marginally subversive

Planning for Marketing? Think Finance - Think Lifetime Value

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Marketing has borrowed quite extensively from Finance in the last 10 years.

As marketeers, we've started talking about returns on investments - finding the "biggest bang for our buck".

Some (like my former team in a previous company) have started talking about risk management procedures - not just in managing contracts (and employing "options"-like buying techniques), but also in delivering gross impressions and shares.

All these are well and good.

Perhaps this is one way of the marketing department proving themselves to the finance department - an attempt to say that 'we are more than just an expense line on the balance sheet'.

But as marketeers and suport-teams of the marketing department, we have got to do more.

Employing evidence-based marketing, metrics-based objective-setting and results evaluation, real profitability analyses that take into account present and future value of marketing investments --- all these need to be more apparent in the marketing department's language and in the language of its partners in the advertising, media, promotions, PR, research, and digital space.

The Age of New Banking Is Upon Us...

I came across this video just today (a year old, really, so quite old by internet standards).  It is about banking and how consumesr are changing the face of banking.

What I really liked about what Brett King, an author, said in the opening of the video: 

Just because you are a bank and you have a banking licence doesn't mean you have an exclusive on banking.

And another one: 

If customers don't want to come to the branch..., we just serve them where they are.

 

on #analytics: data availability is no longer the problem

Data availability is no longer the problem.  Accessibility is no longer the issue.  The cost of acquiring data has gone down dramatically.

Neither is the technology behind data collation the problem.  There are a myriad of options that one can collect, store, discover, collate, systematize, analyze, and use data.

The real problem is people's apathy and/or antipathy to data and data analyses.

It's all about changing the mindsets of business managers - specifically of marketing managers who think that their jobs encompass merely looking after advertising and media technologies.

David Campbell, as interviewed by Alex Howard (at Oreilly Radar) has this advice to clients about using their data:

From the data side, we've lived in what we'd call a world of scarcity. We thought that data was expensive to store, so we had to get rid of it as soon as possible. You don't want it unless you have a good use for it. Now we think about data from a perspective of abundance.

Part of the challenge, 10 or 15 years years ago, was where do I go get the data? Where do I tap in? But in today's world, everything is so interconnected. It's just a matter of teeing into it. The phrase I've used instead of big data is "ambient data." It's just out there and available.

The recommendation would be to stop and think about the latent value in all that data that's there to be collected and that's fairly easy to store now. That's the challenge and the opportunity for all of us.

(Emphases mine; from http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/david-campbell.html)

Here's the video of the interview:

 

 

FACEBOOK, the brand

BRANDZ, from Millward Brown Optimor, reports that FACEBOOK posted the fastest growth in brand value, growing by as much as 246% to 19MM USD.  It still trails APPLE's value, which was valued at 154MM USD, and other tech brands such as Google (112MM USD) and Microsoft (78MM USD).  But its growth is staggering.

After FACEBOOK, we've got BAIDU, the Chinese search engine that is slowly moving into other competencies in the mainland; it posted a growth of 141% to 23MM USD.

Below is the table showing the 20 fastest growing brands in the world, according to the study.

new consumer-media-brand landscape demands new marketing metrics

"New" is used loosely above.  Social media have always been around - technology just amplified it by empowering people to connect and communicate with each other more effectively.

With this "new" trend came problems for marketeers: "How do we use them?"

Some have jumped on the bandwagon by creating Twitter accounts and Facebook pages and Groupon promos, measuring retweets, reblogs, and "likes".

But these metrics are just skimming off the surface, really.

There is more to The Social than these metrics.

Jeremy Owyang of Altimeter and John Lovett of WebAnalyticsDemystified shared this presentation which I thought was an excellent start towards creating an integrated approach to measuring the effects of The Social on brands' and their businesses. 

Oh - and just for the fun of it, let me state that "digital" doesn't mean "search-strategies" only anymore. ":D

 

 

Social Marketing Analytics

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang

i am an artist, you are an artist, we are all artists

It's not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on a wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it art, is that the person who made it overcame the resistance, ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human.

Art is not in the eye of the beholder. It's in the soul of the artist.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

someone in your office could very well be an artist.

she may not know how to draw - but she can do magic with spreadsheets and make them easy to use.

he may not be able to carry a tune - but he may be able to deliver presentations that make people listen.

she may be from the finance and accounting department.

he may be working at the reception area.

it doesn't matter.

they are artists.

and perhaps, in all of us - when we do what we do and imbue it with our perspiration (and sometimes, tears) - there resides an artist.

and sometimes, it may not be beholden by others - and others may see it too different, too weird, too... human.

but what they say or do or how they react do not detract to the work we've done.

i am an artist.

you are an artist.

we are all artists.

Fitting equations...

I am fairly sure that if one tries hard enough, one can describe a set of seemingly random data points using an equation or a set of equations.

What I am not sure of is if one can explain WHY such an equation or systems of equations hold or should be true.

creativity is under threat...

... and given the current business scenario that we are in, we cannot afford to allow that creativity be threatened.

Teresa Amabile writes about this in a blog at HBR.Org.  Creativity is threatened whenever the elements that promote creativity are threatened.  From the CFO's viewpoint, the curtailment of these elements may very well be financially sound or logical - but curtailing creativity for the sake of financial goals is certainly very myopic.

Cutting down on elements that induce, facilitate, and catalyze creativity could very well result to savings for the quarter and appease angry shareholders.  But the consequences that will emerge beyond the quarter or the year far outweigh the short-term benefits.

What are the elements that companies should protect in order to ensure that creativity could and would save the day?  Amabile identifies three:

1. Smart people who think differently - or people who somehow have a repository of untapped knowledge and untapped stories.  Or people who see the crisis as a crisis and an opportunity to do better.

2. Passionate engagement - or letting people do what they love.

3. A creative atmosphere - or an atmosphere where people are encouraged to experiment, take considered and calculated risks, and where fear of failure is not the defining feeling. 

I hope that CEOs and other C-level execs would heed Amabile's advice.

 

 

the new laziness...

... is all about inertia brought on by fear.

Fear of the unknown.
Fear of what the big bosses will say.
Fear for one's career.
Fear for one's future.
Fear of consumers' response.
Fear of failure.
Fear of success...

The new laziness is all about the paralysis brought by fear of what could be.

From Seth Godin:

... the new laziness has nothing to do with physical labor and everything to do with fear. If you're not going to make those sales calls or invent that innovation or push that insight, you're not avoiding it because you need physical rest.

 

Marginally Subversive Thought of the Day: Success is the enemy...

Our marginally subversive thought of the day comes from Charles Hampden-Turner and Linda Arc, as quoted by Jamshid Gharajedaghi in the book "Managing Chaos and Complexity":

The most stubborn habits which resist change with the greatest tenacity are those which worked well for a space of time and led to the practitioner being rewarded for those behaviors. If you suddenly tell such persons that their recipe for success is no longer viable, their personal experience belies your diagnosis. The road to convincing them is hard. It us the stuff of classic tragedy.

----------------

That we live in fast-changing times is an open secret. And yet we remain to be stuck with our age-old paradigms and schemas of the world. We invest and we gain - that was what it used to be in finance, in marketing, and in business. It was simple.

But we no longer live in simple times.

We are faced with competitors who are as smart as we are. With suppliers who are as protective of their businesses as we are with ours. With consumers who are armed with information gathered from a vast, constantly growing library called the Social Web. With staff and employees who are fast realizing that life in the Firm is not the only life worth living. With leaders who are far more concerned with their parachutes and exit strategies and with pleasing quarterly-results-focused investors than with long-term brand- and business-building.

And yet our response mechanisms remain to be rooted in the same old assumptions.

It is time for businesses and marketeers to wake up and smell the coffee - perchance its smell will reinvigorate them - and us - to think radically different from how we thought in the past.

Things have changed. Things are changing.

So why aren't we shifting? Why aren't we challenging our old assumptions?

Just because it worked in the past doesn't mean it will work again. And again. And again.

The world has changed.
It's your turn.