Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’
Saturday Morning Reads: Changing the Tune… Fan-Centricity in the Music Industry
I am not sure what triggered me to think about the music industry today. When it comes to music technology, I am a late adopter. I got my first iPod in 2009 and it was only because it came with my iPhone. Next was the discovery of music identification apps like Shazam and SoundHound and Internet radio services like Pandora.
Today, how I find, purchase and create my own music experiences has completed changed. That said, I would be remiss if I did not mention that 90% of my day is still listening to a favorite local radio station—WXPN. Now, however, I don’t just listen, I actively identify new songs with an app and purchase them right from iTunes within 30 seconds.
Perhaps these experiences provoked a curiosity to find out how music aficionados continually drove major shifts in the music industry—the shifts that fans now enjoy every day—and how executives have had to cope with becoming fan-centric.
In Forrester’s 2009 report, Music Product Manifesto: The Product Features That Will Save Recorded Music, they propose six basic consumer music rights:
- The right to great customer experiences first (and business models second).
- The right to unique music experiences.
- The right to share in the creation process.
- The right to share [music].
- The right to fair use of technology.
- The right to be social.
The music industry is over 100-years old. One would think that it would be difficult to change its business culture and practices. Yet, tectonic shifts have occurred in a relatively short time.
Those shifts have allowed fans to get closer to artists, artists to become successful without music labels, and fans to create their own experiences. It makes this marketer wonder if other industries could live up to this type of pressure and—more importantly—what will it take to understand that they are no longer in control.
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Tags: Fan-Centric, Marketing, Music Industry, Music Technology | 
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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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Tags: CLV, Customer Lifetime Value, Marketing, Marketing Management |
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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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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.]
