Dec 15, 2009 | Management, Marketing
Too often marketing is seen as an expense, to be cut when things are tough. Often this is an outcome of a lack of accountability for results emerging from the investment made in marketing.
It is in the interests of marketers to pro-actively take responsibility for their expenditures, figuring out ways to turn the qualitative into traceable quantitative data.
Advertising on the Box will give you a TARP level, essentially reach and frequency against a target audience, printed media will do a similar job, but after 2 generations bred to filter out unwanted advertising, how effective is that?.
By contrast, the quantitative tools embedded in other sorts of expenditures can be accounted for by the behavior generated.
Coupons in the US started in this manner, but have evolved into simply a discount. Direct response advertising can be accountable, but not all of us are up late enough to see the steak knife ads.
The web is starting to offer tools to count the behavior generated by the ads, click through, and purchase, which have changed advertising media choices forever, it is just that most have not realized it yet.
Dec 10, 2009 | Management, Sales
You would not build a house without a plan, so why would you set out to manage your major customers without some sort of plan.
For most businesses, their key customer base is the core of their commercial sustainability, so it is worth investing a few resources to ensure you are able to deliver an optimum experience to them when dealing with you.
Engaging the customer in your planning sessions for their business is sometimes a counter-intuitive, but very worthwhile activity, after all, who knows them better, what they need, how they see the future, the internal hurdles they face, than one of their key employees?
Dec 7, 2009 | Management, Strategy
Currently I am involved in a portfolio management exercise that covers brands, products, and projects on the books for a modest sized but rapidly growing business. A pretty standard exercise that most thoughtful businesses go through on a regular basis as a part of their strategic processes.
However, it occurred to me that the information, and mindset we were using reflected either an internal view of the piece we were looking at, often driven by what had worked in the past, or by industry trend data, that again, reflected an extrapolation of what had happened in the past, the underlying assumption that the past would repeat itself.
We know that the old saying “those who do not understand the past are destined to repeat it” is true, but what of the flip side, deliberately ignoring the past, to envision the possibilities, and using that to inform your portfolio management decisions.
We tried it, and whilst the process is incomplete, it is certain that the outcome has been altered substantially to what it may have been. We have also concluded that looking from the outside in should be a discipline we impose on ourselves, as that is how the markets, competitors, and innovative insights that can be very “left field” will look at us.
Dec 6, 2009 | Management, Marketing
Social media is more than Facebook, Twitter and U-Tube, it is a suite of tools that enables rapid connections to be made, it creates and leverages knowledge, and enables very rapid development of an organisation of those who may be unconnected physically.
Imagine, the government decides to put a waste plant in the local park of your community. Predictably, there will be substantial local opposition in the local community who will want it elsewhere.
Under the “old” way of organizing a protest, someone would get on the phone, and try to stir up some passion and get people to a rally in Macquarie Street, (and a few will turn up so long as it does not rain), letters will be written to the local member, the Minister, the local council, and a few others, and the kids will run a partition around the neighborhood. Not very effective.
Under the “new” way, someone will register a domain “stopthewasteincroydon.org” and a site that will collect views, stories about how the kids use the park, signatures, disseminate information, clog up every conceivable receiver with emails, provide links to the U-tube footage of kids playing then being herded off the park by officious waste managers (actors, probably the kids dads) , and generally make a very big noise against the development. Very effective, the Anti position suddenly has real teeth, because it enabled the anti case to be developed then managed in a way that it has a geometric impact on the receivers, all because the new communication tools were used to assemble and leverage a set of views that would have otherwise been individual, and nowhere near as powerful.
Nov 26, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Small businesses often do not spend the time to develop strategy, agreeing priorities, developing a point of difference, and a plan to execute in the marketplace, and as a result find themselves running harder and harder just to keep up.
Developing a Value Proposition to a defined group of customers is as important to a small business as it is to a large one, perhaps more so as an SME does not normally have the resources to waste on efforts that do offer a return, and they generally have less “fat” in the system to absorb mistakes.
Time spent planning up front always pays dividends in time and resource expenditure down the track.
Nov 25, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Small business
How do you engage with hundreds of people as “friends”?
On a personal level, you may engage deeply with a few, maybe a few dozen, electronically, there may be a group with a specific interest, and you engage with them in a club-type situation, 100 perhaps,150?, but any more and it is not engagement, just some sort of casual interaction, in no way engagement.
The depth of personal relationships simply do not scale.
Our social networking tools have opened new avenues of connection, they are wide, but the width is not a substitute for the depth that can only evolve through a personal connection.
This is one situation where numbers simply do not count, where less is often more, so do not confuse the numbers of contacts with quality of interaction.
