Magnosticism

The newly appointed CMO for a Fortune 500 company is seen dining in the company cafeteria with two colleagues. Who has joined the marketing chief for this high-powered strategy session? The two receptionists from the main lobby.

This is what internal marketing is all about - getting buy-in on your brand message from the front-line personnel who often are the first point of contact with customers, partners, suppliers and prospects. This company seems to get that. The receptionists are “greeters” - they don’t sit behind an imposing desk with a sign that coldly states ALL VISITORS MUST SIGN IN. They will open and hold the door if they see you coming up the steps to the main entrance; they’ll ask you how you’re doing, where you’re coming from, and how long you’ll be staying; they’ll offer to take your coat, or have a cab waiting for you once your meeting ends; they’ll even recommend places to eat in town.

The loyalty this CMO engendered by taking the time to sit and have lunch with these two receptionists will pay off in spades as the greeters deliver the brand promise to each and every visitor to this company’s headquarters.

I was travel-challenged this week. First, I left my phone adapter at home for my trip to Milwaukee, so my mobile died on day 2. Then, I left my laptop power cord at the client site, which combined with the 30-minute capacity of my Vaio battery left me very unproductive on the flight home. Losing your cell phone and your laptop capabilities in the same day is very humbling; I was instantly antsy at my inability to connect, to log in, to download. I was reduced to a passive state, reading a newspaper and wondering what was happening that I wasn’t aware of. Troubling.

A couple of articles I wrote for MarketingNPV Journal are now available on their website. The first, “How Do You Measure Engagement?”, examines the emergence of customer engagement as a hot new marketing metric. The problem is that marketers define engagement in many different ways, which makes it difficult to come to any common understanding of its importance. The article looks at the more accepted view of engagement - the emotional connection a consumer makes with a brand - but argues that a better way to frame engagement is around behaviors, not emotions:

It’s important to note that behavioral engagement is not limited to a purchase of a product or service; it encompasses all the interactions that a prospect or customer has in relation to a brand. There are any number of pre- or post-sale activities that can be (directly or indirectly) predictive of a future purchase or re-purchase; they include visiting a Web site, downloading a whitepaper, calling customer service, recommending a product, or even commenting on a blog.

Such behavioral measures of engagement hold the potential to displace awareness and brand preference as interim measures of marketing effectiveness.

The second (related) article is “Calculating the Value of Referrals: Easier Said than Done.” This piece looks at the emerging methods for determining the economic value of customer referrals and other word-of-mouth marketing activities:

Current methodologies and research give us small glimpses of a great universe, but in many ways our current approach to charting WOM is like being an astronomer back in the pre-Galilean era. We can see the moon and the stars, but we have no real frame of reference around how big the universe actually is or the activity that’s taking place outside of our view.

Consider, for instance, that even the most advanced third-party tools primarily track online WOM — a severe limitation when you look at studies like the 2006 Keller Fay Group survey, which concludes that only 8% of brand-related conversations take place online. “Online tracking mechanisms make it easier to track who’s recommending what,” says V. Kumar, the ING Chair Professor in Marketing at the University of Connecticut’s School of Business and executive director of the school’s ING Center for Financial Services. “But still the hole is there, because the offline activities are not captured.”

The good news is that the tools and research methods are improving — much as the modern telescope has evolved from the early models built by Galileo — helping us to gain more informed insight around the real drivers of WOM. 

I came across two important papers while researching the WOM article, which are cited in the feature: “How Valuable is Word of Mouth” from the Harvard Business Review, and “Measuring the Ripple,” a joint effort by Northeastern University and BzzAgent. Good reading if you’re into that marketing geek analysis stuff.  

An About Us page is a checklist item for any business’s website (and many personal blogs, in its more informal About Me variation). Here’s what NOT to do on your “About Us” page:

• Don’t put your “About Us” page in the “Past News” section - this implies that, well, you are old news.  
• Don’t put embeddable ads in the text. That tells me a lot “about” you - all of it negative.
• Don’t say you have an experienced staff, but then provide no information about or access to those people.
• Don’t post text with numerous typos (and compound the oversight by calling yourself an “award-winning” media publication).

If you don’t think any established website could possibly allow any of these egregious errors to go unchecked, think again: I found one that features ALL of them. And I’m sad to say I used to work for them. What a disturbing decline for a once-great publication.

The art of the press release:

London, UK 16th April 2008 - A survey by Infosecurity Europe (www.infosec.co.uk) of 576 office workers have found that women far more likely to give away their passwords to total strangers than their male counterparts, with 45% of women versus 10% of men prepared to give away their password, to strangers masquerading as market researches with the lure of a chocolate bar as an incentive for filling in the survey. The survey was actually part of a social engineering exercise to raise awareness about information security. The survey was conducted outside Liverpool Street Station in the City of London. 

 

This year’s survey results were significantly better than previous years. In 2007 64% of people were prepared to give away their passwords for a chocolate bar, this year it had dropped to just 21% so at last the message is getting through to be more infosecurity savvy. The researchers also asked the office workers for their dates of birth to validate that they had carried out the survey here the workers were very naïve with 61% revealing their date of birth. Another slightly worrying fact discovered by researchers is that over half of people questioned use the same password for everything (e.g. work, banking, web, etc.)

Chocolate wouldn’t work on me. Ply me with a few complimentary rounds of Jameson’s, however, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.

This is one of those recurring theme stories that pop up every time the economy takes a dip. “Don’t stop marketing!” the marketing pundits scream, as if saying it over and over again will actually make it so.

Sure, it’s common sense that you need to continue to entice customers to buy your product or service at a time when they are less likely to do so. But the reality is, when sales are tanking, something has to give, and usually it’s the marketing budget. Why? Because marketers have the most trouble justifying their investments. (So, to a lesser extent, does IT, which is why you see similar headlines proclaiming, “Don’t stop investing in IT during a downturn!” Same message, different audience.) They’re not equipped to say, “If we stop advertising, our sales will drop X%.” By speaking in generalities, marketing becomes vulnerable to any belt-tightening effots to offset falling revenues.

Some confuse marketing with innovation. Even Ad Age, which should know better, fell into this trap with a lamebrain story on innovations spawned during economic downturns:

Retail sales have gone from slow to declining, and the consumer-spending binge that propped up the U.S. economy for years may not return for a long time.

In short, it’s a great time to be in marketing.

Previous recessions have provided big opportunities — spawning the brand-management system, soap operas, modern cable networks, airline loyalty programs, the IBM personal computer, the iPod, Crest Whitestrips, Axe body spray and — for better or worse — fast-food value menus.

It’s safe to say that the success of most of those items had more to do with the quality and uniqueness of the products than the marketing campaigns around them. I guess the takeaway is that you still want to take risks during a downturn - but the bigger point is that you have to be operating from some baseline of reality. That’s where the real marketing innovation needs to occur; if you can’t start to draw a straight line from your marketing initiatives to some economic benefit for your company, you’ll never gain enough cache to protect your budgets when times get tough. Of course, you can always fall back on sending out more coupons.

Great article on AdAge  (registration might be required, I can never tell what’s behind their annoying subscription firewall) that shoots holes in the tired thinking that marketing on the Internet is all about banner ads. The lemmings couldn’t be more wrong, says author Michael Creamer:

What you’re about to read is not an argument for making over web marketing as a factory for destination websites or for making every brand a content player. … This, however, is a call to give some thought to a question that’s not asked enough about the Internet: Should it even be viewed as an ad medium? After all, in some quarters of the broader marketing world, the habit of looking at advertising as the most important tool in the marketers’ toolbox is undergoing intense interrogation. Consider the growth of the word-of-mouth marketing business, premised on the notion that people not corporations who help other people make consumer decisions. Or look at the growing importance put on public relations and customer-relationship management both in marketing circles and even in the c-suite.

The same conversation should be going on around the Internet. Trends like those listed suggest the possibility of a post-advertising age, a not-too-distant future where consumers will no longer be treated as subjects to be brainwashed with endless repetitions of whatever messaging some focus group liked.

Nice to see someone at an advertising trade pub call out banner ads for what they are: an outdated attempt to replicate the past sins of the print world instead of creating something unique for such a transformational medium.

“Feeding frenzy” takes on a whole new meaning with 7/24 news cycles. Witness the Eliot Spitzer scandal. This guy was buried in a New York minute. My favorite tabloid covers:

You can even write your own NY Post headline.

Google News search results for “Eliot Spitzer” for March 11: 16,199

Google-indexed blog posts referencing “Eliot Spitzer ” on March 11: 2,160

Best jokes, compiled here.

Even advertisers are getting into the act.

Nothing’s more tasty to media folk than a holier-than-thou public figure caught with his pants down. The Steamroller gets steamrolled.

A new study from a research firm called Grunwald Associates indicates a significant shift in the media habits of children:

Sixty-four percent of kids go online while watching television, and nearly half of U.S. teens (49 percent) report that they do so frequently — anywhere from three times a week to several times a day. … The study reveals that 73 percent of TV-online multitasking kids are engaged in “active multitasking,” defined by Grunwald Associates as content in one medium influencing concurrent behavior in another. This trend represents a 33 percent increase in active multitasking since 2002. While kids are using more media, their attention primarily and overwhelmingly is focused on their online activities.

I don’t need stats to tell me about the decline of traditional TV among tomorrow’s generation; I see it daily in my own house, as my 17-year-old watches downloaded episodes of Degrassi on her iPod, as my 12-year-old focuses far more time IM’ing or fast-forwarding through DVR’d Celtic games than watching live TV, and as my 9-year-old runs around the house making videos and begging me to let him post something on YouTube, or as he surfs for PS2 cheats online, half-listening as Jimmy Neutron drones in the background.   

Sure, there are a few seminal TV events that the family feels obligated to watch live, like the Super Bowl or, to a lesser extent, American Idol. But today’s kids are edging - no, rushing - away from the passive TV experience. I do not envy network execs.
 

My Vonage phone crapped out on me again a week or so ago. Had a nice chat with Ezekiel the customer service rep, who troubleshot the problem and determined it was a faulty power adapter (for the second time in six months). He said they would send a replacement “in a few days.” Two days later I received an email asking me to fill out a survey about the experience: “Your feedback … would be extremely helpful in improving the process and providing valuable feedback.”

Well, I wasn’t going to complete a survey until I received the replacement part and made sure it worked. It arrived earlier this week, and the phone is functional again. Cleaning out my inbox today, I came across the survey and decided to click on the link to fill it out - and give Vonage high marks. “We’re sorry,” the web page read, “our records indicate your survey has expired.”

Another lesson in superficial customer care.