Archive for the ‘Customer-Centric’ Category
Saturday Morning Reads: Celebrating Mom-Centric Marketing
It’s Mother’s Day weekend! Let’s celebrate moms and how they have turned marketers upside down.
As a marketer, I have been impressed with how moms have worked with companies to make their voice heard and to get companies to understand that if their needs (and the needs of their children and families!) are met with applicable solutions, they will become brand loyal. As people become as comfortable with social media tools and sharing their voices as moms, I am confident that they will follow this path and forge partnerships with the companies that serve them.
I have tapped into four wonderful moms (of all boys!), Christa Miller, Shelli Johnson, Jeannie Cusick Walters, and Becky Carroll who just also happen to be some of the smartest communicators I know. Here’s the advice they’d like to share with fellow marketers and communicators:
Christa Miller, owner of Christa M. Miller Communications and mom to two boys:
“Don’t assume that all mothers’ experiences are alike. Some are very similar, of course, but motherhood is so intensely personal that even our reasons for (example) going back to work, self-employing, or leaving the workforce altogether to stay home are not as cut and dried as the actions you see. (Mothers forget this, too.) Parenting cuts to all our deepest wishes, hopes and insecurities, our most personal life experiences and the way we see this awesome responsibility. Respect that, whether in humor or seriousness, and you’ll win my trust.”
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Your “Industry Experience Only” Requirement Is Hurting Customers, Employees and Shareholders
“Industry only experience” is not a new requirement, of course, and exceptions have always been made for talented candidates. However, in a down economy, it seems industry experience becomes a highly enforced criterion used to close the door on marketing talent.
I am not in Human Resources (HR), so I cannot tell you why it happens (I have my suspicions though). However, I have been a hiring manager and will say industry experience is something I avoid like the plague when reviewing resumes. Why? Because industry experience has absolutely NOTHING to do with the level of experience, talent, drive, problem-solving skills, enthusiasm and passion a candidate has to offer, which should always be the benchmark when hiring. A smart employee can learn any industry. It isn’t rocket science—unless you are handling marketing and PR for NASA.
[Sidebar: Please do not use the ‘regulations excuse.’ Again, a smart employee can learn regulations. An exceptional employee, however, learns them and then figures out how to stay within mandatory regulations without allowing them to chokehold company goals and objectives (Read: Growth).]
According to Executive Staffing Solutions’ latest newsletter, there is good news and bad news when it comes to filling open positions. The good news is that there are many good positions opening up for candidates. The bad news is companies are not recognizing top talent when it comes through the door.
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Tags: communications, customer experience, Customer-Centric, Customer-Focused, Marketing, Marketing Management, PR | 
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Saturday Morning Reads: What’s the Return on Investment (ROI) of Content Marketing?
As content marketing becomes a continually popular strategy to connect, engage, and hopefully provide value, there is no doubt that the question of return on investment will rear its head.
As you can imagine, content marketing takes time, planning, and effort. It is hard work. How then will content marketing find its rightful and respected place in our short-term, short-patience, short-strategy marketing world?
There is evidence revealing that shortsighted interests— just like with social media—are driving marketers to dive into content marketing with a tool first mindset. Cool tools are fun, sexy, and popular. Who wouldn’t want to be seen as all of that? There is just one little thing to consider, tools are worthless without objectives and strategies dictating which tools are required to meet a set goal.
The tools first philosophy is akin to buying a money pit with the intention to flip in it a down real estate market and then asking what went wrong when it does not sell.
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: communications, Content Marketing, Content Marketing ROI, Content Marketing Strategy, Customer Experience Planning, Customer-Centric, Marketing |
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What Integrated Marketing Is Not (Hint: It’s Not Integrated Tactics)
I just received an interesting comment on my “For Hire” post that asked:
“Are there really any leading authorities – aside from published authors – on integrated marketing and communications? There are a lot of self-promoters who claim expertise in what is usually “the obvious”.
This comment, while obviously an attempt to discredit my experience, made me realized that there are probably many marketing professionals out there that have the same misunderstanding and misperception when it comes to understanding the theory and benefits of true integration.
I want to help fix that.
From the dawn of its time, which would be about 1993, when the “Fathers of Integration” Schultz, Tannenbaum and Lauterborn wrote The New Marketing Paradigm: Integrated Marketing Communications, integration has always been based in customer-centric (putting the customer at the center of the organization) and data-driven marketing. Unfortunately, marketers conveniently ignored the customer-centric, data-driven part of integration. We’ll get to that in a bit…
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: customer experience, Customer-Centric, don schultz, IMC, integrated marketing, integrated marketing communications, Jay Galbraith, Ranjay Gulati |
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Outside-In Thinking
A simple shift in thinking can have amazing beneficial results for customer and company.
The first time I heard of this story was from PR and communications expert and good friend, Leigh Fazzina. The lesson she shared is a poke between the eyes:
“Sometimes we need to change our strategy. If we always do what we’ve always done, then we will always get what we’ve always gotten.”
What’s holding you back from change?
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The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
