News and Perspectives

“When you focus too much on data, you stop hearing the real voice of your customers”. The hotel business is probably the one where customer experience counts more than in any other activity, and so are the economic lessons to be learned for all sectors.
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Robert McDonald is a CEO on a mission: to make Procter & Gamble the most technologically enabled business in the world. To get there, he is overseeing digital technology and advanced analytics across every aspect of P&G’s operations including relationships with retailers, manufactures products, brands, and customers.
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At a recent dinner with a group of CMOs some weeks ago, one of them said : "We are hired to be strategic, but we are forced to spend most of our time on operational issues". Here are some thoughts that could certainly be applied by all CMOs all over the world to get out of the operational morass. Available to registered members of our LinkedIn group only.
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Heavy data collection about customers doesn’t necessarily brings more intimacy with clients. Accumulating and analyzing large volumes of factual data is one thing, but understanding the emotional behavior that leads clients to make decisions is another one.
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Belgacom's Marketing VP is clear: "We want to make our customers’ life easier and easier. We’ll start with a simpler pricing, more readable and easier to understand. We will also simplify our touch points like our Belgacom shops, call centers, website, and advertising campaigns".
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How can marketers make sure that their resources are allocated in a way that delivers? Chetan Saiya describes technologies and best practices that enable marketers to not only survive, but thrive, amid these challenges.
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How to increase conversion rates by 60%: the ING Direct case. "User Experience Design doesn’t win ADC prices, it wins percentages".(Oliver Reichenstein)
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For 45 years, the ANA (the American Advertisers Association) is fielding a unique, comprehensive, and best-selling triennial survey. The 15th edition of the ANA’s Trends in Agency Compensation survey offers clear insights into agency compensation trends, including methods of compensation, performance incentives, etc. For the first time ever, this new volume also contains the ANA’s "Trends in Digital Agency Compensation" survey.
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Every new technology has its skeptics. Over the last years,that sentiment has gravitated to Web 2.0 technologies. Management is trying to understand if they are a passing fad or an enduring trend that will underwrite a new era of better corporate performance. McKinsey’s new survey research finds that companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins.
Source: McKinsey Quarterly
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The launch of the iPad has driven consumers across the globe with people everywhere vying to get their hands on Apple's latest device. But the question is to know if the iPad and other tablets, aside from just a pretty piece of eye candy, will ever have a true business role. Full content available to registered members of our LinkedIn group.
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How could a marketing department within the B2B environment help deliver more qualified leads and business value in the economic recovery? By generating engaged prospects instead of so called leads, and by working in close collaboration with the sales team within a a commonly agreed commercial strategy. Full content available to registered members of our LinkedIn group.
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Even after researching products on their own, many customers enter stores undecided about what to buy. For retailers, that’s an opportunity to improve off-line sales in an increasingly multichannel world.
Source: McKinsey Quarterly
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Companies usually spend huge amounts of money to compensate sales forces, several times the amount devoted to marketing, yet sales force compensation remains a troubling question. Eliminating sales quotas may boost company profits, in one case the new sales compensation plan without quotas resulted in a 9% improvement in overall revenues, which translates to about $1 million of incremental revenues per month.
Source: Stanford Graduate School of Business
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Increasingly, organizations must be able to tap into new, emerging marketing skill sets to drive growth. The prerequisites to successfully integrating performance marketing include transformative thinking, managing the evolving online landscape, and continuous optimization. Outsourcing to experts has advantages. CMOs committed to leveraging online performance marketing should consider all three when deciding between an in-house or outsourced team.
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When many companies continue to suffer from an antagonistic divide between their marketing and sales teams, some others demonstrate significant achievements through channel management as the platform for alignment, or by setting up drastic metrics that enable marketing and sales to permanently see how they perform, how the pipeline looks like and where marketing must deliver particular efforts to support sales. What have been the key lessons from the recent think-tank session on that matter ? Read the full story on our LinkedIn Group - Available to Fellow Members only.
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Source: McKinsey Quarterly - Consumers have always valued opinions expressed directly to them. Marketers may spend millions of dollars on elaborately conceived advertising campaigns, yet often what really makes up a consumer’s mind is not only simple but also free: a word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted source. As consumers overwhelmed by product choices tune out the ever-growing barrage of traditional marketing, word of mouth cuts through the noise quickly and effectively.
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Source : McKinsey Quarterly ~ Whether by receiving marketing e-mails, searching for products on the Web, or using mobile devices to find retail coupons, almost everyone now interacts constantly online with brands. This two-way information flow not only empowers consumers but also gives marketers new ways to influence them. Yet at most companies, digital marketing is an uncoordinated mess. To learn how they can achieve revenue increases of 10 to 20 percent by unifying the end-to-end customer experience, read the article from McKinsey Quarterly.
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Text and opinions on this topic are only available to registered fellow members on the marketing Executive Circle's group on LinkedIn.
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Source: McKinsey Quarterly ~ Long before behavioral economics had a name, marketers were using it. Yet despite marketing’s inadvertent leadership in using principles of behavioral economics, few companies use them in a systematic way. This article highlights 4 practical techniques that should be part of every marketer’s tool kit.
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Text and opinions on this topic are only available to registered fellow members on the marketing Executive Circle's group on LinkedIn.
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Source: McKinsey Quarterly - In previous recessions, many marketers doubled down on large, historically profitable customers, geographies, and market segments—an approach that may now be ineffective because economic woes are affecting consumers and markets in unexpected and very specific ways. Marketers should therefore toss out their historical expectations and look for emerging pockets of profitability.
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Teragram Sentiment Analysis Manager (SAM) is a social media analysis tool that captures relevant product reviews enabling brand managers to analyze the sentiments expressed by their products’ end-users. SAM’s automated processes locate and analyze digital content in real time to determine the writer’s emotional meaning, identify changing trends, while catching singular product defects early.
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Discover the 7 crucial enabling attributes that a successful CMO has to have, and the 7 critical disabling factors that a CMO cannot afford to have.
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