A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (Recovery Losses Momentum) stated that consumers have seen little growth in their wallets and remain skittish about the economy’s prospects.  Of course, if you own a business that depends on people having jobs and disposable income you didn’t need research from the U.S. Commerce Department to tell you that consumer spending is sluggish.  Economists are currently cutting forecasts for the second half, and your calls and foot traffic are already down.  So, what’s your plan?  Take more costs out of the business?  My guess is that you’ve already cut expenses to the bone.  But hold the presses! Do you really need a marketing recovery plan?  After all, Business Week reported (The New Abnormal) that while Americans are broke and depressed they are still swilling $3 lattes and waiting in line for iPhones.  Are you from Apple or Starbucks?  I’m not either; so here are some quick tips to consider in our “unusually uncertain” economy.

1. Focus on the consumer.
a. Translation: Make sure you address competitive weaknesses within the four stages of the consumer purchasing process lifecycle, including: Awareness, Information Search, Evaluation, and Purchase / After-Sale Service.  In addition, you may need to think smaller by breaking large marketing initiatives into several highly targeted micro campaigns based on continuous selection of the best (most profitable) of the best (ready-to-buy).

2. You will not get a do-over, mulligan or practice shot.
a. Translation: Do your P&L homework upfront and structure your best offer immediately. Don’t hold back; consumers with cash and a willingness to spend it are in short supply right now.

3. Don’t wait until there is a problem to contact or follow up with customers.
a. Translation: Monitor trigger events (contract dates, service calls, etc) closely and nurture two-way relationship building conversations. For example, my cell phone contract expired back in February and I still have not been contacted.  When you do follow up make sure you have something valuable or significant to relate.  By the way, a call merely to say you “just wanted to touch base” is not value-add.

4. Keep asking, listening, analyzing and improving.
a. Translation: Keep asking for and listening to your customer’s feedback.  And make sure you are leveraging and engaging your entire organization as it relates to that feedback.  Social media platforms are an excellent channel to help you both listen and engage in conversation.

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.

·         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.

“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.

Creating a new Twitter List is a simple process.  In fact, the first thing you’ll be asked is to provide a name for your list.  That’s where this feature can take an interesting turn.  If you’ve been Listed you’ve caught someone’s attention.  Something in your bio and / or tweets has made an impression.  In the future, your Listor will be able to find you quickly because they filed your profile under a group they intend to monitor.  In other words, your reputation or influence has been noted.  A few examples:

·         @GfKMRINews/marketers Masters of marketing

·         marketingveep/c-level-tweeps All flavors of C-level executives who’ve figured out the magic of Twitter

·         @PaulaGray/brand-product-mktg-mgt Ears to the ground in product, brand and marketing management

·         @MikeMoore_/education Speakers, Authors, Teachers, Trainers and Spiritual Leaders

·         @RicGator/unclassified Don’t know where to list at this time

OK … being classified as “unclassified” is a bit confusing, but overall the Listed feature is a quick way to monitor your branding strategy.  Have you checked lately to see how many times you’ve been Listed?  How did they categorize you?  Does the name fit with your strategy?

Some marketer’s are still eager to list the reasons why they don’t believe in social media platforms:

• It’s for self-promoters or the unemployed.
• It’s for teenagers.
• It’s just over-sharing too much trivial babble.
• It doesn’t directly drive sales leads.
• I can’t control the marketing message.
• There is no measurable ROI.

While all those may be true in isolated cases, you’re not doing your organization any favors by dismissing the game changing power behind the new social media applications. At a high-level social media marketing is about influencing the customer experience by engaging in dialogue with the customer in order to build a trusted relationship over time. To make a social-ready transformation an organization may need to adopt a new mindset. Enterprise transformations involve strategy, technology and processes and a social media transformation is no different in that respect.

1. Strategy: How well does your social media plan support your overall marketing strategy and desired customer experience?

2. Technology: Do you have the technology and infrastructure support to achieve your social media goals and objectives?

3. Processes: Do you have the operational processes in place to support your social media goals and objectives?

Many organizations tend to fall in the following broad categories as it relates to the key transformation areas above:

The Broadcaster:
The Broadcaster is typically focused on one way communications and is most comfortable in the traditional media world of mass marketing. Leveraging typical “push marketing” tools and tactics the Broadcaster pushes their product towards the audience which may or may not be aware of it. The Broadcaster largely focuses on the features of their product or service and seeks a direct response from the mass audience. Often times the Broadcaster is focused on a short-term strategy that involves a specific event or time-based campaign (Christmas deals, Back-to-School, etc).

The Listener:
The Listener tends to focus on push marketing tactics; but also considers customer feedback. The Listener may have customer listening posts established in the form of brand monitoring initiatives, although those initiatives may be fairly informal.

The Conversationalist:
The Conversationalist is more in the “pull marketing” camp. The Conversationalist is typically interested in interacting with their target market at a deeper level of engagement through tighter relevance, content and stronger brand identification. The Conversationalist is focused on the development of trust and perceived value.

The Community Builder:
The Community Builder is fully in the pull marketing camp. The Community Builder looks for ways to engage their customers and prospects in two-way conversations, and is comfortable with the concepts of user created content and co-creation. The Community Builder is focused on influencing and involving vs. educating and controlling their audience.

If you’d like to measure your social media maturity level set aside a few minutes to take the Berry Network Social-Ready Assessment. Building a social-ready organization is an on-going journey. And that journey as well as your organizations position on the social media continuum is determined by several factors, including; overall marketing strategy, desired customer experience, business model, and the competitive environment. Social media isn’t going away so you need to set a course that’s right for your corporate goals and objectives.

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.

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?

In my post “How to Engage the 2009 Customer Mindset” I mentioned that sensitivity to total price, intolerance of poor customer service responses, and a focus on quality and trust was very important. I still stand by those recommendations, but when your customer’s appear to be hunkering down for the long-haul how do you find out what they really value? Consumer needs and preferences are shifting. That means marketers should take extra care as it relates to adjusting their marketing mix and one of the best ways to know what adjustments are needed is to listen. Is your organization listening? Social networking platforms are valuable listening posts and provide a rare opportunity to quickly learn what consumers really value. While reading their words you have the freedom to focus on what’s truly important to the writer. Whether the dialogues are in a group discussion on LinkedIn or referenced in 140 character tweets on Twitter; take time to listen and understand the conversation.