Archive for the ‘Marketing Management’ Category

For Hire! Searching for My Next Career Opportunity

You may have heard around the social media water cooler that I am looking for a job. It’s true!

The economy is in the tank and jobs are limited—especially marketing, PR and communications jobs. Thankfully, I have been able to tap into a network of friends and colleagues that have been supportive, generous, and helpful.

People have been asking me “What are you looking for?”

One can hardly provide a smart response in 140-characters, no matter how many years they have been on Twitter.

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There’s a Difference Between Listening to Customers & Giving Them a Voice

I just finished reading Ernan Roman’s latest book, Voice-of-the-Customer Marketing: A Revolutionary 5-Step Process to Create Customers Who Care, Spend, and Stay and I must say, this book is a gift to marketers, management and any business owners who truly cares about their customers.

I first learned about Ernan’s new book when Denise Lee Yohn interviewed him on her blog. (If you don’t read Denise’s blog, Brand as Business Bites, you should. It’s full of great branding insights!)

After reading the interview, I knew that I had to put this book on the top of my reading list because it not only embodies my beliefs on customer-centric business—it provides a process to bring the customer closer to the center of the organization.

While “voice of the customer ” research has been around for a while, Ernan shares his five-step process so that companies can put VOC research into practice. For those who might be speculative, the process is backed with solid case studies.

Listening Versus Understanding

The foundation to any well thought out social media strategy is listening. If you are familiar with social media, you know listening means using tools like Radian6, SM2 or Google Alerts to capture what people are saying about your brand on the Internet.

However, there is a lot of work that needs to take place between listening, understanding and implementing change. Listening online alone often leads to a misunderstanding of context and nuance.

Scott Rogers captures that best in his post, Listening Versus Understanding: There is a Difference.

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Marketing Dollars & Sense: Calculating Return on Investment

In my recent post, “The Return on Investment (ROI) Craze Won’t Last,” I stated that the demand for ROI would not last because most organizations, agencies and marketers will struggle to gather all three necessary points of data:  Net Profit, Sales and Investment. Without this information, marketers cannot provide ROI—it is that simple.

To be clear, I did not say that I was not a proponent of delivering ROI for social media or any marketing expenditures.  Providing ROI is very important, especially if marketers want to prove their worth to an organization.

If you agree, this post is for you.

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Saturday Morning Reads: What Is Your Lifetime Customer Value?

Yes, it is a double entendre if you didn’t catch it.

When was the last time you asked, “what is the lifetime value of our customers?” (also known as customer lifetime value ), or –more importantly— “what is the lifetime value we offer our customers?”

Is it smart to have one without the other? I don’t think so.

Is calculating CLV a normal event for your organization? I don’t know about you, but calculating ROI seems like child’s play compared to calculating CLV.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

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Rethinking the Marketing Mix from the Customer’s Perspective

Dumping the marketing mix is tough. It’s like replacing well-worn shoes or pair of jeans. When something is comfortable, it makes it even more difficult to toss it aside for something new that could take years to break in to the point of comfort.

However, we are at a point where we need discomfort because comfortable is not working.

We are all familiar with the marketing mix: Product, Place (i.e. Distribution), Price and Promotion. It is drilled into our heads in college and it is reinforced with corporate structure. The problem with the marketing mix is that it does not consider the customer, it only considers the product. Perhaps with the advancement of technology, we should have better predicted that a 58-year old concept might require rethinking.

Thought leaders like Bob Lauterborn, Philip Kotler and Koichi Shimizu have argued for years (since the mid-90s) for a customer-centric model known as the Four C’s: Customer, Convenience, Cost and Communications.

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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.]

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