It Doesn't Matter How Well You Say It...

... Because if you are saying it to the wrong people it simply won't make it past the first hurdle. I am fascinated by the disproportionate amount of time (and resource) we tend to spend in marketing thinking about the message rather than thinking about matching the message to the receiver... I guess this is the difference between coincidence marketing and targeted marketing...

Passion Pays

Max Kalehoff in his AttentionMax blog underlines the singular importance of passion for companies. His main tenet, excellently put, is that competence and flawless delivery are now table stakes and for the customer, passion is the difference maker.

When passion lets loose, you drive focus, cultivate mastery, leverage spontaneity, foster creativity, build intuition and live toward mission. The dots connect. Clarity emerges. Your own bar of excellence sets higher, and you become infatuated with exceeding it.

A great contribution to the debate...

Customer Centricity in Uncertain Times

When the economy slows, consumers become more discerning. As a result marketers need fight harder and smarter to gain advantage over their competitors. A recent survey on CRM (defined as a technological investment) from Gartner showed a 14% increase in spending year over year.

North America remains the largest market for CRM software, accounting for $4.3 billion in revenue in 2007 and projected to reach $7.6 billion in 2012. The strongest growth will come from Asia/Pacific markets, where revenue is forecast to rise from $410 million last year to $840 million in 2012.

Enhancing the customer experience is the key differentiator...

Direct is a Methodology, Digital a Platform

Direct marketing is a methodology all about relevance and the three dimensions of relevant communications. If we assume (and I do) that the three critical dimensions of relevance are: temporal, contextual and experiential, then digital marketing allows us - if we focus and listen well enough - to more easily hit two of the three in one communication. The breakthrough that will come in mobile marketing will allow us to hit all three at once...

To mis-quote Arthur C. Clarke - Any sufficiently advanced marketing technology employed brilliantly, is indistinguishable from magic.

The Truth is More Important Than the Facts (bis)

... but without the facts, you cant get to the truth. According to a recent global survey funded by Computer Sciences Corp., IBM and D&B, few marketers really have the focus on deriving truths from customer data

Among the other findings of the survey:

• Forty-five percent of respondents rate the effectiveness of customer relationship management systems as deficient or needing work.
• Just 15% rate themselves as extremely good or effective at integrating disparate customer data sources and repositories.
• Only 6% say they have excellent knowledge of their customers when it comes to demographic, behavioral, psychographic and transactional data.
• More than 31% have churn rates above 10%, and 32% report having customer turnover of 5% to 10%.
• Thirty-one percent say they don't do data mining at all, and 63% say they are doing only moderate levels of data mining for intelligence and insight.

Two thoughts - becoming a data and insights driven organisation tends to rank highly amongst marketers when asked of their current focus, secondly, organisations are becoming more metrics focussed from the CEO's office to IT (not forgetting HR), is marketing to lag behind?

Moving Pharma Spending Online

In spite of some high spots, pharmaceutical marketers have been reluctant to truly take the plunge into meaningful online marketing. Could this be changing? In their recent study, Cegedim Dendrite found that US direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketers plan to increase their online marketing spending this year and decrease spending on traditional media. Respondents generally said they planned to spend more this year on Web sites, search and e-mail marketing, and less on TV and radio. Tellingly however, Cegedim said that while respondents said they wanted to see more focus on emerging and targeted channels, and less on general mass media tactics, the industry seemed reluctant to actually reallocate budgets to make it happen.


More on the study here...

More on Free

Forrester’s George Colony in reply to the recent article in Wired in which Chris Anderson argued that the economics of web 2.0 will drive almost all content to be free, argues that the limitations of advertising and the continuing development of technologies to avoid it will ensure that this is not the case.

George makes 4 key points of refutation:

More and more people will be willing to pay for content with no or few ads

• Adblockers and the like will change the economics of the game
• Critical information will push out ads on the web – consider subscription models a la Bloomberg
• Human activity that requires deep concentration will abstain from advertising.
  

More here…

The Customer Not the Brand Must Be the Hero

I was delighted to have been able to spend a little time chatting with Josh Bernoff at the Blast Radius CX Innovation Summit in Miami this week. During the event itself, Josh presented extracts from a new book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (which he wrote in collaboration with Charlene Li). The thing I enjoyed most about both the presentation and our subsequent discussion was the relentless insistence on heard-nosed data to support the hypothesis that we are, in fact winning. The authors could have included many other cases and examples in the book but refused because of a lack of - or resistance to provide - the numbers.



The title of this post is from Lester Wunderman's 19 principles of Direct Marketing. These core principles were written more than 40 years ago...

Does Anyone Actually Pay Anymore?

My attention was recently drawn to a free mobile network that launched at the end of last year in the UK - I wonder if anyone under the age of 20 actually pays to use a phone anymore - Anyway, Blyk gives its users 217 free texts a month as well as 43 free minutes in exchange for receiving up to 6 messages a day, targeted based on that users detailed profile. Blyk has so far run 500 mobile campaigns with a 29% response rate. Not too shabby in a hard to reach demographic...

A Person Like Me

According to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, a "person like me" is likely to be the single most influential source of information - But what does a person like me look like?

• “Shares my interests” and “holds similar political beliefs” continue to be the top two defining factors of “a person like me” in most countries, with a slight drop in the U.K., France, and Germany for “shares my interests” (67% to 61%).
• Being from the same local community dropped in importance over the past year, in some countries quite significantly: Ireland to 29% from 51%; Russia to 28% from 47%; Sweden to 9% from 27%; the U.K. to 18% from 44%; and the United States to 24% from 44%.
• Since last year’s survey, being in the same profession dropped in importance: China to 36% from 46%; India to 36% from 63%; Japan to 32% from 46%; Russia to 31% from 51%; South Korea to 27% from 46%; the U.K. to 31% from 46%; and the United States to 23% from 35%.