The new battle ground for marketing-led growth.

In the digital age, consumers are always shopping around. New research shows that hooking them early is the strongest path to growth.

The CEO of a branded apparel company was troubled and began putting some tough questions to the marketing department. The company had spent substantially on promotions and loyalty-rewards programs to drive much-needed growth based on studies showing that targeting current consumers with marketing investments offered the highest return. Yet sales results were disappointing, and an alarming number of customers were drifting away after their initial purchases. They were often going to a rival with a different marketing approach, one that deployed social media to lure shoppers to its website, where—even the chief marketing officer had to admit—creative interactions were attracting new consumers to consider the rival's brand.

If you’re the CEO of, say, a consumer-products company—or one in banking, travel, autos, or other categories where it’s easy for your consumers to compare products—you may be finding yourself similarly perplexed, and with reason. Powerful new currents are disrupting established patterns of behavior. And consumers, including those you may have thought loyal, are considering someone else’s offerings more often than you realize. With top-line growth at the top of every CEO’s agenda, cracking the code of consumer behavior is more critical than ever.

[For rest of article, read HERE ...]

How to get most from your agency relationships

Executives who know how to set up and manage agency relationships are best positioned to improve their marketing ROI.

As January draws to a close, many of our New Year’s resolutions have already faded. But as marketers look for new ways to drive growth in 2017, they should take fresh stock of their agency relationships.

Marketer-agency relationships are more important than ever.  While the shift to digital channels and technologies has created the opportunity to personalize communications with the "always-on consumer," it has also made it harder to stand out out.  This has led to a complex and ever-expanding ecosystem of creative, media, analytics, social, and other agencies than can access specialized expertise.  Managing a broader set of agency relationships, however, comes with its own significant challenges.  Not only is the digital landscape more fluid, but matching the right content to the right channel demands different ways of working with and across agencies and new ways of measuring performance.  Questions around media transparency, viewability, ad blocking, and even fraud have also sown confusion.

Here are five questions to help keep your agency relationships on the right footing.

For rest of article, read here.

How One CEO Taught His Employees A Lesson In Integrity

A successful business man was growing old and knew it was time to choose a successor to take over the business.

Instead of choosing one of his Directors or his children, he decided to do something different. He called all the young executives in his company together.

He said, “It is time for me to step down and choose the next CEO. I have decided to choose one of you..”

The young executives were Shocked, but the boss continued. “I am going to give each one of you a SEED today – one very special SEED… I want you to plant the seed, water it, and come back here one year from today with what you have grown from the seed I have given you. I will then judge the plants that you bring, and the one I choose will be the next CEO.”

One man, named Jim, was there that day and he, like the others, received a seed. He went home and excitedly, told his wife the story. She helped him get a pot, soil and compost and he planted the seed. Everyday, he would water it and watch to see if it had grown. After about three weeks, some of the other executives began to talk about their seeds and the plants that were beginning to grow.

Jim kept checking his seed, but nothing ever grew.

Three weeks, four weeks, five weeks went by, still nothing.

By now, others were talking about their plants, but Jim didn’t have a plant and he felt like a failure.

Six months went by — still nothing in Jim’s pot. He just knew he had killed his seed. Everyone else had trees and tall plants, but he had nothing. Jim didn’t say anything to his colleagues, however.

He just kept watering and fertilizing the soil – He so wanted the seed to grow.

A year finally went by and all the young executives of the company brought their plants to the CEO for inspection.

Jim told his wife that he wasn’t going to take an empty pot. But she asked him to be honest about what happened. Jim felt sick to his stomach, it was going to be the most embarrassing moment of his life, but he knew his wife was right. He took his empty pot to the board room. When Jim arrived, he was amazed at the variety of plants grown by the other executives. They were beautiful — in all shapes and sizes. Jim put his empty pot on the floor and many of his colleagues laughed, a few felt sorry for him!

When the CEO arrived, he surveyed the room and greeted his young executives.

Jim just tried to hide in the back. “My, what great plants, trees, and flowers you have grown,” said the CEO. “Today one of you will be appointed the next CEO!”

All of a sudden, the CEO spotted Jim at the back of the room with his empty pot. He ordered the Financial Director to bring him to the front. Jim was terrified. He thought, “The CEO knows I’m a failure! Maybe he will have me fired!”

When Jim got to the front, the CEO asked him what had happened to his seed – Jim told him the story.

The CEO asked everyone to sit down except Jim. He looked at Jim, and then announced to the young executives, “Behold your next Chief Executive Officer!

His name is Jim!” Jim couldn’t believe it. Jim couldn’t even grow his seed.

“How could he be the new CEO?” the others said.

Then the CEO said, “One year ago today, I gave everyone in this room a seed. I told you to take the seed, plant it, water it, and bring it back to me today. But I gave you all boiled seeds; they were dead – it was not possible for them to grow.


All of you, except Jim, have brought me trees and plants and flowers. When you found that the seed would not grow, you substituted another seed for the one I gave you. Jim was the only one with the courage and honesty to bring me a pot with my seed in it. Therefore, he is the one who will be the new Chief Executive Officer!”

* If you plant honesty, you will reap trust
* If you plant goodness, you will reap friends
* If you plant humility, you will reap greatness
* If you plant perseverance, you will reap contentment
* If you plant consideration, you will reap perspective
* If you plant hard work, you will reap success
* If you plant forgiveness, you will reap reconciliation
* If you plant faith in God, you will reap a harvest

So, be careful what you plant now; it will determine what you will reap later.

“Whatever You Give To Life, Life Gives You Back”

Advertising is failing because it is a ‘lawless game of chance’ says market research boss

Advertising is a “lawless game of chance” according to the CEO of market research firm Forethought.

Speaking at Mumbrella’s Marketing Science Ideas Xchange, Ken Roberts, CEO of Forethought, said 99% of advertising failure is because marketers aren’t rationalising reasons to deliver an advertisement.

Ken Roberts at Mumbrella’s MSIX Conference.

“Why is so much advertising failing? The reason is because it’s just a lawless game of chance indiscernibly better than gut instinct,” Roberts said.

“I believe our focus should be empirical dissection of behaviour in both ways, rational and emotional, and then to develop a creative brief based on these drivers.”

The session discussed how marketing science could help creatives quantify the drivers of consumption.

Roberts said brands need to stop focusing on “made up” measures such as brand equity and “global norms” and test for “validated drivers.”

“You are interested in what the drivers of purchase behaviour are for your product in your category,” he said.

Ken Roberts: Advertising a “lawless game of chance”

“If you’re trying to influence sales, than that’s what you are setting about to influence, why do you need to measure some made up measure called brand equity? You are seeking to change people’s behaviour.”

Also in the session, Roberts said building associations with emotional events can be an effective way of communicating with an audience.

Giving the example of beer brand XXXX, Roberts explained the association with Queenslanders and the State of Origin links the brand with emotion.

“It’s not actually building emotion into XXXX it’s about building the association of XXXX into State of Origin,” he told the audience.

Roberts: “It’s not actually about building emotion into XXXX, it’s about building the association of XXXX into State of Origin”

However, Roberts said measuring emotions is most effective if marketers can understand implicit and discrete emotions such as love and pride.

“If you’re using physiological ways of measuring emotion you are wasting your time. If you are using facial coding – you’re semi-wasting your time,” he said.

Roberts said the best creative work comes when agencies are “constrained” by this process of analysing rational consumer behaviour.

“If the creative agency argues to you that you shouldn’t be constraining the creative guys that’s not right,” he said.

“The best creative comes when they are constrained, when they are having work through this process where they’re fenced.”

Simpler is (sometimes) better: Managing complexity in consumer goods.

Here’s how consumer-goods manufacturers can master complexity—and even turn it to their advantage.

With consumers’ product preferences diverging and retail formats proliferating, consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) companies have compelling reasons to constantly launch new SKUs. Fast-growing niche markets—such as health and wellness products, socially and environmentally responsible wares, and ethnic foods—represent enticing opportunities for CPG companies, as do new online and offline retail channels. Indeed, product innovation can help CPG companies win shelf space and capture growth, which is crucial at a time when many CPG categories are experiencing flat sales. But manufacturing more SKUs means having more complexity in the entire business system—and that’s not a trivial matter to CPG companies already under pressure to cut costs and to become ever more efficient. We estimate that complexity among food-and-beverage manufacturers, for example, is costing them as much as $50 billion in gross profit in the US market alone.

Many companies are painfully aware of the problem, and acknowledge the difficulty of keeping complexity under control. CPG executives from a range of companies—including Campbell Soup, Colgate-Palmolive, ConAgra Brands, and Hershey—have made public statements about their efforts to reduce complexity in their businesses. It’s a tricky undertaking, precisely because some level of complexity is necessary and advantageous. Traditional approaches to simplification—such as “cutting the tail,” or discontinuing the lowest-volume SKUs—are suboptimal, both because they tend to address only one aspect of the business system (a cut-the-tail program is all about assortment) and because they can produce unintended consequences. For example, by discontinuing a low-volume SKU, a manufacturer might inadvertently eliminate a product that plays a unique strategic role in the assortment. Or it might unknowingly drive up the per-unit cost of manufacturing other SKUs made on the same production line.

Read rest of article HERE.

Five ways to lead with humility

Whether you are a marketing manager, sales manager, product manager or even a brand manager, you are a leader in your own right and must possess the inherent qualities to lead.

Here are five ways where you can lead with humility and not arrogance.

It doesn’t take a great leader or person to rule with an iron fist. The true jewels among us in the leadership community are those that are able to simultaneously deliver results and create an unparalleled environment for their teams. Handling your leadership with humility is a surefire way to keep your team happy, unified, and productive. Here are 5 thoughts to keep in mind to successfully lead with humility.

1. Separate yourself from the vision

We all have passionate views about our workplaces. Often, this passion is why we are in positions of leadership, to begin with! However, you must remember that your company’s vision is the ideal that all employees are working toward, from the founder to the trainees. Even in a position of responsibility, take care not to imagine yourself as any closer or truer to your company’s vision than your team. Instead, instill in your team the idea that you are all in this together. Achieving goals will be much more meaningful to your team when you can celebrate as an unstoppable force, rather than a glorious leader standing on their shoulders.

2. Delegate to make your team the stars

Understand that as a leader, the ultimate judgment of your success is not simply whether or not your team achieved an established goal, but also how your team developed along the way. You might think taking on most or all important tasks by yourself is a sign of dedication, but it only establishes to your team that you have no faith in them. Furthermore, your team’s growth is hampered as a result, indicting your ability as a leader to foster development. To avoid this, delegate important tasks to your team frequently, and ensure that you are available to offer guidance. You can have your fingerprints on everything without leaving your team out in the cold.

3. Take responsibility

The ultimate measure of humility is being willing to answer for unforeseen challenges. Your team is there for you every day while chasing down your goals; a worthwhile leader never abandons or throws them under the bus for shortcomings. Rather than blaming your team for challenges, fight for their inclusion in creating a new strategy. The business’s goals are theirs as much as yours or anyone else’s, so keeping them involved can only increase your chance at success.

4. Express Gratitude

Just like your customers, your employees are an indispensable ingredient in the recipe for your success. Generating novel ideas to show your team that their contributions are appreciated can be difficult, but any effort you can make to reinforce to them how important they are is worthwhile. Not every effort has to be grandiose, either. Small gestures like offering a “Thank you” without fail for the completion of daily tasks may not seem like a big deal, but they go a long way toward creating a positive culture for your team.

5. Encourage Feedback

One way or the other, your employees provide you with feedback, but as a leader, you have a degree of control over whether you receive the feedback in a positive fashion. Limiting feedback channels denies your employees of the ability to contribute to the very culture in which they exist, converting them from team members with a real stake in your team’s goals into drones, cynically working towards ends they might not even know and possessing no real reason to stay. Open various channels of communication between you and your team to ensure everyone has a method to voice concerns and ideas with which they are comfortable, and you’ll reap the rewards of an engaged team who cares about goals because they had a hand in creating them.

Remember that every member of your team is important in the attainment of your goals. When you approach your leadership with humility as a guiding principle, you and your team can achieve what you may not have thought possible.

Emails .... are we writing them right? The new art of communication.

People who are in the marketing and sales professions write to customers, but unlike the good old days where it was done via type written letters, today it is all by email. Despite the fact, the pitfall facing our personnel is the weakness in the English language, but with a little guideline, the email can still appear to be professionally written.

How to compose emails such that they will be read and responded to? How do we grab the readers attention effectively who has a full inbox? Be it business or personal, the knack to draft an effective email is exceptionally useful in responsiveness as well as productivity.

All of us are busy, and we all have received long, equivocal and circuitous email. Many of us have also been regretful of writing such voluble email while soliciting for someone else’s time.

The subject line deserves the equal importance as on the body of the email – Spend Time:

The subject line is as good as a conversation starter to the email as that is a headline is to an article or blog post. The most impressive literature or the most splendid offer in the universe is not going to do any shade of good if the email is left unopened. The subject line with few words are the driving words in the conversation and so they need that extra love.

The best of the subject lines are intended to use a mix of clear importance to the reader - concise prose that’s not too boring or too smart, and gives a thrust to make a move. Picture your busy reader saying ‘So what?’ while floating over a full inbox. What do you think that grabs the interest in split seconds?

Think of a specific problem that we intend to help the reader with offer or email, then elegantly construct the subject line around that. Say, a message about a training and development program might tap into the resentment employees feel in their jobs, we might as well make the subject line “A Way out from dead-ended Career”.

Be it in a subject line or elsewhere, the key to any good content is this: Be sure this is definite enough to be pertinent, but general enough to be apt.

[For rest of article, read HERE .....]