Posts Tagged ‘integrated marketing’

Driving Conversions is what it’s all about

Posted: April 22, 2013 in customer experience
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I recently published an article in Chief Marketer about driving conversions through increasing the relevancy of content entitled, Drive Conversions by Making Interactions More Relevant

Customer experience evolves into Co-experience

Posted: November 10, 2011 in Co-experience, customer experience
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Most companies define customer experience as bi-directional brand interactions; the prospect reacting to an ad, a first time buyer, or a customer interacting with customer service. With the advent of social networks, the proliferation of mobile devices and fundamental shifts in the purchase process, traditional customer experience is being replaced by co-experience.

Consumers engage with your brand every day without any direct interaction. When a fan Tweets about a celebrity and their followers re-Tweet the same message, they are having a customer experience with your brand even if there is no direct interaction. Ratings and reviews take place more and more on websites like Amazon and Yelp. People “Like” products or brands on a 3rd party pages or websites. And word of mouth is between consumers and communities, whether it’s happening across the back fence, on a social network or via an eCommerce site.

The sum total of all customer experiences with a brand defines co-experience. Companies and brands have to understand all permutations of consumer relationships across media and channels, how they relate and interact with each other and ultimately how a company can participate in the co-experiences with relevant, contextual content and engagement that produce the most engaging and relevant customer experiences.

It’s the experience itself that matters

Posted: September 7, 2011 in customer experience
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I just had the most incredible customer experience last weekend at Mt. Rainier National Park. And no it doesn’t have to do with a single interaction with park rangers, concession employees or infrastructure. It was all about the experience itself.

Mt. Rainier

Labor Day at Paradise

Spending the last day of summer hiking up the side of one of most beautiful mountains in the world with my son, having a snowball fight in 80 degree sun and running down the trail to bring my wife, who was sidelined by crutches, with a chunk of a glacier before that same 80 degree sun gave real meaning to global warning.

My point is not to rave about a great family outing I had, although it was fantastic. On the drive home, I started thinking about what made the day a great experience. We got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic driving up the winding mountain road. The brand new multi-million dollar visitor center had fewer exhibits than a grade school science fair and we had to walk single file up the first trail because there were so many people. When I look at the day from a series of controllable human interactions, it sounded more like a bust than a memorable moment.

From a UX perspective, they could have designed better traffic flow on the roads. The visitor center might have been adaptable to my persona’s needs and of course they could have simply built more trails, scaling for the demand. But in the end, they wouldn’t have made much difference, because ultimately it wasn’t about navigational or operational issues, it was about pure experience.

My pure experience was blue sky, bright sun, views that dwarfed me and a time/place/people combination that wowed me. In other words, it was the content that made the experience. So much of the content we create today is mass produced, aimed at the lowest common denominator and tries to shock or titillate to such a degree as it simply becomes part of the noise and noise which is getting louder every day.

Tatoosh range

Looking beyond Paradise

The answer is not easy and there isn’t a simple solution, but if try to adhere to one simple principle we may be able to come closer to the mark. Every time we pitch, design, develop, or evaluate an idea, a campaign, or a business model, we should ask ourselves if it can rise to the monumental or at least taste like a lick of a blue glacier on the last day of summer.

The identification and validation of a trend enables real-time marketing

Posted: August 31, 2011 in CMO, real-time marketing, social media
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I’ve been reading a lot about trend identification and real-time marketing lately. I wanted to put the subject into some context. For the last year, I have been working with a new start-up, Blab, which is based on the idea that trends are what get people’s attention, that their attention is very short lived and that understanding trends is only valuable for marketers if they can act in real-time and leverage people’s interest in a particular trend.

Historically, in marketing, trend identification was the prevue of market research companies and typically involved a combination of quantitative (surveys, data mining and modeling) and qualitative research (focus groups and observation). The trends that were identified tended to be macro in nature and were described as the shift in ideas and conduct over time, most commonly measured in years.

The output of these processes were delivered to creative groups and agencies and used to create the “big idea” upon which a marketing campaign was created. They were designed to trigger emotional engagement, leaving a consumer with positive brand association. Validation came in the form of public acceptance, measured again through quantitative and qualitative metrics. Impact was independently measured, typically as a product of reach (the number of people exposed to the “big idea”) and frequency (the number of times an individual was exposed to the “big idea”.)

This methodology has been pervasive over the last half century and continues to be used by most consumer brands in conjunction with the creation and distribution of marketing messages across traditional marketing channels (Broadcast, Cable, Print, Out-of-home…).

Direct marketing provided marketers with access to specific and detailed data relating to who viewed a message and what action they took after consuming the message and outcome. This data driven approach has been applied to email, search, display, web and other digital channels. It has also allowed marketers to improve their ability to identify trends through data mining and modeling techniques, resulting in behavioral analysis leading to predictive analytics, which is intended to give guidance to a company as to when, where and how a consumer will be more receptive to their product/service offering. Like brand marketing, the insights delivered through this type of research are typically delivered to a creative group or agency and used to create a series of campaigns, targeted to like sets of audiences and addressed to identified individuals. Validation is measured by actual response behavior.

More recently, with the advent of social networking and the near ubiquity of Internet access, trend identification and validation has taken on a new meaning. Trends proliferate virally in a matter of minutes and hours rather than months and years. It is possible to spread a message via Twitter or Facebook to 500 people who each forward to another 500 almost instantaneously, reaching 500² or 250,000 people who by their voluntary social association share interests, attitudes and behaviors.

In this context, my company, Blab, has authored a specific and unique methodology and associated algorithms for identifying and validating these volatile and transitory trends in real-time, providing marketers with insight into the pulse of the culture at any given point and the resulting ability to contextualize their content to align with the appropriate topical trends.

Over the next few weeks, I will dig deeper into our ideas around how to identify trends, categorize them and then use that information to inform contextual content creation and publication.

How Real is Real-time? The answer has little to do with data

Posted: August 9, 2011 in CMO, integrated marketing, Marketing Strategy, social networking, Uncategorized
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Srividya Sridharan of Forrester Research, posted the question of “How real is real-time” on the customer intelligence community. I’d like to share my reply to her.

There are multiple areas of marketing in which real-time has a unique definition, it’s own importance and a set of tools, practitioners and process that enable it.

From a transactional point of view, real-time means being able to transact from start to finish with no latency. In ecommerce, this is a given, although it surprises me how many websites still ask the customer to submit a form, or call a rep. to get a quote, complete a transaction or get customer service. The Holy Grail of this type of real-time marketing is the complete integration of multiple channels including online, social and in-store. While some, mostly B2C, retailers have done a good job combining online shopping, order and payment with in-store availability and pick-up, this cross-channel experience has rarely been duplicated in the B2B world where sales are still driven by direct sales forces and represent long and complicated purchase cycles. for example, it’s still virtually impossible for a company’s procurement department to negotiate, transact and fufill an enterprise software licensing agreement online.

From the data perspective, real-time refers to the ability to collect and process data in real-time. Whether transactional or behavioral, it is usually focused on the online advertising, search, web or email experience and increasingly user generated activity on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. There appears to be the most momentum in capturing and analyzing social data, which is created, distributed and reacted to in real-time, however most marketers, agencies and analytics providers are still trying to apply the same methodologies to social as they have used in the past to understand traditional channels like broadcast and print. Needless to say, the importance of frequency and reach is completely different when applied to multi-facted social relationships. it is is this area of campaign management and analytics that appear to be paying the most attention to trying to achieve real-time. It won’t be difficult to generate mountains of data, but the trick is having the resources to understand the data and most importantly use that data in real-time. There appears to be very little progress in brands ability to act in real-time.

And finally, the most important area of real-time, is the one most overllooked; understanding the customer in real-time. We spend a lot of time, technology and resources to understand what consumers did in the past and hope that will help us predict what they are going to do in the future. But we devote very little energy to finding out what’s important to a consumer in the moment and then being able to communicate with them in a manner that is relevant to them in that same moment. This is the real real-time Holy Grail and in an increasingly ADHD afflcited world, this is the key to cutting through the noise and engaging customers on their terms. This is why I’ve started my new company Blab. We’re all about relevancy and relevancy is both listening as well as creating and distirbuting branded content. Check our our website for more details about our approach, http://www.blabbings.com.

Can CMOs and CIOs become good partners

Posted: March 16, 2011 in Uncategorized
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Let’s start with understanding the problem. It’s not that CMOs and CIOs speak different languages, it’s that they fundamentally approach problem solving differently. Most CMOs come out of the advertising and creative world of the “big idea.” At the end of the day, they are dealing with abstraction, creating emotional ties to an ephemeral concept, known as the brand. While they can measure success from outcomes, they can never conduct QA testing to see if the solution works or not. Whereas most CIOs come from an IT background where at there is ultimately a “right” answer or solution to a given problem and it is easily measured b whether it works or not. And the outcome of working is out of scope.

At our company, Blab, I’m lucky that our CTO Joseph and I have a strong working partnership. It comes mutual respect (very common at C level), shared goals (common if business focused) and most importantly, because we spend a lot of time together talking through ways to solve problems.

I’ve learned some of the lingo of technology. I have a rudimentary understanding of database schema and at least don’t cringe when I hear the terms php, ruby on rails and lamp stack. I recognize they are development languages. But what is more important is that I understand that they are critical to my being able to effectively and efficient communicate with my customers across multiple channels.

Joseph, on the other hand, has not spent his entire career managing IT infrastructure. He can write code himself, actually thinking its fun and is excited about solving challenging problems. He’s learned something about frequency and reach and the abbreviations, cpc, seo, sem and crm don’t make his eyes glaze either.

But the real key to our mutual success is sitting down together in front of a whiteboard and sometimes over a beer, talking about the big picture issues we both face. Are we keeping up with our customers? Do we understand the problems they have? Are we equipped with the ability to listen to our customers, analyze what they’re saying and acting on the insight before it’s too late.

Joseph’s mind certainly works differently than mine. He often comes up with a completely different perspective on the issue and as often as not, his logical rational mind is as perceptive as the most gifted and creative brain. And then he tells me how he can build whatever it takes to bring the idea to life.

Popularity and Influence are not the same

Posted: March 1, 2011 in Marketing Strategy, real-time marketing, social media, social networking, User-generated content
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I read a thought provoking article in AdAge this morning by Matthew Creamer. The title, “Your Followers are no measure of your influence,” does an excellent job of debunking the notion that just because you have millions of followers on Twitter, you are automatically an influencer. But I think that Matthew missed the larger point that there are genuine influencers in every community whether online or not. And that there are different categories of influencers representing three kinds of publishers; editorial, brand and peers.

The Justin Biebers or Ashton Kutchers of the world are not significantly different than the Hollywood hucksters of generations past. For anyone who can remember Orson Wells pitching Paul Masson wines, there is plenty of evidence of celebrities trying to convert their popularity into influence. They leverage their own personal brands to add a cache to what they are promoting; branding 101. These people are professional or editorial influencers and to which also belong most politicians, journalists and analysts. Regardless of your aesthetic, political or social beliefs, it’s hard not to acknowledge this class of bloggers, Tweeters and authors. And it’s hard not to understand that no matter where they come from, they are advancing their own or their sponsor’s agendas.

There’s another class of influencers who are exerting their presence of the Web and across social media; brands themselves. Within every category, there are competing brands that are generating content aimed to influence the conversation about and the perception of their brand and the products and services associated with their brand. And like the editorial influencers, they unabashedly have their own agendas.

So what does that leave? The rest of the social world made up of individuals who demonstrate their influence by their expertise, their ability to communicate and the authenticity of their messages. These are our peers, like the best Mommy bloggers, leaders in various forums; what Augie Ray of Forrester Research calls, Mass Influencers. This group which amounts to around 6% of the online population generates 80% of the influence impressions.

All these different categories of influencers can be leveraged by marketers, both to disseminate their content, buoyed by the influencers own credibility, but also as a means of understanding what consumers are genuinely interested in.

At Blab, http://www.blabbings.com, we understand that if you don’t first understand who the “influencers” really are and what is the nature of their influence, you won’t be able to use them to give a lift to your marketing efforts, regardless of channel.

A new advertising agency model?

Posted: December 17, 2010 in New Agency Model
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Current advertising agencies make revenue based on a service model charged by number of employees it takes to deliver an agreed scope of work. All IP, thinking and work an agency does on behalf of its clients belong to those clients. Agency long term value is based on reputation, a portfolio of clients’ work and knowledge residing in individuals who might or might not leave.

There is no current ability to build massive data storage populated with agency owned data regarding what’s important to people, how they interact and make decisions. There is no ability to break down the FTE heavy structure and process inherent in making money to action campaigns in 72 hours or less. There is no ability to scale beyond tens of clients. There is no ability to use data collection to normalize between channels and determine a predictability regarding where and how to best spend marketing funds.

Agencies today develop client rosters based on cultural fit, revenue limitations, geographic limitations, reputation. Agencies don’t identify specific categories and set out to become experts in these categories as a cable broadcaster might, because there is no way of amassing long category term IP.

Agencies do not build and curate influencer communities within specific categories with the purpose of creating a category network that is ripe to consume and proliferate publishing.

….. but what if an agency were to throw the rule books out, starting with the business model and organizational structure

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.

Eight Customer Experience Trends, thanks to Bruce Tempkin

Posted: June 9, 2010 in Uncategorized
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I just read a great report, “eight Customer Experience Megatrends,” from Bruce Tempkin, formerly an analyst with Forrester Research. While every consultant likes to issue their predictions for the next big thing or the direction of the market, I found Bruce’s list and more importantly the key implications of each trend, a stimulating read. Here’s the list. To read the complete report, go to Bruce’s blog, Customer Experience Matters
1. Customer insight propagation… customer insights will drive decisions across the company
2. Unstructured data appreciation… text analytics will become a critical capability
3. Customer service rejuvenation online interactions will increasingly use touch-screens
4. Loyalty intensification… loyalty metrics will be a major element of executive dashboards
5. Interaction iPod-ization… online interactions will increasingly use touch-screens
6. Social media assimilation… social media will get absorbed into the fabric of companies
7. Digital/physical integration… experiences will blend mobile devices with retail locations
8. Cultural renovation… engaging employees will become a key stepping stone for engaging customers

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