Alan See

There is a story that is told of Henry Ford about a breakdown in his assembly line that no one on his staff could fix.  As the story goes, his production lines were down for hours; hours turned into days, and Henry was frustrated.  In desperation he called an electrical engineer friend whom he trusted to come to his plant, diagnose, and repair the problem.  His friend promptly arrived and after spending about ten minutes the Ford lines were up and running.  A most grateful Henry Ford thanked him and told his friend to invoice the Ford Company for the repairs.  A few days later Henry Ford received an invoice from his friend in the amount of $10,000.  Flabbergasted, Henry called his friend on the telephone and protested, “You only tinkered around for ten minutes!  Ten-thousand dollars?!”  His friend agreed that he would re-invoice the repairs.  A few days later Henry Ford received a modified invoice:

Tinkering - $10

Knowing where to Tinker - $9,990

Knowing where to Twitter …

There is a structured path to becoming an electrical engineer.  And based on the outcome of the story, Henry’s friend was either very lucky - or clearly knew what he was doing.  The road to becoming a social media marketing expert isn’t as clear.  In fact, in today’s environment it’s often the subject line of marketing agency jokes.  Still, if you believe there is a breakdown in your strategic marketing plan related to social media here are a few questions to consider before calling in an expert:

1.     Are my customers, prospects or other constituents on social media?  That may sound like a ridiculous question to ask first; but why did you get into social media?  Are you sure you need social media platforms?

2.     Can you describe the elements of your program that don’t seem to be working?  Again, that may come across as a silly question; but are your challenges related to strategy, technology or processes?  At the risk of some shameless self-promotion you might consider taking the Berry Network Social-Ready Assessment in order to establish a baseline measurement on those key competencies areas.

3.    What does the expert’s reputation appear to be in the social media space?  Do I trust them?  Are they practicing what they preach, and if so, are they any good?  Engaging your brand in social media is easier said than done.  So you may need to make room in your budget for paid council.

Remember playing “Rock, Paper, Scissors?” The basics of the game consist of each player shaking a fist a number of times (priming) and then extending the same hand in a fist (rock), out flat (paper), or with the index and middle fingers extended (scissors).  Each of these is referred to as a throw, and which one wins is dependent upon the opponent’s throw.

·         Paper wins against Rock (paper covers rock)

·         Rock wins against Scissors (rock smashing scissors)

·         Scissors wins against Paper (scissors cut paper)

Under close examination many organizations may find they are using a rock, paper, scissors customer experience strategy. You know - prime the market with new product features, throw out interruption based communications hoping to rock your prospects with repeat broadcast ads, cover your defects with stopgap fixes, and then cut your development time so you can do it again - only faster.

Your new product features might be on target, and your ad spend capable of rocking the market; however, your customers may still cut-out your business faster than you can scream “don’t run with scissors” if poor quality impacts their experience.  Research shows that your reputation for quality affects sales in three ways.  It will:

1.      Reinforce the confidence of previous customers.

2.      Win new customers.

3.      Induce customers of competing brands to switch.

The cost of quality may seem high, but the cost of poor quality is still higher.  If you take steps to protect your reputation for quality you will be sure to win no matter what your competition is throwing.

“I’ve been in this business for 30 years and I’ve never seen it like this.”

I can recall hearing that statement three times over the course of my career.  The first time I heard it I was in my 20’s.  My boss at the time had been a part of the Texas oil field service industry for over 30 years and the mid 80’s oil crash was taking its toll.  What once had boomed was now busting, stripper wells that had been profitable were being plugged and new drilling activity came to a virtual stand still.

I also remember the second occasion as if it were yesterday.  It was the early 90’s and I was at lunch with a co-worker who had just received their 30 year service pin from a major computer company.  The World Wide Web was just beginning to make the world a much smaller place, and Louis Gerstner stepped in to save IBM from going out of business.

A couple of days ago I heard the statement again.  Let’s just say that social media, digital marketing and mobile applications are proving to be major change agents for marketers in general.  Tracking that statement for three decades it’s obvious that change is timeless and cuts across all sectors of the economy.  How are you dealing with constant change?  From my perspective I can vouch for the following:

1.  Don’t try to ignore the situation creating the change because that will only keep you off balance.

2.  Getting angry doesn’t help and often makes it worse.

3.  The “good old days” never really happened, and wishful thinking is a waste of time.

More importantly; top management can’t hand out “grand plan” detailed answers to address the entire transition because all the information they need simply doesn’t exist.  Their new strategy in its full detail will need to evolve during the change process.  In short, top management doesn’t have all the answers because some of the questions keep shifting.  But that doesn’t mean they don’t need your support.  In fact, broad-based grassroots support of change can make the difference for every organization.

Most people will agree that practical experience is a good thing.  In fact, if you’ve been around the block a time or two, the old adage “experience is the best teacher” is probably anchored in your mindset.   When I reflect on my lessons learned through practical experience I always find Will Rogers’ perspective insightful, but also at times, troublesome:

“The trouble with using experience as your guide is that sometimes the final exam comes first, then the lesson.”

Why troublesome?  After all, at one point or another we all start out as greenhorns.  And let’s face it; there are situations we occasionally experience that are really not possible to prepare for.  What I find troublesome is the negative impact on organizations when key executives continue to scoff at the lessons offered, or worse, they refuse to acknowledge they were even handed an exam.

Are senior executives in your organization still scoffing at social media?  In today’s environment your customer’s are testing your organizations ability to interact with them on social platforms in the same way you communicate with them through email and over the phone.  In fact, you’ve probably seen the following factoids in a dozen presentations over the last six months:

·         75% of all active U.S. Internet households visited a social networking site.

·         22% of the time spent online is attributed to social networking sites.

·         20% of U.S. adults online publish or own a blog.

·         55% have at least one or more social networking profiles.

·         70% of consumers want to interact with businesses using social media while less than one-third of companies have the strategies, policies, and processes in place to meet this demand.

And yet some of your peers are still hesitant, or openly against implementing social media strategies into your organization.  I suspect some are hesitant because they are not personally using social media, and if the truth were known, they’re still not concerned with learning.  Even so, it’s time to let go of the notion that social media is just for kids and has no business value.  In short, you don’t want the adage “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” to begin to be associated with your brand (personal or corporate).  Here are some brief observations to share with your leadership peers that might motivate them to sign up for a lesson or two.

1.       Your words and actions are magnified by your position.  Most of your actions will seem more important to your employees than you intend; merely teasing about the use or value of social media on your part may become dangerously distorted by your workers.  It’s a critical time for you to provide executive level support for this new and emerging engagement channel.  Keep this in mind; it’s not about you, it’s about your customers.  If your customers want to communicate through LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook who are you to stop them?

2.       No need to boil the ocean.  There are scores of social media related platforms and applications, so don’t be afraid to narrow your focus during your initial learning process.  It’s too early to declare with authority the platforms that will remain standing, those that will be absorbed, or the ones that will fade away.  For senior executives I would recommend focusing on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, in that order.  Sidebar applications that help with efficiency and effectiveness (for example, TweetDeck for Twitter or various mobile applications for Facebook, etc) can wait.

3.       You can’t learn to swim without getting wet, so jump in.  If nothing else, just commit to spending 15 – 20 minutes per day learning the ins and outs of a single platform.  Once you develop a comfort level move to the next platform or application.  If you have a trusted friend or colleague who is already social media savvy consider asking them to breakfast or out for a beer.  Use the opportunity to pick their mind on the platforms they like to use, and how they strategically leverage those applications.  If all else fails, hire someone to help you with your social media education.  Based on my faculty, and consulting background I kind of like this idea!  However, you may want to start out by making an author happy and simply purchasing one of the many social media related publications on the market today.

4.       The clock is ticking.  We’re quickly moving from a time of mass communications to one of masses of communicators; your customers are sharing their experiences through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other platforms at a rate that will continue to accelerate.  As a result, social media should become a part of every organizations risk management and customer engagement strategy.  That means the entire leadership team (CEO, CIO, CFO, CMO, Sales, Legal and HR) will feel the impact.  You know from experience that it always takes more time than expected to secure cross functional support.  So, it’s time to start building bridges.

I’m fortunate to be able to reflect on the role of marketing as both a CMO and educator. In my role as educator my student’s first assignment is always a short interpretive paper in which I ask for their personal definition of marketing; as well as their perspective on marketing’s importance in helping organizations achieve success. Over the years, I’ve discovered that these papers provide a glimpse into the mindset of individuals who are generally not focused on core marketing activities or marketing’s role in relation to broader business strategies.
Demographically, the class typically represents a diverse cross-section. One thing they do have in common; they are full-time working adults who are not shy when sharing their real-world working experiences with the class. More often than not, their original narratives will jump into examples of product-focused mass advertising or publicity activities. The use of sexy and manipulative promotional tactics for selling the audience on why they should want the product is representative of marketing’s tactical purpose in their initial points of view. In fact, for classes that start in January you can bet on at least one reference to a Super Bowl commercial. However; I can tell straight away who is reading ahead in the syllabus, or working for a company that views marketing strategically because those efforts reflect the leadership role that marketing plays as a core business strategy.

An Effective Marketing Strategy

An effective marketing strategy involves a process of narrowing down to a specific target market and marketing mix that represents an opportunity the company wants to compete for based on their business’s mission and vision. Because most company’s resources are limited, and there are usually multiple strategies possible, the ability to consistently zero in on the best market with the best marketing mix will delight both management and the market. Does the previous statement sound familiar? If not, maybe you’ll recognize it in the form of the “right…” phrase that is often found in whitepapers. It’s worded as follows; companies that first focus on the customer’s needs, and then satisfy those needs by delivering “the right product through the right channel at the right price at the right time” will build customer loyalty and maximize shareholder value.
Imagine that an organization fully understands the needs and desires of its target market, and that the marketing mix is combined in a way that fully supports the overall business strategy. In other words, manufacturing, product management, product marketing, advertising & public relations, sales, service, finance and logistics have all pull together to provide perfect alignment. Was that hard to imagine? The perspective painted by my student’s suggests that most organizations are still highly matrixed environments, and that suggests overall business strategies are loosely knit at best. Don’t get me wrong, matrixes are not going to go away. Particularly in large organizations where you need specialists because the scope of the whole marketing job is just too big for one person. Yet, the fact remains that alignment breakdowns between these functional areas continues to put business strategies at risk.

A Written Marketing Plan

How can marketing take a leadership position to help reduce risk and ensure strategic alignment? How about another dashboard or scorecard? After all, a relationship with customers is what capitalism is built on, and the great thing about capitalism is that it keeps score. In fact, at this point technology vendors might be tempted to insert the need for a heavy dose of their specific applications to better manage reporting or improve the ability to target customers and predict their behavior. I can’t argue that specific technology might not help any given situation; however, technology alone won’t turn the product-focused dotted-line matrix challenge into a solid-line customer-focused marketing plan.
A simple but often overlooked discipline to ensure that marketing is facilitating strategic alignment and that the marketing mix is focused on the desired customer experience is to use a written marketing plan for each marketing strategy developed. There is value to organizing, documenting and writing down a marketing plan. The very process of bringing functional areas together to ask and answer the questions posed in a comprehensive marketing plan will create a road map to guide your total marketing efforts, and help bring strategic alignment.
My student’s final assignment is a team-based project that involves the design, documentation and presentation of a complete marketing plan based on the launch of a new product. The presentations always generate lively class discussion as each team talks about their target market and the marketing mix that will be crafted to satisfy the researched needs. Although it takes me several days to grade, it’s encouraging to read their new and expanded perspectives, and I can assure you that the strategic transformation of the marketing function as brought to life in their documented plan would warm any CMO’s heart.

I recently attended a faculty meeting to kick-off the New Year. One of the presentations disclosed enrollment trends that did not surprise, but none the less disappointed some of my fellow faculty. An increasing number of students are enrolling in online as opposed to on-campus courses. In short, the online modality more closely matches many students desired method for consuming education. Although most of the faculty can teach both online and on-campus, their traditional teaching backgrounds creates a comfort level and natural desire to interact with their students in a class room environment. The shift from a class room setting to online just doesn’t feel right to some, and that can make it difficult to embrace change even when the data states the obvious.

Shifting business environments make change necessary, but it doesn’t mean it will be easy. In my role as VP of Marketing there are always struggles to keep new initiatives on track even when the data indicates that the change is not optional. Strong feelings to revert back to the old status quo are often lurking just below the surface. For example, a shift in our media planning recommendations away from traditional media products and into earned media programs at times creates fear, uncertainty and doubt within parts of our organization. You can just imagine the questions swirling:

·         What will our traditional customers think if we’re recommending media they’ve never tried before?

·         How will our competition, not to mention our media partners, react to our strategy changes?

·         How do we know for sure that these new media channels will deliver results?

Change has no conscience. It doesn’t play favorites, or take prisoners. In fact change ruthlessly destroys organizations that don’t adapt. So, from a leadership perspective here are three traits I intend to embrace this year:

1.       Take the initiative by putting my team in charge of problem-solving. If I make them (or let them) wait for hand-feed directions I’ll slow down the process.

2.       Take more risks and be willing to break with the past. I’ll ask my team to mitigate risk when possible; but make no mistake … both my team and I will need more nerve in 2010 in order to keep our new initiatives on track.

3.       Maintain faith in the new initiatives. As soon as change starts throwing off sparks, people become preoccupied with all the headaches, aggravations, and fears. I know there will be dark days; however, I’ll challenge my team to join me helping our entire organization look beyond the bleakness of the moment, and envision the possibilities of tomorrow.

I’m really looking forward to 2010’s opportunities and challenges. How about you?

“Only the Employed Need Apply.” According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal many employers are bypassing the jobless to target those still working, reasoning that those still working are really the top performers. Other strategy guru’s are pointing out that because of record layoffs; the job market is actually flooded with qualified applicants and this presents an opportunity to hire talented employees – at a discount - who would not have normally been available.

An economic downturn can present an opportunity to reposition your team for the future. However; both hiring strategies have drawbacks. Those still working at other firms are not guaranteed to be top performers under your corporate culture. And if you pay a salary below market value, your employees may be less satisfied, and you risk a higher turnover. In the long run, this can cost your company a good deal in lost productivity and time hiring and training.

Do you consider your employees one of your most valuable investments? If so, the current economic environment could provide the cover to build a competitive “employee-based” advantage. What are you doing to plan your hiring so that you receive an optimal return on your investment in terms of productivity, customer satisfaction and the satisfaction of your employees?

Grocery store’s who tried to attract customer’s by influencing the customer shopping experience via coffee bars, fancy bakeries and the availability of exotic products are going back to the basics. Major players such as Kroger, Stop & Shop, Publix and other big food chains are now refocusing efforts on the middle aisles where as much as 70% of their weekly profits are generated. In fact, many retailers are also expected to slice the assortment of products in their stores by at least 15%. According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal (“Retailers Cut Back on Variety, Once the Spice of Marketing”) retailers are trying to cater to budget-conscious shoppers who want to simplify shopping trips and stick to familiar products.

Incremental variations on popular products can be confusing since some 47,113 new products, variations or sizes were launched last year, more than twice as many as in 1998. For example, a typical Target store has 88 kinds of Pantene shampoo, conditioner and styling products. How many hair products do you need? I don’t need any; but then again, I’m nearly bald. If your favorite grocery retailer stops carrying a specific product in the size, flavor or fragrance you prefer are you likely to defect to another store? I’m not; however, if they change my experience by closing more check-out lanes that could make a difference because I hate to wait.

The current economy is forcing changes that may impact the customer experience. What is a show-stopper for you?

At the core of all customer-focused organizations are two essential characteristics: trust and commitment. Through trust and commitment customer-focused organizations demonstrate that they are dependable, reliable and that they honor their word. With that said, my hat is off to Bill’s Jewelry Shop in downtown Grinnell, Iowa. In a recent article in The Grinnell Magazine I read that Elizabeth McJimsey Souder graduated from Grinnell College in 1988 without picking up her restrung pearl necklace from the Grinnell merchant. Shop owners Bill and Jeanne Hammen tried several times over the years to get in touch with Souder, but could not make contact. Over the next two decades Souder moved many times, while her forgotten pearls waited in Grinnell, stored away with some other pieces of unclaimed jewelry.

Souder stated … “I recall wondering about the pearls several times and shuddering at the thought that I had lost them, because they had belonged to my grandmother, I became convinced that I’d carelessly lost them somewhere along the way.”

Last year the Hammen’s were finally able to reconnect the pearls with their owner.

Souder added … “I’m not at all surprised that a Grinnell merchant would go to these lengths to find someone and reconnect them with their belonging – it’s just what people do in that community.”

Today there seems to be a growing chasm between consumers’ trusts and the business organizations they depend upon. Polls shows that only 4 percent of U.S. adults say they trust their HMO; 7 percent their health insurer; 11 percent, their life insurer; 12 percent their telco. Seventy-four percent say corporate America’s reputation is “not good” or “terrible.”

What is your organization doing to help restore and build consumer trust?

A Fortune 500 corporate newsletter I was recently reading mentioned that their Code of Business Conduct was 70-pages long. The code outlined their requirements and guidelines for customer relationships as well as how the employees should interact with each other. Business ethics and customer experience strategies are not optional and should not be treated lightly; but are 70-pages really necessary to frame a Code of Conduct? After all, the Golden Rule is only 11-words long:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Hmmm … also consider the following:

The Lord’s Prayer = 66 words

Gettysburg Address = 286 words

Declaration of Independence = 1,322 words

The more I think about it, 1-page should be long enough.