Experts predict 2010's key marketing trends

We read this and felt it hit the nail on the head pretty well...

Big Ideas …Experts predict 2010’s key trends
Target Marketing Magazine
December 2009
By Heather Fletcher

It's as if marketing experts have been fooling around in the chemistry lab, mixing up potions to try to figure out what strategies will work best. And it seems as though they've discovered the future: integrated, customer-
centric marketing.

Tracking back to figure out what these experts did practically involves a flowchart of the process. But, they insist, the procedure is quite repeatable, and good ingredient blending does consistently boil down to a result of integrated marketing with strong, lifelong customers at the center—who ideally are even involved in the process.

The experiment sounds simple enough. Start with direct marketing the way it is today, then add in customer centricity and creative ideas. Using the catalyst of privacy, heat up the mix and stir in some continuing conversation between businesses and customers. What should be taking shape about now is the beginning of customer insight, which can solidify into research ranging from behavioral to demographic to attitudinal—even to psychographic. But marketers have to keep the process going, so analytics professionals need to come and advise on how best to form the bubbling mixture into a cohesive strategy.

Still yet, this newly formed integrated marketing strategy must cool off and be absorbed into the company infrastructure. At the same time, 
up-and-coming marketers who've observed the nascent process can come in and help improve it. And so the process begins anew.

Big Idea: Integrated Customer Marketing

Many direct marketers understand that they must integrate channels to succeed today. And many within that group comprehend that they have to integrate disciplines, as well, such as pulling skills from or working with people in public relations, finance and so forth. This expert calls on them to do much more.

"If you look at what my definition of integrated marketing would be, I think it's really important right now to put the word customer into that statement," says David Williams , chairman and CEO of Columbia, Md.-based Merkle, a "customer relationship marketing agency" per its September rebranding announcement. "I think integrated marketing is a marcom strategy, not a business strategy …

"And the reason I think the word customer is so important is because it helps you frame the level in which you're having this conversation," he continues. "So the truth is, most direct marketers, when they're talking about their activities in their daily lives, they're talking about advertising activity. They're talking about direct marketing medias and how they're targeting those medias to create behaviors that they want—purchase behaviors, engagement, whatever it might be. But if you raise that conversation up a level, you would really raise that conversation up into a marketing conversation vs. an advertising conversation. Now we're talking about all four P's, not just one of the P's. We're talking about a pricing conversation, we're talking about a product conversation, we're talking about a placement or a retail conversation, and lastly, a promotion conversation, which is where advertising would connect to."

Further, Williams says, it's time for direct marketers to mix it up with the brand camp—in a good way. "The single most important issue is that there is an integrated dialogue amongst the primary entities of an organization."

He details three "currencies" that allow an organization to have a common language to use to talk 
about customers.

Segmentation, which provides a way to talk about the attitudes, needs and values of customers across 
the organization.

A customer value metric, which is an enterprise-level, department-neutral way of organizing around the customers in order to be relevant to them and understand and drive their behaviors over time.

Incremental measurement capability, which means averages must depart in favor of more accurate customer value measurements. "If I can't measure the incremental impact of the next dollar spent, then I can't truly optimize across dollars available to me," says Williams.

Big Idea: Measure Success by Customer Value

While it took half a decade for the industry at large to catch up, most direct marketers now agree with Martha Rogers and Don Peppers , the founding partners of Norwalk, Conn.-based customer-centric marketing strategy consultancy Peppers & Rogers Group. They think it's important for companies to know who their customers are and to build their businesses around leveraging this insight to better serve them.

Rogers says she and Peppers first began talking about the concept of one-to-one marketing in 1993. Since then, they've taken deep dives into ideas like "return on customer," which means that a company should sell the right products to customers instead of finding customers for the products they want to sell, and taking the long view, or emphasizing lifetime value. That last idea deals with beating "the crisis of short-termism" among companies, to paraphrase the title of their latest book.

"So how many companies really practice one-to-one in a model way?" is her rhetorical question. "I'd have to say, none. Including my own, I'm afraid. Because it's very hard. It's an aspirational kind of thing to be able to do."

But the process of attempting to achieve perfection greatly improves a company, Rogers adds. And the next steps in improvement will come in the return on customer metric, balancing short- and long-term goals while keeping customer trust in mind, and seeing the entire company through the customer's eyes.

All that takes integrated marketing skills. And integrated marketing absorbs all channels, all company divisions, all lines of business, "everything," Rogers says. "If a company is customer-centric, then the heart of every decision is this or that customer. That's it."

Big Idea: Violate Privacy, Lose Customers

Consumers have become wary of companies that violate their trust by sharing data about them or misusing the information, even if it's only through incompetence, these experts say. While that's the biggest "don't," there's plenty more happening in privacy.

Larry Ponemon , chairman and founder of Traverse City, Mich.-based independent privacy research and consulting group Ponemon Institute, points to his iPhone as an example of just one of the new technologies that open up a new world of data collection and marketer-consumer interaction opportunities.

Even as these wonderful technologies come along, some marketers will make mistakes that turn off consumers. Ponemon cites the Facebook Beacon program, which passed into history in September, as a good marketing idea gone bad. The idea was that those on the network would learn that one of their friends, for instance, bought a pair of sneakers online. "The reason for doing that, of course, is mimicking is very common, especially around younger people," he says.

But more troubling stories emerged of men buying diamond rings that were meant to be surprise gifts, only to be surprised themselves when their purchases were announced to all their friends—including the intended recipients—through the Facebook news feed.

The Beacon mistake highlights another fact about modern life. "I think one of the trends in privacy is, believe it or not, accepting the reality that privacy is out of the control of the individual," Ponemon says. "There's just too much information out there. So the horse has left the barn."

For the short term on the legal front, direct marketers should be focused on the Federal Trade Commission and "Exploring Privacy: A Roundtable Series." The roundtables that start this month and roll into 2010 have a worrying tone to them, in that the language in the commission's announcement hints the FTC may already have decided what privacy practices cause consumers injury, says D. Reed Freeman Jr., a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of law firm Morrison & Foerster. Freeman, who also is on the board of directors of the International Association of Privacy Professionals, specializes in consumer protection law.

"Next year, with Congress looking at online advertising … at data security, with the FTC re-evaluating its entire privacy enforcement agenda and with the states adopting information security practices that differ from those in other states, we are at the outset of probably the most dynamic regulatory environment for direct marketing since the implementation of the telemarketing sales rule in 1995," Freeman opines. "But this sweeping change will be cross-industry and focused on not just telemarketing, but on all aspects of contact directly with consumers."

Big Idea: Research, Research, Research

Baby boomers have gone digital, and even though they represent 25 percent of the U.S. population, they represent half of its consumer spending. The Hispanic American population is growing and choosing to buy mostly the same things the average consumer buys, and will spend more than $1 trillion in 2010. Millennials, the generation known for loving everything digital, will be the majority U.S. age demographic by 2011. However, there's just one catch for marketers looking to reach millennials—research shows they generally hate advertising, they don't value print or radio channels, and they "say that nearly all TV advertising annoys them," says Rick Erwin , president of the data division for Experian Marketing Services, a marketing services provider based in Costa Mesa, Calif.

Um. OK, then. Now what?

"What's happening in integrated marketing is the ability to target almost every form of media at the granular individual or household level is now technologically possible," Erwin says. "So what's really happening is while marketers make important insights and conclusions from the kind of demographic and behavioral analysis I just gave you on those three segments, what they're really doing is they're targeting very small, very granular segments of individual populations. And they're targeting all of their media activities against the exact same granular, individual profile."

In other words, marketers need multiple levels of research in order to target consumers. Attitudinal research, such as factoring in political beliefs and media consumption choices, is the first step in customer insight, he says. Then combining demographic, behavioral, attitudinal and psychographic data can help businesses market to individual consumers or tight consumer segments.

Big Idea: The Continued Rise of Data

It's almost eerie the way Eric Schmitt 's predictions have come true since he penned his 2004 Left Brain Marketing report for Cambridge, Mass.-based independent research company Forrester Research.

"Three technology trends—media fragmentation, addressability and interactivity—are converging on the world of marketing and advertising. In a new era of Left Brain Marketing, analytical strategies grounded in deep audience knowledge will rise to predominance. Creative will remain essential but will play a smaller, more sophisticated role. The looming transformation of TV into an addressable medium marks the inflection point in the shift," he wrote five years ago.

Now Schmitt, executive vice president of Naperville, Ill.-based marketing services provider Allant Group, can say, "I told you so." But he's more gracious than that.

"I think, broadly, data is more influential in marketing now than ever before," he says. "What previously were mass media, analog media, are now becoming digital. And when they become digital, they become addressable and targetable. And in many cases, they become interactive. And those types of qualities are what lend themselves best [to generating] a lot of data, and they benefit from the intelligent use of data. So the hygiene and the quality of the data is still important. But I think even more … more important than that now is just the continued integration of new sources of data. And then the application of that combined database to drive intelligent communications through these new channels."

Cable providers, for instance, now can target commercials to the household level. Soon, consumers will buy products and services through interactive commercials, he adds.

Big Idea: Creative Needs More Big Ideas

What if companies pictured each customer standing in the middle of Times Square, surrounded by flashing lights and advertisements, bombarded by shouts from street vendors and buskers, watching traffic and readying to cross the street, all while trying to make a cell call? While this might be an average moment in the life of a New Yorker, that type of sensory overload is actually very real for many other consumers, too.

So Nick Moore , executive vice president and chief creative officer at New York-based direct marketing agency Wunderman, says clever ideas have to do double duty to cut through the clutter. First, they have to be amazing. And second, they have to last.

"We need to think beyond the project into long-term relationships with consumers," he says. "We need ideas that can live over time and ideas that are strong enough to adapt and flex to consumers' responses, to consumers' experiences with the brand. And yet the idea is to still maintain a core DNA."

To a customer, interacting with a company is a branded experience—he or she is interacting with, for example, Land Rover, not some silo thereof.

"We are in a creative business," Moore emphasizes. "Data alone merely gets you to the right place at the right time. But if you say something boring, nobody's going to listen to you."

Big Idea: Hire Integrated Marketers

So how about Schmitt's "Left Brain Marketing" prediction that creative professionals would be paired with statisticians to build marketing message strategies?

In perhaps the most apparent display of integrated marketing efforts, companies are mainly hiring analytical professionals with creative bents, says Jerry Bernhart , owner of the Owatonna, Minn.-based digital and direct marketing recruitment firm Bernhart Associates Executive Search.

Through a combination of his own observation and findings in the quarterly surveys his firm conducts about digital and direct marketing employment trends, Bernhart can say that the same basic categories are holding true. Companies are hiring analytical and creative professionals.

But more and more, they want both talents in the same individual, he says. Part of it may be due to economic conditions, but much of it is due to the increasing need to have customer insight from team players. So it's a good thing the top universities seem to be teaching integrated marketing skills.

"It's what I call the 10-check-box syndrome," Bernhart says. "You've got 10 boxes that need to be checked in order to hire this person. We want all 10 checked, right? Right."

Is Your Brand Being Ignored?

A provacative article from Deliver Magazine that we liked;

Is Your Brand Being Ignored?
Deliver Magazine
December 21. 2009

Maybe what you really need is some out-of-the-box thinking about what you communicate.

What’s your brand stand for?

We’re guessing you probably work a lot on that one, don’t you? You and your marketing team spend hours crashing through strategy documents, pulling out nuggets of customer insights, determining differentiators in the industry and understanding what it is that makes your corporation unique.

And in the end, you have a vision of who and what your company is about. It’s that vision that helps establish relationships with customers, win over prospects and get your company noticed in this increasingly chaotic and fragmented world.

Then, after all of that strategic work, comes the execution part of the marketing plan and you decide to go digital. You send an e-mail — which looks just like any other e-mail in your best customer’s inbox.

Oh, we know, you finely tune the colors to match your brand (despite the fact you can’t calibrate how that color appears on any one monitor) or you include photography and graphics (which don’t download until the users request them) or you include the all-important link to your heavily branded Web site (although fewer than 10 percent click through).

So, maybe it’s not the optimum branding experience, but it’s cheap. Boy, is it cheap. And it’s efficient — you can reach hundreds of thousands, heck, even millions in a single blast — and really, you’re getting the word out there.

Then the economy picks up, but your sales don’t jump as much, and at the next marketing meeting, as you’re puzzling over the numbers, someone asks why your customers aren’t so loyal anymore. What’s happened to that great relationship your brand used to have with them? And there’s a lot of this and that around the table, mutterings about “empowered consumers” and “everything’s a commodity,” and the meeting rolls on. You shrug your shoulders and concentrate on the next campaign. There’s work to do.

We understand. It’s not an uncommon problem. It’s just that, well, you could stand for something. You could put something in your customers’ hands, something branded. Imagine that: those finely tuned colors, the carefully selected images, the perfectly worded summation of what your brand is all about sitting right there in the hands of the people you most want to reach. It’s right there at their fingertips.

And inside that package, something amazing — something they could never get digitally. A sample, a tchotchke for their desk, a magnet for the fridge, a baseball bat, a brick, a salami — who knows? Something that’s amazing and brilliant and relevant, just like your brand. A piece that says “Hey, I know you,” and reminds that customer why he or she came to you in the first place and what your brand is really all about.

You could do that. But that’s direct mail, and that’s old school. No point in doing that, right?

Great reminders from Target Marketing Magazine

By Pat Friesen

Excerpts:

I have become fascinated by the multitude of media choices now available to target and deliver the messages you and I write. And there are more new media options headed our way. This means that in today's media-rich world with readers strapped for time and bombarded with marketing communications, wordsmithing alone probably won't get our messages opened and read. We've got to understand how to deliver the message at the right time and in the right place.

• Don't be overwhelmed by choices. Remember what's worked in the past, and test those new options that make strategic sense for reaching your audience and meeting your business objectives.

• Apply common sense and basic direct marketing principles. Measure and evaluate results, including initial response, closure rates, average order size (dollars and units), abandon/cancellation rates, lifetime value, etc. Remember, direct marketers track and measure to the individual level of response.

• Cheaper on the front end isn't necessarily more cost-effective on the back end. Track, measure and compare results.

• Not all media is direct response media … but that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. Like public relations and special events, social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook are marketing tools with the power to influence buying decisions. Use them accordingly.

• Don't put all your eggs in one basket. For example, a client recently called with a letter writing assignment. After successfully testing an e-mail cross-sell offer to customers, he wanted to make the same offer in a letter to his remaining customer database. The rationale? Even with a successful 15 percent to 20 percent e-mail open rate, he still wasn't reaching 80 percent to 85 percent of his highly qualified buyers. A matchback of direct mail respondents showed they hadn't opened the e-mail. Common sense dictated using both e-mail and postal mail to maximize results.

To read the rest of this article; Delivery Confirmation by Pat Friesen

How to write a blog that will turn readers like me into Company Heroes

Using Psychology to lure readers

Are they serious?

I just ran across an article in Advertising Age in which the author, Marsha Lindsay, CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs, an ad agency, suggested that the key to attracting readers to your corporate conversations is to incorporate psychologist Carl Jung’s 12 archetypes into the messages. She wrote: “Messages that speak to one of these discrete motivations naturally engage consumers and fuel conversations for many reasons: Associating with any one of these motivations gives a brand relevance and innate appeal. These motivations are behind our search for change and meaning, and words related to them will find their way into consumers' natural online search habits. They are timeless and universal. Messages based on them will be relevant across cultures and age groups.” Mary Lindsay, Lindsay, Stone & Briggs. Advertising Age Magazine

So, after scratching my head, and shrugging off the urge to dismiss this as hog-wash, I searched for information about the 12 archetypes and found this link: http://www.herowithin.com/arch101.html.

Let’s test Mary’s theory out to see if her idea would work for readers like me.

Step one
Figure out what exceptional blend of the 12 archetypes I am. Here are my results.

Hero/Warrior: Likes to save the day. Sets and achieve goals, overcomes obstacles and persists in difficult times.....tends to see others as enemies and to think in either/or terms.

Explorer/Seeker/Wanderer: Seeks out new paths.

Ruler: Creates environments that invite in the gifts and perspectives of all concerned.

Step Two
Plan a blog addressing these archetypal passions. For the Hero/Warrior/Seeker: Content could present new, cutting-edge strategies and technologies that would help me beat my competition and increase profitable sales; thereby counter-acting the economic downturn……..I’d be able to save the day…….and in the end, I’d be recognized as the “company hero.”

For the “Ruler” in me: A blogger could suggest that I capture a continual flow of new ideas and strategies by encouraging blog readers to share their techniques for getting readers to their blog. Of course this good, no-cost idea would reinforce my hero status.

Well, I have to say that if bloggers presented legitimate content offering fresh strategies to beat the competition and increase profitable sales, while becoming a hero; it would hit on my hot buttons.

What do you think? I’m going to try it, I am already getting that hero feeling.

Step Three
Thoughtfully consider what archetypes your target audience/s represents and theme your blog content to those motivations.

Step Four
Referring to the plan, create a compelling message to post on your blog. They say that advertisers are using it, so let’s watch and see if we are able to recognize when the archetypes are woven into the messages.

Tell me what you find and how you feel this Jungian strategy works. Go get em’.

The Hero/Warrior/Seeker/Ruler

By the way, can any of you give me great ideas to attract readers to our blog? I need the blog to be a smashing success so I become the hero at my company!

Print in the Mix: Fast Fact - Reduced Advertising During Recession Negatively Impacts Consumer Perception

Here is an interesting article I found about consumer perception and advertising.


Print in the Mix: Fast Fact - Reduced Advertising During Recession Negatively Impacts Consumer Perception

Posted using ShareThis

A little myth about saving money in marketing

In today’s economic climate it is imperative to continue to get your message out to the marketplace so that you can stay ahead of your competition and improve sales – all while keeping costs down. This is a tricky dance and many companies are tempted to cut out print from their marketing spend. Why not? It’s much cheaper to send emails, post web pages, write blogs and you might even reach a greater audience.

This is a myth, in fact print advertising is more effective than ever. In 2008, eight of every 10 emails sent was spam. While it may not cost much to send email marketing, what are you getting in return? Is it worth it to spend virtually nothing and get a nominal response? Think about how many emails you receive in one day that you either don’t see because it went into your spam folder, or that you simply ignore because you know that it is spam.

In 2008 close to 40% of consumers surveyed by DMNews/Pitney Bowes have tried a new business for the first time because of information they received via direct mail. Nearly 70% reported renewing a relationship with a business after a period of time because they receive a direct mailing or promotional item.

Location, location, location

I know it seems strange coming from a print-centric blog site like ours, but today’s post is about real estate.

The real estate I’m referring to is not land based; well not exactly anyway. I’m referring to the desktop in an office or the countertop in someone’s home. Every day smart marketers are claiming a portion of that real estate for their products and services. They do that by producing attractive printed products that captivate their target audience enough so that the piece is read, then set aside on the desk or countertop for future reference. It might have been a coupon, or a grand opening announcement, or a catalog. No matter what it was the consumer felt compelled to keep it and now it’s sitting there continuing to communicate.

The problem with the internet is that it lacks the same permanence. With a click your message is gone. It’s lost in the browser history or it’s fallen below new inbox messages. Each form of advertising has its own place in a good communications strategy but each has its own risk and rewards too.

CCS chooses to use both in our marketing strategies. We use social media, web sites like this blog, email and printed communication to reach our target market. We’ve learned that the best way to communicate who we are is to find ways to claim some of that valuable desktop real estate. If we can create printed pieces that are either too compelling, or too valuable to throw away, we win important ground that our competition does not. If we can have our calendar, or notecards, or notepad, or coupon sitting right there prompting them to give us a chance, we will more likely be engaged when the potential customer needs printing services.

In today’s stingy economy we all need to find ways to woo the consumer to choose our products and services. Battling for real estate is a valid tactic and has proven to work. Print will always have a place in marketing and advertising and those who learn to balance the newer forms of communication with compelling traditional media will have the advantage.