December 1, 2009 | Tags:
Today, Forrester Research acquired Strategic Oxygen from Monitor Group. Strategically, this is an exciting move for us and for our partner clients. Forrester’s analysts have spent more than 26 years focused on writing research for marketers of technology products and services. The "what if" nature of our tools will enable Forrester to aid these marketers in planning day-to-day activities on a far more detailed level. Forrester’s deep global channel affords Strategic Oxygen a unique opportunity to widen the application of our tools through hundreds of leading technology brands.
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The two largest learning’s from watching hundreds of programs and campaigns work, fail or just exist is that we, as a technology BtB marketing industry, do not pay adequate attention to what matters to customers outside our immediate areas of expertise. We hope that as 2010 planning and execution looms we can garner some insights from the list of assessments below. Some are as small as a tweet, others maybe fall into the IM category and still others are more questions than answers.
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For all the very complex consumer segmentation models used by a lot of brands we have to increasingly ask if we are paying adequate attention to the most important and clearly most under-represented segment inside the consumer electronics market. I do not mean youth targets, but instead the largest segment of all, females. They represent at least 30% of the decision influence inside families (US and even PRC) and if we assume they are also about 50% of the singles market this means that they are at least 45% of all the influencer targets. The carriers and other organizations such as healthcare providers understand this. We often see from traditional technology brands no more than a tacit and visual recognition of them as influencers.
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The constant row for resources is invariable driven around the new versus established customers or communications, versus demand generation or even infrastructure investments for lower cost communications going forward (social media, CRM), versus marketing for the now. These debates are hardened by the skills and philosophies of those in each camp (hunters for new accounts and farmers for established business), infrastructure builders for CRM and demand generation swat teams for the now.
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November 9, 2009 | Tags:
marketing skills, planning
By John Steinert
In the two previous entries, I talked about the importance in building momentum of getting internal teams working together (e.g. marketing and sales; headquarters and field). I hope that resonated with colleagues living with the daily challenges of fragmentation and silo-ing. I also hope that many of you said “hey, this is all beside the point, we’re really supposed to be focused on the customer”. Ain’t that the truth? But it’s easier said than done.
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November 2, 2009 | Tags:
marketing skills, planning
By John Steinert
There is a great deal of interest these days in pursuing both strategic consistency and potential savings in marketing by centralizing many activities. Done wisely and carefully, I have seen a number of these efforts realize real quantifiable improvements on both the cost and the effectiveness sides of the equation. Building on the theme introduced in the first entry of this series (Read the Chart from Right to Left), here I want to move from discussing the interconnection of marketing and sales in general to the specific case of the headquarters/region connection. If we support the idea that as companies improve their strategic focus, specialization and eventually centralization makes sense for certain activities, we must also recognize that there are limits and there are certainly pitfalls to be avoided. Since the theme of this entire series is “Momentum”, let’s open the discussion there.
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October 16, 2009 | Tags:
social media, Twitter
Please see the cartoon below from September/October issue of BARK magazine (a dog magazine). The picture shows a rather unhappy dog on the floor listening to his human parents. This is an example of the remarkable penetration into our psyche that one of the most recent and now relevant forms of new media has taken on us. The question is what is really being said on Twitter and how does or can it affect your brand and its interactions (dog or not).
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October 14, 2009 | Tags:
marketing skills, planning
-By John Steinert
You’re on the same team! Get focused, Collaborate, Read the Chart Right to Left
There may have been a time when marketing strategies and sales strategies could be very different and still make perfect sense for your company. These days, if it doesn’t resonate with the sales organization, it’s going to be really, really hard to sustain in the budget. So why even try? Why not simply focus on creating the outputs from your marketing organization that are clearly necessary to drive sales? Why not agree that the plans are clearly and transparently aligned?
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In our final part of this series we will discus the marketing mix matrix.
So how does this matrix work?
Please download the whole ppt file here. The key dynamic that invariably drives an analysis of this nature is the correlation between sales complexity and maturity of marketing. The most complex sales (top of the vertical) are the solutions for large enterprise sales. The horizontal represents the range of marketing maturity from a compass type marketing environment to a full GPS-type marketing environment.
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We continue our blog from Oct 2, 2009 on integrated marketing for 2010 with the magic quadrant.
The magic quadrant for Integrated Marketing and where you are
The magic quadrant is a wonderful thing: it brackets the world in a two-by-two controllable set of dimensions, with a trade off from bottom left to top right. Part of the reason for producing the simple health matrix is that it allows you to think about which bubble best describes where you are. You can pick off where you are on the integrated maturity model and this will help drive how to focus on the questions and issues bought up in the previous blogs.
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