Archive for the ‘customer lifetime value’ Category

Launching the Rainier Advisory Group

Posted: September 7, 2010 in Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, enterprise marketing platform, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, online marketing suite, Rainier Advisory Group, SDMA, Strategy, web marketing
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After nearly 5 years, I’m leaving Ascentium and starting my own consultancy, Rainier Advisory Group specializing in helping companies navigate the complexity of the marketing technology landscape.

I’m very proud of the success I’ve had growing Ascentium from a small technology consulting firm into the 5th largest independent digital agency according to AdAge and being called out with the highest customer satisfaction scores in the country by Forrester Research in their 2009 Forrester Wave® of Top Interactive Agencies.

Now is the time to move on and focus on my real passion of mastering cross-channel customer experiences through the integration of the technologies that are helping transform the marketing landscape from search to analytics, lead management to CRM and everything in between. With the maturation of cloud-based services, today’s marketer is faced with a myriad of choices and almost no one to help navigate not only the applications and services themselves, but how they fit into an integrated cross-channel strategy, Forrester calls Digital Brand Orchestration.

I believe that my combination of executive experience on the client side for Lufthansa, T-Mobile and Gateway, agency consulting experience working with companies like Microsoft, Intel, Lexus, and Ford as well as start ups like Marketfish, Quasar, and Surveyanalytics as well as my thought leadership and speaking engagements for organizations like Forrester Research, the DMA, Digital Hollywood, Mirren New Business, The Integrated Marketing Conference and MarketMix, position me well to provide the strategic consulting services needed by leading companies, marketing service providers and advertising agencies.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you’d like more information or if you know of any firm in need of my services.
I will also be devoting time to my commitment to our industry in my capacity as past president of the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, incoming president of the Pacific Northwest Business Marketing Association chapter as well as lecturing on digital marketing at local institutes of higher learning.

Most of my contact information remains unchanged, with the exception that I can now be reached at john@rainierag.com or jkottcamp@gmail.com . Today I have also launched my new company website, www.rainierag.com . Farewells are always sad, but new beginnings are even more exciting. I continue to wish everyone at Ascentium continued success and I look forward to sharing new stories with each of you in the near future.

Market Researchers are the keymasters of loyalty

Posted: July 25, 2009 in Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, Strategy
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I was thinking about loyalty the other day. I had just sat through a company presentation where we talked about the almost 2 years of experience we have with Net Promoter Score. In the same meeting we also talked about our new Web site and how we were going to start capturing visitor data via our Web analytics tools and then incorporate that data into our CRM system. And at the end of the meeting, the topic even began to cover the piloting of capturing social media data and putting that it into CRM. Wow, that’s a lot of data. But what’s the connection between loyalty and data.

In the past, I’ve written about two distinct ways that connect data and loyalty. First, by applying what I call Closed Loop Marketing, a company can create endless loops of communication between consumers and companies. By opting in, a company can track a Web site visitor’s behavior, match with data captured from offline interactions like events, retail transactions or customer service. Then if intelligence is applied to understand the needs and wants of the customer, a company can reach back out to the customer to advance to dialogue, drive incremental transactions or take care of service incidents, closing the communication loop and advancing the relationship and by extension increasing loyalty.

In other contexts, I’ve made arguments about how companies can begin to use a mix of behavioral data captured online, demographics from CRM systems and transactional data from line of business systems to enable predictive analytics that will optimize response rates, close rates and ROI in general.

But today I had an epiphany. The missing piece has been the role of market research. Traditionally we think of market research as focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research and endless cross-tabs slicing and dicing every possible sort of data. And more recently, market research has been turned upside down with the advent of online surveys like Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey. But what is still in its infancy is the pairing of market research analytic expertise with social media influence monitoring.

So what does it all mean? For over a decade we’ve been hearing about the 360° view of the customer. And this has for the most part meant getting more individual data about a customer to be able to sell them more. But what it lacks, besides the fact that virtually no one has achieved it, is that we need to stop talking about data and start talking about intelligence. Capturing transactional data from online and offline is valuable, but only if someone is looking at that data and gaining insight from it.

CRM is primarily a tool of sales people and sales people do not have the time, the background or the motivation to analyze data and turn it into insight. Campaign or brand managers are only interested in their slice of the customer and aren’t really the best choice to be the customer’s advocate.

My choice is to call upon the market researchers. Their skills lend themselves to be good listeners and good ones have the ability to synthesize and extract patterns, critical keys to gaining true understanding of behavior.
So to all of those fellow travelers in the market research space who are seeing their budgets being stripped, there traditional approaches being usurped by self-service tools online and are wondering where their next career move will take them. Start looking at yourselves as the customer advocate and make sure everything you are doing advances your understanding of customer behavior and that you are able to translate that for your businesses or your clients. That will be where you add the most value and this is the key to loyalty.

Forrester Research features Ascentium among the top Interactive agencies

Posted: June 9, 2009 in aQuantive, Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, ecommerce, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, microsoft, social media, social networking, Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0, web marketing
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On Friday, Forrester Research published its Forrester Wave™, Interactive Marketing Agencies – Web Design Capabilities, Q2, 2009. Ascentium was covered for the first time along with other top digital agencies including Sapient, imc2, Razorfish, IconNicholson, IBM Interactive, Organic, Blast Radius, iCrossing, OgilvyInteractive, Resource Interactive, and Rosetta, Critical Mass, Molecular, R/GA, VML, Whittmanhart and Arc Worldwide.

In addition to just being favorably reviewed among such a great group an agencies, we take pride in that Ascentium scored the highest out of all the agencies in the category or customer satisfaction. We credit that in large part to emphasis we have given to growing customer loyalty and constantly measuring it with tools like Net Promoter Scores.

When I joined Ascentium almost four years ago, we were primarily a technology consulting firm with strong Web development skills and some good design talent, but we hadn’t yet made the commitment to become a true full service digital agency. But we got together as a team and agreed that the future was in leveraging technology to advance marketing and to move from advertising to engagement.

Three years and a roster of blue chip clients like Microsoft T-Mobile, Dell, Cisco and Random House, later. We have garnered the attention of the likes of Forrester Research and have grown from a local Seattle-based firm to an agency with offices across the country and internationally as well.

It’s been a privilege to be a part of this journey and to have helped nurture it along the way. It wasn’t always easy teaching technologists and marketers to not only get along, but to actually work synergistically, to create a new model for what Forrester has called, the agency of the future.

So congratulations to all the other agencies featured in the Wave, thanks to all the analysts at Forrester who have seen value in what we’ve created and well done to each and every employee I have the privilege of working with at Ascentium. Just wait for what we have in store for you next.

I’m Hearing from more colleagues than ever before

Posted: April 30, 2009 in Ascentium, Blogroll, CMO, customer lifetime value, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, social networking, Strategy, Web 2.0
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There’s been a definite upswing in the number of ex-colleagues who are reaching out to me via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or via good old fashioned email lately. I’m glad to hear from them as I believe that is one of inherent values in social networking, re-connecting with people you have lost touch with over the years and multiple moves.

The problem is, the common thread of many of these re-connections is that they have been laid off or in some other fashion, find themselves actively looking for new career opportunities. And these are not the grade B people you knew, who while likeable enough, you knew were never going to be ready for the “big time”. Today, it is the A list just as likely to be out searching for something new. The economy has picked stripped the fat and is now eating into the meat and muscle itself.
Last week I attend Forrester’s Marketing Forum and the theme was that it was time to invest in the future. And that is what the smart companies are going to do. But there are still many, many companies who are afraid to invest, the risk is too high where sheer existence seems to hang by such a thin thread. But it seems such a shame to waste the brilliant talent that’s out there right now, filling their days searching Monster.com and cleaning out the basement.

So I’d like to propose that all those companies who are faced with declining revenues and uncertain futures, reach out to the very smart people who have been sidelined and figure out a way you can work together to map out a future that will serve everyone’s best interests and get the ball rolling again.

RFIDs for People, it’s finally here

Posted: April 1, 2009 in Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, community marketing, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, ecommerce, enterprise marketing platform, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, microsoft, online marketing suite, re-marketing, social media, social networking, Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0, web marketing
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Chipmaker, BrandChip Inc., announced that they have perfected a RFID chip that can be embedded in jewelry, watches or other personal items commonly worn by average people. This chip will contain opt in personal information regarding the wearer’s tastes, shopping habits and brand preferences. Participating retailers will be able to access the information whenever the wearer comes into the store and can then automatically generate a special offer via mobile phone.

This is the ultimate in one to one marketing. Don Rogers of Peppers and Rogers fame has been quoted as saying he’ll sign up as soon as he can and looks forward to getting some great offers from The Sharper Image. Google is figuring out how to offer a stripped down version for free and Microsoft is said to be studying it and should have a beta in market by 2015.

I applaud these efforts and look forward the next generation when they won’t even need the mobile connection. You will be able to get the offer straight from the chip.

Oh, and by the way, have a great today, April 1, 2009

Is Integrated Marketing the same as Integrating Marketing?

Posted: August 26, 2008 in Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, integrated marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, social networking, Strategy, User-generated content, Web 2.0
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The other day I found myself in a heated discussion about integrated marketing. On the one side, it was argued that integrated marketing is a decade old concept that was proven not to be either practical or particularly effective. The other camp argued that integrated marketing is a core element of anything we call marketing2.0 and regardless of name, is something that is essential for the future of marketing. Both sides of the debate have good arguments and I couldn’t find any fault with their logic, however I think both miss the point.

The future of marketing does not hinge on integrating messaging across multiple channels like we tried to do at the advent of the internet age. We’ve learned that different media and different mediums require unique messaging. Just because a TV ad is video, does not mean that it’s going to be a hit on YouTube. Traditional print copy losses most online readers before the first sentence is complete and anything that hints of advertising or hype will be shot down within any community.

On the other side, simply participating in every new social network like Twitter, Imeem or Boing Boing does not automatically mean great marketing. Companies still spend as much on Yellow Pages ads as they do on internet marketing and broadcast TV is still the biggest single line item in any marketing plan. They key is not trying to be everywhere, but trying to be in the right places, where the right customers are.

I started out by saying that both points of view are missing the point. It’s not that they are wrong, but I think the real meaning of integration in today’s marketing world should reflect solutions to the problems that are keeping CMOs up at night. The biggest struggle marketing has is not with customers, but with the rest of the company.

For decades, marketing departments have used their own metrics and their own milestones for success. Even as their methods and tools have become more sophisticated, most marketers still speak in terms of reach & frequency, opens, click-throughs and response rates. Those that do attempt to measure business metrics like ROI, tend to use implied or derived revenue data and quite often their formulas do not reflect basic understanding of finance principles.

And this lack of business rigor is reflected in the way other parts of the enterprise view marketing. From the CMO council to Forrester Research, there are multiple studies that say the same thing. Most CEOs do not believe that marketing can justify its expenditures, even if they know intrinsically there is value in what is being done. Few CFOs accept any numbers marketing presents as accurate and VPs of Sales tends to argue over the influence and therefore impact of marketing programs. In general, they assign the revenue to the one who closed the sale, not the one who found the lead.

The answer is the integration of marketing into the rest of the enterprise, allowing the CMO to take their rightful place as a business leader in the C suite. Like everything else in business, this integration has people, process and technology elements. From a people perspective, marketers have to become increasingly left brain thinkers. Identify themselves as business people, no matter how creative they may be and learn to look at everything they do by asking the question, does this advance the business? From a process point of view, organizations have to stop thinking in terms of the marketing funnel, the sales pipeline and customer service and understand and track the customer along the complete customer lifecycle continuum.

And finally, look to technology as the enabler of both people and process. Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, has got to come out of the Sales closet it normally hides in. If companies’ marketing, sales and customer service groups are not all using the same CRM application, or at least the same data, then they are bound to remain siloed in their approach to the customer. If the data collected from each customer touch point is not brought together and form the basis for a robust business intelligence solution, then each division will continue to report on its own metrics; campaigns, sales, incidents and not understand the value contribution of each interaction.

So, by integrating marketing into a closed loop environment, built upon a platform where all customer interaction is captured in a CRM system and then reported on and analyzed through the multiple lenses of a BI solution, companies will be able to understand their customers across time and behavior, as well as across media. The result will be achievement of integrated marketing through the integration of marketing.

Ascentium named Partner of the Year by Microsoft. Why does that matter to a marketing services company?

Posted: June 27, 2008 in Ascentium, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, Customer Engagment, customer lifetime value, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, microsoft, re-marketing, Strategy, Web 2.0, web marketing
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This week Microsoft honored my company, Ascentium, with its prestigious “Partner of the Year” award for our work in the area of portals and collaboration.  We were also named a finalist in the category of CRM Partner of the year.  This comes on the heels of being named one the top ten agencies by the Interactive Media Council and one of the top 50 digital agencies by Adage Magazine. So what, other than it’s always cool to work for a company that’s winning awards and being named to top ten lists?

It shows that we can bring together a team that is equally adept at marketing and technology.  That it is possible for these two distinctly different business types, and I’d go one step further and say two inherently different styles of reasoning can come together and create something new and unique.

I’ve been evangelizing, some might say harping on, the concept of what I have been calling closed loop marketing.  I gravitated to the term closed loop marketing, not because it’s the most accurate representation of my views on how marketing and technology can and should intersect, but because it’s a relatively well-understood term within the marketing world in the context of reporting and reaching the goal of measuring ROI in a way that will satisfy CFOs and more importantly CEOs, not just marketing organizations.

What I really mean by closed loop marketing is the ability to create, develop, deliver, and support truly differentiated experiences, whether between company and customer (B2C), company and company (B2B), company and employee (B2E) or customer and customer (C2C).  Experience is core to communication.  It is both logical, lineal and definable as well as emotional, inspirational and multi-dimensional in nature.  It spans the entire customer lifecycle from awareness, consideration, conversion, retention and loyalty.  It is the essence of engagement and the rationale of relationships.  And ultimately, from a business perspective, it is the source of all revenue.

In today’s world of multi-channels, global reach, micro-segmentation and a societal case of attention deficient disorder, it is the holy grail of successful companies and can only come about through a partnership between marketing, sales and IT.  There is almost no customer interaction that does not involve technology and the capture, use or movement of data.  When a retail customer buys their groceries, an online buyer downloads music, the CEO attends an event or when any of us goes to the Web to search for information or to communicate with our friends (which of course the term friends has been completely redefined in the Web2.0 world), we are engaging because of technology.  CRM, BI, HTML, Ad-serving, lead scoring, site optimization; all are technology tools which provide the intelligence to empower experiences.  So when it comes down to it, the solution is fairly simple:

Experience plus Intelligence equals Relationship –    E + I = R

So back to the question at hand, why does it matter that Ascentium wins Partner of the Year and Top Ten Agency at the same time.  It’s because we have studiously built a team of people who understand the formula and are proving that right brain marketers can co-exist with left brain technologists and that together they can use intelligence to build experience and I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve always that combining intelligence and experience was a good thing.  Maybe politicians should even try it sometime.

Engagement and Lifetime Value: The two ways to measure customers

Posted: April 8, 2008 in Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, customer lifetime value, integrated marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Strategy, web marketing
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Its 4:45p and I’ve made it through most of the first day of the Forrester Marketing Forum.  Met a lot of good people, heard some good presentations, spoke with some smart analysts.  So what, you may ask.  What have I walked away with that is making me think differently about my customers, clients or the direction of marketing?

Brian Haven of Forrester kicked off with Engagement: A New Approach to Understanding Customers.  Which was no surprise since the theme of the entire conference is engagement.  Honestly I was prepared to yawn, not because of the speaker, Brian is a strong, smart and engaging (see, I can use the lingo) speaker.  And not because I disagree with the thesis of the talk, that we all need to move away from speaking to customers or even the 1:1 mantra of dialogue with customers and evolve to relating to customers in terms of the degree and integrity of the engagement with customers over time.  The reason I was prepared to yawn was that I thought I knew the argument fairly well and I was not expecting to hear anything new or enlightening.

So what stood out in the end?  Brian showed an eye chart slide filled with literally dozens of analytical metrics and data points that to a greater or lesser degree we’re all either already collecting or would like to be collecting.  Brian asked the question, “with all the analytical metrics available, which ones are meaningful?”  At first glance, it was a fairly straightforward question.  I looked at each metric on the slide and there wasn’t a single one I could say was not a valid measurement tool or one I would advise a client was unnecessary.  So my first reaction was that they’re all meaningful.  But of course before that idea could even come out of my mouth I questioned it.  It was then that I realized that the issue was not which ones of more meaningful than others, it was really how can you bring all these metrics together in such a way as to demonstrate value to the business.

And I guess that was Brian’s point.  Engagement is the sum of many points of view, touch points and metrics.  It is trying to measure an ephemeral relationship that most likely changes with every new interaction or more broadly with every exposure to the brand.  It is measuring emotion.

Compare that to sophisticated models that calculate lifetime customer value and you’ve got the two keys to measure the outcome of marketing; increasing customer value, i.e. the revenue over time that can be directly attributed to a customer and secondly affinity, loyalty  or whatever other term you want to apply to the emotional relationship that is a driver of influence.

So thanks to Brian for making me think of how to measure customer value both rationally and emotionally.

The Online Marketing Suite

Posted: March 17, 2008 in Blogroll, Closed Loop Marketing, CMO, customer lifetime value, enterprise marketing platform, integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Marketing Strategy, online marketing suite, re-marketing, Strategy, web marketing
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I was just reading Peter Kim’s blog, beingpeterkim discussing the idea of the online marketing suite  I fully agree that the time has come for marketer’s to embrace the idea of an online marketing suite.  However I think it is a mistake to represent it’s value as being primarily around collaboration and optimization.  Marketing organizations are being pushed harder and harder by the rest of the enterprise to integrate marketing with sales, operations and particularly finance.  There are two values of what Peter’s Forrester colleague Suresh Vittal calls the enterprise marketing platform.

First, by integrating various technology tools like analytics, campaign management and CRM, marketing organizations can begin to track relationships, capture real behavior and preferences and engage customers with meaningful dialogue.

Secondly, my integrating all these various applications, marketing will be able to elevate its reporting and analysis from campaign reporting to real business metrics that can measure ROI or ROMI from prospect (think adserving) to conversion (think ecommerce) and most importantly loyalty (CRM).

While the first will bring the most immediate benefit to members of marketing organizations, it is the second that will gain them the success and respect.