Table of contents for October/November 2015 in Marketing

What do you see? * CONTENT PARTNER: a Marketing Content Partner is an organisation with which we’ve entered into a partnership to collaborate on content for the magazine (see page numbers listed for each) as well as exclusive content only available to Marketing Advantage Pro Members. For more information visit marketingmag.com.au/advantage Marketing would like to recognise and thank the members of its Editorial Advisory Board for their invaluable guidance, including but not limited to Dr Michael Valos (chair), Caroline Ruddick, Erik Zimmerman, Mike Harley, Shannon Peachey, Trisca Scott-Branagan, Skev Ioannou, Cameron Woods and Peter Little.…

Verb 1. Examine (something) methodically and in detail, typically in order to explain and interpret it. 2. Resolve (a sentence) into its grammatical elements; parse. 3. Identify and measure the chemical constituents of (a substance or specimen). 4. Psychoanalyse (someone). Origin: Late 16th century: influenced by French analyser, from medieval Latin analysis. The Oxford English Dictionary “The biggest challenge facing marketers in 2015 is measuring ROI.” – Learn the biggest trends from this year’s ‘B2B Marketing Outlook Study’ on page 34. “PwC’s report on supplier risk management identified what it called ‘concerning gaps’ in the way organisations managed suppliers.” – In our feature on managing marketing suppliers, Michelle Dunner examines both sides of the ‘outsource or in’ conundrum, on page 22. “The ultimate way of avoiding over-rationalised, meaningless responses is…

COST-CUTTING NUMBER-CRUNCHERS can be forgiven for feeling a little unwelcome in marketing departments. Marketing is that special area of business that likes to imagine itself transcending day-to-day issues by working on long-term growth strategies and building ungraspable concepts such as ‘brand loyalty’ and ‘engagement’ through the collaboration of creative minds. Big dreams, and the big spend that comes with them, are part of the stereotype of marketers. But over the past decade, procurement professionals have been getting involved in more and more marketing decisions, bringing a new kind of systemisation. This means less control for marketing managers and, often, cost-cutting. In difficult financial times, companies need to calculate the ROI in every area of spending. And at a time when information is spreading digitally and globally, faster than ever before,…

Business has fallen in love with big data, but the old world methods of data analytics have become a bottleneck for all that data offers. It is time to break into the new world analytics that actually begin to make the overwhelming amount of data being produced by enterprises useful to those who actually need it. The time has come for the analysis of data, and even the data being analysed to be reassessed. While the explosion of big data has promised new insights into business, the pace at which it can be used is slowed by the application of old world analytics. Old world analytics is slow moving, potentially suffering from the subversion or exclusion of input data by siloed departments picking and choosing the data that suits their…

How did you go? How do you know? The answer can only be determined based on what success measures were agreed upon at the start. Simple? Yes, in theory, but often not in practice. When I think ‘high performance’ in my role as head of marketing, I see three key areas that have a direct impact and which we measure: • the business outcomes • the people – greatest organisational asset, and • the culture – formed by the leaders of the business. Here are some tips for how I have learned to effectively and efficiently measure performance of both me as a marketing leader and my marketing team. Measuring the business outcomes – you can’t know what you don’t know Start by asking the most important question: what does…

Forget about Bitcoin or China’s Renminbi! The true contender to becoming the new global currency is online (written or audiovisual) content. If you’re after free finance insights and news by industry thought-leaders, just go to BlueNotes, ANZ’s newsroom. When it comes to health, Bupa recently launched The Blue Room. Finally, if you want to become a better marketer… well, keep reading this article, but feel free to also check Adobe’s excellent outlet, CMO.com! Just as for every consumer there is a market, for every pain or passion point there seems to be a free digital resource to educate, inform, inspire or entertain. Beyond generating leads, sales and increasing referral traffic on their websites, content marketing has become the hottest strategy to capturing (existing or new) audiences’ attention. Why? Simply because…

You may have noticed the phrase ‘content marketing’ spring into the vocabulary of a few keynote speakers in the past 18 months. Essentially a pyramid scheme, content marketing works by swindling marketers into its promises of quick riches and business outcomes by updating the arrangement of words across their website. It sounds almost too good to be true. For those unfortunately unable to have attended said keynote speeches, content marketing as a channel came into its own about two years ago and is now the most talked about topic in marketing. Simple in execution, content has since become quite a convenient distraction from more complex marketing issues. It’s all a load of shit. What many people don’t realise is that content has possibly the sharpest inefficiency curve of any marketing…

Heard the buzz about native advertising? Not sure if it’s bollocks? And have been told that it is brilliant? But haven’t yet invested in native advertising while you wait for proof that you will see an increase in your advertising ROI? While native advertising is not new, it’s an area that we get asked about a lot at Effective Measure, so it seemed appropriate to explore what makes native advertising work and what makes it fail – and, yes, it isn’t foolproof. Additionally, there’s the overarching ethical concern that native advertising is blurring editorial and advertising content to dupe the poor unsuspecting consumer. I know you’ve probably read the PR statements, you’ve seen the glowing tweets and you’ve read the articles that pop up in the trade publications every issue…

Determined and “values-driven”, Cindy Gallop has been busy over the past decade since retiring from 30 years in advertising, mostly with Bartle Bogle Hegarty. She started out in London before moving to New York, where she started up BBH’s presence in the US and earned herself the title of New York Advertising Woman of the Year in 2003. Gallop’s passion to drive healthy attitudes and behaviour around sex led to her launching Make Love Not Porn, an online membership community sharing real-world sex videos and open, healthy conversations around sex. Her other passionate venture is If We Ran The World, a website focused on promoting ‘micro actions’ – small things people can do in order to effect the change they want to see in the world. The project is underpinned…

As businesspeople we know how important collecting and analysing relevant data is in improving what we do. If you're wondering where to start, the most important data comes from those with whom you work. Do staff understand and agree with your purpose, direction and priorities? Do they know what success means? Do they feel part of your vision as a leader? Including the performance of you and your management team in this analysis is critical. Jac Phillips, head of brand and marketing at the Bank of Melbourne, has shared her insights on this and much more in her column on measuring performance. The second priority is obviously your users, clients, customers, audience, members or fans. The ‘data points’ here should be gained not through an online survey or outsourced telemarketing…

Our expert panel Any market researcher who introduces themselves at a dinner party faces a conundrum: will people think I stand on street corners – with a clipboard – and ask questions of passers-by? It’s an enduring and hard-to-shake cliché, but it no more reflects market research today than a Model T Ford does the car industry. Over several decades, research has moved from paper questionnaires to automated telephone, online and now mobile surveys. It’s almost unbelievable to think that, until fairly recently, responses from hard copy surveys were manually tallied by large teams of researchers. Focus groups have changed less, but the techniques used to elicit and visualise responses continually evolve. Even the lines between qualitative and quantitative research – historically split between different departments or agencies – are…

Using and analysing large data sets, or so-called ‘big data’, is vital to stay competitive in marketing any business. Our charity partners are increasingly looking to data to help them build fundraising campaigns and build scale to reach more disadvantaged young people. The 43 organisations we work with tend to be smaller charities that run highly effective programs, but operate with small teams and very lean budgets. While they are exceptional at what they do best – changing young lives and giving them hope – several barriers prohibit them from using and analysing donor data to its full potential. Karl Wilding, director of public policy at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in the UK, says, “Data is the new fuel for social change. Money is one of the things…

Background: By the start of 2014, the outlook for Radiant, a former category leader, was at a crossroads. Competing in a category of eight brands, where consumers have very little brand loyalty and are conditioned to only buy at discount, Radiant was in a fierce race to stay in the game. Yet brand consideration, penetration and loyalty were all stuck in a negative slide. An ‘ordinary’ ad campaign wasn’t going to cut it. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. Radiant was fighting to survive. Objectives: A planning overview concluded the following: Detergent advertising is caught in a double bind. Nearly all of it is set in a laboratory or the laundry, it is highly rational, and no one likes it. Our research confirmed this: ‘deathly boring’, ‘patronising to women’, ‘stale…

This article is from a series that attempts to highlight issues marketers need to address to achieve more influence in the C-suite. The contents of the article are intended to aid marketers in addressing a common criticism levelled at marketing, which is that it is an intangible discipline that doesn’t always show value, compared to the allegedly more ‘tangible and value producing’ functions such as production accounting and finance. This article comprises senior executive insights into dealing with this challenge as well as drawing upon a number of studies and articles over the years that have attempted to get to the heart of the issue. The issue of social media and digital marketing is a further consideration. It would appear to add complexity to the already problematic measurement issue. One…

The answer is ‘it depends’. Foremost, it depends on your category. If you’re a bank or health insurance brand the good bad/news is that some studies show the majority of negative positions are still better than the category average! The same Australian study found that by category, the average NPS (net promoter score) was negative. Negative. Sounds depressing doesn’t it. Given that the majority of C-suite executives are appointed based on their ability and potential to win, you can understand why their attention quickly morphs into a laser-like focus when they see a negative NPS score. The issue is in the framing. Instead of viewing NPS as a scale with a goal medal awarded to those brands that reach +100, the best results come from brands that recognise that NPS…

In 1997, direct marketing guru Lester Wunderman talked about a new definition of brand: “It represents a cluster of consumer needs. It is each customer who is becoming a brand. I am a brand – and each of you is a brand.” At that time, he said there were 260 million individual people brands in the US alone. More than 15 years later, the rise of social media has seen Wunderman’s prediction become a reality – in ways no one expected. This new reality represents the biggest single opportunity the PR industry has ever had – at the expense of advertising. According to Nielsen, only 16 percent of people are influenced by advertising they see on the internet, while 84 percent are influenced by what people tell them on social…

Rich, luxuriant chocolate. Exquisite Swiss craftsmanship. A smorgasbord of gourmet flavours and delicious varieties. It is easy to see how a marketer could fall in love with the Lindt brand. Andrew Curran, an engaging and animated expat who moved to Australia with Lindt three years ago, certainly fell hard. But he believes the job of marketing any brand starts with personal adoration, so he’s hardly fazed. The more you listen to him talk – in a still fresh English accent – the more you believe he would exhibit devotion to any brand on which he works. It’s an interesting spin on the higher calling of a marketer: to share your passion for a brand with others, so they can enjoy it too. “The biggest reward [as a marketer] is when…

THE FIRST LENS I put across every request or interaction with anyone is, “Are we making a good commercial decision with what is being proposed?” I am looking for them to support their proposal with good evidence and data and explain concisely the problem they are trying to solve. If marketers can clearly articulate why they are taking an approach and how it will drive increased conversion and a better customer experience, nine times out of 10, I will back them. Unfortunately, from time to time we get proposed the next bright shiny idea, which doesn’t clearly illustrate how we are going to move the consumer through the consideration cycle to purchase. If the proposal is not tied to solving a particular issue or maximising a new opportunity, it will…

The first question I usually get asked when meeting new people in my role as editor of Marketing is this: ‘What are the big things in marketing right now?’ Wearable tech! Virtual reality! Behavioural economics! Nope. Nope. Nope. All interesting things that we’ll see more of in marcomms and branded content endeavours in the near future. And I'll be interested to watch how wearable tech and virtual reality impact on media consumption. But they’re not the big things that keep marketing decision-makers up at night. So my answer is decidedly untrendy, because they’re not at all new concepts. Two things. First: accountability. Second: making sense of technology. Both ripe for discussion in a magazine themed ‘The Analyse Issue’. Both staples of every other issue of the magazine, too. Accountability because…

The ecosystem of technology and data in which marketers operate is ever changing and, because this environment is so dynamic, marketers are presented with a range of changing options. This can lead to confusion on which option would provide the best results. To better understand the changes that are operating within this ecosystem, this article will analyse the ‘B2B Marketing Outlook 2015’ marketing survey carried out by B2B marketing agency Greenhat to look at current attitudes, challenges, opportunities and trends that face marketers today. The survey, in which 455 marketers participated, showed that the biggest challenge facing marketers in 2015 is measuring ROI. Forty-six percent of respondents found it ‘challenging’ and the top marketing objectives are generating leads (81 percent) and nurturing leads (78 percent). Greenhat’s managing director Andrew Haussegger…

On a recent holiday I was devastated to learn that, somewhere in London Heathrow, I had lost my faithful Fitbit. The device that had been securely attached to my wrist for the past 18 months was gone, and I no longer had a way to monitor how many minutes of precious sleep I enjoyed each night or compare the number of steps involved in a shopping trip to Selfridges to a wander around the British Museum. The despair I felt was enlightening. I had become so consumed with measuring my activity each day, but that was all I was doing; I wasn’t actually consuming the data. Without my Fitbit I took the same number of stairs and walked the same distance, just without the digital commentary on my wrist. The…

If you entered the marketing game any time before the past 10 years then there is no doubt that you were brought up on a heavy diet of demographic targeting. Or let’s call it the statistical art of putting people into behavioural buckets. We were convinced that people who fell into certain behaviour buckets were highly likely to behave the same way. And by behaviour, we literally mean ‘buy behaviour’. These people, defined this way, buy this stuff. Yep, these all knowing, all predicting human clusters told the marketers who their key target markets would be, and for a very long time it was true. Demographic clusters like gender, age, income, education, ethnicity, location, language spoken, mobility, home ownerships and employment status did tell us a great deal. They provided…

The quickly evolving digital economy has bred a new kind of consumer that holds every online brand interaction to a previously unseen calibre of expectation. Highly-informed, with the power to switch at any time, the digital customer expects online services to know exactly who they are and to deliver relevant offers at a time and place that suits them. Despite this, many businesses are still operating according to outdated marketing principles that preach ‘the larger the audience, the bigger the sales’ – delivering product-driven campaigns and using a scatter-gun approach, despite the fact that relying on big budgets to translate into sales is no longer an effective strategy. Market leaders are rapidly understanding, however, that marketing practices in the digital sphere need to mimic the way customers think: not in…

Institutions know instinctively that only their most satisfied customers will recommend them, and many have gone the next step and tried to measure that higher level of satisfaction using a customer advocacy metric called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Their instincts are right, but unfortunately NPS has three fundamental design flaws that give decision-makers a distorted view of reality, and increase the risk of making wrong financial decisions. DESIGN FLAWS OF NPS The first of these flaws is its classification bias. This occurs when customers are systematically misallocated to the wrong advocacy state (Promoter, Detractor or Passive). Because bias is systematic, it cannot be ‘averaged out’ or reduced by interviewing more customers. So whether Telstra, for example, calculates its NPS from the daily responses of four customers or 40,000 customers,…

The majority of businesses today are struggling to compete. Not only has technology lowered the barriers of entry into many industries, it has also given customers the power to find, research and buy almost any product, from any vendor, in any part of the world, at any time. To compete successfully in this new consumer-driven era, companies must find new ways to differentiate. A company’s knowledge of and relationship with customers is what will enable it to survive in the age of the customer. The only successful strategy is to become customer-obsessed – your firm must have an obsession with understanding, connecting with, serving and delighting, your customers. Does a customer-obsessed strategy of delivering exceptional customer experience (CX) pay off? Yes. In fact, Watermark Consulting found that to be the…

Exploring new knowledge Throughout the year to date this publication has reflected on a series of themes. All of them, including this issue’s ‘Analyse’, have required examining new ways of thinking and consideration of where future marketing boundaries may fall. To celebrate these themes, I have decided to introduce you to my current research students – each of them reflect the spirit of the themes and in their own way are shaping the way managers will make decisions in the future. A Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) is typically the highest award made by a university. The candidates below are all a privilege to supervise in the pursuit of that degree. I don’t do it alone, however – in each case at least one other supervisor provides essential guidance and leadership.…