’s comfortable with. Setting expectations is key to a well-rounded relationship and should be an integral part of any formal or informal “onboarding” process you currently employ. Even with more seasoned clients, who rely primarily on the contract language and scope of work documents to outline what will be delivered and what will be needed to achieve it, a brief conversation with the more senior management contacts is required, just to set all concerned at ease going forward.

While you can’t always spot a “good” client or a “bad” one at first blush, but with some careful questioning and a solid process, you can reduce the lost time and increase profitability in real world practice, allowing you to grow and expand as time allows – you can only be so many places at once, after all . . .
June 29, 2016
Marketing Automation Can Go Too Far

With as many digital marketing programs, apps, platforms and dashboards as are currently available to the modern marketer, clearly marketing automation is an idea whose time has come. But at what point does all that automation start to mask, hide, obfuscate and cloak the real goal of the marketer – to persuade, influence, elicit emotion and garner a specific reaction by connecting in some emotional way with the individuals who make up the target market. If the machines are deciding the timing, tone, quality, frequency, subject matter and even copy point priority, is there really a relationship being created there?

While I’m still emotionally a bit of a luddite when it comes to technology, I understand it’s uses and marvel at its potential to make our lives easier, and more productive, alleviating the drudgery of some of the more mundane daily tasks and delegating the type of “step, repeat” activities that make up our daily existence to simple machines. However, there are limits to the level and type of task I’m willing to relinquish to the machines. The little voice in the back of my head that warns “If it can do this, what else could it do if I don’t keep control over it” is running that script more frequently when I take a few moments to fill the que of my social media automation platform. It speeds up knowing that the machine will be totally in charge of what people see, when they see it, how often they see it. Relin quishing that level of control is a little scary.

Now, take that a step further. The next generation of software is likely to have wider permissions within your physical and online universe. It’s possible, given the necessary set up structure, for a similar platform to deliver a message to a given recipient, with the ability to search their hard drive and cloud account, dredge up bits of information gauge their reactions to online posts by others, collect viewing habits for photos and videos, and be able to piece these disparate pieces of data together into a coherent letter rife with personal references that only make sense to them. Its invasive, it’s creepy, it gives the recipient a sense of exposure, but if crafted correctly and reigned in appropriately, it would be so personal and so relevant, it would out-pull almost any generic control letter by a factor of 10. Are you scared of the machines yet?

Currently, the overuse of personalization typically takes the form of using the person’s name or address or other key piece of publicly available information too many times. The only damage there is to the sender, as it pulls back the curtain and exposes the use of data in the letter, destroying the illusion of personal relations and destroying trust. This depresses response, but doesn’t hurt anything. But taken a notch further, say that same letter is riddled with personal information, including images of your home and kids, banking and financial “hints”, information about your mortgage or car loan, the kids’ school names or addresses, extracurricular activities. Looks and sounds personal, right? Now imagine that letter is stolen out of the mailbox, or picked up out of the delivery bin before it even gets to you. The person with ill intent now knows more about you than they could ever discover any other way, and can use that data to do anything they want, unfettered by regulations, legislation, professional ethics or legal restriction.

Used correctly, personalization and data “injection” can make messages feel relevant, feel familiar, feel comfortable, and lead to a positive response. Used incorrectly, personalization can open the door to abuse, cause damage to both the sender and the recipient, and lead to a range of problems from minor headache to legal action. When employing automation for driving or disseminating marketing messages, best to err on the side of caution and keep your human fingers in the pie at critical points – just to be sure everyone stays on good terms – be careful out there . . .

June 9, 2016
Self-Branding: Keys to Making a Great First, Second and Third Impression On Prospects, Clients

Most professionals in a wide variety of industry verticals are aware that they need to create a positive impression when they meet a potential client or colleague. Service pros of all stripes have at least some understanding and self-awareness regarding the impression they leave people with upon first meeting. What many neglect however, is that branding is an ongoing activity, and that if you want to activate the positive impression you’ve created with that person or group, you need to keep providing evidence to reinforce this impression – that brand is yours to damage or degrade, and a few smart, conscious choices can help you provide reinforcement to that initial impression and enlarge upon it in a productive, actionable way.

Branding has much to do with consistency, and human beings by nature are rather arbitrary, although certain behaviors are potentially predictable. Behaving the same way, reacting in a similar way to certain inputs and stimuli, developing routines and habits that are simple and obvious are ways you can reassure those around you that you are dependable, reliable, solid and can be counted on to to be reasonable. This requires a level of maturity, self-control and self-awareness, but once mastered, you might be surprised how effective it can be. Something as simple as arriving at the office at the same time a majority of the time, if possible, lets people around you know that if they’re patient, you’ll arrive in time to assist them if they need it.

Work on picking a style of clothing that really works well for you, is comfortable for you and others around you, is appropriate for the situation, and still expresses your individuality. Steve Jobs locked onto a pair of dark jeans and a black mock turtleneck, and wore them constantly for years. Not only does it save you some time in the morning “deciding” what to wear, but it sends a consistent message that says “I’m reliable, and focused on behaving consistently with your expectations.”

Be honest, straightforward, transparent and ethical in your dealings with clients and colleagues. Trust is the core of every brand, and if there’s a hint of inauthenticity, people will pick up on it and shy away when given a choice. Authenticity is critical to those in more publicly-visible positions. If you represent the face of your company, it is absolutely critical that you be as authentic and direct as you can, to stay in keeping with the brand expectation of stakeholders everywhere. People will sense a false note, and equate it with hiding something or covering up.

Treat everyone equally. Be as egalitarian in your dealings with everyone in the building as you can be. Treat the maintenance workers and cleaning crews with the same respect and attention that you pay to the CEO or Chairman. A quick word to everyone carries an amazing amount of weight with everyone you encounter, and it makes you personal, approachable and memorable, because very few can pull it off consistently.

Every move you make, every meeting you attend, every memo you send out, can either work to build the brand or dilute it – the choice is really yours. If you’re someone who is consistently late for appointments, meetings and happy hours, when you start to show up on time, it actually builds the brand, as long as you can keep it up! The opposite is true if you’ve started off being the first to arrive and then slip into sauntering in at ten minutes after . . . If your emails win awards for brevity and succinct word choice, and later you start to elaborate some, it builds the brand, and lets you open yourself up a bit, makes you approachable. If you push out 800-word tomes regularly, when you shift to the short and sweet formula, it can be interpreted that you are upset or angry at the recipient, or don’t care to include them in your thinking.

Stay on point. Everyone has goals, but few write them down, and fewer revisit them, review and revise them regularly. When your actions start to drive you toward your goals, staying on point and on message will help you build and maintain momentum. It also helps you hone and maintain your core message consistently, which builds trust with stakeholders throughout the organization, both up and down the org chart.

Devising a personal brand can be a terrific springboard to career and personal success. It plays to others’ expectations and allows them to feel comfortable with you more quickly and completely. Some self-reflection, self-awareness, self-control and self-discipline will help you craft a brand that propels you forward almost effortlessly, and will be worth the effort and time it takes to do it “right”.

June 3, 2016
Brand Loyalty Is More Fragile Than You Think

Marketing and sales pros know that people don’t really buy features and benefits, they buy feelings and stories. Your brand (hopefully) tells your buying audience a compelling story, one that gets retold each time they interact with your brand, which makes them feel a certain way, under a variety of circumstances. For retailers this means that each time customers shop your store, whether brick and mortar or online, they have certain expectations of that experience, and if you don’t live up to them, you may be doing damage to your brand. This makes customer service a key component to brand loyalty.

I was speaking with a friend of ours the other day and we were comparing the stores where we buy wine. I buy at a small, boutique, one-off adult beverage emporium, one that specializes in having a large selection of micro-brews, and a strong selection of more esoteric Bourbons and Scotches, and a terrific selection of wines from around the world. She shops at a chain store, owned by a major grocery retailer, with a huge inventory of all the top brands, great pricing due to volume buys, and a no-frills approach to store design and displays.

The reason she was asking me where I buy is because she had recently experienced three separate instances of poor customer service by store sales staff. She swore that after three strikes, she would never patronize that store again. Her brand loyalty to that brand, which had been off-the-charts strong before, based on it’s affiliation with the larger grocery chain, had been eroded to zero in just three perceived poor incidences of inattentive, rude, or unpleasant behavior. The selection, pricing, hours, decor and layout hadn’t changed one bit, but her perception of the store and its contents changed dramatically, for the worse.

Now I’m pretty sure the large chain won’t really miss her business, and will likely never make positive changes to the sales staff’s training or behavior guidelines, probably because they will never know they have a problem, and she has no reason to tell them about it. But if you multiply her experience by a hundred, or several hundred, or several thousand chain-wide, you start to see some negative effects on the balance sheet. If you disappoint your target audience badly enough, or often enough, then your brand is no longer what it was.

Ongoing feedback from customers, becoming more customer-centric in your operations as well as your marketing, can help stem this downward spiral and if caught early enough can give you a start on reversing it. Some companies are acutely aware of this, and take great pains to listen carefully to their customers. This customer brand monitoring takes several forms – feedback cards, social media monitoring, ongoing survey research, continual customer service call monitoring and review, and a host of technological solutions that track and measure customer attitude and preferences.

One of the more diligent brands in this regard is Hilton. They religiously guard their premium brand, listening carefully to all customer feedback, and taking swift, effective steps to satisfy customer complaints. They do it so well that most complainers are turned into brand evangelists! They have an overwhelmingly positive customer rating in a variety of categories by organizations like J.D. Power, Zogby Analytics, and media outlet lists like MSN, List25, and Wall St. 24/7. They have realized that their customer interactions are a driving force in their brand loyalty, and take iron-clad, positive steps to protect it and bolster it with each customer experience they deliver.

The real message is that while a single customer may not contribute much to your bottom line on their own, the symptoms and actions that lead to that customer losing their loyalty to the brand need to be addressed before they “go viral” among your customers and degrade the brand. As Barney Fife once said, “we can’t have that kind of behavior, we gotta nip it in the bud” when you fail to deliver the highest level customer experience each and every time.

May 21, 2016
Make Your Marketing Dollars Work As Hard As You Do

Marketers are typically asked to justify their expenditures, to craft a nearly inviolate budget often as much as two years ahead of time, and to stick to it to control spending. Rarely are they asked if those expenditures are the most cost-efficient solutions, or if allocating more resources to a particular item might improve its resulting gains over above the spend, by scale or efficiency. Corporations with a culture of control focus more on the outflow than the value of the resulting inflow when discussing marketing expenditure. Based on years of experience with both winners and losers in the corporate and non-profit world, I can honestly say that this might be a losing approach to marketing.

Corporate leaders often assume that marketing is ALWAYS doing the most cost-effective thing to achieve results, based on a cost-conscious culture and the nature of marketing as an accountable function. Spend “X”, and you can usually count on “Y” coming back. But what if you doubled “X” and “Y” quadrupled or quintupled? Would they have approved the additional expense at the beginning of the year, prior to the effort? Probably not. In some cases, more time is spent trying to justify expenditure than on creating the method and message of the expense. To me, that’s crazy!

Fortunately, in today’s expanded culture of innovation, a business climate rife with entrepreneur-ism and start-up fever, fast-cycle test-fail-repeat operations are becoming more prominent, and with that comes an easing of the penny-pinching, along with a realization that “if we try ten things and six work, we’re ahead of the game” for marketing departments lead by enlightened senior executives.

Finding such an enlightened marketing leader requires some work, but the effort is almost universally worth it based upon the game-changing results that can be had as a result of their efforts when supported by senior leadership. They are often cloaked in other experiences, other disciplines, and usually don’t fit the linear career paths that the HR Department is trained to look for. Such outliers can really move the needle, and are worth the effort to find. But that’s not the whole story.

A quick analysis of your marketing expenditure will show you where the money is going, and each item should provide some indication as to what it’s returning for that spend, either in dollars, or results of some kind. If it doesn’t, some sort of metric needs to be “baked in” to that activity so that you can make it accountable. Once that’s in place in the budget, sort and rank the items by results, not by cost, and see if the order changes from the cost-based ranking. Comparing those two lists seems simple, but it can be an eye-opener when seeking an edge, by finding inefficiencies and reallocating resources to drive growth and revenue generation. Like the stock market or Las Vegas, you double down on the winners and bag the losers quickly, to mitigate risk and drive growth of return.

The other advantage to this type of approach is that you avoid the “cheap trap” of not thinking large enough, based on a lack of faith in the results. Thinking bigger has a really strong track record of success, doing everything as cheap as possible doesn’t, because many great ideas, initiatives, campaigns and other activities die from capitol starvation before they ever get a chance to come to fruition. If the initial tests are even reasonably favorable, feeding that idea has a 2000% chance of succeeding over the one that breaks even and stays small. Good testing programs and solid research mitigate that risk even further, and will highlight even greater opportunities as results come in and new ideas surface based on their successes. It’s a good day when the winners spawn more winners.

Good ideas, good research, patience and faith combine to drive success in marketing. As a famous marketer for a large consumer products company once was rumored to utter, “every dime I spend on events and marketing comes back to our company dressed up like a quarter.” When you scale up, double-down on winners, and feed the best ideas, that quarter quickly becomes a dollar.

April 28, 2016
You CAN Teach An Old Dog New Tricks . . . Sometimes You Don’t Have To
In the world of marketing, there are new things to learn, new innovations introduced, new techniques that surface, every day. It’s a fast-moving, wide-open world where marketers chase the next big thing, the new, shiny object that promises more information, faster feedback, better data or segmentation, easier tracking, more operations under one platform, and other enticing offers to help marketers make sense of this huge, complex puzzle called marketing.

But sometimes, that new shiny object turns out to be a tarnished, older, less spiffy tactic in a new package, or a reboot of a more traditional tactic, dressed in digital clothing. Old or new, the object of the game is to connect with, to engage, to persuade, and to change opinion and the subsequent behavior to a purchase.

Sometimes marketing skills and practices can be applied to new tactics as well. E-mail is a strong, successful tactic when used under the right circumstances with the right audience. The same characteristics that make an effective e-mail campaign, the same skills that e-mail uses to reach the audience effectively –
- strong, persuasive copy;
- a solid, clear, concise and compelling offer
- eye-catching headlines and carrier tagline (read “Subject Line”);
- the right list, one that is accepting, responsive and relevant and clean of undeliverable addresses;
- attractive imagery that resonates with the audience and conveys the message and reinforces the brand;
are those used in direct mail. Yet direct mail, and it’s practitioners, are increasingly marginalized by clients, agency leaders, and pundits as a dying art, an antiquated technique, an anachronism. However, those same experts agree that those elements are what makes e-mail campaigns successful – so why are those skills declining?

One reason might be the ease of using e-mail versus crafting a direct mail campaign. There are lots of moving parts to doing direct mail well – there are formats, sizes, stock selections, printing techniques, postal regulations, list prep, personalization issues, pre-sort and data processing, on top of the writing, imagery, offer, list and subject line to consider. The time required to put together and manage a direct mail campaign is almost always longer than an e-mail campaign – production time, mailing time, list data management, merge-purge, and other operations to allow for postal delivery, and the physical transport from one production process to another takes much more time than writing, designing, loading, and sending an e-mail. That additional time comes in handy, it allows for lots of thought, editing, revision and review by lots of different sets of eyes along the way, with lots of opportunity to spot errors, typos, color and size problems, regulatory and weight issues, and a host of other potential errors that can sink your program and tank the results. E-mail, thanks to a variety of competent and inexpensive software programs, can be executed solo, with no oversight as to what goes out, how it’s designed, and no restraint as to the content, the biggest constraint being the list has to be deemed an “opt-in” originated, so that SPAM regulations don’t apply.

[pullquote align=”left or right”]Old or new, the object of the game is to connect with, to engage, to persuade, and to change opinion and the subsequent behavior to a purchase.[/pullquote]

Yet, all the simplicity and speed of e-mail should free up time to write tremendous copy, to craft a very persuasive offer, to tell a story with endless insight and as much real estate on the page as you need to tell the full compelling tale. But with all that extra time, how many top-quality, really creative and persuasive e-mails have you read recently? Based on the total received on a given day, not many arrive in my inbox that compel me to do anything but hit “delete” . . .

. . . and the ones that do, I’ve found, were usually crafted and written by those with direct mail experience in their past. DM pros make great e-mailers, but the reverse is not usually true.

Turns out, the craft of copywriting, the ability to relate directly to an audience in writing, the skill required to turn features into benefits, to make offers that are easily interpreted and unambiguous, to build rapport with the audience, to engage and entice that audience with something as mundane as a plastic widget or a monthly meeting, is still just as valuable in the new digital frontier as it was in the bad old days of catalogs and direct marketing. Kudos go to those who’ve taken the time and energy to learn their craft, to perfect their art, to become true 10,000-hour experts at the art and science of communicating to an audience of individuals. Next time you think you’ll dash off an e-mail to your hot list and it takes you twenty minutes or less to get it out the door, take a few minutes before you hit the “send” button, and see if that’s really the best, the strongest, the most interesting and compelling message you could possibly send . . . if not, maybe wait until someone else gets to read it before you launch it out into the ether . . . the job you save may be your own!
April 21, 2016