On November 6 at the Yale School of Management, a conference is being held on “Finding the Upside in the Downturn: The Changing Role of Marketing”.
The conference will feature keynote speeches from Michael Polk, President, Unilever Americas; John Hayes, Chief Marketing Officer, American Express Company; Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO, Denuo, Publicis Groupe; Steven Sturm, Group Vice President, Toyota Motor North America, Inc. The topics they will explore include how their companies are rethinking their marketing, innovation, pricing, product, and communications strategies; their use of new media and new technologies; changes in media consumption and brand building tools; and consumer behavior challenges and opportunities in both developed and developing countries.
Watch this space for an update after the conference.
Brian Lenhart at the Columbia Business School recently posted about Driving Results with Social Media. Brian argues that we need to understand what Social Media is all about and defines it as a constantly flowing communications channel. He gives the following tips to stay ahead of it:
1) Launch, Track, Learn, Evolve, Rebuild
Don’t skimp on reporting. Everything in the online space is trackable — so track it. Launch initiatives quickly and then use the information and results that are gathered to learn and continue to evolve your platforms. Some of my greatest insights and strategic program adjustments have come by really diving into the numbers.
2) Leadership Support and Empowerment
The success of social media programs can be influenced by the degree of leadership support and decentralized decision-making inherent in the process. To me, leadership support means two things: 1) empowering employees and 2) encouraging new ideas by involving social media gurus.
3) Form Progressive Partnerships
At its heart, social media is about people and relationships. You can say this applies for anything in marketing, but I believe it is especially true for social media.
Monitor Consulting recently published on StrategicOxygen.com on the importance of awareness of where your organization currently exists. That progression is dependent on awareness.
Similar to Monitor Consulting, we too provide organizational assessments and have have seen vast misalingment, but also a lack of metrics to even build an understanding of current performance.
This is a picture from the blog entry on managing performance, how can it be applied to your current campaigns?
The article asks the following questions:
- What are the likely pain points for next year?
- Where are the pain points you still need to solve?
- What experiments must we force to happen?
- What skills do we need to enhance?
John Sviokla of the Harvard Business Review posts four keys to consumer interaction. He uses the online coupon group buying power company Groupon as his case study to illustrate the essentials for any company that sells over the web. These include:
- Make the interaction super simple — one deal, one day, one city. What could be clearer?
- Create a sense of urgency in your customers. If there are not enough people by midnight, the offer disappears.
- Energize your customers to get other customers. Good word of mouth is useless unless it turns into sales.
- Make it fun! Groupon’s tone is upbeat, enjoyable, and does not have that yet-another-boring-coupon feel.
If your company has an online presence, how does that presence convey the above points? How does your site drive new business? And what barrier does your company image have to overcome to secure returning business?
A Harvard post by Auden Schendler addresses the misalingment and miseducation of the critical environmental situation we are facing today. Auden makes the argument that not all climate initatives are equal. Recyling bottles does not equate to electirc cars.
“Companies are not doing the most important environmental work if they aren’t driving climate policy at the highest levels. If a business is serious about its green efforts but hasn’t yet sent its CEO to Washington to lobby for climate action, it’s missing the point.”
Columbia Business School professor Marieke Van der Lans gave an update on the Public Offering page yesterday.
Her recent client Qaulitas of Life offers community-based financial education workshops for low income earners. It was her job to pull together a plan to engage and retain volunteers who facilitate the workshops.
With a framework and guidelines complete, it all came together. In the end, it led to six types of recommendations: raising awareness; identifying and recruiting volunteers; welcoming new volunteers; organizing and allocating tasks to volunteers; measuring and rewarding volunteers, and communicating effectively with volunteers.
The Harvard Business Review’s Peter Merholz recently picked up on a blog post about how mass media today doesn’t know who its customers are.
A key point brought up is that in mass media, readers, watchers, and audience are the product which are served up to the actual customers, the advertisers.
So how will mass media actually engage their audiences, instead of trying to shove “advertiser-friendly” crap down their throats? Their first step should be to listen to their customers.
The primary mistake being made in mass media according to Peter is in classified listings targeting advertisers instead of the social media content. Market gains will be made by engaging the increasingly powerful audience, refuting existing assumptions, and working with customs as they engage with the content. Market domination will come from a multichannel approach to facilitate a pathway to customer interests through a holistic approach without being everything to everyone.
Examples include that of Craigslist. It is simple and ugly, but no one can displace it in the market. This is due to one simple reason, it is designed for the consumer, and trusted by the customer. It was designed with the audience in mind.
The paradigm shift in mass media will be the movement away from the advertiser to serve the audience its true customer.
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