Launching the Rainier Advisory Group

September 7, 2010

John Kottcamp 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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

The Future of Agency Relationships needs everyone’s participation

April 7, 2010

John Kottcamp Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The other week, a new report came out of Forrester Research, entitled, The Future of Agency Relationships by three analysts, Sean Corcoran, Dave Frankland and Vidya Drego. First, I highly recommend reading the full report if you have Forrester access. You can also check out Sean’s blog post, Marketers Must Lead Agency Change or read Michael Bush’s article in AdAge, Memo to Marketers: It’s Your Fault if Your Shop Flounders.

All the coverage does a good job of summarizing the changes to the way agencies should provide value to their marketing clients and more importantly to their clients’ customers, be they consumer or businesses. Forrester has identified three fundamental services they feel agencies must provide: Ideas, Interaction and Intelligence. They call it adaptive marketing. And they are sending a clear message to marketers that the burden is in their court to demand these services of their agencies.

I agree with the logic. Ideas will always be central, but if and only if, the ideas can be developed and converted into real, meaningful and engaging experiences for customers. As Forrester say, “Experiences become more prominent than campaigns.” Interaction is the process of converting ideas into experiences. And in general the process for interaction is what is changing most radically. Interaction used to be the consumption of messaging, mostly through traditional channels like broadcast and print. But today with the explosion of channels, devices and emerging media, interaction is highly dependent on technology to bring the “big idea” to life. And this is one of those areas where it’s the agency that needs to change more than the marketer.

Agencies can no longer hide behind the big idea or the visually arresting creative treatment alone. If they cannot provide experiences that they, together with the marketer, and most likely the client’s IT department as well, can build, execute, support and track, they will not be successful in a highly digitalized world.

And this leads to Forrester’s third “I”, intelligence. Customer intelligence is, or should be, at the core of every action, experience and program agencies promote, marketers adopt and businesses demand. While much of the process of coming up with the “Big idea” is still a very right brain, creative exercise, which demands talent, experience and the ability to communicate, it is the question of who do you communicate with, how, when and with what message that is at the heart of customer intelligence, or left brain marketing. Any agency that does not understand and value the role of data, research and measurement will not be able to deliver success to their clients. And any marketer who does not demand measureable success from their agencies will not be able to translate those marketing metrics into the business metrics that drive a company’s “C-Suite” and that will reward marketers with budgets, respect and a seat at the business table, which is definitely where a CMO should sit.

So, go check out the Forrester report and think about how it should impact your business, whether you are a corporate marketer, an agency or a marketing services provider.

Market Researchers are the keymasters of loyalty

July 25, 2009

John Kottcamp Strategy, integrated marketing, CMO, Marketing Strategy, Closed Loop Marketing, customer lifetime value, Customer Engagment, Ascentium , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

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.

High ROI Marketing Strategies for a Down Economy

February 6, 2009

John Kottcamp Blogroll, Marketing, Web 2.0, web marketing, Strategy, integrated marketing, community marketing, social networking, social media, Interactive Agency, CMO, Marketing Strategy, Closed Loop Marketing, Customer Engagment, Ascentium , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

high-roi-tips1Last night I had the opportunity to moderate a great panel discussion on the topic of High ROI Marketing Strategies for a down Economy, held in conjunction with the Seattle Direct Marketing Association, SDMA. monthly dinner meeting.  The panel consisted of Andrea Schwarzenbach from Alaska Airlines, Andy Cotton,Yahoo, Jamie Lomas, AdReady, Brian Ratzliff, WhatCounts and Michael Williams, Williams-Helde.

The was a great turnout of about 85 marketing professionals from all over the Puget Sound and the discussion was both lively and thought provoking.  The overriding messages were; don’t be afraid of the economy, now is the time to try something new and pay more attenpation to your customers.

I had asked each panelist to come up with 1 tip that they could pass on to the attendees and we put all the ideas together in a short deck.  Take a look, download it or pass it on to a friend.  We all got a lot out of the evening and I hope you will as well.

When CRM works, it’s all about aligning Marketing, Sales and Service, in other words, the customer lifecycle. But is it about the customer?

May 28, 2008

John Kottcamp integrated marketing, Interactive Agency, Marketing, Strategy, Web 2.0, web marketing , , , , , 1 Comment

I was busy preparing for a conversation with a client about the importance of building a solid strategy around how to get business value out of an upcoming CRM technology deployment when I ran across a couple of good articles from William Band at Forrester Research.  In his piece entitled, “The Right CRM Metrics For Your Organization,” published last October, two key points are made; 1) “metrics enforce the discipline needed for CRM success and 2) Link CRM strategy, Tactics and metrics to business goals.”

Neither of these points are radical, new or very complicated.  But what surprised me about them was that they were almost the same key learnings I walked away with from a global CRM initiative I was a part of back in the 90s.  Does that mean we haven’t learned anything in the last decade or does it mean we were looking at the wrong metrics back then and did we understand what the business goals really were?

Over the years, I have talked about campaign metrics, customer lifecycle metrics, lifetime customer value, recency, frequency, RFM and of course the ubiquitous ROI.  More recently I’ve looked at aligning sales and marketing as a goal of CRM in itself and that raises another whole list of metrics; lead score, lead conversion, entering pipeline stage, time to conversion, order value….  And if that wasn’t enough, add in the Customer Service metrics like issue resolution, customer satisfaction, churn….  Not to mention the call center’s own internal performance metrics like time on call, pick up rate, drop rate….  In the end it appears that there are almost countless metrics that need to be considered and as Mr. Band suggests, it should be done before the technology purchase.

So what’s my point?  What was my aha moment when getting ready for my client.  It was simply this.  We have moved from tactical marketing, sales or service goals and raised them to business goals.  But in the process what about customer goals?  We have moved even more company centric at a time when the market is becoming more customer centric whether we like it or not.

Customer Relationship Management really refers to how companies can manage their customers.  It is a very one-sided and natural way, to track the relationship between company and customer.  In a Web2.0 or 3.0 or whatever .0 world we live in, our customers are taking control of the relationship itself and we need to establishing a new set of metrics that represent what is important for them.

We can start with customer rankings and ratings.  Which one of us are tracking how our products are being rated on 1) our own Web site if we allow it 2) commerce sites like Amazon.com 3) the big black blogosphere and 4) and perhaps most importantly in communities, both online and offline?  And if we do track this information, how many of us are using it alongside other metrics in our business dashboards?

We do countless surveys and research to see what is important for our customers.  Let’s start measuring it as well.  And not by the good old fashioned customer satisfaction surveys or even by net promoter scores.  No let’s get down to the individual level not the aggregate and add key metric fields right into the CRM system so we can report on, analyze and perhaps even optimize our customer experience from their point of view, not ours.  When we do, I think we may find some surprises

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