Nachdem es nunmehr seit mindestens acht Jahren eine doch beachtliche Aufmerksamkeit fuer das Thema “brand community” gibt, insbesondere wissenschaftlich, kommt jetzt heraus: “There are no brand communities!”

Bestritten wird zwar nicht, dass sich mit bestimmten Produkten und Marken “community”-Effekte verbinden.

But at the end of the day, these are not brand communities, they are passionate rider communities, scrapbooker community, adventure seeker communities.

Die anschliessende Debatte ist ungewoehnlich rege. Warum wohl?

As a loyal customer to many different companies and their brands, the following email is the first I recall ever receiving where a company I have chosen to spend my money with has asked me to participate in their brand’s community.

Customer Retention Strategy

What better way to retain customers than to engage them and let their voices be heard?

MB Advisors

While I am certain other large companies like Mercedes Benz are actively pursuing methods like establishing brand communities for further engaging their customers, I am also certain – the smaller the company – the less likely it will have enacted any kind of ongoing engagement strategy at all.

What engagement strategies can your business institute to help customers make their voices heard?

This week’s mid-week focus comes from one of my favorite SlideShare users helgetenno.  It’s stuffed full of insights and interesting view points that are definitely worth taking a peek at.  Hope you enjoy the presentation, and be sure to rate this presentation when you are done viewing it here.

Each Wednesday, I will post a popular piece that embodies key pieces of customer engagement in new and exciting ways by skillful and talented creators in each space.  Today’s piece focuses primarily on the aspect of brands.  It sends home the message that traditional methods of pushing messaging is not the answer.  Helge hits on the point that understanding and engaging people through each of the ideas will help brands in the long term.

On July 3, John S. Barry, one of America’s great marketers, passed away at 84. Today, terms like brand equity and brand community are bandied about as companies spend untold sums on flashy products and flashier marketing campaigns. Before the buzzwords or the Internet, Mr. Barry accomplished these branding ideals with a product that made no pretense of being cool, just useful: WD-40.

The New York Times chronicles Mr. Barry’s achievements in turning a lubricant/protectant originally designed for the military into a true household name. His legacy reads like a marketing textbook:

• Changed the name of the parent company to the name of the flagship product–the brand belongs on the building as well as the can
• Shipped 10,000 samples per month to Vietnam to help troops keep their weapons operational–a laudable donation tied to a major issue of the day
• Sold WD-40 in supermarkets–a change in “place” strategy to accommodate buyer behavior
• Refused Sears’ request to supply a version of the product under their name–shades of Apple in the 1980s vetoing Mac clones, preserving its brand
• Pushed into overseas markets–going global before the term was popular
• Encouraged consumers to send in their unique uses for the product–fostering brand community and promoting new applications to update a mature product. Today, WD-40 has an online fan club as its official social media platform
• Neutralized a primary competitor–in 1995, WD-40 bought 3-in-One Oil and maintained it as a separate brand

Forbes cites Mr. Barry’s contention that WD-40 is a marketing company, not a manufacturing company. Frankly, every company is a marketing company and every CEO is marketer-in-chief. John S. Barry understood that.

In looking at over 50 types of brand communities, Sean has been able to dissect and classify them into 9 different buckets that make sense. He could have segmented them by core purpose (innovation, evangelism, distribution, insight, user generated content, decision-making, employee-rallying, customization), but the segmentation would become meaningless given how many different purposes exist for brand communities, oftentimes found all in the some of the better communities.

Instead, two defining characteristics of a brand community are:
1) Exclusivity – how private or public is the access granted to members/prospects within the community
2) Depth of Involvement – what is the scope of the collaboration being asked or commitment being required
All forms can be valuable depending on the brand.

So the 9 Types of Brand Communities resulting are:

Low Exclusivity
1) Fan Club – Wd-40 (low involvement)
2) Brand Forums – Intuit Quickbooks (mid involvement)
3) Brand Network – Jones Soda (high involvement)

Middle Exclusivity
4) Brand Nation – Nike Plus (low involvement)
5) Brand Ambassador – Maker’s Mark Embassy (mid involvement)
6) Brand Meritocracy – Spread Firefox (high involvement)

High Exclusivity
7) Influencer Clique – Lululemon (low involvement)
Advisory Panel – Dell Ideastorm (mid involvement)
9) Brand Cult – Harley Davidson – HOGS (high involvement)

Some of the categorizations have a few rough edges but Sean believes the categorization is an effective
paradigm for looking at brand communities.

For those interested in the subject, please pass along any brand communities that they believe fit into one of these groupings (distinguish between an commercial object-centred, brand community vs. a people/ego centred social network like Facebook/Digg). Also, provide any constructive feedback to build on this model.

Fuente: Buzz Canuck

Marketing via word-of-mouth, social networks and brand communities is not new.  Effectively leveraging social media technologies both in support of these marketing initiatives and as part of an ongoing, two-way customer-brand dialogue, however, has emerged as a burning issue on marketers’ minds. 

Social media technologies, themselves, certainly have their own learning curve, but the greater learning curve for marketers is contending with the fundamental power shift in the customer-brand relationship that social media technologies are enabling.  Thus, recognizing and responding to the new reality that individual customers and brand communities increasingly define (and have part ownership over) brands requires a fundamental shift in our approach to bringing products and services to market.

Source: IBM Press

IBM executive Sandy Carter is a forward thinker on this issue whose experiences and industry dialogue eventually led her to realize that marketers need a new set of tools if they are going to better contend with this power shift.  Her new book, The New Language of Marketing 2.O:  How to Use ANGELS to  Energize Your Market, delivers just such a ‘tool box’ for marketers — presenting a normative framework, together with numerous case examples from companies in a variety of B2B and B2C industries, to help marketers think through these challenges inside their own businesses.

Few are as well-equipped to tackle such a subject as Carter, who has had an impressive career in the enterprise software arena and who currently is IBM’s Vice President, SOA and WebSphere Marketing, Strategy and Channels.  In this role, she is responsible for IBM’s cross-company, worldwide SOA initiatives and is in charge of one of IBM’s premier brands, IBM WebSphere, which under her leadership has shown strong growth.  She also led her global marketing organization to garner 14 industry marketing awards in 2007.

What is Marketing 2.0, and what are Carter’s thoughts on how marketers can gain leverage in the dizzying world of social-media technologies to energize their marketing programs?

We’ve touched on this topic in the past, including a post on “Changing How You Think About Marketing to Your ‘Mobile’ Brand Community” and another on “Deploying Social Media for New Product/Service Development,” but I think Carter does a particularly good job of tying it all together in an integrated context; thus, we wanted to present her perspectives here.

So here is our Q&A with Carter on Marketing 2.0, ANGELS and her new book.

PB:  How would you describe Marketing 2.0 (and its underlying drivers) to someone in 200 words or less?

Carter:  Marketing 2.0 is adding social media tactics into your marketing plan for greater market understanding and demand generation. Marketing 1.0 was about using e-mail, and static Web pages to generate new demand and progression; for instance, leveraging your Web site to drive participants to an event. Marketing 2.0 takes the linkage to the next level. It is about using blogging to add another listening channel to your focus group strategy. It is about innovating new product ideas with Twitter or Wikis. It is about using innovative personalization through online chat or Jellyvision to form tighter relationships with your customers. Marketing 2.0 is using the new technology of search optimization, virtual environments, social networks and microblogs. To be most effective, Marketing 2.0 optimizes the mix of social media with traditional marketing methods.

You talk about your ANGELS marketing approach in the book. What does this acronym mean, and how can it help marketers better contend with the realities of Marketing 2.0?

Social media is still relatively new and we are experimenting with all the different outlets and mixes available. This is the fun part – we can actually be instrumental in shaping how best to use social media in any business. In the book, I try to help companies by introducing readers to an ANGELS approach that is really a framework for leveraging techniques and determining the right marketing mix.

• A nalyze and ensure strong market understanding 
• N ail the relevant strategy and story 
• G o to Market Plan 
• E nergize the channel and community
• L eads and revenue
• S cream through technology

The book details the strategies at each step of this framework with a summary section on Putting It All Together.

Do you believe that knowing, understanding and connecting with your target customer is becoming more simple or more complex for marketers over time? And what role is technology playing in this evolution?

Marketing 2.0 is about engaging communities through conversations. In social media, these communities take the form of social networks and the communal groups that develop within them. But joining the conversation isn’t as simple as just jumping in. People are not going to engage with you if you are a passive ‘taker’ of the community. We have to listen, talk, listen again, assess and contribute value – becoming citizens of each respective community we wish to join. As such, the complexity of the market is at a unique place. We have a set of clients that are digital citizens. These digital citizens expect the use of technology to connect with them. But we still have a set of clients that are not comfortable with the digital world. As such, marketers have to segment how they communicate with that audience. For instance, I recently talked to a customer who no longer does e-mail. He will only read Twitter or texts! At the other end, I work with a CEO who also doesn’t like e-mail, but rather prefers in-person seminars. A great marketer needs to understand the clients’ digital preferences!

You discuss the strategy of ‘lightly branding’ in your book. Can you explain what this is and its importance in the current marketing environment?

Lightly branding is about using influence to drive your brand, not a heavy product push! Look what Unilever did with Dove in this space. They created a blog on “What is Real beauty?” Unilever realized that there was juxtaposition in the market. While other companies said they were supporting beauty, they only showed airbrushed, slim models. Dove wanted to truly connect with real women. They wanted to give women confidence in their own beauty and started doing so through a very successful set of forums and blogs, not on their products, but their stance for young girls and women on beauty. While the blogs have increased their sales, their focus is on their corporate values, not their products.

Lightly branding means that marketers know they no longer own their own brand. It implies that marketers must understand the new circle of influence in the Marketing 2.0 world and learn about the power of technology to reach some of those influencers.

Two core points you make in the book are the importance of breaking through the noise and of ’screaming.’ What do you mean by the latter, and how can marketing organizations be more effective at screaming to break through the noise? What are the tools and technologies they should leverage in doing so?

Today we are overwhelmed with information. There are more text messages sent everyday than there are people in the world. If MySpace was a country, it would have the 11th largest population in the world. As such, in order to scream you must be a great marketer in the basics and more. You can’t forget the basics of having solid value propositions to target your client and show relevant value. That fundamental does not change. And won’t! But, you do have to have add into the marketing mix the right set of social media tactics. To be most effective, you must learn about technologies like Twitter, LinkedIn groups, Jellyvision, podcasting and more. For instance, Twitter has been used by Dell to sell their excess inventory, IBM is using blogs to strengthen our connection to the market, and Meijer, the supercenter pioneer with 185 stores in the Midwest, is using widgets to build customer loyalty and repeat purchases and it’s been a tremendous hit with moms who shop and prepare meals. I would highly recommend that all marketers update their use of technology.

You believe in the importance of leveraging influencer and word-of-mouth channels. As the size and scope of the social-media universe explodes, how can marketers remain focused in their leverage of influencer networks to efficiently meet their goals and objectives (without getting caught in the weeds)?

In the book, I recommend creating a wheel of influence. This wheel of influence is where you look at the world of who has the most powerful voice. For instance, now with all the new technology and social media, all marketers must look at the bloggers that influence their sphere. By way of example, Twitter, a micro blog site, recently influenced Johnson & Johnson to change their advertising based on what Tweets said about their latest Motrin ads.

My advice to marketers to not get caught in the weeds is to do the following:

> First, listen to the marketplace to gather valuable market intelligence about their brand and their competitors. This will allow companies to better understand the awareness of their current market position and to identify key thought leaders and ‘tippers’ in the critical communities.

> Second, leverage that information to shape the Marketing 2.0 strategy in order to: 

• Engage with existing (or identify new) subject matter or topical experts to contribute to the online dialogue about your company/industry
• Create and maintain an ongoing presence and active voice in key market conversations
• Create and maintain ongoing relationships with key external bloggers that show a passion and depth of knowledge

You talk in your book about ’serious gaming’ as an emerging marketing communication channel. What are the opportunities and challenges you believe marketers face when employing this channel?

Serious gaming is a phenomenal opportunity to assist companies in a number of areas like education, on-boarding, collaboration and marketing. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) 63% of the US population now plays video games and this number is significantly higher in Asia. Today’s game players are acquiring the skills that companies increasingly value as the gaming generation enters the workforce. Using games to market has a very compelling value proposition. When well-implemented, a game can virally target a sweet spot demographic, where they live, in a medium they love and understand. The games can then be used to gather all kinds of information about the player, and even generate leads. For instance, IBM is using gaming for education and has its game Innov8 in thousands of universities. The biggest challenges are in understanding your goals and selecting the right gaming approach. In the book, I outline the top 5 lessons that I have learned in my gaming experiences to date.

You have some interesting observations about best practices for building marketing dashboards. What are your top few rules for building an effective marketing dashboard? How does this relate to your philosophy of managing marketing in a 2.0 world?

In the end, Marketing 2.0 comes down to effectiveness. Without the right results, none of it matters. In designing a marketing dashboard in the new world, there are a few key areas for focus.

• First, always link to your business strategy. It is really more than just a marketing dashboard. It is what binds marketing to the business and truly reflects the value of the function.
• Second, the dashboard needs to be updated for the new world. In the book, I recommend adding in some new metrics around innovation from listening, engagement from social networks, blogging and Wikis.
• Next, consumability is a key element. To be effective, a marketing system or dashboard must allow management to drill into supporting details in related reports, or conduct multidimensional analysis to determine why a metric is performing a certain way.
• Finally, it is a journey. It requires specific focus on data quality, systems to support campaign management and the movement of data from the Web to sales automation systems, establishing consistent processes for lead management and integrating business intelligence tools to monitor results and plan appropriate actions.

You introduce the concept of the ‘in-process’ metric as a way to better manage the hand-off and carry-through between marketing and sales in customer acquisition and management. Can you explain why this is so important?

A high performance marketing organization is one that ensures that marketing and sales are tightly connected. The premise is that it is not enough for the seller to say, I am responsible for an account. Marketing is not my job. And it is equally unproductive for marketing to say that they have completed their job because they helped create an ad or helped create a lead. So that means that sales and marketing linkage is equally important in your Marketing 2.0 plans.  

As such, at IBM, we created something called in-process metrics. They show what happens ‘in-between’ a marketing action and the closing sales. It involves ownership of both marketing and sales to progress the leads between creating the lead and closing it.  Whether it is a virtual summit or an in-person event, this ownership and joint teaming is crucial for success. Connecting marketing with sales is about accelerating business transformation and growth overall. In-process metrics are a best practice in the industry to show indicators that Marketing 2.0 is connected in the overall business. Again, back to the dashboard, marketing must be connected to the business!  This principle applies regardless of how we identify the opportunity – through social media or traditional methods.

Today we are beginning a new ’semi-frequent’ feature on the Propelling Brands blog.  In addition to the regular features and ‘who’s propelling’ profiles of individuals and companies, we will periodically feature Q&As with individuals that are true forward thinkers on brands, marketing, innovation and technology.

Source: Wisconsin School of Business

Professor Aric Rindfleisch is just such a forward thinker and marketing researcher, who works to fuse insights from the front lines of business and marketing with cutting-edge academic research.  In addition to his extensive academic background, he has worked for both ad agency J. Walter Thompson in Japan and marketing research firm Millward Brown.  Rindfleisch is currently the Associate Dean for Research & PhD Programs and a Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He teaches graduate-level courses for the Wisconsin School of Business on new product development and marketing strategy; his academic research focuses on understanding inter-organizational relationships, consumption values, and new product development; and he is developing a new blog for the school, titled WisconsInnovation which seeks to bring together the ‘co-created’ insights of both faculty and students on innovation in business.

Rindfleisch has recently authored a groundbreaking paper, titled “Customer Co-creation:  A Typology and Research Agenda,” which we are fortunate to be able to share on this blog.  His co-author is Matthew S. O’Hern, a lecturer and doctoral student in marketing at Wisconsin.  The paper is slated to be published in an upcoming volume of the academic journal Review of Marketing Research.  And it is the focus of our Q&A here.

So what does co-creation really mean?  What is the impact of co-creation research on businesses, and how can marketers embrace co-creation as a strategy for improving the customer-brand relationship?

We’ve touched on co-creation in a past blog piece on this site that looked at Marketing Personalization 3.0, but it’s a topic that in many ways is revolutionizing marketing organizations’ approaches to developing and delivering products and services to their customers, so it deserves a more in-depth look.  (And … well … Rindfleisch is one of the foremost experts on the topic, so we thought we’d go straight to him on this one.)

So here is our Q&A with Rindfleisch on co-creation and his new paper:

PB:  How would you describe co-creation to someone in 200 words or less?

Rindfleisch:  In its purest essence, co-creation is a managerial paradigm. Specifically, co-creation is the realization that one’s customers can lend value beyond the traditional means of simply choosing and using your product and/or service. This realization, in turn, enacts a set of changes in business practice (e.g., new product development) that empowers customers to play a more active role in creating a product and/or service. This empowerment can take a variety of different forms, ranging from asking customers to share their ideas to providing them with the tools to do their own development. Regardless of the specific form chosen, successful co-creation requires managers to be both humble enough to realize that they don’t have all the answers and trusting enough to allow customers to take increased control.

How is co-creation different from mass customization?  And from traditional ’stage-gate’ innovation?

Co-creation essentially involves three steps: (1) obtaining contributions by customers, (2) selecting the best of these contributions, and (3) incorporating these selected contributions into products, processes, or services. In contrast, mass customization focuses largely on just obtaining contributions and entails little selection or incorporation.

In contrast to traditional ’stage-gate models,’ which by definition seek to carefully control and systematize the new product development process from the top-down, co-creation is considerably more bottoms-up, uncertain, and requires a release of control. Also, co-creation differs from stage-gate models in terms of its paradigmatic assumptions of why new products succeed or fail. While the stage-gate approach largely assumes that new products fail because the process of developing new product solutions is faulty, co-creation focuses on the faults inherent in the traditional manner in which firms seek to ‘sense’ customer needs.

Your upcoming paper in the academic journal Review of Marketing Research talks about the ‘asymmetry’ of traditional new product/service development.  Can you explain what this is and how it points to an opportunity for co-creation?

By ‘asymmetry,’ we are referring to the gap between the wants that customers actually desire versus the manner I in which these desires are sensed by marketers and embodied into the new product solutions that they deliver to these customers. Many, is not most, new products fail due to this asymmetry between the translation from sensing to solution.

Your paper also sets out a ‘typology’ for co-creation.  Briefly, what are the different types of co-creation, and how mature is each as an approach?

In our paper, we identify and describe four forms of customer co-creation:

• Collaborating: In this form, customers have the power to collectively develop and improve a new product’s core components and underlying structure.  We conceptualize collaborating as the form of co-creation that offers customers the greatest power to contribute their own ideas and to select the components that should be incorporated into a new product offering. A good example of collaborating is open-source software, such as Linux or Mozilla.
• Tinkering: In this form, customers make modifications to a commercially-available product and some of these modifications are incorporated into subsequent product releases. Tinkering is similar to collaborating in terms of allowing customers a relatively high (but somewhat lower) degree of autonomy over new product development (NPD) contributions. However, firms that employ tinkering usually retain a considerable degree of control over the selection of these contributions. A good example of tinkering is video games that allow customers to make changes to the basic offering, such as The Sims or Little Big Planet.
• Co-Designing: In this form, a relatively small group of customers provides a firm with most of its new product content or designs, while a larger group of customers helps select which content or designs should be adopted by the firm. Co-designing is characterized by a relatively fixed contribution approach but a high degree of customer autonomy over the selection of these contributions. A good example of co-designing is the t-shirt manufacturer Threadless.
• Sharing: In this form, customers directly communicate ideas for new product offerings to a firm. This form of co-creation is characterized by the least amount of customer autonomy in terms of both NPD contribution and selection. Although submitting resembles co-designing (i.e., both types of co-creation allow customers to directly contribute their own novel ideas and solutions), it differs from co-designing because in submitting, the firm retains full control over the NPD selection process. A good example of sharing is Electrolux’s annual DesignLab challenge.

Of these four types, sharing probably has the longest history. For example, General Mills has allowed customers to share ideas via Betty Crocker bake-offs dating back to our grandparents.

Source: Aric Rindfleisch

What are some good examples of companies that successfully co-create in a B2B context?  How about in a B2C context?

My favorite B2B example is the Italian controller board manufacturer Ardunio.

My favorite B2C example is the Chicago t-shirt firm Threadless (cited above).

What are some of the key implications of co-creation for marketers and their go-to-market strategy?

Here are two: (1) Think of your customers as not just passive choosers and users who are the targets of your value creation process, but also as active co-creators of your value proposition.  (2) Open-up! Replace secrecy with transparency. After all, your customers can’t co-create unless you provide them with sufficient information about your objectives and desires. Several big-name firms, including IBM and P&G, have made this transformation and are reaping the rewards.

How can co-creation improve the customer-brand bond?

We know that customers connect not only to a brand but to other users (i.e., brand communities). Most forms of co-creation allow customers to connect with others, and thus, should strengthen the customer-brand bond by enhancing their sense of communal ties.

Does co-creation necessarily impact margins in a negative way?

Good question. I think co-creation could jeopardize margins and profitability in at least two different ways: (1) Some firms may be reduced to simply manufacturers of designs developed by their customers, and hence, may lose the margin-boosting value of being a well respected brand; (2) By empowering customers, firms may find that their co-creation efforts may actually be the birthing ground for a new class of “competitors,” who challenge the firm and restrict its ability to take potentially margin-boosting actions.

How is technology enabling co-creation today?

The big enabler of current co-creation is, of course, the Internet. The Internet has enabled co-creation by providing customers with both a means of easily accessing information and also connecting with not only firms but also other potential co-creators. However, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Many forms of co-creation are also enabled by a broad array of consumer electronics, including laptops, cell phones, software (e.g., Photoshop), etc. These devices and programs provide are tools for co-creation.

Where does technology still need to go to make co-creation more viable?

Thus far, co-creation has made limited in-roads in the manufacturing sector. In my view, this limitation is primarily due to a lack of appropriate tools. Most of the tools I mentioned above are great for co-creating digital products, such as software and designs. However, their ability to co-create physical products is limited. This limitation may be overcome within the coming decade or so by the advent of customer-friendly manufacturing tools, such as 3D printers.

Over the past few months I’ve checked in with a number of current and past colleagues and acquaintances who work at a variety of marketing services agencies — PR, ad agencies, social-media firms, brand consultancies, etc.  In addition to the usual pleasantries, our discussions could not help but touch on the state of the industry.  I’ve also seen and commented on a growing critical mass of news articles and blog posts on the future of advertising and PR  firms.

Source: iStockphoto

What has been interesting about all of this dialogue, both online and off, is one consistent theme:  The business environment for ‘traditional’ agencies is changing … radically … and overnight. 

“I hear death is imminent for your business model, in fact I’ve heard the industry itself might be beyond repair,” commented Kyle Flaherty, a former PR agency professional and current tech-industry marketing director (now on the ‘client side’), in a December post on his Engage in PR blog.

What is causing this ‘plague’ of Biblical proportions throughout the agency world, and how can agencies overcome this situation by preparing for the next-generation of client expectations?

The current environment is being shaped by a myriad of factors:  the advent of social media; the emergence of Web 2.0/3.0 infrastructure and applications; the power shift from brand-company to customer; the slow death of traditional print/broadcast media; the increasing enterprise focus on ROI/quantitative metrics; a growing client-side demand for integrated marketing communications campaigns; Recession-era chaos inside corporate America; a disruptive technology environment; more disruptive technology … I could go on. 

But this myriad of factors all boil down to a single factor:  Many agencies are out of touch with their corporate clients’ current needs.  Marketing is becoming more sophisticated, and its agencies need to, as well.

This reality has hit the agency world hard.  In mid-December, Adweek reported that bellwether BBDO laid off approximately 5% of its 3,700+ North American staff members.  It also noted that BBDO’s parent, Omnicom Group, which is a holding company for dozens of advertising and PR agency brands, “… is trimming [close to] 5 percent of its worldwide staff of 70,000.”  Many of its cuts are in ‘traditional’ PR and advertising brands, while ‘digital’ and ‘interactive’ agencies are garnering increasing investment.  And this follows a previous hiring freeze across the Omnicom portfolio.

“This may be the perfect storm for big agencies to find ways to transform themselves,” commented Idea Couture CEO Idris Mootee, shortly after the BBDO news, in a piece on his Innovation Playground blog titled, “Big Advertising Agencies Are Needing Bailouts Too. Bailout Is Never Any Real Solution. This Is Part Of An Industry Evolution.”

There is indeed an opportunity for the agency world to right itself and to deliver on the needs of the next generation of clients, but that requires developing the next generation of marketing services agencies.

What are the key pillars of a next-generation marketing-services agency?

I believe there are five key characteristics that will mark successful marketing agencies in the near future:

> Holistic focus on both brands and brand community:  Any good athlete knows you need to keep your eye on the ball.  The core objective of any agency’s set of services is to support the marketing of brands.  This means that agencies need to be hyper-focused, as never before, on the impact of their programs on both brand equity and on brand revenue; moreover, agencies need to act as an extension of their clients’ organizations, giving marketers and brand managers leverage in their own effort to maintain a holistic view of their brands.

“I need an agency to create, manage and monitor our online brand, alerting me to the communications landscape every morning,” wrote Kyle Flaherty in the same blog piece cited above.  “Currently I spend 2-3 hours each morning performing this function … time I would gladly transfer to your agency.”

Brands also exist at the center of brand communities — a phenomenon identified by Professor Tom O’Guinn, a marketing researcher who heads the Center for Brand and Product Management at Wisconsin.  I highlighted O’Guinn’s insights and the importance of understanding brand communities as a strategic component of improving brand marketing programs in a past blog post on this site, so I won’t go into more depth here.  What is important, though, is that agencies are in a unique position to help bridge what is often a highly inwardly-looking perspective of marketers and brand managers with the outside world – helping to better connect brands with their brand communities. 

Thus it is important for next-generation of marketing services agencies to focus on, and ideally be the expert on, how best to connect with and engage in two-way dialogue with these brand communities.  This means not only proactive engagement via promotional activities but also reactive listening and understanding that leads to key customer insights and that supports continuous evolution and growth of the brand. 

> Integrated, multi-channel suite of marketing communication capabilities:  The legacy of the agency world is of firms that built a practice around being an expert in the medium — advertising firms, direct marketing firms, media relations firms, etc. … you get the picture.  Over time agencies have become diversified, but their diversification was always about adding additional mediums.  The problem?  Effective marketing communication must be medium agnostic. 

Marketers must understand the combination of mediums that are most effective for reaching their target customers and brand communities; marketers must also realize this will change over time.  This means that marketers need agencies that can execute campaigns across an ever-changing combination of mediums and do so in a coordinated fashion; moreover, it means that recommendations for the ‘marketing mix’ need to be driven by real client/brand needs, not agency agenda. 

Tim Hurley, former managing director for PR agency Porter Novelli’s Boston office, a few years ago came to this realization, which he shared in a recent blog post: 

PR should be thought of as a key part of an effective, integrated marketing strategy. However, other critical marketing functions including corporate and product positioning and messaging, awareness and lead generation, sales support, events, marketing strategy and increasingly, social media and Web marketing must be part of the mix. And it really makes no difference, whether these functions are executed in house, through an agency, or as is most often the case, through a collaborative effort between client and external resources.

This realization led Hurley to partner with Alison Moore to build what is rapidly becoming a very robust and forward-thinking integrated marketing services agency, BluePoint Venture Marketing.

Business and innovation strategist Idris Mootee, cited above, believes the large agency holding companies, such as Omnicom, Publicis and WPP, are already feeling pressure from their clients to integrate in this fashion.  He discussed this in another blog piece he published a year ago in January 2008:

The Web has fueled marketers’ frustration with the lack of collaboration inside the ad holding companies that dominate the industry. Many advertisers complain that ad executives too often push agendas that will most help their own bottom lines and tend to favor certain types of media, such as TV. Advertisers want a “media-agnostic” approach, one that picks whatever medium is best for the ad campaign.

Some bigger marketers have taken matters into their own hands during the past year. Procter & Gamble, Dell and Johnson & Johnson each have tried — working with ad holding companies — to create new types of ad groups that blend different functions.

> Balance of strategic capabilities with strong tactical execution:  I do not enter this third point as a ‘new’ idea as much as a reminder that this is a critical component.  Agencies are often asked to manage scale campaigns while ensuring that they are executed at every point and via every channel with perfect, ‘ground-level’ tactical execution.  This means that successful next-generation agencies must have a blend of talent — both communication medium experts and business/marketing/brand strategy experts — that can make sure the complete spectrum of a client’s business needs, from the highest level down to the lowest, are fully covered.

> End-to-end results measurement and closed-loop client analytics integration:  “… [C]losed-loop analysis is the process of tying all aspects of your company to financial data and creating metrics,” explains JT Buser, a senior product manager with lead-generation firm Bulldog Solutions, in a post on his company’s website.  “[Closed loop analysis] allows you to follow each department’s impact on each other and ultimately, gain insight into your company’s financial well-being.” 

Getting  to this level of closed-loop analysis is a priority for marketing organizations because it helps to tune their marketing mix and better understand how marketing investments impact both brand equity over the longer-term and brand revenues over the shorter term.  Agencies, thus, must become better partners in supporting their clients’ closed-loop analysis efforts — eventually playing a key role in enabling real-time measurement and dashboards.

Moreover, the same factors that are driving marketing organizations to achieve new levels of cross-channel integration are requiring a new level of sophistication when it comes to measurement:  “There is a significant movement toward integrated campaigns and the focus on development of metrics to support that integration will help you measure the overall impact of integrated campaigns and the individual components,” comments IBM executive Sandy Carter in her new book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0.  (Note:  We will be featuring a Q&A with Sandy about her book in an upcoming post on this blog.)

Next generation agencies must be fully integrated with their clients’ information systems and be able to supply real-time marketing performance measurement data, across mediums, directly into their clients’ closed-loop analytics platforms.

Measurement and analytics also need to be focused.  I discussed in a past blog post on this site how important it is to develop a simplified and proportional ‘top-five’ group of metrics.  Most marketers and brand managers are drowning in data, and as agencies become more sophisticated in their technology infrastructure (discussed below), they likely will be, as well.  The key is to cut through it all and to focus — in concert with clients — on the metrics that are most important and that will allow you to assess real impact and success of marketing efforts.

> Sophisticated, underlying technology platform:  Whether it is for driving execution management for integrated campaigns or it is for improving measurement and integration with closed-loop analytics platforms, a sophisticated, underlying technology platform is a critical component of next-generation marketing services agencies.  In fact, technology infrastructure must be as much a priority as hiring smart people at agencies.

Some of the critical capabilities that agencies must embrace include:

• Business intelligence/analytics infrastructure – to better structure, organize and analyze the myriad of data points developed each day
• Cross-channel marketing execution management platforms – to effectively manage execution across channels and to ensure consistency of personalization to brand communities and in the representation of the brand, as well as to support measurement and data collection  (Note:  As I discussed in a previous blog post on this site, I am in the process of building a list of ‘top’ vendors in this emerging space.)
• Dynamic, Web-based content management/delivery expertise - especially via open source, blogging and social-media platforms such as WordPress/CSS,  MySQL/PHP and now Twitter
• Enterprise-grade data centers – to operate on a truly peer level with clients and their service-level expectations
• Multi-channel ad and content serving- especially via emerging mediums such as the mobile channel, as well as better tying together online and offline advertising
• Semantic analysis of both structured and unstructured data – to better develop  customer insights and to monitor brand dialogue, especially via traditional media and now new social media channels on the Web
• Web services/cloud computing orientation – to enable efficient ‘tie-ins’ to clients systems and to efficiently feed data, in real time, into closed-loop analytics platforms

What are the major barriers to the success of next-generation marketing services agencies?

What I’ve described above is certainly an ‘ideal’ world, but we hardly live in an ideal world, nor ideal times.  Being realistic, I must admit there are certainly barriers to firms succeeding in the new context I’ve described above.  Yet, I see these barriers more as opportunities and would suggest that firms focus on how to not only overcome them but also to make doing so help better position them for future success.

These key barriers include:

• Legacy, marketing channel-specific silos inside corporations:  Agencies find their greatest success when there is a clear, demonstrated client-side champion within a company.  For example, advertising agencies in the past have been able to prosper when their client is a sophisticated (and dedicated) advertising ‘department.’  As agencies move to an integrated marketing communications context — even if this is what their clients say they really want and need — they will find it difficult to sell into client organizations that have not yet organized into cross-functional, integrated teams focused on a specific brand or business unit.  It’s simple:  It’s a lot harder to sell to a group than to an individual.  If client-side departments such as advertising, branding, direct marketing and public relations operate in silos, they will not be able to effectively engage with next-generation agencies that are organized around delivering integrated, multi-channel marketing communications, nor fully realize the critical value from them.
• Technology phobia of many agency folks:  Much of the traditional leadership of agencies comes from a background rooted in either client-account management or ‘creative’ development.  In fact, I would be surprised to see any critical mass of agency leadership that is actually proficient in HTML, CSS or PHP or that can talk knowledgeably about business intelligence technology.  I’m not advocating that agency people be at a CIO level of technology knowledge, but they do need to be comfortable and proficient with technologies related to content management, brand tracking, marketing program execution and marketing program analysis — especially those capabilities listed above.  Integrated agencies need staff members who can build next-generation technology platforms for managing and measuring integrated campaigns, both online and offline, and for better interfacing with and supporting the emerging needs of their clients.
• Ongoing issues of normalization and evolution of performance metrics:  Marketing data faces two problems.  First, the format of data on marketing-program performance differs wildly, depending on the medium — making it difficult to make side-by-side comparisons for an integrated campaign across multiple online and offline mediums.  Second, the quality of these metrics — e.g., concepts such as ‘impressions’ — are a continuing issue.  Improving end-to-end, holistic brand insight and analytics, especially from the agency’s side, requires greater normalization and evolution of performance metrics — something the marketing world continues to wrestle with.
• Figuring out how to pay for it:  A key piece of the economic logic for many agencies is figuring out how to pass as much cost directly onto their clients as possible.  Less agency-side cost means more profit; I get it.  Yet investment in some of the pieces cited above, especially technology infrastructure, is tough to assign to the needs of any single client; thus, one might argue that could potentially cut into agency profit.  This mindset may be the single greatest barrier in agencies’ evolution.  What is the payoff?  Survival.  This is the price of admission to next-generation client opportunities; moreover, for smart agencies, it can eventually lead to labor efficiencies and rationale for changing how you bill clients … changing the economic logic.  Ultimately that means agencies that can be more profitable, not less, and that are more in demand.   

This the first in a two-part series of posts on next-generation marketing services agencies.  On Monday, the next post will present snapshots of several, specific firms I’m watching and that I believe are representative, forward-thinking leaders in the next-generation marketing services agency world.  Stay tuned for more …

What’s next?  What do you think?

As always, this dialogue is just beginning.

• What are your comments on my five key pillars, above?
• Do you think this is the right direction for the agency world?
• What are specific technology capabilities you believe next-generation agencies must possess?

I wrote in a recent piece on this blog, titled “Marketing Personalization 2.0,” about how companies are increasingly applying techniques from mass customization, using ideas such as personas and embracing what Patricia Seybold refers to as ‘customer scenarios’ to improve personalization of marketing efforts.  I also cited a range of technologies that can manage execution of this type of marketing.

Yet, even as this evolution represents an advancement over Marketing Personalization 1.0 (i.e., demographic and lifestyle channel targeting), there is much to be desired.  We are still at a point as marketers where we are guessing at personalization.  It is still possible to make costly mistakes, particularly if we misjudge customer persona or the channels for interacting with a given persona.

Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original)

“If you think backward from the audience you’re trying to reach and the channels and methods you’ve used to try to reach them, it all argues for taking a much more integrated approach to the work of marketing and communications,” argues Jon Iwata, SVP of Marketing and Communications for IBM, quoted in a recent piece by Paul Dunay on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog.

What do I mean by this?  Customers, who increasingly have power and leverage over brand-companies, will not only specify what they want but will also shape the boundaries and expectations of their communication with, recommendations regarding and the ultimate delivery of products and services from vendors. 

The entire experience will become a partnership, but why is this important?

This may sound altruistic, but I think there is critical goal, more important than mere customer experience that underlies why marketers should care about this.  Marketing Personalization 3.0, through co-creation, offers the ability to improve customer-brand engagement, increase marketing ROI and fundamentally upgrade the profitability of many businesses.  And technologies such as semantic analysis and social graphs are the keys to unlocking this.

What is driving the need for Marketing Personalization 3.0?

You’ve heard it before, but it is true.  There is a continuing shift in power from companies and their brands to the end customer.  “The war is over,” decried PR-industry executive Steve Rubel in a 2005 piece on his Micro Persuasion blog site.  “The people have defeated the corporation.  …  They are the ones who are in charge now.  They are using the Internet to tell companies what products to make or telling the world what a word means.  That’s when they’re not developing new products of their own and marketing them.”

So this shift in the power balance is not new, but as it becomes more weighted toward the customer it has important implications for marketing activities:

• Customers increasingly determine the rules of marketing engagement;
• Brand-companies must know their customers better than ever (a huge leap for B2C companies that rely on channel partners, such as retailers, for actual customer sales and delivery – a reality that is very different from B2B companies that actually maintain detailed customer accounts and records, especially via CRM systems); and
• Companies must understand how to stay in touch with increasingly ‘mobile’ brand communities across a diverse set of communication channels and media platforms (something I covered in another past piece on this blog, titled “Changing How You Think About Marketing to Your ‘Mobile’ Brand Community”)

What do I mean by co-creation, and what is the implication for marketers?

The idea of customer co-creation is most commonly applied to concepts of approaches to new product/service innovation, but holistically it represents customer and brand-company working together in any type of partnership to develop a joint outcome.  Co-creation has lived for years in the B2B world.  (For example, in a public-relations agency, many of the agency’s outcomes and marketing of itself, especially via RFPs, are very much collaborative and result from a partnership between agency and client.)  Co-creation remains very new to the B2C world, yet it is quickly becoming a critical concept – one that is being used to respond to the fundamental shift in power, mentioned above; moreover, co-creation is being applied to a broader range of customer-brand interactions.

Whereas past thinkers such as C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy have advanced the concept in a new-product development context, I believe Patricia Seybold really frames up the opportunity to extend this concept into the marketing sphere via the introduction to her 2006 book, Outside Innovation:  How Your Customers Will Co-design Your Company’s Future: 

What can you do to channel this customer energy into a positive direction — one that will power your business rather than sink it?  Here’s the answer:  Engage your customers in more ways to help you redesign your business, your products, your processes, and your business models.

You’ve already begun to open the floodgates by giving your customers the ability to do business with you electronically.  You’ve felt the excitement of working shoulder-to-shoulder with specific customers to help them solve problems or design new products.  You may have already empowered customers to solve each others’ problems.  Your executives are immersed in customer meetings.  You’re sprinkling your organization with customer survey data and customer loyalty scores.  But that’s drip irrigation.  Now it’s time to turn the spigots on full:  Invite customers to play more roles in driving your business direction.

Marketing co-creation is more than simply asking customers when, where and how they would like brand-companies to engage with them.  It is also more than simply externalizing the process of formulating marketing strategy and tactics.  It is about giving customer-brand marketing active life and making it two-way, give-and-take.  It means brand-companies becoming engaged in their customers’ worlds as much as customers are engaged with brands.  It means blurring the line between your objectives as a marketer and those of your customers.  It means acting in an integrative fashion.  What do I mean by integrative?  I mean “the more complex process of trading off between issues (people are ‘making the pie bigger’ by matching or ‘integrating’ their interests priorities and differences),” as G. Richard Shell defines in his text on negotiation theory, Bargaining for Advantage.  The outcome, ideally, is win-win, rather than one party getting more than the other.

Valeria Maltoni focuses on this new relationship and mode of communication in a recent piece, titled “How to Talk with Customers Differently,” on her Conversation Agent blog:

You speak the language of efficiency and scarcity, your customers think in terms of collaboration and story – most likely their story/experience with you and other providers.  You hear what they say as a problem, when you could be listening for the opportunity it comes with.

In many cases all of the ingredients are there, they just need a different mix. Or you may need to open up the kimono, let your customers tell stories about you – your brand as open-source API for the meaning they are looking for. Think of the alternative – if nobody is talking about you, do you really exist? Are you top of mind? And if they’re saying negative things, join the conversation, show them you can and do pay attention.

The insights of Maltoni point to four key elements of approaching marketing co-creation and gaining this level of engagement:

• Participating in customers’ channels and platforms:  Whether it is a mainstream broadcast network channel, or a Twitter conversation, if customers are engaging with brands, the brand-company must be there, participating in the dialogue. 
• Letting go of messaging and taglines:  The best brand positioning strategies are holistic.  They are about a feeling and an experience; they transcend specific words.  And to enable marketing co-creation, customers must be able to put positioning in their own words.
• Meeting on neutral ground:  Marketing co-creation, in order to be most effective, means that customer and brand-company must interact on an equal footing.  Finding new opportunities for neutral ground, whether it is an online social-media platform such as Facebook or an offline music festival or sporting event, will facilitate this interaction.
• Embracing negative feedback as a critical component of tuning your marketing:  Not only should you be open to negative feedback, you should embrace it and respond to it in a constructive fashion.  As Maltoni points out, this is an opportunity, not a challenge in the world of marketing co-creation.

What is the business case for Marketing Personalization 3.0?

Bridging between the theoretical look at co-creation and the technologies underpinning this new level of interaction is its business case, which is quite simple.

Marketers face three strategic challenges in the current era – challenges that cost money and that limit ROI, or ROMO, “return on marketing objectives …,” which means “… did the campaign meet lead goals, pipeline goals, conversions of leads to opportunities, etc.,” notes marketing agency BluePoint Venture Marketing in a recent post on its blog.   

These challenges are:

• Explosion of communication channels and media platforms:  When and where to communicate with and share information with customers is increasingly more difficult each day.  Lurking in the digital abyss is the customer, calling the shots.  Trying to find him/her can be very costly.
• Lack of buy-in from customers in marketing programs:  Customers are increasingly resistant to participation in any type of marketing activity.  Why is this?  Spending to find that customer results in a very high degree of marketing messages that are off-target.  Customers build up ‘immunity,’ and then it takes more and more marketing and spending to get through to them.  This gets even more costly.
• Inefficiency of old approaches to targeting:  To make matters worse, the tools of Marketing Personalization 1.0 – of targeting via demographics and via lifestyle channels – pervade every aspect of marketing.  This means much of the spending today continues to be on tools and modes that don’t have a chance of finding the customer in that abyss, anyway.  And this is the most costly issue of them all.

So the tools, and the technologies that underpin them, ultimately are the keys to making this all work.  This brings us back to the technologies that are the key to Marketing Personalization 3.0

What technologies are enabling Marketing Personalization 3.0?

Two new technology trends – semantic analysis and social graphs – are critical to enabling marketing co-creation and to achieving Marketing Personalization 3.0.

> Semantic analysis:  Semantic analysis enables companies to target advertising based on the true meaning of a text stream or Web page.  This technology “… looks at how words in a sentence relate to one another and tries to understand the context of keywords.  Terms with several meanings require semantic analysis of the other words around them for context,” according to a recent article in eWEEK.

Semantic analysis is differentiated from traditional text-search advertising, which keys in on specific terms and their frequency via platforms such as Google AdSense; contextual advertising, which focuses more on the environment or nature of the text stream via platforms such as Proximic; or behavioral targeting, which looks for patterns of activity.  These existing ad-targeting platforms often make costly mistakes.  The problem is that “… Google’s AdSense program will occasionally place misleading or inappropriate ads for certain articles,” points out eWEEK writer Clint Boulton, article cited above.  “For example, next to a New York Times science story on a jaguar, the Google AdSense algorithm picked out ads for Jaguar automobiles. In another article on an airline disaster, AdSense showed ads about low airfare rates for vacations.  The algorithm didn’t intend to provide results in poor taste, of course, and neither did Google’s human engineers.  /  The problem is that AdSense relies on keyword frequency but doesn’t drill down into the semantics—the meaning in the words.  [Semantic platforms attempt] to go further by using semantic intelligence to analyze the text on each page and ensure that ads are placed appropriately to increase click-through rates.”

Semantic analysis enables marketers to move closer to marketing co-creation by bringing accurate ‘listening’ to ad targeting and enabling this on a mass-scale basis.  If a customer says on his/her blog or fan website that (s)he is looking for ‘X,’ a brand-company is able to match up an ad for X.  It also knows when not to place an ad, say because a customer specifically said (s)he does not want X.  This means less un-targeted ads and, as a result, it lessens the need for customer immunity and raises the likelihood of customer buy-in to marketing.  It also becomes more important as traditional media channels integrate with digital and enable comment/feedback functions.

Some of the emerging leaders in the semantic analysis space include:

• Peer39:  “Based on natural language processing and machine learning, Peer39’s patented algorithms understand content meaning and sentiment, enabling precision targeting down to the page level so that display ads appear on pages most relevant to their message,” asserts the company in a June 2008 press release.  “SemanticMatch gives brands the necessary protection to target any page, including inside social media, and opens entire new targeting capabilities to online brand and performance advertisers.”  A Crain’s New York Business article from the same month also notes, “Since its software does not track users’ Web-surfing habits, the firm avoids any privacy issues that other online ad firms confront.”
• Expert System:  “Using semantic intelligence, COGITO Advertiser analyzes the text on each page and ensures ads are placed appropriately to increase click-through rates,” asserts the company in a September 2008 press release.  Boulton’s eWEEK article, cited above, further provides insight into how the technology works, noting that “… Cogito Semantic Advertiser understands content based on four key methodologies:  studying the morphology of words; looking at parts of speech; sentence logic, or the reduction of sentences to subject, verb and object; and disambiguation … .”

> Social Graphs:  Social graphs move marketers even closer to enabling true co-creation through the ability to sense identity and community in the digital-marketing arena.  This means you can (a.) know who/where your customer is and (b.) be thoughtful in engaging that customer in marketing efforts by understanding the mediums and messages that are relevant to them and their network.  “The advertising community has been searching for the ability to identify and reach micro-affinity groups on a scalable basis through tangible, data driven methods,” notes Dr. Joseph Plummer, a marketing professor at Columbia University School of Business, on why social graphs are important (via a Media6Degrees press release).

Alex Iskold, in a post on the ReadWriteWeb blog, helps to explain what is meant by social graphs:

Our society spawns one gigantic social graph.  In this graph, each one of us is a node.  There is an explicit connection, if we know each other.   For example, two people can be connected because they work together or because they went to school together or because they are married.

Sociologists have been studying these graphs for decades.  Famously, the social networks have a so called Small World property – more widely known as the Six Degrees of Separation.  This is both an anecdotal and scientific observation that we all are connected to each other – no more than six people away.  The secret?  It’s because this is how human networks form – dense clusters are interconnected by shortcuts.

A simple way to think about it is this:  your friends know each other, and with time, they meet each other.  If at least one person in a group meets someone from a remote part of the world, the whole group is now connected to another part of the world.  …

With the recent rise and proliferation of social networks, the social graph comes into the spotlight. Unlike the one that scientists have been studying, this one is digital and defined explicitly by connections in all social networks.

Marketing via social graph has recently been advanced via the rollout of Facebook Connect, which creates the ability for customers to maintain a constant identity thread, via Facebook, throughout their online communication and commerce.  And there is an open-source alternative, known as OpenID, which is Facebook’s main competitor and which has a similar purpose.

Source: Marshall Kirkpatrick via ReadWriteWeb blog

Privacy concerns aside, social graphs are a huge development for marketers.  They have the potential to be the CRM of the B2C marketing world.  In a recent presentation, digital ad agency Razorfish said, “We believe that portable social graphs coming from Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are going to transform how consumers interact with digital technology and each other.  Marketers and Web product managers must take notice today.”

This space is still developing, but two interesting developments could potentially help marketers better target customers and stay in better contact with their mobile brand communities.

• Media6Degrees:  “[Media6Degrees] uses patent pending algorithms to produce audience analytics based on the familiar concept that ‘birds of a feather flock together.’ [Media6Degrees] will build on ‘network neighbor’ data and social graph theory that shows advertisers can achieve a lift in response rates of up to 500 percent,” asserted the company in a May 2008 press release.  More recently, the company has conducted analysis showing the improved performance in marketing ROI using its platform.  “In a discovery with important implications for the emerging field of social media, [Media6Degrees] demonstrated that a consumer who was connected to any firm’s existing customer (a ‘network neighbor’) responded to advertising from the firm at rates 2X – 30X higher than consumers targeted using traditional demo or geo targeting techniques,” noted the company in a December 2008 press release.  “This occurs because linked consumers share high degrees of homophily (the tendency of like-minded people to be attracted to each other) and evidence similar psychographics and engage in group purchase behavior.”
• Google Android:  While much has been made about Google Android as a mobile operating system and mobile search platform, what is most interesting is that it establishes a mobile identity and point-of-contact for marketing to mobile communities on the go – in line with the comments from Razorfish on mobile social graphs.  This is a distinct advantage for Google in that it helps bridge the obvious issue of marketing via social graph when your customer is not at home or at work and online – thus bridging the true ‘digital divide’ between a social graph’s interactions online and off.

What’s next?  What do you think?

As always, this dialogue is just beginning.

• What are your own experiences with marketing co-creation?
• Are you using semantic analysis and/or social graphs in your marketing?
• What are the precursors to Marketing Personalization 3.O — i.e., what are the steps/path between 2.0 and 3.0?

Over the last month or two, I’ve had numerous conversations with marketers in traditional (i.e., non-technology) industries about their Web-based and social-media strategies.  In fact, I talked about the challenges of so-called ‘buzz campaigns’ and Web micro sites in a recent blog post on Internet marketing sustainability.  Let me sum up the challenge that has surfaced in all of those conversations:  Many marketing leaders are excited about new marketing communication channels; however, they are approaching these new mediums with the same advertising/one-way-communication mindset that seems to pervade too much of the marketing communication world.

That’s why I was impressed with a very engaging Opinion-page piece by Silicon Valley marketing executive Tom Hayes and ABC News ”Silicon Insider” columnist Michael S. Malone, titled “Marketing in the World of the Web,” in The Wall Street Journal this past Saturday.  Hayes and Malone argue that marketing participation on the modern Web and in social media platforms requires a new marketing mindset.  “A very different set of tools, concepts and practices is needed,” noted the two.  “Call it Marketing 3.0.”

What do they mean by this?

Their point gets to the heart of what is going on in the world of brands and marketing today — a critical point that too often gets missed. 

A revolution is coming!

The channels through which we market are evolving and changing, but that’s not the only thing that is changing (or that must change).  How we market is changing.  In many ways, new technology mediums such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are less about new channels than they are a reflection of how the nature of marketing — facilitated by technology that empowers the user — is returning to the age-old concept of personal brand relationships and of a new reality of brand communities.  This re-invention is moving us from a top-down strategy perpetuated by Mad Men to a bottoms-up approach where individuals and their insights and preferences once again matter.

In an unrelated (but very related) piece on her Conversation Agent blog, the day before the Hayes and Malone piece appeared, Valeria Maltoni wrote, “Social media is about building relationships – starting with your customers, business partners, influencers and their networks, communities of practice, fans and critics, etc. It’s not like the shotgun approach to marketing, it’s like the focused, appropriate conversation with those who wish to talk with you. In some cases they already are telling you what you want to know, if you are listening.”

That is why the direction in which we’re going, in many ways, is not new, it’s just a return to the equilibrium state of individuals and communities mattering to our brands and marketing efforts.  “Brute force marketing won’t work inside social networks,” argue Hayes and Malone.  “The best online marketing now takes place among people who know and trust each other.”  Now, we as marketers need to figure out how to once again participate in such a state.

What are the keys to Marketing 3.0?

Hayes and Malone offer some great insights into how to do this.  They offer five major themes for thinking about Marketing 3.0:

> From loyalty to attention:  “Before you can win consumer loyalty, you have to capture and reward consumer attention.  Old propositions — network television’s tired offer of 22 minutes of canned sitcoms in exchange for eight minutes of untargeted commercials — won’t cut it.  Consumers are demanding a better deal.”

> From crowds to clouds:  “Once you get that attention — once you generate heavy traffic to your site, gather a large league of ‘friends’ on MySpace, or spawn a dedicated following on Twitter — how do you monetize the crowd? / Smart brands are turning their crowds into ‘clouds’: organic, self-forming and often self-governing communities of interest.  Companies … use their clouds as feedback loops to get better faster by obtaining good, timely, often brutally honest customer insights.”  This is an interesting point and is very much in line with the concept of ‘organic marketing’ Valeria Maltoni talked about a few weeks ago.

> From places to spaces:  “Consumers are increasingly organizing themselves into new communities … myriad idiosyncratic slices of narrow, passionate interest …  With this shift toward self-organization by consumers, national advertising campaigns as we know them will increasingly become a waste of time and money for many companies.”

> From memes to bemes:  “In the Age of Broadcast, good advertising could occasionally manufacture memes of tremendous social impact. … If you can’t recall an irresistible or effective turn of phrase of late, it’s because it is exceedingly difficult to spread a meme in today’s fragmented media environment.  Marketing 3.0 is now the science of devising and managing … bemes.  Bemes are sent by members of social communities to each other and typically contain a reward or exclusive offer, which, when redeemed, also results in a reward coupon for the sender.”  Hayes and Malone believe this is the key incentive for propagating future, effective ‘viral’ campaigns.

> From silos to simultaneity:  “Too many retailers today persist in believing that online shopping is merely a virtual extension of real world shopping.  That is a big mistake. / Rather, online and offline need to coexist, and we need to rethink how they relate.”

Hayes and Malone end their piece by asserting, “All of this suggests that Marketing 3.0 is not only different from its predecessors, but actively undermines them.  If your marketing program fails to adapt to this new world, it won’t just become irrelevant — it will actually work against you.”

Is this new paradigm of Marketing 3.0 scalable?

I don’t want to end this piece without acknowledging the giant ‘elephant’ in the room when we talk about Marketing 3.0.  Is it scalable?

This is the major strategic challenge that marketing thought leader Beth Harte recently called out in a piece titled “Is Social Media Scalable?” on her The Harte of Marketing blog (related to a blog post by Chris Brogan).  “… [T]ouching or engaging in every conversation that occurs across the Internet would be virtually impossible and a full-time job,” writes Harte.  “… [W]hat does this mean for businesses? If they are enticed to join the on-line conversation (social) via Web 2.0 tools (media), what happens when they can no longer provide that two-way conversation…the reason behind why they got involved in the first place?”  Harte believes “[t]wo-way conversations are not scalable,” but that’s not to suggest that companies should not aspire to achieve Marketing 3.0 interactions.   (In fact, her post has many great comments from marketers and social-media gurus exploring the challenge of scalability.)

Our challenge as marketers is to find ways to engage Marketing 3.0 techniques … while also making them scalable.

What’s next?  What do you think?

As always, this dialogue is just beginning.

• What are your own perspectives on this marketing revolution? 
• How are you embracing Marketing 3.0 in your own Internet marketing efforts?
• How can we build Marketing 3.0 mechanisms that are scalable?

I was listening to a presentation by marketing leaders at a major consumer packaged goods (CPG) company this past week, and it made me think about the issue of the sustainability of our marketing campaigns and investments online.  One of these marketers was talking about how her team, as part of a major brand marketing initiative, had launched a Web micro site.  The site was well-produced, but it was little more than an online brochure (with some value-added content, to be fair).  It was not bad, but my immediate thought was about the half life of such a site.  Sure it would help drive traffic and subsequent exposure and attention for a period of time, but it was static, with nothing special to keep people coming back once they had gotten tired of it.  It wasn’t serving as an ongoing catalyst for the customer relationship and for longer-term brand community.

I had a similar experience listening to another presentation by marketers at a different CPG about a month ago.  They were talking about how a key piece of a new product launch was a ‘buzz campaign.’  It made me wince, but — yes — they were talking about paying people to go online and create buzz for their new product.  The ethics of such a campaign aside, it also made me think about sustainability.  As long as these ‘buzz agents’ were being paid to talk about the product, there would undoubtedly be dialogue in chat rooms and on blogs, but once the campaign was over, how long would this continue, and what would be the impact on the brand’s reputation if people found out about the paid buzz agents?

Dr. Justine Foo, a scientist and marketing researcher, perhaps said it best in a post, titled “New metrics for sustainable marketing,” on her Brains on Fire blog earlier this year:  “Our current market is driven by short-term forces: get next quarter’s numbers up, what it will cost me now, # of mass impressions, etc. As a result, we create campaigns, not movements … .”

Where is the sustainability in all of this?

This to me is the core challenge of Internet marketing.  Are we investing in campaigns that are little more than one-way ads/brochures online with diminishing returns, or are we investing in a long-term marketing presence that will establish a foundation for growth, that will really stir the passion of our customers and that will, as a consequence, be self perpetuating over a longer period of time?  This is an issue that impacts not only the strength and life of our brands but also the ROI from our marketing investments.

What is marketing sustainability, and why should I care?

To answer this question, it’s worth taking a moment to understand what I mean by sustainability — getting away from the environmental associations — and how it is relevant for businesses.

> Business context:  Sustainability in a business context is the concept of creating business strategies that meet the needs of today’s stakeholders, especially customers, employees and shareholders, “… without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” per the World Commission on Environment and Development in the G3 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines document from the Global Reporting Initiative.  That means running a business in a responsible way that enables continuity and growth over time — i.e., creating a context for sustainable stakeholder value.

> Marketing context:  This concept of sustainability is highly relevant in a marketing context, especially when considering marketing investments.  A sustainable marketing presence is one that can be built upon and grown over time, contributing to sustainable and growing commerce.  This means that a dollar invested in marketing today should not only generate revenue today, but it should also contribute to a growing stream of revenues down the road.  Sustainable marketing is also integral to building and growing brand equity — a key asset for every business.

What are the key factors in Internet marketing sustainabilty?

The core of marketing sustainability is the effectiveness of programs that facilitate and grow customer connection.  In the Internet environment, there seems to be two major levers that are most significant:  engagement and ownership.  To what degree are customers engaged in the marketing (i.e., actually interacting versus being passively exposed)?  And to what degree do they take ownership of their engagement and proactively participate in the program?

When our Internet marketing programs promote customer engagement and ownership, we find that minor investments lead to tremendous returns.  Not only do we convince these customers to buy our products, but these customers also become vested stakeholders in our marketing programs and brands; thus, our marketing investments produce multiples of returns through word of mouth, buzz and true brand advocacy.  The impetus is then on us as marketers to build marketing programs that lead to engagement and ownership.

There are other ways to think of these key factors.  I ran across an interesting, recent presentation by David Armano, vice-president of ‘experience design’ at marketing firm Critical Mass, (via Bob Kosovsky’s Furtive Librarian blog, BTW).  Armano framed the issue of building a sustainable Internet marketing presence via what he calls the ‘three U-s.”  They are:

• Usefulness:  marketing that “serves a purpose”
• Utility:  marketing that “fosters meaningful interactions”
• Ubiquity:  marketing that is “effective across multiple touch points including social [media]“

One of the most basic ways to approach both engagement/ownership and the ‘three U-s’ is through technologies that invite user-generated content and experience — perhaps the most significant trend in Internet marketing today.  This stuff changes everything, and yet many business leaders still question whether social media, social networking and user-contributed media is really in the mainstream. 

If you don’t ‘believe’ that this ’social stuff’ is really happening, consider these data points:

> Participation and user-generated content dominate the top global Web sites:  Among the top 10 Web sites globally, according to Internet-tracking service Alexa, 5 out of those 10 are social media, social networking or user-generated media sites.  They include:  YouTube (3), Facebook (5), MySpace (7), Wikipedia (8) and Blogger.com (9).  And even for the other 5, including Google, user-generated content is a critical piece of the overall equation.

> Growth among ‘produced’ sites is diminishing; engagement is critical:  User-generated content increasingly rules the roost, not polished, professional and ‘produced’ content on sites such as Yahoo!, especially when it comes to news and information.  “[O]nline news audience growth is flat and the market is highly fragmented, with nearly one-half of traffic going to sites that are below the top 100 news sites,” according to Jupiter Research in a press release issued in March of this year.  And this is occurring even as the total number of Web sites globally continues to explode.  In response, the same press release urged, “… site publishers must actively engage online users to combat audience fragmentation.”

> User-generated/social media IS a reality today when it comes to ’best practices’ among Internet marketers:  Former Forrester analyst Peter Kim, who is today working on an ‘enterprise social technology’ venture, keeps a tally of ’social media marketing examples’ on his blog.  It lists some pretty major companies with brands many are envious of.  Most importantly, there are many companies on this list that have really embraced sustainability of their Internet marketing.  I’d take a second to check out this list; the extent of the examples may surprise you.

What are the benchmarks for determining whether my company is building a sustainable Internet marketing presence?

I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue over the past week.  Below is a working set of benchmarks.  It’s not definitive, but it’s a good start:

> Is interactivity a feature or the focus?  The number-one Web site on the Alexa rankings (from above) is Yahoo!.  Some would argue that there is a tremendous amount of user-generated content and contributions on the Yahoo! site.  I would agree.  But I would push back on this point:  Interactivity is a feature on Yahoo!, it is not the focus.  What do I mean by this?  It’s easy to add the ability to comment to your Web site, but does this lead to user-mediated interactions that breed engagement and ownership.  No.  It just means that users can comment.  As a consequence, are you really building a sustainable relationship?  Interactivity has to be the focus.

> Is your customer dialogue ‘produced’ or ‘authentic’?  This gets into the issue raised earlier on by the CPG that was investing in ‘buzz agents.’  Sustainable marketing is predicated on building brand community.  But when you are paying people to pretend like they are community members to drive excitement, what happens when those buzz agents are no longer in the mix?  The buzz — not really sustainable — will die. 

I might take this a step further, though, to include how honest your communications are with your customers.  Is everything perfect in your online world — i.e., is everything polished and ‘produced’ — or can you — ‘authentically’ — admit when things don’t go perfectly in your customer relationships and engage in real dialogue? 

It’s a good question, and I was impressed by some recent comments on the Meet Innovators blog by Best Buy CMO Barry Judge, who addressed this in the context of his company’s Internet marketing:

As a retailer in this space, it is important for people to trust us. The only way people will trust us is if we are behaving in a way that makes us trustworthy. Part of that is sharing and being honest, genuine and open about what’s good, what’s bad, what’s working, and what’s not working.

Going forward with social media, maybe we can start to somehow get all those conversations on our Web sites. It’s not hard for people to see what’s being said about Best Buy, both the good and the bad. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, it’s being said, so why not make it easy.

Robert Stevens, the founder of Geek Squad who still works at Best Buy said to me, “Let’s make it real easy for customers to complain. We want to hear it. Then we can do something about it, so let’s do all we can to make it easy.” 

> Are you advocating for your brand or building brand advocates?  Push versus pull.  That’s what it comes down to.  Does your marketing make people want your brand, or are you focused on pushing your brand to people through an unending stream of campaigns, direct-mail pushes, etc.?  Marketing that builds brand advocates (who then pull) is much more sustainable than marketing that constantly has to re-validate and remind people of its brand.

Related to this, in your Internet marketing, are you delivering tools to help support your brand advocates?  Small things such as commenting and participating in the blogs of your brand advocates, rather than just letting them do this on your site, and helping them stay in touch via mechanisms such as RSS feeds and tags such as del.icio.us make a huge difference.

I think this also touches on the topic of brand community, which was the topic of a past post on this blog.  That dialogue was about keeping up with your ‘mobile’ brand community.  Does your Internet marketing strategy take into account the cross-channel reality of your brand advocates’ lives?  I’d check it out.

> Are you helping or hurting return on brand equity?  A business needs to generate revenue in increasing amounts over time.  That comes from leveraging assets, and brands need to be a key asset in that scenario.  Are you leveraging your brand equity to generate growing revenues, or is your Internet marketing actually using up your brand equity?

What’s next?  What do you think?

As always, this dialogue is just beginning. 

What can you add to the initial list of benchmarks, above?  I’d love to hear more on the dimensions you think should be considered. 

What do you think are the keys to sustainable marketing, and do you agree with the premise that we as marketers should care about business sustainability? 

Please share your thoughts.

I was doing some research over the past week related to best practices for shaping customer-brand experience, and it made me think more about the state of marketing personalization.  The whole point of marketing is to build a relationship between a customer and a brand through which both the customer and the company behind that brand derive benefit.  It is a direct, one-on-one and mutual commercial exchange; for the customer, the brand is experienced at a very personal level.  In fact, we may aggregate data about brand perceptions for larger populations, but the basic unit of measuring brand experience remains something that occurs at the individual level.

That’s why “[e]xperiences need to be designed for individuals,” advocates Bruce Temkin, Forrester Research’s principal analyst for customer experience in his blog-published book, The 6 Laws of Customer Experience.  “While it may not be possible to individualize every interaction, focusing on narrow segments (like Personas) is critical.”

Yet so much of marketing practice and technology infrastructure seems to focus on de-personalizing and scaling marketing communication to as large of an un-segmented population as possible – a trend decried by marketing pundit Seth Godin.  We extract the individual and disregard his/her personal experience.  We engage in shotgun marketing.  Why is that?

I’m not saying that as a marketer we shouldn’t attempt to reach a scale audience.  Quite the opposite, we should absolutely shoot for scale, but I’d argue it’s how we build that scale that is critical.  We need to do it one customer at time … which is the point of personalization.

How can we make both scale and personalization co-exist as hallmarks of every marketing program?

Let’s pursue this question in three parts:  (1) examining normative approaches to personalization, (2) considering insights from mass customization research and (3) exploring the technology platforms that promise to help us connect more personally with our customers.

How can we approach the topic of personalization in marketing?

One way to look at personalization in marketing is through the context of the degree of customer engagement.  On one end of the spectrum, the customer tells us when, where and how (s)he wants to interact with our marketing programs; on the other end of the spectrum, we anticipate when, where and how to market to market to customers without any input; a third option would be something in-between.

> Customer-defined personalization; Chinese menu:  One option in any marketing strategy is allowing the customer to tell us what (s)he does/does not want.  How simple, right?  Seems straightforward, but this approach can have unintended consequences.  First, this approach assumes a high degree of customer engagement, which can be difficult.  Second, it assumes that you are able to offer the customer a ‘Chinese menu’ of channel, communication and configuration options for your marketing.  In fact, customer-defined personalization can wind up limiting your opportunity to market to, and thus to grow your business with, that customer.

> Anticipatory personalization; customer scenarios:  The opposite approach is one we might define as ‘anticipatory personalization’ of marketing activities.  Patricia Seybold, a technology-industry analyst and recognized thought leader in CRM technologies, frames this approach in a May 2001 Harvard Business Review article.  She noted, “We live in a time when customers are under unceasing pressure to do things more quickly, to cram more into each day.  By thinking broadly about the challenges your customers face, rather than narrowly about what you can sell them, you can almost always find ways to make their lives easier.  That, more than anything else, will earn you their loyalty.” 

As an approach to doing so, she advocates analyzing customer needs in terms of what she calls ‘customer scenarios.’  “By building a detailed understanding of common customer scenarios, a company can often find creative ways to expand its reach into the lives of buyers, helping them save time, use products and services more effectively, and fulfill supplementary needs that may not involve the company’s offerings at all.  In delivering such benefits, the company becomes a vastly more important – and much more indispensable – supplier to its customers.”

> Hybrid personalization; collaboration:  There is something in the middle.  Can’t we find a happy medium where we both engage customer input on marketing preferences and also use customer scenarios to achieve some level of scale and aggregation?  Yes, and we see this happening in more and more venues — increasingly facilitated by technology platforms that enable collaboration between customer and brand for marketing personalization. 

A prevalent B2C example can be seen on the Amazon Web platform.  The vast majority of content on this site is customer-generated; moreover, product suggestions, ‘up-sells,’ targeted offers and other marketing activity are all customer-mediated.  The information provided by the customer, together with his/her purchase history and privacy settings form the context for a customer scenario, which Amazon’s platform uses (via complex algorithms) to match customer to marketing activity.

This type of hybrid personalization of marketing is increasingly occurring not only in B2C but also in a B2B context.  A recent profile in US Banker magazine of Barbara Goodstein, chief marketing officer and chief innovation officer for AXA Equitable, details her company’s investments in marketing technology infrastructure that have enabled it to be more targeted and personalized in its marketing to customers.  “She has built an automated platform that allows salespeople to send customized marketing messages to their clients by email and postal mail with a few clicks on the keyboard.  The return has been huge: for every marketing dollar spent, Axa calculates that customers have come back with $5.36 in business,” noted the article.  The article also talked about a new project, code named the ’Personas Project,’ that her team is developing.  It “… will create new and improved Web sites for financial advisors, complete with product recommendation tools similar to those used by Amazon.com,” noted the article.  These tools will help Axa better personalize its marketing to end customers by better arming the channel that serves those customers.

What insights can we apply from ‘mass customization’ research in approaching marketing personalization?

Mass customization as a topic is often discussed in the context of manufacturing and delivering customized products and services, but shouldn’t marketing be just as sophisticated — if not more so — in tailoring offerings to the needs of the customer?  The goal in a marketing scenario is analogous to that of a manufacturing scenario — wanting to accomplish customer-centric customization of engagement but on a scale level.

Operations research on the topic of mass customization is, in fact, quite instructive in thinking about this topic and helps us frame our thinking.

Paul Zipkin, a professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, published a thoughtful piece in 2001 in the MIT Sloan Management Review.  He identifies the three main elements of mass customization:  “Mass-customization systems have three key capabilities:  elicitation (a mechanism for interacting with the customer and obtaining specific information); process flexibility (production technology that fabricates the product according to the information); and logistics (subsequent processing stages and distribution that are able to maintain the identity of each item and to deliver the right one to the right customer).  Those elements are connected by powerful communications links and thereby integrated into a seamless whole.

“Examining elicitation, process flexibility and logistics more closely reveals the difficulties companies can encounter when they attempt to master the capabilities critical to mass-customization systems.”

Translating this to marketing activity, the steps are clear:  (1) knowing who we’re talking to, (2) modulating when, where and how we talk based on that knowledge of who we’re talking to and (3) ensuring that our custom message/offer makes it via the right channels to its intended recipient.

What technologies can help us better personalize marketing?

The good news is that personalization is an increasing area of marketing-technology development — especially when it comes to demographic and ethnographic profiling of target customers and brand communities.  The bad news is that the track record of personalization is not as strong as it should be.

> Customer relationship management (CRM) / sales-force automation (SFA) platforms:  The most basic, mature and widespread tools for marketing personalization — cited in the Axaexample, above — come in two flavors:  either making sure the sales person gets the customer’s name right (a.k.a., SFA) or making sure the e-mail/direct-mail piece gets the customer’s name right (a.k.a., CRM).  I am over-simplifying – I know – and this is not intended to be dismissive of the roust capabilities of CRM and SFA platforms.  But knowing who you are sending an offer to, and signaling to the recipient that you know who you are sending the offer to, is a huge step in improving the effectiveness of marketing. 

CRM and SFA platforms are the keys to getting this right, and the community of technology providers in this space includes:

• Robust CRM/SFA suites:  Pivotal CRM, SalesForce.com, SugarCRM
• Integrated business suites that include robust CRM/SFA:  Lawson Software, Microsoft (Dynamics CRM), NetSuite, Oracle, SAP

> Intelligent, integrated marketing management platforms:  First, what I just described – i.e., such ‘intelligent, integrated … platforms’ – do not really exist … yet.  Second, the point is that it’s important to go beyond a basic level of personalization and to be more ’semantic’ in the customer dialogue.  I’m not saying that traditional CRM/SFAplatforms are not capable of doing more, but there’s more to be done.  Is the name customized, or is the entire e-mail message customized?  Is the sales person guessing that the products/services recommended are a good fit, or does (s)he actually know they are.  And can personalized marketing, and a personalized customer-brand experience, be maintained cross-channel?  To achieve ‘marketing personalization 2.0’ in the current age, a basic CRM/SFA platform is not enough. 

Robust, intelligent, integrated marketing management does not yet exist in any single platform – i.e., it still requires cobbling together technologies for a company to build such an enterprise platform.  There are two interesting areas of development, though, that I believe will power future intelligence:

• Predictive analytics platforms:  These platforms enable marketers to predict future customer choices based on past behavioral patterns.  They are driven by complex algorithms and underlying statistical models.  The plus is that they deliver tremendous, customer-insight-driven marketing capabilities, especially around marketing personalization.  The drawback is that, today, they are complex to implement; however, the two leaders in this $1.4 billion market (according to IDC in a June 2008 TechWeb article) – SAS and SPSS – are working to change that.  I also recently ran across an interesting, emerging effort to better marry predictive analytics to personalized marketing via a new alliance between much-smaller competitors ATi and Integrato.  A press release on this relationship notes, “ATi’s unique predictive analytics engine powers the Integrato direct marketing delivery solution for precise, personalized marketing communications. The new solution uses ATi’s proprietary technology to accurately predict in real-time who to target for what product or service and when, with automated customized fulfillment of the communication. The revolutionary product will define the optimal media to use for the best possible return on marketing investment using one-to-one communications, whether by email, dynamic direct mail or call center interaction.”  I don’t know how revolutionary their product is, but I like where they’re going with it.

• Cross-channel marketing execution management platforms:  These platforms – still very much evolving as a technology space – enable continuity of program objectives, execution, experience, personalization and metrics across numerous channels.  An emerging leader in this space is Neolane.  “More than 100 of the world’s most innovative marketers including Accor Hotels, EMI Music, Sephora and Virgin Megastores use Neolane to improve effectiveness and drive revenue via cross-channel, personalized marketing,” according to a company press release.  Another emerging player in this space, ADRevolution, has multi-channel technology that “… dynamically targets individuals with customized marketing messages, allowing people to select which ads they prefer and to reject the ones they don’t enjoy,” also according to a company press release.

> Mobile marketing platforms:  “… [T]he mobile device has become an extension of the body. Consumers keep it with them all the time: at the office, at the movies, watching TV – even while they sleep,” asserts mobile marketing firm HipCricket in a piece on its Web site.  In fact, this was the topic of another piece I published about two weeks ago that examined the ‘mobile’ nature of brand communities and how mobile marketing technologies can improve management of relationships between brands and their brand communities.  I won’t duplicate what we covered in that piece, but as an extension of that dialogue, it’s worth noting the role that mobile marketing can play in marketing personalization.

Rob Dalgety, communications director at Mformation, commissioned a recent survey of mobile users in the US and the UK.  “The survey … found that, while consumers want to use more mobile applications and services, these need to be tailored more closely to the needs of each user. Respondents indicated that they want a more personalised (sic) mobile experience …,” Dalgety notes in a recent blog post. 

Customers want personalization, and they look to their mobile devices to deliver it.  The potential for marketers to take advantage of this context is significant.

> Social-media/social-networking marketing platforms:  I’ve also written on multiple occasions on this blog about the role social-media/social-networking can play in improving one-on-one communication between customers and their brands.  The challenge is managing that interaction – keeping it one-on-one, but also enabling it to be conducted on a scale basis as a strategic component of your marketing programs.  This is an emerging area with technology capabilities developing both within communities, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as via external technology providers.  One such example of an external technology provider is Satmetrix, which seeks to power dialogue in a social-media/social-networking setting.  The company notes in a press release, “Satmetrix for Communities enables companies to movebeyond treating small segments of customers as isolated marketing focus groups to having a full ongoing interactive engagement with thousands of customers, influencers and prospects. Companies can tailor the user experience based on customer interest and/or segmentation.”

What’s next?

This dialogue is just beginning.  What are your thoughts on personalizing marketing?  What is your company doing to improve personalization?  Please share your thoughts.

In Jutta zweiter Session beim CommunityCamp in Berlin wurde es etwas wissenschaftlicher, um nicht zu sagen soziologischer. Dr. Marius Lüdicke und Dr. Kai-Uwe Hellmann beschäftigten sich mit dem Thema Brand Communities. Bei einer Brand Community, also einer Online-Gemeinschaft rund um eine Marke oder ein Produkt, muss der Spagat zwischen der „kalten“ und wirtschaftlichen Marke und dem „warmen“ und sozialen einer Gemeinschaft kombiniert werden. Das wirkt sich bestenfalls – aber nicht immer – positiv auf das Image eines Produktes/ einer Marke aus und macht das Thema darum für Unternehmen so interessant. Viele Gruppierungen bilden sich aber einfach so – aus Interesse und durch die Initiative der Nutzer – ohne jeglichen Zutun von Unternehmensseite.

Dr. Marius Lüdicke und Dr. Kai-Uwe Hellmann (v. l.)

Beispielsweise HOPE (Hummer Owners Prepared for Emergancies), eine Community bei der sich Hummer-Fahrer mit dem American Red Cross zusammen getan haben, um in Krisensituationen zu helfen, ohne das General Motors damit etwas zu tun hatte. Sind Brand Communities vielleicht sogar nur dann erfolgreich und glaubwürdig, wenn sie unabhängig von einer Aktivität des Unternehmens gegründet werden? Für die User sicher. Aber für das Unternehmen kann es auch unangenehme Entwicklungen geben – siehe dazu die Plattform Fuh2.com (Fuck you and your hummer too), bei der Hummer-Gegner ihrem Protest Luft machen.

Wie entstehen (Brand) Communities und warum entstehen sie manchmal nicht? Warum sind einige erfolgreich, andere dagegen dümpeln nur so vor sich hin? Hierzu haben Dr. Marius Lüdicke und Dr. Kai-Uwe Hellmann folgende Einflussfaktoren identifiziert, die additiv oder auch einzeln eine Rolle spielen können:

Kulturelle Spannungen
„Brand Communities organisieren die soziale Bearbeitung kultureller Spannungen bzw. kollektiver Verlusterfahrungen.“ Soll heißen, wenn eine Marke es schafft, bestehende kulturellen Spannungen aufzubrechen, kann das helfen, Sympathie aufzubauen und zur Bildung einer erfolgreichen Community zu führen.

Motivüberlappung
Die Motive der Zielgruppe sollten ähnlich denen der Marke bzw. der Brand Community sein, um eine hohe Identifizierung zu erreichen. Das kann so weit führen, dass Community-Mitglieder persönlich beleidigt sind, wenn jemand schlecht über „seine“ Brand spricht.

Opportunität
Brand Communities entstehen, weil sie die Gelegenheit dazu haben. Das ist logisch – gibt es keine Marke, keine technischen Voraussetzungen oder kein Interesse, dann kann sich auch keine Community binden.

Distinktion
„Brand Communities entstehen, weil die Marken, um die sie sich bilden, den Mitgliedern eine relevante Unterscheidungsmöglichkeit bieten.“ Es muss dem User durch den Beitritt also eine Abgrenzungsmöglichkeit geboten werden. Beispielsweise BMW vs. Mercedes und den Rest der Welt. Mit dem Beitritt macht man deutlich: Ich bin ich und nicht du!

Komplexität
Brand Communities entstehen, weil niemand alleine mit den Produkten/ den Themen, um die sie sich bilden, klar kommt. Beispiel: Mutterschaft und die Frage nach der richtigen Musik. Oder auch die Vernetzung von Technologie-Nutzern und Do-it-youself-Schrauber zum Erfahrungsaustausch und zur Problemlösung.

Selbstverständlich sind das nur einige Aspekte. Weitere können gerne hier im Blog durch einen Kommentar ergänzt werden

The challenge of any marketing strategy is that as marketing leaders we always face the great ‘leap of faith‘ that you can’t get over.  We try to design marketing programs that coincide with right place, right time and right target audience.  And we have binders full of statistical, demographic and ethnographic insights that we use to justify this triangulation.  But it all remains a guess.

Further, our target customers don’t choose to participate in a given media or social-networking channel saying, “I hope my favorite brand will market to me there!”  They choose these channels out of their own personal and professional interests and needs. 

Finally, their choice of channel constantly changes over time.

Thus the underlying issue is that our brand communities are mobile – not just in the phone sense but in the holistic sense.  And it’s our challenge and opportunity as marketing leaders to figure out how to keep up with them.  Yet many of our legacy approaches, processes and platforms do not enable this; instead, they focus more on the medium, rather than the brand community relevance.

What can we do to help solve the ‘mobility’ problem and better center our marketing on brand communities?

Where should we start?

Nearly all of the major technology platforms and strategic marketing/brand frameworks have their shortcomings.  But we’ve got to start somewhere, which is the goal of this post – to get the dialogue rolling on this most central of issues to us as marketers.  I would like to propose that we start by:  (1) understanding brand communities; (2) placing brand communities at the center of our marketing strategies; (3) recognizing the challenges and opportunities inherent to mobile marketing; and (4) asking the right questions as we evolve our marketing programs to better target our mobile brand communities.

What are brand communities?

Brand communities are a ‘connected’ group of admirers and/or active users of a brand, and they can exist on multiple levels.  A brand community is also an important, conceptual way of thinking about brands as a cultural ‘totem’ or icon that helps to organize groups of consumers, their brand affiliations and the strength of those affiliations.  On the one end of the spectrum, there are visible and strong brand communities, such as Harley-Davidson enthusiasts – a group often cited in academic papers and case studies.  But brand communities are everywhere and cover even the most inconspicuous of brands. 

Brand communities have always existed, but research into brand communities has only really evolved over the past decade.  Professor Tom O’Guinn, who heads the Center for Brand and Product Management at Wisconsin, is a leading thinker on this topic.  “Brand communities have changed the basic marketing paradigm in that it has forced marketers to realize the enormous importance of consumer-to-consumer communication in a wired world, where groups of consumers may speak not with the voice of one, but with the power of thousands,” commented O’Guinn in a 2007 press release.

The research of O’Guinn and his colleagues supporting the concept of brand communities provides a powerful way to think about how we market to our customers.  Moreover, the growth of the Internet and of social networking/social media platforms has served as a key enabler for more effective identification of, connection with and management of brand communities. 

Years ago brand communities may have been less visible, but today they are front and center.  In fact, someone in your brand community may have even ‘friend-ed’ your brand on Facebook.

What are the implications of brand communities on marketing to an ever-mobile customer?

I believe that there are two key, twenty-first-century realities we must keep in mind:

> Think cross-channel; track their movements:   In the past we might have arbitrarily decided that the particular customer we’re going after is ‘more of a radio audience’ (or TV, or Internet, etc.) and so we would have focused our major campaigns in this way.  And our metrics and ratings from Nielsen or Arbitron would have been entirely-focused on that channel.  Now, more than ever, we need to identify where our brand communities congregate, cross-channels, and track and measure the performance of our marketing investments in this way.  We need to find correlations between channels and identify how our customers use these channels at different points in the process of interacting with and reacting to our brands.  (One example can be found in the emergence of digital place-based media – covered in a recent post on this site – where there is a interesting opportunity to tailor messages to customers in specific settings, making specific decisions.)  Then we need to communicate differently through different channels as part of an integrated marketing communication strategy.  We also need to keep our fingers on the pulse and know when our brand communities are permanently migrating from one platform to the next.

> Capture mass perception, but maintain one-on-one relationships:  O’Guinn succinctly identifies the universal truth of a brand community  – that it is not a homogeneous collective but, rather, is a collection of individual perspectives and opinions that has a common interest – your brand.  This means that while mass perceptions do matter, your integrated marketing communication strategy needs to embrace one-on-one, customized and personalized interactions with your customers wherever possible.  A one-size-fits-all message to a brand community will fall flat.

What are the challenges and opportunities inherent to mobile marketing?

A key opportunity for better connecting with our mobile brands – staying with them and maintaining that all-important, one-on-one dialogue – is to communicate with them via channels that allow access anytime, anywhere.  The most compelling platform is, of course, their mobile phones and data devices. 

Mobile marketing remains in its infancy – with many marketers wrapped up in text-based ad campaigns and sponsored-search marketing.  Such an approach is, at the end of the day, not very sophisticated, has diminishing returns and imposes on the medium the same limitations that have been noted above about centering marketing activities on a communication channel, rather than on a brand community.

For mobile marketing to evolve and grow, we must treat it differently.  But the question is how to do more with a platform that remains limited in many ways. 

Let’s explore some of the challenges and opportunities:

> Voice and SMS remain king:  Let’s not sugar coat this fact.  The majority of usage of this medium is not about fancy graphics and snazzy iPhone manipulation of photos; today, the mobile medium is primarily about voice and text.  80% of mobile operator revenues comes from voice services, according to industry analyst group Yankee Group in an article in Telephony magazine.  Mobile text campaigns regularly get 10X better return than those using rich media, according to the CEO of Limbo in a BrandWeek article.  An iPhone user is 70% more likely to use SMS, according to Nielsen Mobile in the same BrandWeek article. 

But let’s qualify this data.  Those phone calls and texts are the ‘ether’ that ties together brand communities and is how ideas and insights spread at a grassroots level.  So the challenge may be the slow adoption of the advanced, rich-media mobile services we all dream of, but the opportunity is to enable and participate in this dialogue today, via predominant mediums, not imaginary future mediums.

> Cross-channel ‘mash-ups’ are changing the game:  The opportunity to participate in this dialogue is rapidly emerging as part of a new round of mash-ups that are aligning the capabilities of the Internet and social-networking/social-media world with the accessibility of mobile devices. 

Perhaps the most interesting of developments is centered on the portability of social networking/social media platforms.  LinkedIn, a tool for professional networking, has migrated from accessibility via a Web interface to integration with Outlook and now with your mobile BlackBerry or iPhone.  Meanwhile Facebook, a platform for broader social networking (and perhaps the better channel when it comes to tools and capabilities for interfacing with brand communities in the consumer arena), has also gone mobile.  In fact, Facebook has a native application for BlackBerry and for iPhone, making it even more interactive and useful than LinkedIn’s mobile-browser interface.  Increasingly, even Twitter and blogs (including the Propelling Brands blog) are optimized for mobile access.

Usage of these sites is still nascent, but it shows great potential for growth.  Yankee Group, in a previously-cited Telephony article, states its belief that 15% of young adults/teens that use social networks already access them via mobile devices, and the firm pegs current carrier revenue from mobile social networking at $600 million.  And there is a lot of room for growth. 

The chart below (which I developed from a number of data sources, noted in the caption) illustrates what is still very early but promising penetration of mobile usage into leading social networking/social media sites:

Sources: M:Metrics; Wikipedia; Yankee Group

Two other emerging mash-ups of interest to us as marketers:  First is the evolution of mobile devices as an ‘e-wallet.’  This concept is not new, but there is emerging evidence that this idea has potential traction with consumers.  Harris Interactive, in a BrandWeek article, notes that roughly 20% of consumers want to see their mobile phone become an e-wallet.  Second is Google’s foray into the mobile arena.  The drawback to Google’s approach is that it is still very search-centric, which means that it is a more-tangential approach to centering marketing on brand communities; however, their new, open-source ‘Android’ platform for mobiles will likely offer marketers a whole new level of intelligence when it comes to interacting with and measuring brand communities on the go.

> Lots of promise:  Not surprisingly, many marketers are very bullish about mobile marketing.  83% of marketers believe mobile marketing effectiveness will grow over the next 3 years, and 23% of mobile subscribers have been exposed to mobile marketing, according to Forrester in the same BrandWeek article cited above.  The good news is that such an attitude lowers institutional barriers.  Translation:  ‘We want it; we just don’t have the tools, yet, to maximize our use of it!’

How can we better align marketing programs with mobile brand communities?

To be clear, my overall statement here is not that in order to stay with your ‘mobile’ brand community you need to embrace mobile marketing.  Mobile communication mediums are just one aspect of this opportunity to shift our opportunity and our thinking; rather, I think of this as an holistic move that has multiple parts.

Here is a proposed checklist of whether your existing marketing programs are aspiring to be mobile-brand-community-centric:

> Support for two-way dialogue:  This is a topic I’ve noted before and is inherent to platforms such as Twitter (discussed in a previous blog piece).  Are the channels you’re using to communicate with your brand community one-way or two?  Are you listening, or are you just talking?

> Tracking organic community movements:  I’m not talking about location-based services or GPS or ‘big brother.’  It’s simple:  Will you know when your brand community migrates from one platform to the next?  AOL is a great case study in this.  In many ways, the combination of Facebook and Twitter have taken the place of AOL, it’s e-mail platform, its communities and its AOL Instant Messenger application.  If these were mediums that you were marketing through, can you honestly say you were aware of the migration as it was happening?

> Incentives and rewards; participation:  How pervasive is your customer relationship?  What are the incentives and rewards inherent in not only your product or service but in the marketing programs that promote your product or service?  A friend and colleague, John Rotheray, who is working on an interesting venture related to mobile marketing, likes to call it ‘participation’ marketing.  I like this concept a lot.  How participative is your marketing program?

> Multi-channel/multi-platform thinking:  When you look at the lifecycle of your consumer and his/her purchase decision, how have you integrated your marketing communication programs so that there is a seamless handoff from one medium to the next?  And how natural is that connection?  There are numerous instances of marketers ‘forcing’ brand communities to aggregate on branded product websites.  Is that the right approach?  How channel and platform agnostic are you?  This is less of a problem as Web-browsing standards have stabilized, but if you’re pursuing mobile marketing, do you work on a range of mobile devices or just one?  Most importantly, are you embracing platforms, such as Facebook (and, frankly, even plain-old-text-based e-mail) that can be served up in numerous mediums – via desktop application, via Web and via mobile?  And have you optimized your communications so that they can be viewed easily cross-channel/cross-platform?  These are the subtleties and the realities of staying with our brand communities.

> Brand-community-centric metrics:  Finally, and most importantly, do you know when you’re connecting with your brand community versus just generating a lot of ‘impressions?’  Do you have the right metrics in place to assess the quality and strength of your connection with you brand community and to gain guidance about where you might take your branded products and services?  This is perhaps most fundamental and a topic we will come back to in future posts.

What’s next?

This dialogue is just beginning.  What are your thoughts on centering marketing programs on brand communities?  What are your experiences with making marketing mobile and multi-channel/multi-platform?  Please share your thoughts.

I wanted to call out an interesting thought piece I saw on the Conversation Agent blog today.

Marketers are often excited about riding the wave of every new channel or technology medium for reaching customers.  There is a sense of cache, but there is also this sense that if you get in first, you can actually rise above the background noise and make your message heard.  In recent years, this has meant embracing social media as part of brand building.  The latest darling, of course, is Twitter.

The issue is that too often the medium becomes the message and as marketers we forget the role each channel plays in the ongoing dialogue between brands and customers.  Also, all too often, we treat these mediums as a chance to shout at customers but never to really communicate with them.

I like this piece by Tony Hung.  It provides insight into what this medium is – and is not – in the context of dialogue between brands and their customers.

He urges that brand managers view Twitter as a way to do three things: 

1. really listen to customers,
2. show your commitment to participating in direct dialogue and
3. identify and interact with true thought leaders.

Most interesting:  Tony Hung is not a marketer.  He’s an internal-medicine physician that just happens to be passionate about social media, especially Twitter.  He blogs at Deep Jive Interests.

I’d take a moment to check out his piece.

There is an unending stream of advances in technology for monitoring the quality and quantity of mentions of your brand … online and under specific circumstances.  But are you getting a complete, relationally-accurate picture of how your brand is performing both online and off?  And/or are you looking in the wrong place? 

To level set:  It is impossible – today – to have a dashboard that shows you 100% of overall brand perception and reputation in real time and across all channels.  And I would be weary of any technology vendor that tries to sell you on the promise of such a 100% picture.

Is there, however, a way to ’sample’ multiple channels in a fashion that gives an accurate and proportional cross-section of real challenges, opportunities and context?  And can these samples be meaningful projections of the larger population?  Yes, but it requires challenging conventional wisdom about your program.

Here is what I propose as some thoughts on best practices for balancing your ‘brand picture’ – both online and off.

Don’t Try to Get It All … Instead, ‘Sample’ and ‘Project’

The first mistake most organizations make when they build a brand monitoring program is that they try to get it all.  They look at search engines such as Google and assume that from a simple interface you should be able to explore your global brand – instantly and comprehensively.  Or they look at what are some pretty fantastic multi-platform search engines, such as Biz360 or Factiva, and assume that you should be able to fully count and measure all of your media/PR/marketing/ad ‘hits.’ 

You can’t.  Nor should you try to. 

Attempting to capture every brand mention, every bit of verbatim or every minor directional insight on your brand at every given moment from every given channel doesn’t make sense.  It’s impossible, and there is no ROI in it.  Doing so will only get you caught up in an unending array of directionless data crunching – analysis paralysis. 

So how should you approach this scale problem?  Let’s take a page out of the marketing researcher’s play book.  Marketing researchers don’t poll everyone in a population with a typical survey; instead, they poll sample populations and with statistical methodologies are able to project – within a statistical significance level – what the larger population looks like.  This is how companies – especially those in scale markets – should measure their brands and make decisions related to brand perception and reputation.

Focus on Proportionality

When judging what is being said about your brand – in a chat room, on a blog, on the nightly news or around the water cooler – keep in mind the channel, its frequency and relative magnitude.  Do you know where your customers spend most of their time engaging with or reacting to your brand?  This should guide how you measure brand performance.

First, you should ensure that you are capturing all of the different channels that matter – both online and offline.  This is where companies such as Biz360, which combines insight from online media, print media, broadcast media and blogs, and emerging player Phoenix Marketing International, with its proprietary AdPi and BrandPi multi-channel tracking and metrics, are critical.  They recognize that Web measures, alone, do not capture all of the instances of a customer’s interactions with a given brand and they help support a proportional picture of your brand – online and off.  There are also nuances to the online world.  For instance, start-up Twing.com has built a search engine focused on chat rooms and discussion forums, where – the company’s founders point out – a majority of online discussion occurs, not in blogs.  Make sure you’re not putting too much emphasis on one channel – such as websites – and missing others simply because you don’t have an efficient way to search that channel today.

Second, you should develop a sense of the relative ‘mind share‘ your customer lends to each channel in his/her decision-making about your brand.  Out of the 16+ hours we are awake each day, where do your customers spend most of their time communicating?

Third, you should proportionally balance your metrics and scorecards against this type of insight.  If blogs are (hypothetically) only 2% of relative mind share and other channels represent a much higher proportion, should you really be too worried about a single blogger?  Your internal brand analysis processes should take this into account.

Simplify Your Metrics

Most brand managers and marketers are drowning in data.  And does it really help us?  Instead of getting caught up in the cycle of trying to capture every single, minor directional insight that might possibly provide clues into what your customer thinks about your brand … simplify.  Focus on straightforward and highly-correlated metrics that really tell you something.

Create a simple, ‘top-five’ group of easily-measurable metrics with straightforward indicators and what they mean to your brand.  If you have large amounts of aggregated and organized data, one way to accomplish this would be to invest in a ‘factor-analysis’ project, using software from an analytics firm such as SPSS.  But if you are a smaller company or have data that isn’t typically captured in a database, focus on simple questions:  What are the top indicators that most impact purchase intent, repeat purchases and willingness to recommend your brand?  What are the degrees of good or bad that really matter?  Identify them; simplify them; and then trust that they are capturing most of what you need to know.

I should mention that often it’s only metrics at the extremes that really indicate true inclination in a customer toward a given brand.  Researchers Jones and Sasser conducted studies in the mid 1990s that showed that merely being ‘satisfied’ as a customer (i.e., 4 out of 5 on a 5-point scale) is not enough.  ‘Totally satisfied’ customers (i.e., 5 out of 5) are six times me likely to repurchase than merely satisfied, Jones and Sasser found.  Turns out a 2, 3 or 4 rating doesn’t tell us much as a marketer.  So why suffer over nuances that don’t really matter at the end of the day?

Be Proactive Rather Than Reactive

Don’t wait for someone to point out a problem with your brand.  Put systems and processes in place – both online and off – to keep an eye on what your current and perspective customers think about your brand.  Having proportionally-aware, recurring systems and processes will help to establish baselines and will provide better perspectives when there are significant ‘deltas’ in how your brand is perceived.

Go to the Source(s)

If you really want to know what your customers think, ask them.  Granted, most marketing researchers will admit that there are things customers won’t tell you.  But you’d be surprised at what they will tell you and how appreciative they may be at your asking for their insight.  Just be sure to respect their time and privacy.  And recognize that there are different strata of customers and customer influencers – advocates and detractors; customers, former customers and prospects; third party influencers, etc.  The key is to recognize how your customers’ perceptions are built and then to put in place ways to measure changes at the source.

How has your organization balanced monitoring its brand both online and offline?  What technologies and vendors have you used to integrate and manage a total perspective of your brand?  Please share your thoughts.

We are officially launching this blog, and as is customary in the blog-o-sphere, we thought we would take a few minutes to give readers a sense of the blog’s focus, differentiation, contributors and agenda.

What is the focus of this blog?

This blog is focused on the topics of brands, marketing, innovation and technology – separately and together, in parallel and as they collide … and one of the firm beliefs of the folks behind this blog is that they ARE colliding.  This is requiring brand and marketing leaders to retool, but it also means that those developing new innovation and technology – especially software companies – need to retool.  A revolution is coming!

The blog’s content captures changing views of how to effectively ‘propel’ brands in the marketplace and how to measure and validate success and failure.  It is also about opportunity … for brand builders and marketers to take their game(s) to the next level by embracing new approaches and new tools that are often the product of new innovation and technology. 

But most of all it is meant to drive dialogue – to ‘propel’ ideas – about the future of brands, the people and companies who develop and market them and how they can gain competitive leverage through innovation and technology.

How is it different from other blogs?

There are many, many, many, many, many, many … (you get the point) blogs about each of these four topics, but there are no blogs that really capture the ‘overlap’ of all four topics or that probe the boundaries of what we know and think about this convergent domain. 

As you read this blog over the coming weeks and months, you’ll ‘get’ what it is all about, but for those who follow other blogs in this space, let us identify how this blog is different.  What is this blog NOT about?  It is …

• NOT a ‘fuzzy-logic’ commentary on social media X.0, per se … although blogs, social networks and related technologies will be a regular topic from the prospective of their value to managing and marketing brands
• NOT just about the online world, but instead seeks to bridge online and offline brand strategies … given brands really do have a life beyond their web site
• NOT marketing technology for marketing technology’s sake … although we will talk a lot about marketing technology
• NOT an attempt to recreate BrandWeek, Brand Republic, or any of the other industry news sites/mags
• NOT a how-to guide for building a tactical lead-generation system or infrastructure
• NOT repetition of anything that your Marketing 101 professor told you but that you have since conveniently forgotten
• NOT a regurgitation of others’ blog posts

Who is writing this blog?

This blog is being primarily written, produced and moderated by Adam Needles and Christine Needles – two professionals who are brand builders, marketers and communicators, who work in the technology industry and who also are passionate about integrating innovation and technology into the practice of brand building, marketing and communication.

Over time, our vision is to invite other thought leaders to contribute their own insights and to expand this overall dialogue. 

But we believe it is most important to hear from you, the reader.  Please comment on what you see here, if it stirs your thoughts, and let us know if you would like to join the site as a regular contributor.

What can you expect on the horizon? 

We hope that the topics and issues will be evolutionary; however, we also realize it’s important to get conversation started.  So we have brainstormed some initial topics for upcoming posts:

• Balancing online brand monitoring with the offline world
• Bridging the marketing ‘digital divide’ between industries that are technologically sophisticated and those that remain in the low-tech/no-tech universe and finding a middle ground
• Developing nimble marketing technology infrastructure via service-oriented architecture and software-as-as-service platforms
• Finding your next-generation integrated marketing services agency
• Nesting effective mobile marketing strategies and campaigns in a larger effort to capture value from ‘brand communities’
• Tackling ‘MRP’ – marketing resource planning – and other ways to re-think your marketing infrastructure
• Understanding how the advent of search technology changes (and sometimes doesn’t change) brand perceptions and strategy

What do you think? 

Let us know what is on your mind and where we can focus our dialogue.