CMO and Marketing Leadership

Well-Established Digital Channels Should Be Top Priority For Shopper Marketers In 2012

Tracy Stokes — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Shopper marketing is going digital, providing shopper marketers with a plethora of new high-buzz technologies, devices, and platforms to communicate messaging, promotions, or content to their shoppers along their path to purchase. But with limited budgets, and such a wealth of options, which ones should they choose? To help shopper marketers prioritize their technology investments in 2012 and beyond, my colleague Cory Madigan and I evaluated 17 digital tools for using Forrester's TechRadar™ methodology. The highlight trends reveal that:

How Is Social Media Changing Your Brand Strategy?

Tracy Stokes — Tue, 08 May 2012 12:24:22 +0000

How many times have you been asked, "What's your social strategy?" As Facebook's IPO grabs the headlines, and new social sites like Pinterest and Tumblr grab consumers' attention, many marketers are wrestling with what brand building looks like in today's social world. But the real question you should be asking yourself is, "How does social media change your brand strategy?"

Marketing leaders now view social media as critical for brand building. In our February 2012 Marketing Leadership Online Survey, nine out of 10 marketing leaders told us that social media is fundamentally changing how brands are being built in the 21^st century. In fact, they view it as second only to search for brand building. But many are still struggling to determine how to integrate it into their marketing plans. The truth is, while social is a great new tool, it lacks the power to build a brand alone. Marketing leaders such as Coca-Cola and JetBlue recognize this and are integrating social with paid and owned media to build a 21^st century brand experience. In my new report, "How Social Media Is Changing Brand Building," I identify three ways social media can help marketers harness the power of social to build their brand by 1) building a relationship to become more trusted; 2) differentiating through an emotional connection to become more remarkable; and 3) nurturing loyal fans to become more essential.

How is social changing your brand building strategy? What challenges are you facing in the social brand building world? Comment here, or join the conversation in our community of marketing leaders.

Thanks!

Is Your Brand Living Up To Your Customers’ Higher Standards?

Christopher Stutzman — Thu, 03 May 2012 22:05:40 +0000

I like to think of brand building as the quest for market share and mindshare. But that journey has become a steeper hill to climb. How much steeper? On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say it's an 11.

Here's why. Empowered 21^st century customers have higher standards for your company and the products and services you produce. That's what we learned in our 2012 North American Brand Performance Study. I recently talked about it in the CMO Strategy section of Advertising Age. But I'd like to provide some deeper insight into "Brand Building In The 21^st Century" in this post.

To put the learning from our study in context, consider the graphic below. The strength of a brand's position and perception in the marketplace is built on four pillars of equity: 1) credibility; 2) leadership; 3) uniqueness; and 4) relevance. As you build stronger equity across those pillars, it supports higher performance over the long haul through superior: 1) referral; 2) pricing power; and 3) preference.

This foundation of brand building still applies in the 21st century, but our analysis revealed that the pillars of brand equity have started to crack under the weight of consumers' higher standards.

How Can Digital Out-Of-Home Fulfill Its Potential? (Insights From The MediaPost Digital Out-Of-Home Summit)

Tracy Stokes — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

As digital infuses every medium, one of the oldest advertising mediums around -- out-of-home -- is getting a digital makeover. Forrester Researcher Cory Madigan recently attended a MediaPost summit on this topic. Here's Cory's take on the event:

On April 11th, MediaPost hosted a Digital Out-Of-Home Summit in New York. The event was primarily attended by digital out-of-home (DOOH) vendors, and the content was geared toward that audience, focusing on what the DOOH industry can do to help media planners and buyers shift spend to that channel. The opportunity is clear: As the medium closest to offline purchase, marketers can use DOOH to complete a marketing loop that involves TV, mobile, social, and out-of-home media. Tricia Nichols, global lead of consumer engagement and media strategy for Gap brands, noted that the interactivity of DOOH screens lends itself to in-store experiences, going beyond offers and into social loyalty. But with what seems like an obvious way to spend ad dollars, young DOOH media is having a hard time selling itself to media buyers and advertisers. How can the industry rise to the challenges it faces?

TV Is Getting More Targeted? Online Video Is Adopting GRPs? Welcome To The Upfront Twilight Zone.

David Cooperstein — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:00:21 +0000

The ever-insightful Mike Glantz has picked up on something strange in the water for video (TV and online) advertising these days. After conducting a great panel at the Forrester Marketing Leadership Forum in Los Angeles last week, here's his take:

Online video is certainly rising fast as a medium and an ad vehicle. Just this week, comScore announced that Americans watched more than 8 billion video ad impressions in March alone, setting an all-time record. Audiences in the US are embracing online video across a wide variety of devices and show no signs of slowing down. To capitalize on this explosive growth, many of the big online publishers like AOL, Hulu, and Yahoo are hosting their own "New Fronts," with the hope of emulating TV and attracting bigger advertisers with deeper pockets and larger commitments to purchase the more valuable online ad space in advance.

Moving From Cool To Critical: What We Learned At The Forrester Marketing Leadership Forum

David Cooperstein — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:55:54 +0000

Last week, Forrester got about 700 of our friends together (ok, conference attendees) to figure out what is cool and what is critical in marketing today as well as what is likely to cross from the former to the latter. We had amazing presentations from major consumer goods, retail, insurance, and technology brands tackling these different issues.

Below, I have included the graphic illustrations of these presentations (courtesy of Kate Dwyer at Collective Next), highlighting the key takeaways from each. In them, you can see the stories and concepts that our speakers revealed to help the audience progress in this complex marketing world we now live in.

What's cool?

Branding is cool again, according to Chris Stutzman. He studied the relationship expressed by consumers between things like brand pride and brand uniqueness and how they influence premium prices and willingness to recommend. His insight: 21st century brands will be built on different foundations than 20th century brands, especially as they relate to what leads the marketing effort. Product-led brands will suffer as experience-led brands thrive (Note: His report will be coming out soon, but here is preview from Advertising Age).

ICANN Extends gTLD Application Window By A Week — Time For All Brands To Pay Attention

Jeff Ernst — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:50:03 +0000

Bummer, we have to wait another week. Apparently ICANN is concerned about possible tampering with the TLD Application System (TAS), as they rightly should be, so they have closed it down for a few days, resulting in the application window for new gTLDs being extended from today to next Friday, April 20th. As it states on its site, "Recently, we received a report of unusual behavior with the operation of the TAS system. We then identified a technical issue with the TAS system software."

Not that this shouldn't make a difference to you, because if you haven't taken a stand on gTLDs for your company and don't have your application all ready to go by today, you're most likely gonna miss the boat anyway. But as a marketing leader, you need to make sure you have someone paying close attention to the program over the next few weeks.

We've been expecting that ICANN will post the public portions of all the applications on its site by April 30th (don't be surprised if this slips a week as well). By reviewing this posting, you'll see who is applying and what strings they are applying for. Whether or not you have applied for your own gTLD, make sure you go through the list to see if someone has applied for a string that may violate a trademark right for your company or one of your brands. It will be up to you to file a legal rights objection if this happens. It is most likely to happen if you've got a company or product name that is a commonly used word, like United.

What Kind Of Music Will Chevy's New Agency Arrangement Play?

Christopher Stutzman — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:10:37 +0000

Forrester applauds GM, Goodby, and McCann for breaking ground to create a new genre of agency orchestration.

Last week's announcement of Chevrolet's new global creative agency Commonwealth, a joint venture between Omnicom's Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and IPG's McCann Erickson Worldwide, is further evidence that the complexity of managing a global brand demands marketers and agencies to work together in new ways.

Despite being created primarily out of financial necessity -- to cut more than $2 billion in global marketing expenses -- CMO Joel Ewanick and agency leaders at Goodby and McCann arrived at an innovative solution to improve the brand's global creative stewardship. Less-committed CMOs might've given up on the idea that they could get their two most important creative agencies, from different holding companies, to work together. And lesser agencies might have folded up the tent and retreated to greener pastures, before sharing brand strategy and creative duties. But they didn't. They stared a cold financial reality in the eye, apparently over a hot coffee at a shop named Commonwealth.

So what kind of music will Commonwealth be playing for Chevy?

Time To Shift B2B Social Media Marketing Focus From The "Media" To The "Social"

Jeff Ernst — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 22:30:12 +0000

As marketers, we think of ourselves as social. So why is it that almost 50% of B2B marketers surveyed say that they primarily use social media as just another channel to push messages to their target market?

And those are the ones who are attempting to use social media for demand generation. There are still many who are not. One marketer I talked with recently believes that social media is only useful for marketing to consumers and the gimmicks that B2C marketers use would never work for B2B. To some extent that's true, but B2B and B2C marketing are both about people-to-people communications and eliciting emotional responses, which social is perfect for doing.

I was giving a presentation to a marketing team a few weeks ago, and one of the senior folks in the room said that his buyers are too old, too senior, and too busy to be on Facebook. But we were able to show him that his demographic of buyers does use social media when learning about solutions the company sells. Forrester's B2B Social Technographics data shows that business decision-makers use social media for business purposes, and when it comes to creating content and sharing opinions, they do it more for business than personal reasons.

Social media can be harnessed for generating demand, but you have to recognize how it's different from your other channels and use it differently.

New Data Is Bringing New Insight To TV Viewing

David Cooperstein — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:06:50 +0000

At our Marketing Leadership Forum in April, Forrester Researcher Mike Glantz will be talking up TV in its future state with a panel made up of Comcast, ABC, and others. Here is a post written by Mike about his upcoming panel and a report he is working on. Enjoy!

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

Marketers have struggled with accurately measuring their reach across TV and digital media platforms. Today's TV watchers multitask with digital devices, fluidly moving between platforms and expecting a seamless experience. In this complex world, marketers need standardized data sets to measure:

Q&A With John Swigart, CMO At Esurance, About How To Approach Marketing In The 21st Century

David Cooperstein — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:57:36 +0000

I recently got to engage with John Swigart, CMO at Esurance (recently acquired by Allstate), who will be keynoting at our Marketing Leadership Forum in Los Angeles on April 18. Here are some words of wisdom from him about how to take new marketing tactics and put them into action.

1. What was your approach and justification for investing in new marketing tactics that are still in their development phase?

I'm pretty consistent in pushing my teams to explore new avenues that may yield better results for us. I want us to make informed decisions but take risks, whatever the application might be. We're a company borne of the Internet, so I think we are a little more forward-leaning than some of our competitors in some ways. We push pretty aggressively -- how can we improve, gain more mindshare, and sell more policies -- things like paid search, cost per clicks are all very much a part of the online environment we grew up in, as is social media, so it made sense for us to explore making a tighter connection between our offline advertising and our social media presence online. The average Facebook user spends about 6 hours a month on the platform, so we certainly see the value of having a conversation with some of the 200 million Facebook users in the US.

2. For your industry, what "gotchas" did you have to look out for?

P&G Brand Building Goes Digital, But This Is Not The End Of TV Advertising

Tracy Stokes — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

As the world's largest advertiser, any move by Procter & Gamble (P&G) is closely watched. So much attention has been paid to its recent announcement that it will cut $10 billion from its marketing budget over the next five years. In an interview last week with The Wall Street Journal, P&G's Global Chief Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard elaborated on the company's intent to lean more heavily on digital media at the expense of higher-ticket TV advertising as part of its cost-savings strategy. The Wall Street Journal interview is part of a PR push from P&G around its digital ambitions, highlighted in a Signal event in Cincinnati last week that focused on brand building in a digital world. The event brought in digital players and experts from Facebook and Google to Buddy Media and Flipboard as well as Forrester's own eBusiness experts Sucharita Mulpuru and Andy Hoar. So why is P&G making this digital shift, and what does it mean?

The public event and announcements are, as the event name suggests, a signal -- a welcome signal to Wall Street that P&G will be faster and more efficient (the company's stock rose 3% with the budget-cutting news). It's a return shot across the bow to competitors such as Unilever and L'Oreal, which are both making high-profile advances in their digital ambitions, and a signal to P&G employees around the world that their leaders are serious about digital and that they need to accelerate change in the slow-moving P&G ship.

Is Your Brand Making Promises It Can't Keep?

Christopher Stutzman — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:33:30 +0000

That's a sure sign that your brand is still stuck in the 20^th century. And that's what I'm going to talk about at this year's Marketing Leadership Forum in Los Angeles on April 18-19.

We believe that brands will matter more than ever in the 21^st century. But the brands that win will focus as much on delivering on their promise as they do on making promises. Come join me and find out how you can update your 20^th century brand positioning and align your brand-building assets, to make sure you're building the kind of brand equity that adds value for your customers and fuels growth for your business.

What If We Merged The Marketing And Sales Funnel With The Customer Life Cycle?

Jeff Ernst — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:16:44 +0000

Carlos Hidalgo from The Annuitas Group reminded me in his blog post yesterday that at last year's DemandCon, I decided to be a little provocative in my keynote by claiming that "the marketing funnel is dead." I couldn't resist, especially given that the conference logo is a funnel. I didn't get the oohs and aahhs I expected, and no one threw tomatoes.

I went on to explain that the funnel still serves a purpose, but it no longer reflects today's buyer journey, as my colleague Steven Noble articulated in his report "It's Time To Bury The Marketing Funnel." In a nutshell, buyer behavior is less funnel-like than ever before: Buyers don't move in a linear fashion, they don't necessarily narrow their consideration set as they move through their problem-solving process, and, if you deliver a great experience, they buy from you again.

What does a buyer's problem-solving process look like? It's a customer life cycle (see the picture on the right), where business-to-business (B2B) buyers 1) discover they have a problem or an opportunity and get to a point where they realize they need to change the status quo; 2) explore their requirements and the options for solving the problem; 3) select the best solution and acquire it; 4) and engage with the solution provider and with their peers as they implement the solution . . . and so on and so on.

Did Media Multitasking Hasten The End Of Canoe’s iTV Ventures?

David Cooperstein — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 01:37:25 +0000

Last week's big TV news was that Canoe Ventures, the company jointly founded by the major cable MSOs (Comcast, Cox, Charter, Cablevision, Time Warner, and Bright House), has decided to abandon its interactive TV (iTV) business and focus its efforts on enabling targeted advertising in video-on-demand (VoD) programming. (See Advertising Age story here.) Departing CEO Kathy Timko was cited as saying that the shuttering of the business was "the result of what the marketplace told us," but marketers have long demanded that their TV ads be more interactive and engaging. What happened?

I would argue that marketer demand for Canoe's request-for-information (RFI) interactive ads, though never incredibly high, was the victim of not only the difficulties of getting large cable companies to work on a joint end product but also the shift in consumer behavior to media multitasking and an explosion of second-screen experiences. Since 2008, there have been a number of trends that would suggest multitasking would negatively affect Canoe's RFI ads:

CMO and Marketing Leadership

Well-Established Digital Channels Should Be Top Priority For Shopper Marketers In 2012

Categories:

How Is Social Media Changing Your Brand Strategy?

Categories:

Is Your Brand Living Up To Your Customers’ Higher Standards?

How Can Digital Out-Of-Home Fulfill Its Potential? (Insights From The MediaPost Digital Out-Of-Home Summit)

TV Is Getting More Targeted? Online Video Is Adopting GRPs? Welcome To The Upfront Twilight Zone.

Categories:

Moving From Cool To Critical: What We Learned At The Forrester Marketing Leadership Forum

Categories:

ICANN Extends gTLD Application Window By A Week — Time For All Brands To Pay Attention

Categories:

What Kind Of Music Will Chevy's New Agency Arrangement Play?

Time To Shift B2B Social Media Marketing Focus From The "Media" To The "Social"

Categories:

New Data Is Bringing New Insight To TV Viewing

Categories:

Q&A With John Swigart, CMO At Esurance, About How To Approach Marketing In The 21st Century

P&G Brand Building Goes Digital, But This Is Not The End Of TV Advertising

Categories:

Is Your Brand Making Promises It Can't Keep?

What If We Merged The Marketing And Sales Funnel With The Customer Life Cycle?

Categories:

Did Media Multitasking Hasten The End Of Canoe’s iTV Ventures?