Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
The Return on Investment (ROI) Craze Won’t Last
For over three years, I have sat back and witnessed the resurgence of a concept that seemed to be largely ignored or only found in dusty marketing books: Return on Investment.
I am referring to the buzz (or is hype a better word?) around social media ROI. What I find interesting is that marketing management is requiring social media ROI to qualify its worth before implementing it. Smart marketers know that it is impossible to determine ROI (a financial calculation) without having net profit, sales and investment numbers, which are not available without actually having done something. Could it be that demanding social media ROI is a stall tactic?
The next logical question then is if there is such a keen interest in social media ROI, why isn’t management requiring the same for all marketing, communications and branding? We should have those numbers readily available, right? (By the way, cost per lead is not the same as ROI.)
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Saturday Morning Reads: (Re)Organizing for the Customer
Without a doubt, this downturned economy has been a struggle for most organizations. Layoffs, reorganizations and new executives seem to be the crutch du jour (perhaps ‘du ans’ is more fitting) to fix downward spiraling revenues. Add to that a layer of new(ish) customer communications and feedback via social media channels and you have yet another complexity to deal with. In the past customer feedback was contained to customer service or a customer satisfaction survey designed to hedge qualitative and quantitative feedback to guarantee an internal pat on the back. With unfettered social feedback, the organization emperor’s kimono is being opened and the proverbial band-aid is being ripped off.
Structured in a top-down hierarchical manner, organizations have positioned their products and services to take center stage. This familiar “command and control” structure is typically the wellspring of alienation between customer and company and often the cause of reduced revenue generation. The challenge of reorganizing is avoid playing musical chairs so that the last person sitting is not the new person reinventing the standard and comfortable hierarchal structure.
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Tags: Customer Relationships, Customer-Centric, Jay Galbraith, Marketing, Organization Design, product marketing, Ranjay Gulati, Reorganization, Service Marketing, social business | 
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9 Truths About Marketers
Okay, maybe not the absolute truth across the board but it is a catchy title, no? Read on.
My last two jobs have been marketing to marketers. Marketing to the market you belong to couldn’t be easier, right? Wrong. What has me thinking about this? While the hip thing right now is using social media to target marketers, I’d posit that the pool is very small. Most marketers are behind the eight ball.
Marketers come in all shapes and sizes. While you might assume that most marketers a degree in marketing, that’s simply not the case. Many marketers have degrees in English, Journalism, Engineering (yes, true!), Business Administration, Fine Arts, Sociology, etc. and some do not have a degree at all, but have a ton of business experience. Having dissimilar educational foundations leads marketers to having completely different outlooks on what marketing is and how to execute it. Some end up being great marketers and others… not so much. The other consideration is the sliding scale of dedication to the profession. For many, it is just a job and for others, it makes up who they are as a person, it is their identity. One final consideration is what silos marketers place themselves. Marketing professionals tend to like specialties versus generalities. All of these things wrapped up make for a complicated market.
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Customer-Centric: An Operational Practice, Not a Marketing Buzzword
This past weekend I had the pleasure of being introduced to Ron Shevlin, his blog Marketing Tea Party, and his recent post “The Problem With Customer-Centricity.” (Hat tip: Valeria Maltoni.)
Given that I am a proponent for customer-centricity, I could not help but add my thoughts to Ron’s post since it is at the heart of what I practice and believe as a marketer. As well, I am seeing the trend for customer-centric becoming destined for buzzword bingo and I would hate for it to become meaningless well before its benefits are recognized and experienced.
Ron offers a well thought-out case for what customer-centric is and why it may not in the best interest of an organization (be sure to read all of the comments, too). After thoughtful analysis, Ron arrives at this bottom-line:
“… All this talk of customer-centricity is an utter and complete waste of time. The term means nothing. There’s no common definition, no definitive way to measure it, and therefore, no real proof that a company that claims to be customer-centric is any better (for any of the stakeholders) than any other firm.”
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Saturday Morning Reads: Personas… Do you really know your customers?
Personas are nothing new, but they seem to be popping up in conversation more often (I am curious why, how about you?). David Meerman Scott has been talking about personas for years (a whole lot of reading here!).
I would like to caution you that personas are not just good old-fashion market segmentation. Heck no!
If you purely slice and dice your market by demographics (B2C) or firmograhics (B2B) you will be missing out on a WHOLE lot of customer information that will affect your marketing efforts and not in a positive way.
Keep Reading…
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Tags: Customer-Centric, Market Segmentation, Marketing, Social Media |
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The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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