Receiving loads of emails regarding my Henley MBA materials (mind maps) I have decided to make them globally available for free. Would describe it as a kind of open source. In return I would appreciate if we get connected on LinkedIn or XING to stay in touch and give me feedback about your MBA (or any other) journey.

Furthermore, please understand that I’m not in a position anymore to help you in detail with your assignments due to time constraints. However, don’t hesitate to drop me a line…it always worth a shot.

Have a wonderful MBA journey! I hope that my mind maps will help you through…somehow :-). The Henley MBA is a demanding and truly rewarding experience. I’m using the materials, network and mindset every day to be a better leader.

The post MBA mind maps available for free download appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

Let’s have a look at a new criterion that eases your life but only a few companies can deliver (and basically not those companies that you approach when buying some leads). Let’s call this criterion creditworthiness. Creditworthiness means an assessment of the creditworthiness of a company or individual to ensure that in 12 months time the subject is still active and won’t go bankrupt.

What do you think about it? Might sound strange to a marketer? What the heck do I have to care about creditworthiness in sales or marketing? Isn’t that finance departments problem? No it is not. At least no any longer. Credit management usually should start right before the first contact. Or don’t you agree that you should not approach any prospect that is highly unlikely to be on the market for any longer than the next 12 months? See. I knew it. In times when resources are scarce anyway why should you want to risk your marketing budget by wasting money on prospects that either cease trading soon or cannot pay for your products anyway?

Have you thought about it what’s going to happen if you leave this to finance or the credit department? Assuming that you contact some prospects that in turn will buy your product but won’t pay for it: The process will pretty much resembles the following one:

1. Final reminder
2. Collection proceedings
3. Maybe successful in collecting some money, maybe not.
4. Assuming that no money could be collected due to the fact that the company goes bust
5. There will be a gap due to the loss that needs to be offset by additional sales. What if among those additional sales there are some more bad debts. In industries where there are small margins a loss can become a serious challenge to offset. (Example: 3% margin, loss of 10’000 $  –> additional sales required of = 333’333 $…..that’s A FIGURE)
6. Certainly, marketing will be responsible for those bad debts due the fact that the wrong companies / people have been selected leading to a direct loss.
7. Marketing budget might be reduced because the performance is not appropriate, in fact it’s even generating some direct losses at the bottom line (not even considering the costs of those leads etc.)

I guess you don’t want to go into such discussions. Therefore, think about taking creditworthiness into your catalogue of selection criteria to ensure that you really target companies and people that are worth the effort.

The post Marketing campaign driven by which criteria? appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

However, considering relationship management as a strategic task there are various implications for the management. First of all there should be a sound understanding what a „relationship organisation“ is all about. Some important characteristic traits of relationship organisations are:

• Willing to develop new possibilities through partnerships & strategic alliances
• Non-core activities should be outsourced
• Product development to turn ideas into products
• Open relationships to employees
• Use IT to serve the customer better
• Customer satisfaction measurement linked to compensation & rewards structure
• Market driven & customer led
• Partnerships (any stakeholder) based on trust & commitment
• Responsive & adaptable (provide information to and get information from stakeholders)

Payne’s six market model (link here) helps any senior management to make sure that they have considered every “market” that is essential for relationship management. For each and every market a dedicated target could be set and a realistic approach planned. By doing this the executive can define how they want to orchestrate their marketing activities. Those six markets encompass:

1. Customer markets
2. Referral markets
3. Supplier markets
4. Employee recruitment markets
5. Influence markets
6. Internal markets

Customer markets

With the development from a transactional relationship to a relational relationship the marketing activities have changed as well. It is today the goal to moving customers up the marketing loyalty ladder to become an advocate of the company linking into the referral market element of the six markets model.

To achieve this many components have to be aligned like quality management, service management, customer retention management, complain management, innovation management, communication management and last but not least customer value management. Each component contributes to the holistic approach of relationship management to develop the customer step by step into a company advocate who recommends the company and it’s offering via word-of-mouth etc. A crucial point is to keep an eye on customer satisfaction to track the performance and the stage of a customer. Measures like the net-promoter score (that is a score measuring how many promoters and detractors a company consists of in a relational way on a scale of -100 to 100) could help to derive a portfolio view of your entire customer base.  However, as outlined in my previous entry it might be that customers don’t seek a relational relationship but a transactional relationship.

Referral markets

Referral markets are important to spread the word about the company and its offering. This could be done by customers and intermediaries. Kick-back incentives for a recommendation is a possible way how a referrer could be bought into this approach.

Many companies work with recommendation marketing because a satisfied customer or intermediary is always the best referrer without being biased. On the other hand referrals have a far wider reach then the company’s marketing efforts only. Today with the help of social media the word is spread in minutes across the globe with the means of e.g. Facebook, Youtube etc. It’s therefore essential that you offer the tools to spread the word across these platforms and make it as easy as possible for the referrer. Today’s digital native generation has really reinforced the “social spreading” gene and companies should direct their marketing initiatives into this direction as well.

On the other hand, negative word of mouth can be spread the same way. So it’s recommendable to track and monitor what has been sound on the market to intervene as early as possible.

Influence markets

Influence markets are markets that can change the rules of the game. Legal perspectives like laws etc. can quickly change the basis of your entire industry. It is therefore important to build relationships with the government, lobbies, authorities, regulators etc. Mostly this is a formal relationship with an interest of information exchange.

Supplier markets

The relationship between the company and its suppliers has undergone a change from just squeezing every drop out of the supplier to a relationship where customers needs are mutually anticipated and products build upon the needs. Companies always suffer if a supplier is suffering even if the good could be replaced or substituted by another supplier. Starting again a new relationship that carries some uncertainties has become a risk in a world where product lifecycles are getting shorter and shorter. The customer expects new products on a regular basis which again requires a sound and working value chain starting with the supplier.

Recruitment markets

Managing the recruitment market is an important strategic approach that has been neglected for a long time. Today, the most important resource of any company is not their goods or intellectual property but the employees. They are responsible for the ideas and innovation that leads to goods and intellectual property. Highly skilled people form a competitive advantage that can be sustainable if people can be retained. It is therefore extremely important and strategic to attract skilled people that again influence customer satisfaction – a virtuous cycle. This task is about employer branding by showing presence at universities, fairs and positioning the company in the minds of the people. Form that perspective it’s not entirely down to the human resource department but also a marketing task of each and every employee and department.

Internal markets

This market is about internal employees that act as internal customers and suppliers. Additionally, management has to ensure that employees are aligned to the company’s vision and mission. If everyone in the company acts in concert it can be ensured that the best possible output for the customer and the relationship could be achieved. By doing this it is paramount that the internal limits of processes etc. are not imposed onto the customer.  Managing internal markets is a central task of senior management.

The six markets model helps to consider each and every market of relationship management. However, not every market requires the same amount of effort and time. It is nonetheless important that every market is dealt with to ensure a holistic perspective of relationship management.

• Six market model
• Net-promoter-score

• Relationship Marketing mind map 2
• Relationship Marketing mind map 3

The post Relationship management is strategic appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

Customer acquisition becomes more and more difficult. Relationship marketing could be a remedy.

The financial crisis and its aftermath increased the difficulties to acquire new customers. Many companies invest significant amounts of (marketing)money into customer acquisition without the desired outcome. They struggle to acquire the right customers (which is mostly down to wrong segmentation and personas) and finally they’re not able to convert prospects into frequently buying customers. However, the financial targets nonetheless need to be met which is why companies rethink their strategy. Relationship marketing could support this undertaking by building up on a relational relationship rather than a transactional with customers. Furthermore, many scholars have proven that the costs of customer acquisition are higher than the costs for retention due the costs of information and missing experience. If the industry is on heavy competition the costs for acquisition might increase even more. From a profit point of view Reichheld & Sasser found in their article “Putting the service-profit-chain to work”  that an increase in customer retention by only 5% might lead to an increase of profitability of 25% to 85%. Customer retention on the other hand is a result or objective of relationship marketing.

What is relationship marketing? A definition.

There are many definitions of relationship marketing. CRM and RM are used many times interchangeably. I personally like the following statement that summarizes many facets of relationship marketing:

Relationship marketing is how a company finds you, gets to know you, keeps in touch with you, tries to ensure you get what you want from them, checks that you are getting what they have promised – all to it being mutually beneficial.

What you can see is that RM is about a two dimensional communication rather than just a single way of communication. Relationship that is the underlying term in RM is based on trust and commitment. There are two kind of relationships that we need to understand first:

Despite the fact that the advantages of a relational business relationship can be seen and are proven we nevertheless have to bear in mind that under certain circumstances a transactional relationship is more appropriate and desired.  E.g. in low risk purchase situations none of the involved parties sees a reason for a relational relationship or for example in price sensitive markets when buyers try to play off suppliers against each other. Sometimes customers just want to make a one-off purchase.

Drivers of relationship marketing

It is furthermore beneficial to understand what really drives relationship marketing. These drivers could serve you as arguments why relationship marketing could mitigate your revenue and profit issue.

Some drivers for relationship marketing could be identified as:

Some resistors can be identified as:

Objectives of relationship marketing

Relationship marketing aims at customer retention primarily to be able to establish longterm business with the customer. Customer lifetime value as future-oriented measure of customer value goes hand in hand with customer retention.

Apart from pure retention RM tries to develop the customer intitially from an prospect into a partner of the company that makes referrals. Payne developed the loyalty ladder model to show how the customer could climb up the ladder to become a partner (see below). The notion of having a mutually beneficial relationship that is based on trust and commitment is crucial and a central goal of RM as well. All marketing activities within the company are directed into a relational mind set to serve the customer in the best possible way.

Strategic topic

Whether to enter into a relational operating mode is a strategic decision and can’t be left to sales, customer service etc.  It is basically a philosophical approach that needs to be implemented into processes, structures, mind sets etc. of a company. As with any strategy this should be represented by senior management to ensure that the strategy is really happening. Marketing in that sense is perceived to act as a holistic mindset of the company rather than just as a functional department. Everyone in the company is therefore part of relationship marketing and acts as a marketeer towards various internal & external stakeholders.

See what Peter Doyle says about relationship marketing

You’ll read in the next RM post more about the strategic nature of relationship marketing and some important models (e.g. Six markets model) that can be used in RM.

The post What is relationship marketing all about? appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

After some thoughts about the future direction of this blog I have decided to slightly change the content of the articles. Most of the articles were about my successfully achieved MBA at Henley Business School. As I’m finished now I would like to share my knowledge from the MBA combined with my professional experience. The main focus therefore will be on Marketing with an emphasis on strategic marketing, relationship marketing (CRM) and marketing performance management.

For all those of you that are interested in my MBA I have good news for you. I’m planning to share my extensive mind maps covering the entire materials of the MBA with you. I won’t just put a package of all maps onto the net but rather incorporate the maps into my articles. A quick count amounted to over 200 mind maps standing for roughly 2’500 hours of MBA. Hope you guys are looking forward to it…I do.

The new direction brings along a new name, tagline and design of the blog as well. Hope you guys like this as well :-): If you have any comments or questions feel free to drop me a line at pgalig (at) galig (dot) ch.

The post Blog content and direction change appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

Just a short entry to let you know about the new ranking of Which MBA? from the renown The economist (link) that places Henley on 12th in Europe (and 42nd in the world).

It’s always a dangerous thing to assess schools only by the rankings as they apply various criteria but it is important to know about them. I’m pleased that Henley improved their ranking by 15 places worldwide. Apparently, after some teething trouble in the aftermath of the merger of the University of Reading and the Henley Management College it finally seems to pay off. However, it is not the rankings that will help you, it is what you get out of your MBA. I know people from top 10 schools that don’t perform accordingly…

Have a look by yourself and make a judgment: http://www.henley.ac.uk/mba/henley-mba-economist-rankings-2012.aspx.

Cheers

Patrick

The post Henley in the Which MBA? Rankings from the Economist appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

A quick one. Got back my results for my thesis about marketing metrics (marketing performance measurement) as part of my Henley MBA. I’am extremely delighted as I haven’t expected such a brilliant result despite the fact that the thesis took me a fair amount of time. Guess I can now deservedly call myself a marketing metrics specialist. My tutor always said that we should aim for a B as this is an extremely good mark on this level and everything above is for the Harvard Business Review. So I guess then I’m up for Harvard Business Review :-).

However, I’m happy that many of my peers did it as well and we’re going to celebrate a funny graduation in October in Henley. In the interim I’m going to publish a couple of my findings here soon out of my thesis.

Bye for now…

The post Master thesis marked – MBA officially over and done. appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

Master thesis was challenging
The thesis was extremely challenging but worth every minute. After a diligent literature review about marketing metrics (loads of marketing performance measurement articles included) I have formulated a couple of research questions (basically one overarching question that has been broken down into 7 sub questions) that were answered in the investigation part with the help of internal qualitative interviews and an external quantitative survey. The analysis of the internal interviews followed a thematic coding approach and was carried out deductively. The quantitative survey used descriptive statistics to describe frequencies and inferential statistics to test hypothesis with t-tests, Kruskal-Wallis tests, ANOVAs and linear regressions. Quite challenging I have to admit but I managed it quite well.

Analysis of marketing metrics on this blog soon
You’ll find some basic analyses of the survey on this blog soon. I guess marketing metrics are extremely important and the feedback I got from the respondents was overwhelming. Many agreed on the importance, many asked loads of deep questions and many wanted to have the results of the final analysis. However, I have to admit that I had hoped for clear correlations between success of companies (that has been adjusted to reflect the credit crunch) and the used metrics in terms of number of metrics, frequency of measurement, dashboard and success etc. None of these relationships could have been proved significantly so far with the used methods. That was due the scope of the thesis as well. However, some interrelations exist, especially between non-financial marketing metrics and company success. Guess I have to analyse it further out of personal interest in the next couple of month. Nevertheless, at the moment I’m just glad that the thesis is done and the MBA journey is over.

Work-life-balance – got it back now?
The MBA journey is history. No more learning at the evening, at the weekend, at the holiday etc. Just family and social life. I guess in retro perspective this has been the biggest trade off I had to accept. Not sure whether it has been worth, time will definitely tell.

So what’s my recap of the MBA just a few days after the end? Extremely valuable, learned a lot of applicable stuff that has made me a better manager for sure. Made some international friends for life. Have proved that I can work for a long time over the limit if necessary despite the fact that overall health definitely suffered. Nevertheless, I’m so much more better in many ways compared to when I started the MBA…holistic, interrelationships are not any more just fancy words. However, as said before I now have to turn to work-life-balance again. Imagine: For the first time in 3 years that I have mown the lawn without a guilty conscious!! Fantastic. Need more of it. And I guess I have deserved it as well.

New objectives? Yes. I’ll keep you posted. Soon. Now a bit of celebration seems to be appropriate to me.

The post Henley MBA journey is over. What a relief. appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

Quite a long time ago since my last entry but I was kind of busy.

Light at the end of the tunnel

I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. So after a bit more than 2.5 years the end of the MBA seems not that far away. It has been an extremely valuable journey with ups and downs but in the end I’m convinced that I made some important experiences and learned a lot of applicable stuff. I now have a huge toolbox but at the end of the day the difference comes from which tool is being used rather than the sheer number of tools. It’s not the tools it’s about their application. This is something Henley excels at….teaching what’s relevant.

Master thesis proposal accepted

So why can I see the light at the end of the tunnel? I have handed in my management challenge proposal (=master thesis) and it has been accepted. This means that in the following months I’m going to focus on my master thesis which is about marketing metrics. The title: “Development of bespoke marketing metrics for the use within a strategic marketing dashboard to sustain growth”. The whole story then revolves around strategic marketing (especially marketing performance evaluation, relationship marketing etc), financial resources (KPI’s, project evaluation with the help of NPV etc.), corporate finance. Bespoke because the whole thesis is in application to my employer Dun & Bradstreet (Switzerland) Ltd.

400-600 hours of work ahead of me

I’m really looking forward to the estimated 350-400 hours of work (according to Henley, but we have learned that they tend to underestimate the workload by some 50%) as this project offers me intresting insigth into a very fascinating topic. Be honest: Does your marketing department or your senior management align marketing metrics (if there are any at all) to the overarching strategy? Do you plan marketing campaigns etc. from that perspective? Current thinking in the area shows that a lot of companies don’t even measure marketing perfromance apart from the commonplace metrics like sales, profit margin, market share. But is that sufficient? How does sales fit into your customer retention strategy or put differently is sales anyhow a valuable metrics of your customer retention strategy efforts? I’m keen to delve into this topic to figure out the interrelationships etc. Will be kind of fun and from a future point of view it’ll make me an expert in a field where a lot of “creative” people bustle but many of them lack knowledge when it comes to performance evaluation. In the end marketing is not about pure creativity and innovation but about measurable impact and contribution to a company’s strategy and bottom line.

The post Light at the end of the tunnel….Master thesis appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.

I found a wonderful peace of software which gears towards „full synchronization“. The tool is called Wunderlist and is a task management tool on the Internet which seamlessly synchronizes across computers or mobile devices. Set up your task categories (like business or private for example) and enter all tasks you have to do. It automatically synchronizes the tasklist with your iPhone and you are good to go. If you have finished the task just tick the box and the task is marked as finished. Luckily the tool is free of charge and has an appealing user interface. So it’s kind of fun to use the tool as well.

Have a look at their homepage: Wunderlist

Wunderlist | Task Management At Its Best

The post Task management with Wunderlist – A powerful tool for free appeared first on 360° Marketing insights by Patrick Galig.