Marketing News: April 2019

AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

AMA.ORG

APRIL 2019

YOUR S WA G I S GETTING SCRAPPED Always On: Three Decades of the Market Maven The Ethical Perils of Dark Ads

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table of contents AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

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SEEN ON AMA.ORG

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ANSWERS IN ACTION

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• Snapshot • Core Concepts • Ethical Marketing

20-21

SCHOLARLY INSIGHTS • Andrea Heintz Tangari, My (Myla) Bui, Kelly L. Haws and Peggy J. Liu

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EXECUTIVE INSIGHTS • Vikas Mittal • Pam Neely

50-54 CAREER ADVANCEMENT • Revenue Marketing • Customer Engagement

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#OFFICEGOALS  Your Trinkets Might Be Trash

Promotional products may be an environmental nightmare, but they’re also effective. What’s an ethical marketer to do? Tread lightly and choose wisely.

40  From Knowing Alexa,

to Following @Alexa, to ‘Hey, Alexa’: The Evolving Market Maven

It’s been three decades since Linda Price and Lawrence Feick’s market maven paper changed the way marketers thought about customer-to-customer influence.

In that time, consumers have come to expect nearly anything they want at any time—amplifying the need for an ever-available influencer.

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Trash or Treasure

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chotchkes have become an accepted part of marketers’ lives.

But it’s time we rethink how we catch—and keep—consumer attention. Managing editor Sarah Steimer explores how promotional products needn’t disappear altogether, but marketers need to keep functionality and desirability in mind when selecting products, and how the company is reflected in those items.

“Marketers have two options when choosing promotional products to represent their brand: They can be the New Yorker bag—sought-after, functional, reusable and building positive brand awareness—or they can be the cheap earbuds tangled and forgotten at the bottom of the bag, destined for a landfill,” Steimer writes. “Perhaps the worst possible impression a bad promotional product could provide is a trash can filled with logos. Sponsors vie for the chance to be the constant visual in conference photos, the logo on the bag that everyone is carrying. But make a poor promotional product choice and your logo can only

compete with discarded coffee cups.”

Elsewhere in this issue we explore how today’s advertisers are changing course with shorter ads, more ethical targeting and the most influential influencers of all—digital assistants.

What are you doing to advertise differently?

MOLLY SOAT Editor in Chief @MollySoat

CONTRIBUTORS

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ZACK BROOKE

LISA PREDKO

Zach Brooke is a former AMA staff writer turned freelance journalist. His work has been featured in Chicago Magazine, Milwaukee Magazine, AV Club and VICE, among others.

Follow him on Twitter @Zach_Brooke.

Lisa Predko is a Chicago-based photographer who specializes in conceptual and narrative images and is co-author of Lisa Food, a photo-centric gluten-free cookbook. Lisa’s two favorite design elements are lighting and color; upon entering a room, the first thing she typically looks for is a dimmer switch.

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APRIL 2019

VOL. 53 | NO. 4 AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION

Bill Cron Chairperson of the AMA Board 2018-2019 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org EDITORIAL STAFF

Phone (800) AMA-1150 Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org David Klein, Chief Content Officer dklein@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor in Chief msoat@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Managing Editor ssteimer@ama.org Julian Zeng, Assistant Managing Editor jzeng@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Bill Murphy, Designer wmurphy@ama.org ADVERTISING STAFF

Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Nicola Tate, Associate Director, Media Channels ntate@associationmediagroup.com (804) 469-0324 Miranda Maclean, Recruitment Advertising Specialist miranda.maclean@communitybrands.com (727) 497-6565 x3404 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly except June/July and November/December by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601.

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LETTER FROM THE CEO

Advertisers: Let Your Customer Tell Your Story

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hree forces have spurred marketers to rethink the concept of advertising, which for more than 50 years was a one-way barrage of formulaic “problem: solution” messages touting brand benefits to consumers. The three forces include the dawning of the digital age, the advent of social media and the explosion of so-called content marketing.

This period of industry self-examination has been one of enlightenment for marketers, ad agencies and brand-owners.

The digital age has empowered more precise targeting of content to consumers who we know a lot more about. Social media shifted one-way communication to an omni-directional co-creation of content in a world where everyone is a publisher.

Lastly, the evolution of content marketing in the B2C space was supposed to change the brand-consumer dynamic from selling the customer to helping the customer buy.

Sounds like progress, right? Perhaps.

Has the evolution of ethics stayed in tune with these new capabilities? Do marketers have new responsibilities as a result of these new powers? Or have we had these responsibilities all along and just shirked them?

I recently attended a three-day symposium hosted by one of the world’s preeminent universities where thought leaders from both industry and academia shared cutting-edge best and next practices in the field. Not once did I hear the word or concept of “solution” uttered.

Instead, experts spoke of using their new powers to sell. When will brand owners realize that the customer does not want your product? Consumers want the solution your brand was hired to perform.

Too few brand owners have expanded their market view to innovate new solutions instead of new products and services.

Too few brand owners have let go of the idea that they control their brand story.

Moreover, they fail to grasp the power of stories from customers who enjoyed superior experiences.

A blog post from Duct Tape Marketing highlights that a lot of businesses can offer consumers a solution that’s similar to your own.

“Plus, with the internet, location is not a barrier in the same way it used to be,” post author John Jantsch writes. “So how do you stand out from your global competition?

Storytelling is a great way to build a personal connection with your customers, which is the differentiator that will keep them coming back to you, year after year, rather than turning to your rivals.”

If marketing is to retain, much less improve, its stature as a critical interdisciplinary science, we have to agree on what the essential goal of it is. I don’t believe it’s getting consumers to buy; I believe it’s providing superior solutions wrapped in superior experiences.

Marketing gets a bad name when marketers try to story-tell their way to prominence. The most genuine and effective stories are those told by the consumer, not the brand owner. Let your customer do the talking. Excellence in marketing is about giving them good reason to do it.

RUSS KLEIN CEO

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Marketers’ Confidence Drops Due to Consumer Spending Outlook on consumer spending drops the Marketers Confidence Index from 131 to 122

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he Marketers’ Confidence Index dropped by nine points from 131 in July 2018 to 122 in January 2019. The report— sponsored by Kantar Consulting and the AMA—finds that the drop was due to marketers losing confidence in consumer spending.

The Marketers’ Confidence Index is an online survey that asked 255 AMA newsletter subscribers a series of questions. Most respondents—41%—are at the VP or director level.

In July’s survey, 14% of marketers say that their confidence had decreased in consumer spending over the past six months; in January’s survey, 24% say that their confidence in past consumer spending decreased.

Marketers also lost confidence in customer spending over the next six months: 7% say that their confidence dropped in July’s survey, whereas 17% say they lost confidence in future consumer spending in January’s survey.

Though marketers are less confident about consumer spending, they remain confident in their ability to grow. The survey finds that 56% of marketers expect growth, a slight improvement from the July survey. Marketers also feel as though they have similar, albeit slightly less, influence than those surveyed in July. In July, 71% felt that they had influence, while 65% felt that they had influence in the most recent survey.

Budgets have remained mostly even in the past six months. Marketers spend the most in creative (24%), media placement (22%) and product maintenance and support (17%). If marketers had to cut their budgets, 21% say that they would first cut media placement.

—HAL CONICK

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JULY 2018

JAN 2019

43% 35%

Marketer Confidence Index

131

INCREASED

DECREASED 14% 24%

Past (6 months) Customer Spending

JULY 2018

36%

JAN 2019

33%

INCREASED

DECREASED 19%

20%

Past (6 months) Marketing Budget

JULY 2018

JAN 2019

46% 40%

122

INCREASED

DECREASED

7% 17%

Future (6 months) Customer Spending

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Expected perfomance in terms of revenue growth PRODUCT MAINTENANCE/ SUPPORT

CREATIVE (ALL CHANNELS)

17%

24%

INNOVATION/ NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

-9%

12%

Current Marketing Budget Distribution

ANALYTICS

MEDIA PLACEMENT

8%

22%

MARKET RESEARCH/ INSIGHTS

+56%

8%

SPONSORING

10%

Marketing’s influence in the organization Reduction of marketing budget would be made in:

-8%

MEDIA PLACEMENT

21%

SPONSORING

20%

CREATIVE (ALL CHANNELS)

17%

PRODUCT MAINTENANCE/SUPPORT

16%

INNOVATION/NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

11%

MARKET RESEARCH/INSIGHTS

9%

ANALYTICS

6%

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5 Lessons in Brand Effectiveness: Attracting Customers Who Connect and Convert

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onsumers are publicly declaring alliances with brands that they have personal connections with and that advocate for similar causes they support. As a result, brands are investing funds in advertising campaigns that target their ideal customer by using strategic channels and content. The following are five adoptable lessons in brand effectiveness that have helped brands prove their leadership to and awareness of their audience.

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Know Your Audience.

My all-time favorite marketing

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campaign is “Share a Coke.” In 2014, Coca-Cola put popular first names on the front of their bottles, which drove engagement and sales. Consumers scrambled to find their names and post the pictures to social media.

“Coke has been trying to get on a first-name basis with consumers since launching its ‘Share a Coke’ packaging play,” Ad Age Assistant Managing Editor E.J. Schultz wrote of the campaign. “By stamping first names on packages, Coke is feeding into a thirst for personalization and customization.”

THE LESSON: Understand your audience precisely. Make your messaging and engagement personal so they feel acquainted with you. This strategy will increase your sales and loyal customers.

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Content is Still King.

When people think about food delivery, they typically think about pizza or their favorite neighborhood Chinese restaurant. The tail end of the 20th century brought about online food delivery services that increased the consumer cuisine options to French, Indian, Greek and even wine delivery. The online food delivery company Seamless addresses consumer desire for convenience and versatility in an amusing way, creating subway posters that read, “The least ideal neighborhood for making out:

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Highbridge, Bronx. Based on the number of garlic-based orders,” and tweets that read “How do you roll?” with a sushi poll. Seamless speaks directly to consumers and delivers information on how many food options are available through their service.

Bill Gates wrote his “Content is King” essay more than 20 years ago and it’s still true today. Content drives engagement, interest and potential conversions. Teach your audience by providing funny and educational content.

THE LESSON: The more engaging the content, the higher the conversions.

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Adding Color to the Story.

A Mastercard commercial caught my eye recently. The spot featured singer-songwriter Camila Cabello happily walking through a crowded street full of vivid colors. The sun was shining, adults were smiling and children were laughing. Cabello presses “pay now” on the Mastercard app and, like magic, people had coffee and cupcakes. Mastercard did a great job connecting their tagline— “Priceless Surprises”—with the creative imagery in the commercial. The ad urges people to apply for a Mastercard and receive priceless surprises or consider making someone’s day by paying it forward.

THE LESSON: Be sure the story you tell in words matches your overall creative direction.

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Are You Worth It?

American Express is widely regarded for its premier service to cardholders. With the tagline “Don’t Live Life Without It,” American Express prides itself on offering credit cards that fit the lifestyles of everyday people. With the Gold Card, an annual fee allows cardholders to receive rewards points when they purchase

groceries, electronics and airlines tickets. American Express is doing more than just investing advertising dollars to target the everyday consumer, they are promoting countless beneficial features. This proves their worth and quality to potential customers.

THE LESSON: Consumers won’t invest in a poor quality product that does not provide benefits. A brand’s messaging will attract the ideal consumer, but a great product will lead to a conversion.

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Be Authentic. Be Consistent.

Brand perception, including its unique selling position and messaging to the intended audience, must be authentic and consistent. Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan was created in 1988.

Now, 31 years later, the slogan keeps the brand consistent. The authenticity of this slogan was tested in 2018 when Nike featured Colin Kaepernick in one of the most controversial advertisements of the year with the statement, “Believe in something even if it means sacrificing everything.” The spot polarized conversations across the U.S., but Nike did not stray far from the core beliefs and messaging it has used for decades. In fact, Nike’s stock closed at an all-time high of $83.47 per share that quarter.

Brands are investing funds in advertising campaigns that target their ideal customer by using strategic channels and content.

THE LESSON: Consistency and authenticity sell. Consumers are loyal and your brand has the potential to reach more of your target when they feel familiarity and a sense of reliability.

Each of these strategies can be executed efficiently by researching your target consumer. Engage consumers on a personal level with customized messaging, illustrating how your brand can best service them.

—TIFFANY K. SCHREANE APRIL 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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The Era of Martech

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arketing technology is integral to every aspect of marketing, and if you’re not leveraging its power, you’re falling behind.

The fundamentals of marketing are largely unchanged: Know your audience, position your product and provide compelling offers to turn prospects into customers. However, as the marketing journey has gone omni-channel and threatened the traditional marketing funnel, the way brands communicate with prospective customers has changed—along with the technology that makes it all possible.

How Did This Happen?

Marketing automation software vendors have incorporated a wide variety of tools and

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capabilities—content marketing systems were the first, but the technology has grown sophisticated.

This resulted in a land grab by technology companies to develop software that could manage different aspects of the marketing life cycle.

According to chiefmartec.com, approximately 7,000 vendors offer services including enterprise data warehouses and chatbots serving as the first point of contact for would-be customers. Virtually every aspect of marketing funnels, processes and analytics is supported by a technology tool that promises to turn data into valuable insights.

Whether you’ve been marketing for years or are new, it’s important to know that we are already in the martech era. Gartner’s 2018–19 survey found that martech jumped to 29% of the

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average CMO’s budget this year, up more than 7% from a year ago. The best way to understand marketing technology is to have a framework to understand what it is and how to use different tools that support day-to-day marketing activities.

A Marketing Technology Framework It’s no secret that marketing technology can be complex. This is especially true as you think about all of the integrations, contingencies and updates that occur every day; the possibilities are endless.

Gartner and other research firms have done amazing work to develop visuals and other frameworks for thinking about and managing marketing technology. In its Transit Map example, Gartner interprets martech as a visual landscape, helping to reduce complexity and clarify centers of excellence critical to marketing success. This type of work helps professional marketers think about the overall strategy and specific product categories relevant for marketing technology.

Another way to think about marketing technology is as various layers designed to address the primary functions of an integrated marketing program. These layers include advertising, experience, core and analytics.

The advertising layer is generally where marketing first appears. Any truly effective marketing program begins with market and competitor research and a strategic planning process, but once that direction is set, technology helps the professional marketer communicate through advertising. In the advertising layer, technology tends to focus on search, display advertising, content marketing, social media and even marketing automation. Technology enables almost all of our advertising today. From programmatic to automated lead scoring, it’s possible to do more in real time to understand how our prospects find us and to improve our marketing qualified lead metrics. This foundational layer of technology is often where many of us were first introduced to martech and continue to engage with it.

As new users come in contact your omnichannel marketing programs, they enter the experience layer. This includes websites, mobile applications and e-commerce. It also includes how we interact with prospects and customers through testing and optimization, personalization, and voice of customer tools. Through web

analytics and tagging, we can understand consumer behavior and enhance the experience.

As customers interact with our digital properties and brands, we accumulate an exhaust pipe of data. This information must be stored, aggregated and homogenized before we can develop our marketing insights. In the core layer, sometimes called the “back office layer,” we see things such as customer relationship management system tools; data management systems; content management systems; enterprise data warehouses; and third-party integrations with finance, inventory and service.

With such a large data lake available, the next step is to make sense of it all. The final layer is focused on analytics. Today’s marketing technology and emerging artificial intelligence is helping to make sense of this data lake. Through

According to chiefmartec.com, approximately 7,000 vendors offer services including enterprise data warehouses and chatbots. attribution modeling, data visualization tools and predictive modeling, companies large and small can better understand the marketing programs that help to grow their businesses.

Begin Your Martech Journey Today Everyone’s marketing technology journey is different. If you’re in a Fortune 1000 company, chances are you’re already using enterpriselevel technology that integrates with dozens of existing technologies across your business. But martech isn’t just for large companies—even small organizations must use technology to manage their customer lists, optimize web properties and deliver various communications-based interactions that customers and prospects have with the brand.

Think about this basic framework for martech and what you’re doing to take advantage of technology in advertising, experience, back office and analytics. The more you know, the more effective you will become.

—MICHAEL FLEISCHNER AND BETH GRAD APRIL 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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Only 54% of ‘High-performing’ Marketers Lead Customer Experience Initiatives Customers want to be treated like humans and not numbers, but a recent report from Salesforce finds that marketers aren’t doing enough to engage with them

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ost customers—84%—say they want to be treated like humans and not numbers, but only 54% of high-performing marketing teams lead customer experience initiatives, according to the fifth edition of Salesforce’s “State of Marketing” report.

The report, which surveyed more than 4,100 marketers, finds that 49% of marketing leaders believe that they provide an experience that’s aligned with what customers expect.

Marketing leaders say that their No. 1 priority is “engaging with customers in real time,” but also responded that their biggest challenge is the same— ”engaging with customers in real time.”

“High-performing organizations stand apart by embracing strategies that consider customers’ entire journeys, and therefore enable truly personalized engagement,” the

84% 10

Salesforce report says, adding that 56% of high-performing marketers are actively mapping the customer journey across the company. “These same high-performing marketers have

56%

of high-performing marketers are actively mapping the customer journey across the company.

managed, to a much greater degree than their competitors, to foster collaborative relationships across their organizations, effectively apply

customer data and ultimately engage their customers and prospects in real time.”

Salesforce finds that: • 30% of all marketers are satisfied with their ability to use customer data to create more relevant experiences.

• 29% are satisfied with their ability to deliver the right message on the right channel at the right time.

• 28% are satisfied with their ability to create a shared, single view of customers across the business.

• 28% are satisfied with their ability to create personalized omnichannel customer experiences.

Although many marketers are still unsatisfied with their ability to create a great customer experience, the majority seem to be on the path to get better. Salesforce’s report finds that 65% of marketing leaders say that team members share metrics and a common goal, while 62% say that “individuals and teams are more aligned with each other than ever before.”

“Customers see one company— not separate departments,” the report says. “As customer experience leaders, marketers must look outside their hallowed walls for new opportunities to drive superior engagement.”

—HAL CONICK

of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.

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SNAPSHOT

Land O’Lakes Kicks Off Identity Initiative with an Ode to Female Farmers The She-I-O campaign brings attention to the company’s co-op model with a female empowerment message

BY ZACH BROOKE

zcbrooke16@gmail.com Goal upermarket standout Land O’Lakes is a brand that needs no introduction. The refrigeratedaisle mainstay has dominated butter sales since its introduction in the 1920s.

What’s less known is that the company is an agricultural co-op composed of more than 3,600 “farmer-to-fork” member-owners, about half of whom are dairy farmers. In 2018, Land O’Lakes promoted this under-told story as a key differentiator for its brand.

The new ethos first showed up in a

S

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subtle but significant way on product packaging last year. The phrase “farmerowned” was added to the right corner of Land O’Lakes labels, just above the brand name. But the co-op story required more oomph than remixed detail work.

Land O’Lakes undertook a new initiative called All Together Better to draw a more human face on the brand and tell its coop story.

“All Together Better was built on the premise of inclusion, one of the core values at Land O’Lakes,” says Catherine Fox, senior marketing director at Land

O’Lakes. “In an increasingly divided world, we want to be a unifying force, celebrating the boldness, strength and grit reflective of the female farmers who make up the Land O’Lakes cooperative.”

All Together Better is no one-off; it will be the company’s core brand identity for the foreseeable future. The message required a showstopping debut campaign that would set the table for whatever came next, something that features traditional farmers who form the backbone of the agricultural giant. The added twist: The campaign would feature all women in farming.

“When you Google farmers, only pictures of male farmers come up,” says Anne Marie Hite, senior vice president and creative director at The Martin Agency.

“Then you go on these farms and there are tons of women doing all this work.”

A USDA agriculture census finds that 30% of farmers are women. It doesn’t hurt to highlight female famers when this gender is more likely to be the primary household shopper, according to market research company The Hartman Group.

“Our ultimate goal was to sell butter,” Hite says. “These days, people want to buy products from companies they believe in and have a higher purpose. Land O’Lakes has that, it wasn’t something we needed to fabricate.”

Action There needed to be a song; it had to be catchy, novel and exultant all at once. Hite and her colleagues drafted a female retelling of the children’s classic, “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” Called “She-I-O,” it eschewed aging patriarchal farmers altogether in favor of the ladies of livestock. The song was good enough to win over Land O’Lakes marketing brass, but skilled hands were needed to turn the idea into an earworm.

Dozens of musicians were evaluated to turn the nursey rhyme into a product jingle with some manner of authenticity.

The team selected Emmy Award-winning country singer Maggie Rose, saying she reflected the project’s emotional heart.

They also brought on songwriter Liz Rose (no relation), whose collaboration with

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SNAPSHOT

Taylor Swift won the pair a Grammy in 2010. “We left them in a room for three hours,” Hite says. When we came back in, Maggie had her guitar, and they played us this amazing song. It was pretty close to what we ended up with.” The song was recorded soon after in a Nashville studio and filming of the campaign music video took place on two actual Land O’Lakes member farms in Pennsylvania. The final cut flicks between female farmers at work and a glammed-up Maggie Rose performing in a red jumpsuit with her band in an empty storage shed.

“Authenticity was key, which is why the video features the Dotterer sisters, their cousins and their daughters, just a few of the many real-life female farmers from Land O’Lakes,” says Anna Squibb, Land O’Lakes senior manager of integrated marketing.

The footage was shot by veteran music directors and female filmmaking team Charlotte Fassler and Dani Girdwood.

Another crew, The Female Farmer Project, also produced a three-part digital documentary series called, “In Their Words,” which told the stories of the women working the farms.

“My favorite moment of the whole process was when Maggie Rose and her band were on the farm,” Hite says. “All these women and their daughters were standing around Maggie and the directors as they played the song. I turned around and they all were crying. This is their story.”

Everything was timed to drop on Women’s Equality Day on Aug. 26, 2018.

The cultural moment served as a natural amplifier of the ad’s message and allowed Land O’Lakes to pursue a charitable tiein. For every “She-I-O” music video share or comment received via social media, the brand donated one dollar to Feeding America, with a $100,000 cap. Squibb notes that hunger disproportionally affects women and that 3.1 million foodinsecure households are led by single women.

Finally, in a bit of brand-affirming synergy—which the Land O’Lakes team swears is in no way related to “She-I-O”— the company’s first female CEO, Beth

Ford, took over leadership in the same month the advertisement went live.

Results “We were monitoring Twitter all night to see what people were saying,” Hite says. “[We saw] things like, ‘I’m never buying another brand of butter again,’ and, ‘I love Land O’Lakes.’ It obviously resonated on

COMPANY

Land O’Lakes HEADQUARTERS

Arden Hills, Minnesota AGENCY PARTNER

The Martin Agency RESULTS

420 million impressions— including 75 million social media impressions—$100,000 raised for charity, 70% increase in word-of-mouth and 10-point improvement in purchase intent.

answers in action

such a deep level with women and what it meant for their daughters.”

A month after the initial push, a 90-second ad was shown during the season 15 premiere of “The Voice” on Sept. 24. Hosts Kelly Clarkson and Blake Shelton were both impressed enough by the song to share it on social media without being paid to promote it. The ensuing buzz was enough momentum to briefly place the track into iTunes’ Top 20 rock songs.

The more traditional goals of the campaign were more than satisfied.

All told, the advertisement generated 420 million earned impressions, with 75 million via social media. “She-I-O” was talked about in 777 media outlets, including AOL, Fast Company, Today, Vox and Food & Wine. Numbers provided by The Martin Agency show a 70% increase in word-of-mouth and 10-point improvement in purchase intent.

Land O’Lakes also met its $100,000 charitable contribution cap.

For Hite, the results validated the campaign’s unique mix of business as usual and passion project. “We all went through a mourning process after it was over because you don’t get those every day,” she says. “We felt so honored to be telling that story, especially when you get out there and meet the farmers.” m

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CORE CONCEPTS

81% believe unskippable six-second preroll ads are effective.

Find a Short-ad Strategy The cost of viewer attention has increased significantly in the past 20 years. Experts weigh in on how to create attentiongrabbing and attention-keeping ads.

BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER

hconick@ama.org

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t isn’t just your imagination: shorter ads—six seconds in most cases—are more popular than ever. “A six-second bumper appears in pretty much all briefs that we get,” says Dean Challis, head of communications strategy at global ad agency Droga5. These short ads—sixes, he calls them—started appearing in most Droga5 creative briefs in the past two years.

Although six-second ads have become commonplace online, the shorterad trend is 25 years in the making, according to Thales Teixeira, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. In the 1980s, TV commercials were anywhere from 60- to 90-seconds long, and the content was mostly informative. In the 1990s, 30-second ads—more dynamic and entertaining—became the norm, before 15-second ads became more common in the 2000s.

“When you go online, history repeats itself,” Teixeira says. Advertisers cut ads

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to five seconds, he says, but most soon realized that shorter ads can’t simply be pulled from longer spots—there must be something that sets short ads apart. “Fastforward to today, what we see are ads that are made for the internet, not made for TV and then repurposed,” Teixeira says.

Short ads aren’t likely to flame out as a trend. According to Teixeira’s research, the cost of consumer attention has increased by seven to nine times in the past two decades. He believes the increase is due to an abundance and variety of content online. People have an endless number of options for what to watch; why would they choose an ad?

This is where unskippable six-second ads become essential; these ads capture anywhere from 8% to 11% more attention per second than longer ads, according to a 2018 study by the Advertising Research Foundation and TVision Insights.

Advertisers have caught on: A 2018 study

by Adweek and GumGum surveyed 305 brand marketers and agencies to find that

Build a Ladder of Engagement These days, few people get information on products from watching ads, Teixeira says. Brands need to find ways to make ads more entertaining to capture viewer attention. To create a series of entertaining ads, Teixeira suggests building a “ladder of engagement.”

The ladder of engagement is akin to winning the attention of a new friend, Teixeira says. Just as you’d spend a few minutes chatting before inviting them to coffee, then to dinner on another evening, a brand builds its ladder of engagement step by step. Brands can start with a fivesecond ad, then a 15-second ad, then 30 seconds, then try to get consumers to visit their website.

“The height of the first step has to be very, very small,” he says. “Unless you’re Apple, you can’t expect that any consumer will sit through more than five seconds without knowing your brand. … The idea is that people will get little chunks of information, as opposed to getting all the information in one longer ad because people just skip through that.”

A methodical, entertaining reveal also avoids what Teixeira calls an “aversion to persuasion”; he says that many viewers stop paying attention when an ad is informative. If you tell a story instead of trying to persuade, Teixeira says that viewers are more likely to keep watching.

“One of the first jobs of the ad is to remove this barrier to be persuaded,” he says.

To do so, Teixeira says brands should include relatable characters and use more engaging than informative content. Once viewers are entertained by the ads, he says they won’t automatically click away once they see the brand’s logo and realize that they’re watching an ad. Insurance companies—think the Geico Caveman or Allstate’s Mayhem series—have been striking this balance for years, Teixeira says.

Advertisers can know if the ladder of engagement is working by keeping track of how many people watch the ad

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CORE CONCEPTS

until the end, Teixeira says. Longer ads that try to convey too much information tend to get skipped, he says, but modern advertisers must realize that buying an ad isn’t buying attention—it’s buying an opportunity to communicate.

“The advertiser’s first role is not to throw away the potential attention that they bought,” he says. “Don’t screw up and don’t lose what you’ve already paid for.”

A big piece of moving up the ladder of engagement is creating emotion, Teixeira says. In a 2018 Journal of Marketing paper, “Video Content Marketing: The Making of Clips,” Teixeira and co-authors say that giving Netflix viewers a sample of the emotions they’ll feel when they watch a show or movie was effective. “We used facial expression analysis to really understand what [expressions] are most emotional and just put those scenes in the movie trailer,” he says. “In some cases, you can actually get people to feel the intensity of emotion in a short period of time. Not as intense as a beautiful movie, but it goes pretty far.”

Teixeira warns against pushing nonstop emotions in ads. Think about a highpitch beep that never ends, he says—it’s annoying, but people get used to it and it blends into the background. “What people never, ever get used to is that periodical beep-beep-beep,” he says.

“Those car alarms will drive you nuts for five minutes, five hours or five days.

So that’s what you need to do with the emotions in ads.”

Keep Brand Awareness Challis—whose role at Droga5 is to ensure media is considered at the start of the creative process—says that sixes will never replace longer ads, but they now play a role in brand awareness for nearly every brand in Droga5’s roster. Instead of a ladder of engagement, Challis believes short ads are a way to remind viewers of the campaign’s core message. Sixes can also be used to improve specific parts of the customer journey, he says.

“In most instances, they will work within a system with a longer-form asset—be that a longer-form video

or whatever will form the base of the campaign messaging,” he says. “Then sixes can be used to target specific audiences. … Whether you want to target people on their coffee break or other points [of the day], you can do that quite smartly and cost effectively in that format.”

In 2018, Droga5 created a series of short ads to go along with the Under Armour “Will Finds a Way” campaign.

The initial ad was about 75 seconds long and featured a voiceover from actor Dwayne Johnson on how different young athletes chose to train. The accompanying sixes went into more depth on the stories of the young athletes.

“When [a six is] working off of a main campaign, you use it to remind people of what the main campaign was and you can retarget people who have been exposed to the initial message,” Challis says. “You know you’re not getting wastage.”

To ensure ads aren’t wasted, Challis says Droga5 looks at the typical reach and frequency numbers, but ideally wants to build a multivariate model that shows how the ads lead to business success.

What success is will always depend on what the campaign set out to achieve—if the campaign for a consumer product rolled out over time, Challis says they’d look at how the sixes affected site visits.

By knowing sixes will follow the campaign’s centerpiece, Challis says the creatives at Droga5 can more easily plan shoots and production. Instead of starting a shoot with plans to merely get what they need for a 30-second ad, they can plan for what they’ll need in the sixes and build them out during production. Challis says this helps them plan for how the messages will be sequenced and allows the story to continue after the main ad runs, akin to having a ladder of engagement after the campaign’s centerpiece.

“Then we can also look at the context in which it appears,” he says. “If you’re looking at it on YouTube, for instance, you target certain types of content … that’s going to follow it. If you’ve got sports content or comedy afterward, how do you make that six seconds relate to the thing you’re about to see?” m

answers in action

Dos and Don’ts of Creating Short Ads DON’T simply cut down a

30-second ad. “It just doesn’t work,” Challis says. “You can’t think about multiple scenes.

Think a one-scene story or even message.”

DO think about how you can grab attention. Most creatives are still thinking about how they can create content that will get people to buy their products, Teixeira says.

Instead, they should think about how they can hold people’s attention.

DON’T forget to brand.

Brands must entertain in short ads, Teixeira says, but they can’t forget to inform.

“You can’t just entertain for free,” he says of the ladder of engagement process. “You’re still an advertiser. You have to ease into the pitch.”

DO have clarity on the role of the short ad. “From a design standpoint, having clarity on what the take out of the ad is and how it fits into the broader work [is important],” Challis says.

“Because with a six-second hit, you don’t have a huge amount of time to take away a message.”

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answers in action

ETHICAL MARKETING

The Ethics of Targeting Minorities with Dark Ads For years, advertisers have been able to target and exclude people using “dark ads.” Often, those ads have targeted and excluded minorities.

BY HAL CONICK | STAFF WRITER

hconick@ama.org

I

n 2018, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development filed a complaint against Facebook, alleging that the social media platform had violated the Fair Housing Act. Facebook had done this, the complaint alleges, by allowing advertisers to discriminate against users based on sex, race, religion and even by interests such as “mobility scooter” and “deaf culture.”

“Facebook mines extensive user data and classifies its users based on protected characteristics,” the HUD complaint said. “Facebook’s ad targeting tools then invite advertisers to express unlawful preferences by suggesting discriminatory options, and Facebook effectuates the delivery of housing-related ads to certain

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users and not others based on those users’ actual or imputed protected traits.”

After the complaint, Facebook responded by saying that “there is no place for discrimination” and removed 5,000 ad target options. “While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important,” Facebook said in a blog post.

But the charges of discrimination by Facebook aren’t new; for the past three years, Facebook has been consistently hounded by charges that its platform allows for discriminatory targeting. A 2016 investigation by ProPublica found that Facebook advertisers could create

housing ads allowing posters to exclude black people and, a year later, found that Facebook hadn’t fixed the issue.

In 2018, the American Civil Liberties Union and three women filed a lawsuit against Facebook claiming that they were blocked from seeing job ads posted by 10 businesses that were using Facebook’s ad system to show job postings only to men—if true, this would likely be a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects employees and job applicants from discrimination based on sex, race, religion and national origin.

These dark ads are made to be seen by specific groups but unviewable by others; some may refer to them as microtargeting or nano-targeting. The public became most aware of dark ads during the Cambridge Analytica controversy in 2018, when The Guardian reported that President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign relied heavily on dark ads, often running 50,000 to 60,000 variations of Facebook advertisements each day. Brad Parscale, digital media director of Trump’s 2016 campaign and campaign manager for the 2020 campaign, told Bloomberg that they used these dark ads to target black voters.

The aim of the ads was lowering voter

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ETHICAL MARKETING

turnout for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Bloomberg reported.

Dark ads, especially those based on immutable characteristics such as sex and race, pose an interesting question to advertisers and marketers: When is it OK to exclude someone from seeing an ad? When is it OK to target based on an immutable characteristic, such as sex or race?

A New Opportunity Guilherme Pires, co-author of Ethnic Marketing Theory, Practice and Entrepreneurship and professor of marketing at Australia’s Newcastle Business School, says that ethnic minority customers face several challenges in the market—bias, price discrimination, invisibility, language-related problems and perceived low critical mass.

“Invisibility is, in my view, a major source of concern because the implications for perceived critical mass detract from their being targeted,” Pires says. “In fact, even when critical mass is not the issue, a business may avoid targeting a specific group on account of negative reactions from other groups and, in particular, the mainstream.”

When used well, dark ads could overcome these visibility and critical mass problems, Pires says, as they allow marketers to target individuals with tailored value propositions. This can make dark ads relevant and beneficial for the targeted group while being inconspicuous to others.

“The possible ethics issue, in my view, has to do with the ‘how’ and ‘what’ is actually done,” Pires says.

“Has permission been granted by the consumer to be targeted with dark ads?

Has the content been abused, such as by containing pictures, endorsements or other content that is false, misleading or in some other way abused? Are there clear and easy ways for consumers to terminate undesired communications and get compensation for malpractice?”

These questions are relevant to all customers, Pires says. In Ethnic Marketing Theory, he and co-author John Stanton write that marketers must be especially

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While there are some good ways to target by group, targeting or excluding by race, sex, sexual orientation or other immutable traits is largely ineffective and, at worst, unethical. aware of how people’s culture affects their behavior—and self-aware of how their own culture affects their behavior.

“The increasing visibility of minority ethnic groups … has heightened business awareness of the opportunities offered by ‘new’ markets based on multiple ethnicities within national borders,” Pires and Stanton write. “Yet, the perceived effectiveness of the increased multicultural marketing efforts to take advantage of those opportunities were estimated at only four of each 10 cases.”

Targeting by Exclusion Targeting by group is ineffective, says Felipe Korzenny, author of Hispanic Marketing: A Cultural Perspective and professor emeritus of advertising, integrated marketing and management communication at Florida State University.

But Korzenny says that targeting by exclusion, as had been allowed on Facebook, is clearly exclusionary.

“If you say, ‘I would like to reach everyone except for people in same-sex relationships,’ that would be exclusionary to sexual [orientation],” Korzenny says, as an example.

But Korzenny says that it would be OK to target by exclusion if the exclusion is based on a behavior rather than a trait.

Even still, Korzenny says that targeting by exclusion or group will be much less effective than targeting by past behavior.

“That’s what the big marketers do,” he says, citing Amazon as the best example of a company that targets consumers by how they behave. “They reach you believing that you will continue to behave in a certain way in the future and that is a lot more accurate than saying ‘Hispanic.’”

To further highlight the ineffectiveness of targeting by ethnicity rather than behavior, he notes that Hispanics share

many common traits—the Spanish language, the Catholic religion, roots in Spain, an affinity for lime flavor—but if a marketer tries to sell lime soap, targeting people who have previously bought limescented items will cast a wider net than only targeting Hispanics. After all, there will be individuals who aren’t Hispanic who would love lime-scented soap and individuals who are Hispanic who detest lime-scented soap.

Another easy way to see why targeting by racial group can be ineffective: Imagine trying to target white people, a group that has come to encompass multiple ethnic backgrounds and live in all regions across the U.S. Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans have similarly expansive histories and backgrounds.

While there are some good ways to target by group—people who send money to Mexico are likely Mexican, Korzenny says, and people shopping for black haircare products are likely black— targeting or excluding by race, sex, sexual orientation or other immutable traits is largely ineffective and, at worst, unethical.

“You can almost always find a set of behaviors that would give you more bang for your buck because you might be able to include a bunch of other groups that do the same thing,” he says. While databased behavioral targeting is likely more expensive than group targeting, Korzenny says that it’s also more precise.

Regarding exclusionary ads, Korzenny notes that—as the HUD complaint shows—it’s illegal to exclude people by traits they can’t change.

“That has been a gain by our society,” Korzenny says. “There’s still a lot of backward [thinking] going on. But most marketing departments probably have people who are a little more sophisticated than that.” m

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scholarly insights

FOOD CONSUMPTION

Providing Calories-PerServing Info Can Backfire Snack manufacturers can lead consumers toward healthier lifestyles, making their snacks a sustainable, daily part of consumers’ routine

BY ANDREA HEINTZ TANGARI, MY (MYLA) BUI, KELLY L. HAWS AND PEGGY J. LIU

S

nack food packaging provides ample information for savvy consumers.

Before they eat, consumers can review a snack food’s ingredients, nutritional information and calories per serving. Consumers often play a game of “this, not that” to regulate calories, selecting items they view as lower-calorie based on per-serving recommendations.

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But food manufacturers play along by posting caloric information for the lowest serving size. Often, these posted serving sizes don’t map to what consumers actually eat in a single sitting. Think of an individual eating tortilla chips during a TV sporting event. Before they know it, the whole bag is gone­—but one serving is anywhere from six to 13 chips.

This issue is especially important given the single-serve packaging trend, as well as the role snack consumption plays in weight management. Snacks often represent a full fourth meal in terms of calorie intake.

In a new Journal of Marketing study, our research team demonstrates how consumers respond when presented with calorie information on snack foods.

This study is especially timely because food manufacturers are prominently displaying nutrition information, even providing this information on the front of packages. In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is mandating increases in the stated serving sizes for many consumer packaged foods to better reflect the amounts consumers eat. For example, individuals typically consume a 16-ounce soda in one sitting, although it

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is supposed to provide two servings.

Our research team proposed that providing calories-per-serving information can backfire, as consumers eat more perceptually unhealthy snacks when presented with that information.

Interestingly, the same does not hold true for perceptually healthy snacks, as they are not a guilty pleasure. We further proposed that increasing stated serving sizes (and thus calories per serving) could eliminate consumption backfire effect by altering perceived consumption risk.

For example, chocolate cookies at 1,000 calories per serving size no longer look as desirable as when the caloric information was for a smaller serving size.

Our team conducted a series of experiments to test intended versus actual consumption of snack food products, presenting participants with snack foods that had a variety of labels. Specifically, we tested control conditions with no calorie or serving size information, labels with standard serving size and calorie information, labels with serving size and calorie information that was double the standard level and conditions that manipulated calorie expectations to be higher or lower than expectations. We also tested these conditions across snack foods that consumers perceive as healthy and unhealthy.

As expected, consumers did eat more when presented with calorie information for unhealthy snacks. This effect increases when consumers’ calorie expectations are higher than the calories per serving,

which occurs with small serving sizes.

Furthermore, the effect occurs even among consumers who are monitoring calories to maintain or reduce weight.

So Why Does This Matter?

Food manufacturers may not care if consumers snack excessively. In fact, it’s good for business. However, policy makers, regulators and consumer welfare advocates do care. These groups are concerned about consumer nutrition and the growing obesity epidemic. As such, the FDA is updating serving size standards for some products to more accurately represent what consumers would eat in a single sitting to help them make more informed decisions. For example, the FDA will be increasing the serving size of ice cream, chips and soda drinks. It will also require that calorie information be the most prominent piece of information presented on the Nutrition Facts Panel labels, followed by serving size. Thus, food manufacturers can work with regulators and consumer welfare advocates to post more accurate serving size and calories per serving information.

Providing realistic and prominently displayed calorie information and serving sizes can be used as a competitive advantage by aligning food manufacturers and purchasers around the shared goal of pursuing good nutrition and healthy weight management. Our research found that consumers who actively pursued weight management goals were the most

scholarly insights

susceptible to calorie information. Thus, increasing serving sizes and calories may help consumers make better choices, such as measuring snacks, sharing them or eating them across multiple days.

Snack manufacturers can choose to lead consumers toward healthier lifestyles, becoming partners on a shared journey. By partnering, they can make their snacks a sustainable part of consumers’ daily routine, building better predictability into their revenue.

As all food manufacturers know, what is accepted by consumers today can become an anathema tomorrow because of changing dietary or social norms.

So leading—not lagging—on accurate labels may preserve business for the long term. m ANDREA HEINTZ TANGARI is an associate professor of marketing at the department of marketing and global supply chain management in the Mike Ilitch School of Business at Wayne State University.

MY (MYLA) BUI is an associate professor of marketing in the department of marketing and business law at Loyola Marymount University.

KELLY L. HAWS is the Anne Marie and Thomas B. Walker, Jr. professor of marketing in the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.

PEGGY J. LIU is an assistant professor of business administration in the marketing and business economics area in the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.

Providing realistic and prominently displayed calorie information and serving sizes can be used as a competitive advantage.

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executive insights

MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS

How Customer Focus Improves the Success of Mergers and Acquisitions

BY VIKAS MITTAL

 vmittal@rice.edu

T

he 2013 merger of two iconic brands, Kraft Heinz—backed by Warren Buffet and 3G Capital— was predicted to reduce costs to boost profitability. Yet in February of this year, Kraft Heinz recorded several writedowns, wiping out more than 25% of its valuation. The anticipated cost savings had failed to materialize. In 2016, GE acquired Baker Hughes for $30 billion only to find that expected synergies in revenues and costs did not transpire. In 2018, GE announced it would separate from Baker Hughes, marking down the valuation of Baker Hughes to less than $15 billion.

These examples echo the findings of a March 2019 Wall Street Journal survey of 1,000 corporate executives. The survey identified several impediments to merger and acquisition success: expected sales not materializing (33%), execution and integration gaps (32%), failure to achieve expected cost synergies (26%), failure to achieve expected revenue synergies (23%) and lack of cultural alignment (20%).

CMOs, guided by a customer focus, can play a critical role in overcoming these hurdles.

M&As are likely to fail when senior leaders focus on operations and finance at the expense of focusing on customers.

In 2010, when Continental Airlines and United Airlines merged, much was made of the potential operational and financial synergies. Yet an analysis by marketing researchers found that United customers

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were less satisfied than Continental customers: In 2009, Continental scored 68 in the American Customer Satisfaction Index, 12 points higher than United.

Even in 2018, the parent company United Continental Holdings ranked lowest in customer satisfaction at 67, compared to the airline average of 73 and Southwest’s score of 80. Despite the operational and financial synergies, United Continental’s stock has lagged behind Southwest’s since the merger. To avoid a similar outcome,

CMOs can take three steps to bring a customer-focused approach to M&As. Measure Customer Satisfaction and Its Drivers for Both Companies Before and After the M&A Research shows that customer satisfaction is a reliable and consistent predictor of sales. By measuring the level of customer satisfaction and the weight of satisfaction drivers, CMOs can quantify the relative health of each company’s customer base. Let’s say an industrial company we’ll call ParentCO wanted to acquire a competitor that we’ll call TargetCO. The CMO of ParentCO helped conduct a study measuring customer satisfaction and its drivers for both companies. Results showed that TargetCO’s customer satisfaction was lower than ParentCO; further, TargetCO’s customers were dissatisfied with its sales and bidding process and its product quality, both key drivers of overall satisfaction. Prior to the acquisition, the CMO helped

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TargetCO develop specific goals in terms of satisfaction targets along with an operational plan to improve the sales process and product quality. The COO and CMO worked together to monitor the post-merger goals, achieving a 12% increase in overall customer satisfaction for TargetCO and a 23% sales improvement within two quarters. By developing measurable customer KPIs that link to operational KPIs, the CMO and COO led the merger to success.

Have a Dual Focus Many companies emphasize either revenue expansion through customer satisfaction or cost reduction through efficiency initiatives. Some companies have a dual focus—simultaneously achieving revenue expansion through satisfied customers and cost reduction through efficiency initiatives. A 2005 Marketing Science study of 77 Fortune 100 firms between 1994 and 2000 sought to answer this question by measuring customer satisfaction and cost efficiency. It found that only firms that could simultaneously achieve cost reduction and customer satisfaction—a dual focus—showed an increase in longterm firm value. For an average firm with a market value of $46 billion, achievement of dual focus was worth $1.61 billion in firm value.

A 2013 Journal of Service Research article showed this same effect for merging firms. The study compared firms that implemented a dual focus to those that did not. Results showed that among merging firms, only those with a dual focus showed an increase in firm value. Firms that focused only on customer satisfaction or only on efficiency failed to realize these gains.

Strategically, a singular focus on efficiency—at the expense of customer satisfaction—can reduce the chances of achieving a successful merger. At Kraft Heinz, management was so focused on improving manufacturing efficiency that it failed to incorporate the shifts in customer needs—healthier products, nutritional labeling and

executive insights

M&As are likely to fail when senior leaders focus on operations and finance at the expense of focusing on customers. organic ingredients—in its offerings. As the CFO and COO focus on financial and operational efficiency, the CMO must ensure that customer needs are being satisfied and incorporated in the strategic plan. One effective way to accomplish this is to quantify the impact of each efficiency initiative on overall customer satisfaction through rigorous measurement. Another approach is to use a customer satisfaction survey to develop and monitor customer KPIs that drive sales.

Align Your Marketing Resources Merging companies often bring different types of marketing resources to the table: sales force, marketing collateral, social media presence, customer databases, consumer research expertise and product pipeline. A purposeful alignment of marketing resources after a merger can influence the return of the merger or acquisition. If the motive for an M&A is to consolidate, then the firms should align their marketing resources to be as similar as possible. An alignment of marketing resources can ensure synergies among the firms, present a unified value proposition to their combined customer base and ensure that customers are less likely to switch to competitive offerings.

As an example, the motive behind the Kraft Heinz merger was to consolidate.

From all available accounts it seems that Kraft Heinz was mostly focused on manufacturing efficiencies with little attention paid to aligning marketing resources. Thus, even as its costs declined, its sales stagnated.

To align marketing resources, CMOs at merging companies should set a joint

task force involving senior marketing executives from both firms. The task force can develop an inventory of marketing resources, rate the quality of resources each firm brings to the table and identify areas that require alignment. In the case of the industrial company example discussed earlier, a similar task force identified specific initiatives to align marketing resources: migrate the different CRM systems to a single platform, harmonize the sales force incentive plan, and mandate that both companies adhere to a unified brand standard and use a single advertising agency. Because these alignment opportunities were identified in the pre-merger stage and a plan of action was developed, they were achieved within a relatively short period of time after the merger, thus accelerating revenue expansion.

What Now? M&As require a customer-based perspective led by the CMO to mitigate the downside and maximize their upside.

Three crucial strategies for this include focusing strategy by measuring customer satisfaction and its drivers, achieving a dual focus through simultaneous revenue expansion and cost reduction, and developing a concrete road map for aligning marketing resources. CMOs can play a critical role to implement these three strategies and ensure that companies can satisfy their customers’ needs and meet shareholder goals after a merger or acquisition. m VIKAS MITTAL, Ph.D. , is a professor of marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University in Houston.

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NETWORKING

which the senders would respond to themselves.

A Crash Course in Networking for Marketers Who Have No Time We’ve all seen the auto-invites for connections and the direct message sales pitches on social media. There’s a better way to make friends and influence people.

BY PAM NEELY

 pamneely@gmail.com

H

ow do you develop business relationships online? If you’re a solo marketing consultant or at a small agency, this is on par with keeping the lights on and your internet connection up. Even if you have a cushy job at a great company, we all know how fast that can change.

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But putting yourself out there and promoting your services can seem pushy, tacky and even cheap. A lot of the time, networking is pushy—far too many people think they’re networking when they’re just shooting out cold emails, impersonal LinkedIn invites and auto direct messages on Twitter—none of

Nobody Likes Automated Networking Whether a cold email or an automated social media message, this sort of networking turns people off.

Looking in my own LinkedIn inbox, I have three messages from three different accounts with the identical greeting and first sentence. How personalized (or persuasive) is that? Some of the notes in my account include fake typos, too—a trick to mask the automation.

This is why personalizing your messages is still effective; so few people do it. Personalizing your messages isn’t hard, either. Look at people’s activity on social media, see what they share, what they comment on and what they like.

Click through and actually look at their websites. It takes three minutes or less.

Incredibly, much of the networking or outreach done doesn’t even go this far. If you can add a small personal touch and actually make yourself useful, you’ll get dramatically better results.

“But…” you argue, “That takes a lot of time! I don’t have that much time.”

And you don’t—I don’t. None of us do.

Even if you’re at home, unemployed and have no scheduled commitments for the next month, you still probably don’t have that much time.

Fortunately, there is a way to do relationship-building that’s far better than the automated DM and invites. It’s called social selling. Our friends in sales have been doing it for years. Marketers, however, seem to have held back on this a bit. Maybe we’ve been thinking, “That’s a sales thing. I’ll leave it to them.”

But marketers need some of the skills sales pros have, just as sales pros have had to learn strategies from marketing.

Consultative sales uses an educational approach to sell in the same way marketers use content marketing to

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educate their buyers.

Social selling uses that same no-sell, no-ask, educational approach to send personalized communications that genuinely attempts to be helpful. But to do that you’ll need some great content to share.

Content Curation for One-to-One Networking This doesn’t have to be your own content.

Content curation has always been the best way to fill up a social media feed.

Curation is basically just sharing other people’s content and adding a bit of your own commentary. And third-party content, incredibly, is often more trusted than the content that brands publish themselves.

There are plenty of services, including Quuu and Feedly, that can help you find great content to share. But that’s only phase one. Unfortunately, it’s only as far

taken 280 minutes for the same results that I got from 15 minutes of sending a relevant article.

Sending personalized, curated content will get you further than automated messages. But there’s still more work to do.

Build Your Network Intentionally With a ‘Make Friends With’ List The trick to building a genuine network is to limit who you connect with.

Sure, there are people who can do more than 200 coffee meetings in one year and people who can go to 20 conferences annually and make connections with 20 people at each. That’s great and I aspire to that level of connection, but that’s industrial-grade networking.

Fortunately, that level of supernetworking isn’t necessary to build an enviable network than moves you forward. Consider what Tim Hughes, author of Social Selling: Techniques to

Gaining a client, getting a job or generating more influence requires a network. It doesn’t even need to be a big network, just a strong one. as some of us take it. To do social selling, or just to build a legitimate network, you need to find good content for specific people you’re connected to.

I read a study one day and found an interesting tidbit about surveys. I have a connection who’s a CEO at a survey company I wanted to write for, so I sent him a note about what I learned. Not only did he reply, but he also invited me to his private Facebook group filled with highvalue networking and a group of smart, friendly people. The CEO also asked what my availability was for some work and what my rates were.

That’s more of a response than I would have gotten from sending seven coldpitch emails, even if they were highly personalized with a valuable piece of advice tailored for each person.

Normally, it takes me 40 minutes to send a hyper-personalized pitch email.

Sending seven of those emails would have

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Influence Buyers and Changemakers, says about network size: “First and foremost, community is not measured in the number of followers you have. We are aware of people with 400 followers who, because of their niche, have been able to build a community.”

To build a community or a network, you’ll need content to attract people’s attention, to share to your social media feeds and to directly send to prospects to nurture your relationship with them. This is why that list of 400 is so important. If you had to send a personalized note with a relevant article to 5,000 people, you’d go crazy. But with just 400 people, you can send one article a day to each person on your list.

Frankly, you might not even want to do that. If 400 seems too much, make up a “Make Friends With” list of 50-200 people you’d like to connect with. You’re not going to be best friends with them, but

you’d like to build the type of relationship where they would open and respond to an email you’d send them. They might say “yes” if you asked them to present a webinar or do a podcast interview. They’d take a call from you, maybe even meet you for coffee.

If you pick your list carefully, 50-200 of the right people are enough of a network to change your business or to catapult you toward being recognized as a thought leader or an influencer, which is what 19% of mid-level marketers say they’d like to be.

Just don’t only go after the industry superstars. Here’s a possible mix for your list: • 10% rockstars of your industry and in business overall.

• 30% those who might hire you.

• 30% near your career level who may become stars.

• 10% starting out in their careers or who haven’t yet started their careers.

• 20% in tangentially related industries, or who do things you’re enthusiastic about.

As you build your list, think about where you want to be in five to 10 years. Do you want to be the VP at your company? Do you want your own agency? Do you want to write a bestseller or be an event organizer? Choose people you genuinely admire, but who might also help you to get where you want to go.

Gaining a client, getting a job or generating more influence requires a network. It doesn’t even need to be a big network, just a strong one.

Instead of spamming people to make connections, be helpful and listen. Be generous with your expertise and connect with people you genuinely admire and want to support. Should you see an opportunity to help them, carefully offer help with no strings attached. m PAM NEELY has been in digital marketing for 20 years. She’s a serial entrepreneur and content marketing enthusiast. She has a master’s degree in direct and interactive marketing from New York University.

Follow her on Twitter @pamellaneely.

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Promotional products may be an environmental nightmare, but they’re also effective. What’s an ethical marketer to do?

Tread lightly and choose wisely.

By Sarah Steimer Photography by Lisa Predko Art direction by Vince Cerasani Photo assistance and retouching by Tom Michas

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WHEN MEREDITH THOMAS WAS GROWING UP, HER MOM WENT TO A LOT OF CONFERENCES. Thomas, an assistant professor of marketing at Florida State University, remembers branded conference swag lying around the house.

She returned to college after trips home with branded totes and other promotional items in tow. As many college students know, the sendoff haul is often one part care package and one part “don’t return with this.”

“Once you get home, you don’t want them anymore,” Thomas says of conference swag. Promotional products have a way of appearing to be prized loot, but once the sunglasses, flash drives, stress balls, pens and T-shirts make it home, they often fail to—as Marie Kondo would say—spark joy. The items that looked so shiny and bright, sitting in big bowls or fanned out at conference booths, now look cheap and out of place among the carefully chosen products in your home or office. They’re dumped in the trash, exiled to the junk drawer or sent off with the college student.

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The disposable swag problem has been acknowledged by the promotional products industry itself, with some companies and conferences actively trying to fix it. But many more outside of the industry sat up and took note in November 2018 when Fast Company published an article titled, “It’s time to stop spending billions on cheap conference swag.” (The page title hits even harder: “The $24B promotional products industry is an environmental nightmare.”)

“When you think about all of the energy and resources that go into making just one of the tote bags that I have just thrown into the trash—only to end up in a landfill—

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the impact is staggering,” Fast Company’s Elizabeth Segran writes. In her search across promotional product websites, she found that “They’re all competing with one another to sell products at rock bottom prices. The companies buying these things are looking to get them out to as many people as possible, while maximizing their marketing budget.”

She likens the industry to fast fashion, which has come under fire for its unsustainable products and use of factories with poor labor practices.

The arguments and comparisons made were unflattering, and the industry was quick to respond. While some were fairly straight rebuttals—Paul Bellantone, president and CEO of Promotional Products Association International, said that environmental responsibility is one of PPAI’s core pillars—other responses included more acknowledgement of the issue: A blog post from commonsku, an order management software company for promotional products distributors, wrote that, “Elizabeth was right about a few things.” A January feature story

in Promo Marketing Magazine, titled, “‘We could get rid of cheap swag altogether.’,” went a little deeper: “Despite the best efforts of a handful of forward-thinking companies, organizations and individuals, the perception that promotional products are mostly cheap novelty stuff—the proverbial trinkets and trash—is alive and well. And, more than that, it’s a perception rooted in reality.”

But the industry was sure to point out the other reality of these items—they tend to work. By PPAI’s estimates: • 65% of advertisers cite promotional products as highly effective in reaching consumers and contributing to brand recall.

• 88% of marketers recommend promotional products.

• More than 80% of promotional products are used for more than a year.

• Eight out of 10 consumers pass along promotional products versus throwing them in the trash.

Segran herself acknowledges the appeal of promotional products. She begins her Fast Company article by confessing that she has canceled her New Yorker subscription and re-subscribed just to get a new version of the magazine’s tote bag. Some giveaways are enjoyed and even coveted, the ideal promotion for the brand. But many still get tossed, which not only fills landfills, but chips away at hard-wrought brand equity.

Marketers have two options when choosing promotional products to represent their brand: They can be the New Yorker bag— sought-after, functional, reusable and building positive brand awareness—or they can be the cheap earbuds tangled and forgotten at the bottom of the bag, destined for a landfill.

THE PROBLEM WITH BAD SWAG

If promotional products—cheaply made or not—are being tossed as often as Segran suggests, it’s certainly not a good look for the promotional products industry. But it’s also bad optics for brand managers. Companies pour time and money into perfecting the brand, agonizing over voice, fonts and colors.

But a bad promotional product can derail that brand story and instead suggest a disconnect in messaging. For starters, a tossable giveaway can highlight a disconnect between claims of corporate responsibility and company actions.

“There are so many companies right

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DO YOU WANT YOUR BRAND REPRESENTED WITH A FIDGET SPINNER? IS THAT WHO YOU ARE?

now trying to be good corporate citizens and they’re finally discovering that events are where their members or their guests, where their stakeholders see them,” says Nancy Zavada, president of MeetGreen, a sustainable conference management company. “There’s a quote that says events are windows to a company’s soul because you get an opportunity to peer in and see how a company might actually be doing. If you say that you’re going to save oil as an organization and then you have plastic bottles sitting up on

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the speaker’s podium, that’s a disconnect.”

Telling a corporate responsibility story through items must also be authentic. There’s no shortage of available promotional products that call eco-consciousness to mind: pens that resemble a bamboo stick or stress balls shaped like the earth. Although often categorized as a green or “eco” product on websites and sold alongside truly recycled items, they’re often eco-friendly in appearance only. “The promotional products industry has a lot of greenwashing,” Zavada says.

The solution seems to be doing your homework and spending a little extra on items that align with the quality your brand stands for. You could reach out to someone like Denise Taschereau, CEO and co-founder of Fairware Promotional Products, who can get nearly any promotional product for her clients from an ethical supplier. Her company has been at the forefront of the ethically sourced promotional products movement, often pushing to change the supply chain itself (the latest trending request, she says, is recycled ocean plastic). But just because something is ethically made, doesn’t mean it will resonate with the user. Here lies the second disconnect: Just because it’s sustainable, doesn’t mean it relates to the brand. Sure, Taschereau could get you 400 fidget spinners made with recycled plastic and manufactured with union labor in the Bronx—but how does that toy relate to your company?

“Do you want your brand represented with a fidget spinner? Is that who you are?”

Taschereau asks. “Maybe you’re super playful and fun, maybe that is the right thing. But if it’s not, then are you a fad-based company?

Are you a company that is okay with having your brand based on something that will probably be obsolete within the season?”

One of Taschereau’s top cringe products— and maybe one of the most popular promotional products—is the stress ball.

“We get these sustainable brands that call us and they’re like, ‘We want stress balls.’ No you don’t,” she says. “Sometimes we’ll talk to their sustainability people and say, ‘You need to talk to your marketing people because they’re about to give something out that is so off-brand that it’s going to do damage.’”

But recently, Fairware got a request from a research center that works with patients with mental health issues, specifically around

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stress. The organization requested brainshaped stress balls. “I actually thought, you know what, there’s a fit.”

Perhaps the worst possible impression a bad promotional product could provide is a trash can filled with logos. Sponsors vie for the chance to be the constant visual in conference photos, the logo on the bag that everyone is carrying. But make a poor promotional product choice and your logo can only compete with discarded coffee cups.

“Visibility is a huge factor and the last thing you want is for people to see your brand in the garbage,” Thomas says. “That’s a horrible connotation, especially if there’s a lot of them there. You’d be better off not to have sponsored anything than for that to happen.”

REIMAGINING THE TRINKETS

As people become disillusioned with wasteful promotional swag, there has been some movement to the opposite end of the spectrum: no giveaways at all. UKGovCamp, a public sector “unconference,” announced in 2018 that it was going swag-free. Instead, it would give companies the option to sponsor food and drinks, daycare for attendees’ children or a bursary to cover attendee travel costs. Capital One had a #GoSwagless campaign in 2018, urging companies to use the budget and resources normally allocated to giveaway items to support a nonprofit.

Other brands have opted to sponsor experiences at events, rather than give out items.

But it’s tough to argue with the ROI figures that PPAI cites. And despite minimalism trends, people do seem to enjoy getting free stuff. As an example, Taschereau references a viral 2013 video of Paul McCartney at a New York Nets game: The former Beatle, with an estimated $1.2 billion net worth, was captured trying to catch a free T-shirt (he did finally snag one two years later).

If people are inclined to grab whatever swag you lay out—or shoot from a cannon— the promotional product suppliers and the companies ordering from them are charged with thinking ethically. “It’s been a long, slow curve,” Zavada says. She started MeetGreen 25 years ago and has watched the industry slowly

take up the sustainability cause. “It’s moving faster right now. …. The radical transparency of social media has had a big impact.”

One of the biggest industry movers on ethical standards came through the creation of the Quality Certification Alliance in 2009. The organization certifies supplier processes as they relate to product quality, product safety, supply chain security, social accountability and environmental stewardship. According to its website, QCA has certified 27 suppliers.

Choosing a more ethically produced product comes with a price tag. A 100% post-consumer recycled fabric tote bag sold by 4imprint, the largest distributor of promotional products, costs $4.45 each at a quantity of 100. A bag of the same size (and with far more color options) made of the thermoplastic polypropylene is sold by the same company for $2.19 each at a quantity of 100. Is it worth spending extra on better-made products when people seem willing to snag whatever you lay out? Yes: Because consumers don’t make emotional connections with junk.

Todd Weaver, a professor of business at Point University, has studied sustainability and anti-consumption. He says people who purchase repurposed goods find the items to be more interesting because they have a story.

Those consumers are more likely to keep the repurposed items and value them more highly. Weaver points out that if the goal of swag is to give something away to promote your brand, and the consumer is expected to have an ongoing engagement or connection with the item, “It would certainly make sense to give them something that’s not just like everything else that they get.”

A generic, cheap gift can signal that the potential lead or client isn’t special.

“Just like all consumption, so much of it is tied up into people’s identity and selfconcept,” Weaver says. “The things that we consume, oftentimes we’re consuming them for symbolic or identity-expressive reasons—especially if the goods are going to be consumed in a public or social setting.”

This latter point may explain why so many giveaway T-shirts are hidden away at home for use as sleep shirts. Sure, they’re not so bad— but they’re not cool enough to wear in public.

Weaver references the 2017 Cone Communications CSR Study, which found that 63% of Americans are hopeful that

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WE TRY TO MATCH THE PRODUCT WITH THE STRATEGY OR THE MISSION AND THE MANDATE

businesses will take the lead to drive social and environmental change. Consumers aren’t likely to pick up a copy of your CSR report, but they’d be more likely to believe you support the cause if your promotional giveaways suggest as much.

ACCURATE REPRESENTATION

A consumer doesn’t want to believe their business is only worth a 49-cent promotional notepad, and a company shouldn’t want to be represented by a forgettable trinket.

Promotional products should match the company’s strategy and mission.

“If we’re working with someone like Aveda that has biodiversity as a core guiding principle, we wouldn’t bring a recycled tote bag to them,” Fairware’s Taschereau says.

“We need to bring an organic cotton tote bag to them. If we’re dealing with a recycling company, we’re going to [recommend] recycled polymers. We try to match the product with the strategy or the mission and the mandate.”

But not every company buying promotional products is the size of Aveda, and the

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suppliers are also often small companies.

The reality is that marketers working on a shoestring budget—and who hear the siren song of ROI claims around promotional products—will be drawn to buying 300 pens for 59 cents each. The other reality is that the fierce competition within the promotional products industry means often having to focus on price over quality. As noted in the Promo Marketing article, “smaller (promotional products) companies … can’t refuse sales so easily, especially not on the basis of some intangible, far-off concerns.”

Make giveaways a central part of the promotional strategy plan, Taschereau advises. Rather than make a last-minute decision before a conference, marketers can take time to better intertwine their brand story or strategy with the giveaway.

Take Patagonia, for example: The famously eco-friendly retailer was rolling out a new workwear line to compete with Carhartt. As a promotion, it gave away branded carpenter pencils, an item that aligned with the new product line (and likely cost very little).

Successful marketers use their limited marketing funds to give away a smaller number of well-made promotional items.

“There’s this mentality of, ‘I’m supposed to give away something to everybody who walks by my booth’ or ‘I’m supposed to have T-shirts for new employees,’” Taschereau says.

“It’s just really thinking strategically about merchandise.”

Thomas, now attending conferences herself, hearkens back to those useful totes from her mother she was sent to school with.

She’s planning an event at Florida State in May, and functionality is a high priority for her giveaway plans: Her team is considering branded umbrellas as a nod to the region’s rainy spring season. They’ll be optional, of course, so they’re not foisting unwanted products on anyone. “There’s more of a focus on not burning people out with these things that they don’t want anyway,” Thomas says.

“And if they do get something, it seems to be with functionality in mind.”

Thomas suggests smaller logos could create a more appealing aesthetic for those hoping to use the functional products in their lives without feeling like a billboard. “It’s this simplicity movement of wanting less stuff, less text, less everything in favor of simple, clean design.”

Whatever the aesthetic, the products that stay out of junk drawers and landfills connect

LESS STUFF, LESS TEXT, LESS EVERYTHING IN FAVOR OF SIMPLE, CLEAN DESIGN

the dots: They can show the consumer that the company values them enough not to offload cheap, repetitious junk on them, but these products can also tell the story of the brand’s ethics or campaign strategy. As appealing as a cost-saving, trendy knick-knack may be, Taschereau cautions: Do you want to be the logo on the selfie stick, or you want to be the experience that warrants the selfie stick? m

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Some companies are rethinking swag entirely. These eco-friendly options have myriad ancillary benefits: they’re trackable, Instagrammable and even edible.

BRANDED FOOD

Danielle Baskin was invited to a barbecue in honor of a friend selling their start-up company, Scroll Kit, to WordPress. Wanting to celebrate her friend’s success and contribute to the meal, she applied Scroll Kit’s logo to the avocados she brought to the party. “I noticed that people were taking pictures and putting it on Instagram,” Baskin says.

“I thought, ‘Oh, actually this is really good swag.’ People really like avocados, but they’re taking pictures of it because it’s very novel.

It’s pretty effective for marketing because you don’t have to bring this artifact home with you, it doesn’t sit in a closet or get left in a drawer—it doesn’t become a problem. But it also gets more views than a water bottle or something you’re used to seeing.”

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Baskin is a serial entrepreneur, and one of her first companies—Inkwell Helmets—gave her experience in printing on unconventional surfaces. After seeing the response to her avocados at the party, she launched Custom Avocados in 2016, expanding to other fruits and vegetables in 2018 and renaming the company Branded Fruit. She attributes the appeal of her products to two main factors: companies trying to be eco-friendly but still providing physical swag, and the universal appeal of food. “People like oranges, people like avocados, people like clementines,” she says. “It’s different than a pair of sunglasses.

Not everyone needs or likes this type of sunglasses. They might not be stylish.”

The fruits and vegetables are sourced as locally as possible (not a terribly difficult feat, as Baskin is located in San Francisco).

She also packs the fruit in a way that doesn’t create unnecessary waste, unlike many promotional items that are individually wrapped in plastic. She’s highly aware of the waste that can be created in the manufacturing process, having visited factories and manufactured products for her other businesses in China. For cheap items in particular, Baskin says, the waste occurs not just when the final consumer receives and tosses the swag, but also in the manufacturing process during quality assurance testing, or if there’s a flaw when the item comes off the assembly line, such as an off-center logo.

The branded fruits may be a bit more expensive than bulk plastic items, but they’re not out of line with the cost of, say, a notebook. Her lowest-cost items, clementines, are $3 each and avocados cost $5 each. But unlike those notebooks, Baskin’s branded fruits and vegetables are likely to have a bigger impact because of how unique they are.

“I go to a lot of conferences and you get this particular notebook and a tote bag and a pen,” Baskin says. “It’s stuff I already have. I talked to someone who’s been in the

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promotional items world for 25 years and they said, ‘We don’t see new things as frequently.

This is what really excites us—nobody has printed on fruit.’”

In addition to being highly Instagrammable, some brands have used Branded Fruits to create an entire experience for event participants. For example, a liquor company requested a cocktail recipe be printed on grapefruits. The company made the grapefruits available at a bar so people could take one home and have a cocktail recipe that involved grapefruit juice and the company’s product.

Branded Fruit was profiled by Fast Company in December 2018, after which Baskin says she received about 300 inquiries for her products.

“I thought, ‘Oh, it’ll die out, this is trending online,’” she says. “But it hasn’t at all.”

DIGITAL SWAG

Digital companies such as Event Farm, an event and experiential marketing platform, are coming up with ways to maintain a dotted line between attendees and sponsors long after the physical trinkets are forgotten.

Ryan Costello, CEO and co-founder of Event Farm, likens the shift toward digital swag to invitations. Save for major events such as weddings or other milestones, invites have largely gone digital—and they track the experience even after it ends, with platforms such as Evite asking attendees to upload photos from the event.

“It’s not just because of sustainability, but it’s more efficient, it’s quicker, it’s trackable, it’s all these things,” Costello says of digital swag. “Not only does that check a box of [being] better for your global footprint, it also provides more value.”

Event Farm has created products such as a digital gifting wall, where event attendees can tap their event ID or a wearable to receive exclusive digital content: coupons, videos or white papers. It can all be highly personalized to the attendee. The benefit to the company is that they’ve captured the person’s data and can send customized follow-ups.

“I get the brand awareness value,” Costello says. “Having a connection with the brand— that’s what events are about, it’s not just about handing out swag but, how do I really

engage? This is my chance to authentically engage with a human for an extended period of time. If it were just about giving T-shirts to people, why don’t you just mail them? Why are you having the event in the first place?”

The trend may be more relevant as the demographics of conferences and events change. It’s easy to see the benefit of digital swag when you consider the younger attendees of Coachella or the Ice Cream Museum: Would they rather have the water bottle or the selfie?

Costello’s company is in the early stages of another event platform, a sort of digital memory bank that would store event swag— those personalized, exclusive pieces of content—along with photos and content from sessions you may have missed because you opted to visit a different track. It acts as loss prevention. Rather than lose the important business cards in the bottom of a free tote bag filled with tossables, a digital memory bank allows users to retrace their steps and relive the experience.

“It’s another way to remind the person that the thing that you wanted the most, here it is—and here are the other things that you can still take advantage of,” Costello says. “I think we’ll see conversion go up. We will get those coupons converted more because they can access it again in a place where they want to go to, because they have other things of value there—as opposed to that gift bag.”

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From Knowing Alexa, to Following @Alexa, to ‘Hey, Alexa’:

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THE EVOLVING

MARKET

MAVEN It’s been three decades since Linda Price and Lawrence Feick’s market maven paper changed the way marketers thought about customer-to-customer influence. In that time, consumer demand and new technology has amplified the need for an ever-available influencer.

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O

n Linda Price’s kitchen countertop sits an Echo Show, an Amazon Alexa-connected speaker device with a screen.

The artificial intelligence-driven Alexa voice answers Price’s questions and makes suggestions for what it thinks she should hear, watch and buy.

About 32 years ago, Price, a professor of marketing at the University of Oregon’s Lindquist College, and co-author Lawrence Feick published the influential paper, “The Market Maven: A Diffuser of Marketplace Information,” in the Journal of Marketing. The paper—which has been cited more than 1,700 times and was featured in author Malcolm Gladwell’s multimillion selling book The Tipping Point—coined and defined the term market maven.

Price and Feick defined market mavens as people who have early awareness and high levels of information about the market, namely new products and brands. Market mavens use a diverse number of sources to get their information, are altruistic and simply enjoy shopping—they take pride in being wellsprings of information. Other consumers also recognize mavens when they talk to them, Price and Feick wrote, adding that mavens regularly influence people’s purchase decisions.

At the time, Price says that the concept of a market maven was a vast departure from how economists and marketers viewed consumer-to-consumer influence. Most believed that consumers were driven to maximize their utility in the market by focusing only on their interests. But the market maven is broadly interested in the market and willing to share what they find with anyone who will listen.

Neither Price nor Feick have studied the market maven much in recent years, but Price has noticed changes in the world of consumer influence—one big change sits on her kitchen countertop. The market maven isn’t simply a friend or co-worker anymore,

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she says, but an Instagram influencer, an aggregate website like Yelp or even a large business such as Amazon, Google or Apple, which she says seem to have co-opted—and at times automated—the role of the market maven. It’s uncharted territory that shifts the field, she says, but this new-age consumer influence is studied insufficiently in academia and still poorly understood by most companies. But there are opportunities to improve: Whereas marketers had a hard time locating market mavens in the 1980s and 1990s, they can now use tools to find online influencers and communities. “When I was enchanted by the information of a market maven, I couldn’t go online and see 2,500 reviews of the local car dealership,” Price says. “Alexa is in my kitchen trying to influence what I know about the world.

That’s a really interesting example of the co-opting and automation of that consumer influencer role.”

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P

eople are still market mavens offline; most everybody can recognize a maven in their life, Price says, even the young students in her university classes. But in the past, the role played by the Echo Show in Price’s kitchen would have been occupied solely by a visiting neighbor or a friend like Mark Alpert, whom Price says was her original source of insight into mavens. Price introduced Alpert—a professor at the University of Texas—to Gladwell while she was being interviewed for The Tipping Point. In the book, Price called Alpert “the perfect maven”; she told Gladwell a story about when she was looking for an Easter ham and Alpert, a Jewish man, was still able to give her the best deli to visit and the price she should pay. In interviews with Gladwell, Alpert said that he believed a market maven was someone who wanted to solve other people’s problems by solving their own; Gladwell summed up Alpert by saying that “There’s something automatic, reflexive, about his level of involvement in the marketplace.

“Alpert is almost pathologically helpful,” Gladwell wrote. “He can’t help himself.”

Pathologically helpful is a good way to describe the content radiating from the smart devices in homes, offices and pockets across the world.

Most of us know a maven, someone who takes an almost-obsessive interest in the market, but all of us have access to thousands—perhaps millions— of new-age mavens through searching Google, asking Alexa a question or seeing what the latest trends are on Instagram. When Price and Feick wrote their first paper on market mavens, there was no thought of this kind of digital influence expanse; they saw consumers who drove wordof-mouth communication through interactions, like Alpert helping his friends find the best place to eat or find the best deal on a washing machine, but not consumers becoming de facto publishers and creative directors as we now see through Instagram influencers such as Kayla Itsines (who will recommend food and fitness products) and Mariano Di Vaio (who will tell you what to wear and how to style your hair). Brands of the time were sure they were in control of influencing consumers through ad campaigns, dubious of word-of-mouth and consumer-to-consumer influence.

“I came from a world where the people didn’t pay attention to word-of-mouth because they didn’t think it mattered. I thought better all along,” Price says. “And now everybody wants to study word-ofmouth because they know it matters.”

From Price and Feick’s “The Market Maven: A Diffuse of Marketplace Information”:

“THE DEFINITION OF THE MARKET MAVEN includes both general marketplace knowledge or expertise and influence. Thus, the definition is comparable with the definition of the opinion leader in that influence derives from knowledge and expertise, but differs in that the expertise is not product specific. The market maven’s influence is based on more general market expertise. The definition of the market maven does not require that these individuals be early purchasers of products or necessarily even users of products about which they have information.”

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From Kozinets and Rebeca Perren’s “Lateral Exchange Markets: How Social Platforms Operate in a Networked Economy,” a paper explaining the “technologically intermediated exchange between actors occupying equivalent network positions”:

“ALTHOUGH THE SO-CALLED SHARING ECONOMY has grown rapidly and been the beneficiary of significant public attention over the past few years, its relative newness means that we still know very little about how it actually operates.

Marketing managers working in these disruptive new fields must make important decisions about their businesses without the tried-and-true guidelines bestowed to managers in established industries.”

MARKETERS MUST BECOME NETNOGRAPHERS

Executives at Beiersdorf, a German personal care company, were initially unsure if they would be able to find consumers online who were passionate about deodorant. They wanted to find consumers who could give them information to improve the launch of a new deodorant for their Nivea brand and started searching for customer intel online. “Lo and behold people are discussing everything,” says Robert

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Kozinets, who has been studying online consumers and communication for more than two decades.

In 1998, he co-authored a paper, “On Netnography: Initial Reflections on Consumer Research Investigations of Cyberculture,” in Advances in Consumer Research—the paper has been cited more than 3,700 times. Kozinets and his co-authors were the first to create and define netnography, a method of online ethnographic research of consumers and communities. Through netnography, companies such as Beiersdorf have found that there are experts in everything—even deodorant and sweat stains.

Beiersdorf hired Munich-based innovation company HYVE, which used netnography to find health, laundry and even weightlifting groups that were discussing the link between deodorant and sweat stains. Deodorants themselves don’t cause sweat stains (they’re caused by sweat mixing with skin bacteria), but HYVE researchers used netnography to find people online who were attributing their yellow-stained shirts to shoddy deodorants. After HYVE surveyed and read web postings by experts of varying niches—including The Undershirt Guy, “the world’s undershirt and underwear expert”— Beiersdorf ’s chemical engineers were able to formulate a product that would protect clothing from sweat stains. Eventually, the company launched Nivea Black & White Invisible Deodorant, a product that promised to eliminate sweat stains from clothing. The product won a “Best in Category” award from the GfK Group and, in a press release, Beiersdorf celebrated its launch as “the most successful deodorant launch ever seen in the almost 130-year history of the company.”

“Even though it was off-brand, even though it was very controversial within the company, they ended up basically creating a sub-brand that opened up new opportunities. It all came from listening to people online,” says Kozinets, who is currently a professor of journalism and chair in strategic public relations and business communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “What marketers are dealing with now is really many layers of substrata of expertise. … You’ve got all sorts of different product categories and different elements of product categories that intersect with one another in really unexpected ways.”

If Price were to renew her interest in studying market mavens, she says that she’d start with influencers. Influencers are often people like The Undershirt Guy, niche specialists who grow an authentic audience and spread the word on the

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products they genuinely enjoy. Price wouldn’t be alone in her research; Kozinets studies influencer networks and hosts influencers in his Influencer Relations class at USC. Marketers have also been increasing their testing of and reliance on influencers: MediaKix predicts that by 2020, marketers will spend as much as $10 billion on influencer marketing.

Influencers are driven by both sides of the market, Price says, as they use and publicize products they care about, but they also know their niche market better than anyone else. Researchers and marketers now also have an advantage because of tools such as netnography, textual analysis and social network analysis, Price says. With these tools, marketers can find who is spreading information online, how they’re spreading it and who else is listening, whether through a focused group of people who follow a specific influencer or a less focused review aggregation website, such as Yelp or Google.

Modern influencers differ from the market maven

in one big way, Kozinets says: Influencers focus their knowledge on their followers rather than the market.

The classic market maven may know a lot about brands that sell underwear and undershirts, but The Undershirt Guy has a small following of people who message and interact with him about what kinds of underwear they like and dislike. More than the products, he’s likely to know a great deal about what other people who are passionate about underwear want.

“Expertise has really changed, in particular from the side of being an expert in a product or product category to being an expert in a particular audience, their perspective and their needs,” he says. “In a way, you have proxies for consumer groups. They’re very valuable because they can give you feedback. If you’re trying to find an influencer for your product and you keep getting the answer, ‘No, this is not a brand for me,’ then you probably don’t have a good product.

If you’re rejected by influencers, it’s very similar to being rejected by customers.”

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From Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point:

“MAVENS HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE and the social skills to start wordof-mouth epidemics. What sets Mavens apart, though, is not so much what they know but how they pass it along. The fact that Mavens want to help, for no other reason than because they like to help, turns out to be an awfully effective way of getting someone’s attention.”

All the dimensions of the market, including the market maven, have broken down into deeper niche categories, Kozinets says. He compares parsing the new world of influencers—including the size rankings of macro-, micro- and nanoinfluencers—to discovering a new jungle and trying to name its different species. Practitioners are ahead of academics in their work to discover these new aspects of how customers communicate online about their products.

Even so, he says that while many newer companies use online research and Big Data research methods, many legacy companies have trouble consistently finding and using information gleaned from influencers and other online niche experts. “You need information that’s right now,” Kozinets says.

“That’s all there online.” As Kozinets and two coauthors wrote in a 2018 paper—titled “Evolving netnography: how brand auto-netnography, a netnographic sensibility, and more-than-human netnography can transform your research”—the world is changing whether marketers change with

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it or choose to ignore the discussions customers are having online. “What comes next is anyone’s game,” they write.

THE NEW MAVEN IS AN OBJECT

Although Price says that she’d study influencers if she were to re-focus on the market maven, she can’t help but wonder if today’s true market maven sits on her kitchen counter. “Do I believe that Alexa is out to help me?” Price asks with a laugh. “No, I do not. But she is reliably always there.”

Market mavens aren’t always with you, but they are always authentic—Price says that the magic of the fleshy market maven lies in its authenticity.

Alexa can’t possibly be authentic, she says, as there will always be an algorithm written and guided by a company—its purpose will always be to make money rather than altruistically share knowledge. But these devices and their influence can’t be ignored; Gartner predicts that consumer homes across the world will have 12.8 billion intelligent and Internet of Thingsready devices by 2020, up from about 4 billion in 2016. Our strong ties to human market mavens seem to have stagnated, Price says, while our weak ties to AI and smart objects have become expansive.

But are ties to these electronic, AI-driven voices actually weak? Donna Hoffman, a professor of marketing and co-director of The Center for the Connected Consumer at The George Washington University School of Business, believes the ties we form to these AI voices may be stronger than most people realize. In her career, Hoffman has researched these IoT objects and found that the links between the devices and consumers can be strong due to how often people interact with them.

“There is routine, habitual interaction, but it’s different kinds of interaction that happens over time,” Hoffman says. “As that happens, these relationships can acquire a great deal of strength and capture a number of emotions or behavioral components. They might become increasingly hard to break.”

The relationships will become even stronger when these AI-based mavens begin to make purchases for their owners. Instead of the fleshy maven telling you what’s new on the market, the object maven will automatically order and ship new detergent or toilet paper to your house when it notices that these items have run low. This is exactly what companies want, Hoffman says; once object mavens have the trust and control of purchasing decisions in the home, they become the ultimate influencer—the market maven who controls the market.

Brands controlling the role of the maven should raise some interesting questions, Hoffman says. “If I

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say, ‘Alexa, I need more toilet paper,’ what is she…” in the background, Hoffman’s Alexa chimes in, adding toilet paper to Hoffman’s shopping cart. “Oh god, no Alexa! Remove! Remove the toilet paper. My god.

For example, what did she just add? I didn’t go to the website. I didn’t read reviews. I didn’t choose a brand. I didn’t look at the prices. What did she just do? One of the first things that’s going to happen is there’s going to be a lot of price discrimination and that’s already happening on Amazon.”

Price discrimination is when a customer is charged different prices for the same product, according to Investopedia—at its worst, sellers charge each customer the maximum price. Hoffman says that this will happen because many consumers will decide to abdicate the decision-making process in shopping—whereas the classic market maven, like Alpert, would lead friends to the best product at the best price, consumers who abdicate their role as researcher will allow object mavens to select whatever item at whatever price it chooses. How an object maven arrives at its choice would likely be a mystery. “Maybe it’ll be the brand I used last time,” Hoffman says. “But what if she decides to put in a new brand because that brand paid more for virtual shelf placement? I think that there are a lot of interesting implications.”

Brands have potential to become a trusted adviser—a loved voice—in a relationship the consumer relies on. The relationship between brands and consumers will deepen as consumers rely more on brand-driven smart objects. Hoffman says that the potential for this kind of relationship would give brands many new opportunities to market through the suggestions of an object maven, but would create a world fraught with privacy concerns, discrimination and data security. What happens when consumers come to trust a voice that is essentially a brand’s proxy?

“It’s a big concern as we start to wonder if these different service processes driven by AI are causing us to go from a loss of agency to a loss of free will,” Hoffman says. “But as we start to lose agency—like, I can’t control what Facebook serves on the timeline, what kind of things that decide I need to see—I can go to a situation where I can’t even control what products Alexa would let me buy. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there.”

That’s a huge shift from the early days of the internet. In a 1996 paper from Hoffman and co-author Tom Novak—titled “Marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments: Conceptual foundations” and cited more than 7,200 times—they wrote that marketers must adjust APRIL 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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From Hoffman and Novak’s “Consumer and Object Experience in the Internet of Things: An Assemblage Theory Approach”:

“IN OUR ASSEMBLAGE THEORY FRAMEWORK, consumer behavior is not just something exclusively done by and for humans.

The emergence of consumerobject assemblages, which involve object-to-object interactions that already outnumber consumer-toobject interactions, strongly implies that smart objects play a role in consumptionrelated processes. Is it time to consider expanding the boundaries of consumer behavior? We believe that we have arrived at that place where our usual human-centric perspective may be limiting our opportunities to address these important questions about the future of consumer behavior and the object consumers we are creating.”

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and create new marketing concepts or risk their own demise due to customers having more control and information than ever.

“We have argued that the traditional one-tomany model, with its attendant implications and consequences for marketing theory and practice, is simply not applicable in this new hypermedia environment,” they wrote.

But a 2018 paper from Hoffman and Novak, titled “Relationship Journeys in the Internet of Things: A New Framework for Understanding Interactions Between Consumers and Smart Objects,” they ask marketers to consider smart objects less as objects and more as beings with varying levels of agency, autonomy and authority. What will emerge from a relationship between humans and devices, especially as those devices begin to appear more like humans and less like machines? “As the number and capabilities of smart, Internet-connected objects increase, so do the complexities of the dynamic and evolving assemblages that emerge from consumer-object interaction,” they write.

THE MARKETER’S ROAD FORWARD

How can marketers manage the uncertainty of this new jungle of mavens? In Hoffman’s world of IoT, object mavens, it remains to be seen; she says that no brand is doing it well yet. The big three digital corporations—Amazon, Apple and Google—all serve as proverbial toes dipping into the water, but no company yet has met the full potential of taking the role of a digital maven.

“But this is what we have right now,” Hoffman says. “We can observe what kinds of things are happening.”

Brands and researchers are actively observing how the big-three companies run their object mavens, Hoffman says. One of the things she’s currently studying with Novak is the role of trust in the relationship between humans and smart objects. What will make people give up authority and give an object more authority to make decisions on their behalf?

“These companies aren’t just thinking, ‘Let’s just get these objects in the home,’ they’re thinking, ‘How can these objects start to make decisions?’” Hoffman says. “As they make these decisions, they [become] influencers.”

For fleshy influencers—those who get to know their followers and what they want en masse—Kozinets says that the first step for marketers is to pay attention to what’s

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happening online in niche groups.

“If you’re not spending a half-hour to an hour a day out there online observing what’s going on, you’re gonna miss a lot,” Kozinets says. “If you’re a marketer and you’re trying to follow trends or understand what to launch or what to do or what to take off the shelf today, you need information that’s right now. And that’s all there online.”

Price suggests that marketers look for influencers whom the company could have an authentic relationship with rather than the influencers who have the largest number of followers. Brands that look for taste influencers should also seek those who have a broad portfolio, she says, a portfolio partially sponsored by brands, but one the influencer has expertly and lovingly curated.

“That means that you are looking for evidence in the influencers’ Instagram and in their posts and in their followers that they influence or care about the followers,” Price says. “Because what you’re trying to do in that case is understand the C2C transaction that’s vital in understanding networks of care and helping.”

Price cites the cultural phenomenon that is Japanese organization guru Marie Kondo; she says that Kondo’s Netflix show, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” is an example of “grabbing

hold of people’s lives” by going beyond cleaning clutter and into understanding their goals, projects and relationships. By going beyond simply selling or—in Kondo’s case— pushing a system for tidying your house, Price says that authentic relationships can form between brands and people.

“The power of the market maven was that they weren’t pushing a particular brand or a particular product category, but they were pushing good ways to live your life in the marketplace,” Price says.

No one knows if the new-age maven—the influencer, the aggregator, the smart object, the brand co-opting the maven’s role—can help consumers live their best lives in the marketplace. Price, Hoffman and Kozinets all say that the roles played by new-age mavens and their relationships with customers need more research. But it’s far-fetched to think that any new-age mavens could have quite the same effect as the personal interactions between a classic market maven and their friends. But where the classic market maven stagnates—your knowledgeable friend can’t be there in every grocery aisle, nor can they satisfy every curiosity during morning coffee—marketers can find new opportunities to guide, influence and perhaps even become the maven. m APRIL 2019 | MARKETING NEWS

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career advancement

REVENUE MARKETING

ago when I was working with a global marketing team for a financial services organization. I often ask marketing teams to tell me about their relationship with sales. This group said they had a great working relationship with sales, but as they continued the explanation, I saw that the relationship was based on marketing serving as the sales team’s fulfillment department for anything they requested.

It was not a relationship based on revenue production, but on marketing staying in the traditional framework. In this scenario, neither marketing nor sales realized they could and should have a revenue relationship.

SCENARIO NO. 2

Sales Lessons for Up-and-Coming Revenue Marketers Revenue marketing involves transforming marketing from a cost center to a revenue generator by adopting financial accountability, driving digital engagement and pivoting to customer centricity

BY DEBBIE QAQISH

debbie@pedowitzgroup.com

T

he percentage of marketing organizations that report financial results has remained a constant 35% for the last few years. With the plethora of technology that enables financial accountability and the many case studies demonstrating its possibilities, it seems unusual that this number has remained constant. One reason for this low figure may be a lack of communication between sales and marketing.

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Sales and Marketing Relationship Scenarios The sales and marketing chasm creates a variety of relationship scenarios, which includes being unaware of the possibilities and creating havoc when marketing uses new technology. When the sales and marketing chasm is bridged, a very different scenario plays out.

SCENARIO NO. 1

I learned a valuable lesson a few years

I also work with companies where sales and marketing have a contentious relationship. This often occurs as marketing begins to harness the power of marketing technology to gain a better understanding of the customer and to positively affect revenue. In this scenario, the traditional marketing and sales relationship is often turned upside down. The result can be an environment characterized by miscommunication, loss of marketing credibility, lack of lead follow-through and eventually no reportable ROI from marketing efforts.

SCENARIO NO. 3

When the sales and marketing chasm has been bridged and the two groups enjoy a synergistic revenue relationship, I see a very different scenario. Here are five characteristics I often see in successful revenue marketing organizations.

1. Marketing and sales use a common revenue language.

2. Marketing and sales have mirrored organizational structures.

3. Marketing and sales are proactive in their relationship.

4. Marketing and sales work together as one revenue team toward achieving shared goals.

5. Marketing and sales have goals and compensation tied to shared revenue metrics.

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REVENUE MARKETING

Four Elements of Marketing and Sales Synergy Scenario No. 3 represents a successful revenue relationship between sales and marketing. Now that we know what a synergistic relationship looks like, let’s review the four key elements to understand how to achieve it and to further define the behaviors required of a revenue marketer.

The four elements include activating an ongoing educational process, using a common revenue language, deploying effective communication strategies and sharing common goals.

1. EDUCATION

The first step in creating any relationship with sales is to educate the marketing team on sales. Trying to create a relationship with sales without understanding their world simply does not work. Marketing needs to understand sales goals, be a part of sales initiatives, understand the sales process, know the sales team and be educated on the pipeline.

SYNERGISTIC MARKETING BEHAVIORS:

• Participate in weekly sales pipeline calls.

• Participate in monthly and quarterly sales calls.

• Listen to or go on sales calls.

• Participate in sales training.

2. REVENUE LANGUAGE

A few years ago, I met a vice president at an event where we were both speaking.

As I listened to his talk, I tried to figure out if he was the VP of sales or the VP of marketing. He sounded like a VP of sales as he mentioned things like pipeline and forecast. He talked about joint sales meetings and understanding the current level of quota achievement across the sales team. He talked about accelerating time to close and improving average deal size. I was honestly confused as I was pretty sure they had not invited a VP of sales to be a part of this event.

As it turned out, he was a “VP of revenue marketing.” As with sales, revenue marketers must begin embracing the language of revenue to build credibility and drive revenue. Revenue marketers don’t

talk to sales about fonts or newsletters; they talk to sales about opportunity pipeline, quota and revenue. They ask sales questions such as: What number do you need to hit for your new acquisition target?

What does your current opportunity pipeline look like and how can we help?

What is your average deal size and how can we help grow that? Why are opportunities not closing and how can we help?

SYNERGISTIC MARKETING BEHAVIORS:

• Listen to the words used by marketing during an interaction with a salesperson—are they sales-focused or marketing-focused?

• Listen to the words used by marketing as they participate in a sales meeting— are they sales-focused or marketingfocused?

• Listen to the presentations marketing makes to sales—are they sales-focused or marketing-focused?

3. COMMUNICATION

A game plan must be established for marketing to be ready for revenue marketing and to engage in a new kind of relationship with sales. It’s up to marketing to plan, create and communicate it, collaborate and get buyin from their team and sales.

Creating and gaining commitment to a jointly developed game plan takes time and repetition. Marketing can’t just walk into a meeting and expect sales to understand their goals after a 30-minute presentation.

After all, marketing has probably spent months attending conferences, reading white papers and educating themselves about the benefits of revenue marketing.

Marketing will need to plan multiple communication methods, meetings and events to share the sales vision and craft the ultimate game plan.

career advancement

• Incorporate the elements of an effective revenue marketing communication plan.

4. SHARED GOALS

Sales and marketing must have shared goals, aligned compensation and complementary organizational structures. In the world of sales, no revenue accountability for marketing means no respect from sales. When I look at the most successful revenue marketing machines, I see that marketing has the same kinds of goals as sales. If sales has a number tied to new account acquisition, so does marketing. If sales has a number for enterprise accounts, so does marketing. If sales has a number for a new product, so does marketing.

SYNERGISTIC MARKETING BEHAVIORS:

• Marketing has common revenue goals with sales.

• Marketing revenue goals are transparent.

• Marketing has compensation tied to revenue goals.

• Marketing is structured or operates in a complementary framework to create revenue synergy.

The Challenge Marketing and sales alignment is a key success factor of revenue marketing success. Do not assume marketing understands sales. Unless they have a background in sales or have worked in a revenue marketing model with sales before, they cannot be expected to know how to align. Assess where marketing is in their understanding of sales and then follow the guidelines in this article to improve that level of understanding and begin exhibiting fruitful revenue marketing behaviors. Following this model will help marketing understand sales and become revenue partners. m

SYNERGISTIC MARKETING BEHAVIORS:

• Develop a communication plan like a marketing campaign.

• Deploy your plan using a marketing automation platform and track and engage with digital body language.

• Develop personas and messages.

• Work in multiple channels.

DEBBIE QAQISH, Ph.D., is principal partner and chief strategy officer of The Pedowitz Group. She manages global client relationships and leads the firm’s thought leadership initiatives. She has been helping B2B companies drive revenue growth for more than 35 years.

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CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Engaging Customers in an Omni-channel World Contributor Parna Sarkar-Basu chats with Panviva CMO Steve Pappas about customer experience

BY PARNA SARKAR-BASU

parna@brandandbuzzmarketing.com

A

s a marketing professional, I am obsessed with learning about new trends and technologies.

I frequently speak with my peers, entrepreneurs and analysts about their business successes, market shifts and lessons learned from initiatives that may not have gone as planned.

I recently read a Gartner study that said more than two-thirds of companies compete mostly on the basis of customer experience. In two years, the report says

that 81% expect to compete mostly or completely on the basis of customer experience. These are not surprising stats.

As a digital consumer, I buy only from companies with superb customer service.

I turned to CX expert Steve Pappas to help me understand how companies can engage with customers in today’s digital world, a place where everyone expects real-time service and detests having to answer the same questions for multiple representatives. In addition to being the

CMO of software company Panviva, Pappas has built and sold six companies.

His mantra is the customer is at the center of the universe.

Q A

How did you get interested in marketing?

It was out of necessity that I immersed myself in marketing techniques and methods. I was starting companies and needed to market our services and products. My first startup was Cruise Travel Outlet and I had to learn very quickly how to market a costplus service nationwide. Our goal was to be nationwide while being local to garner customers away from local mom-andpop or chain agencies. We made a lot of mistakes and wasted a lot of money in the first six months, but then I learned how to focus my efforts to build the business.

Now I’m hooked. Marketing is the true lifeblood of a startup’s growth.

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career advancement

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

Q

A CMO wears many hats today.

What do you think should be a CMO’s top focus, and why?

A

CMOs need to better understand their customers since customers have other choices. Get out and constantly talk to customers. Ask about their stories.

Understand them better than any survey or research project could ever tell you.

Make a point to call, visit or spend time in your call center. There is no better way to understand what works and what doesn’t than spending a few days in your call center. You will gain incredible insight from your reps and the customers they serve to help you make better decisions going forward.

Q

How can companies best engage with customers in today’s omni-channel world?

A

I believe there are five ways to engage with customers.

1. Be where the customers are. We need to start by understanding the customers’ processes. Most of my peers call this journey mapping. For years, I have used techniques that look at everything, including how the customer thinks they need a product or service and when they have an issue with either and need support.

2. Determine customer communications preferences and mediums. Do customers want to use social media? Do they prefer to walk into a retail location? Will they email us? Communicate online with a chatbot? Understand how customers want to interact and get information from your company.

3. Develop one source of truth. This means rolling all of the possible answers, decision flows and governance processes into a single repository of information that will serve all channels used today, while being flexible enough to accommodate all future needs.

4. Create a customer-first culture.

Teach your team to focus on delivering the very best customer

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experience possible, not just creating and executing marketing programs.

Customer experience is everyone’s job. Marketing happens during the early part of the customer experience, where we look to make the awareness journey pleasant and easy for customers. Sales has their part to play in assuring the buying experience for the customer is frictionless and positive. Finally, customer experience starts even before the product is developed and packaged. Always ask, “How will this be for the customer?”

Think about their level of effort, frustration points and saving them time.

5. Build relationships. After a sale is done, all of the departments should be charged with supporting, servicing and retaining the customer and delivering great experience. Try to promote more of a long-term partnership with customers rather than a vendor-customer relationship.

Q A

What marketing trend do you see coming down the road?

I see everyone trying to jump on the omni-channel bandwagon, which is the future, but I don’t see folks approaching the transition with an eye to process. No digital transformation or omni-channel initiative will give the payoff you need without you first addressing all of your current processes and setting them for future needs. I always tell my team not to look at your processes based on today’s needs. At midnight, today is over. Look at what you will need for processes two to five years out. Really think about these growing channels. Channels are all of the ways your customers, partners and prospects can interact or transact with your company.

Then make sure you are applying the right messaging and style for each. As CMOs, our companies are looking to us to provide vision on how we should be marketing tomorrow to benefit today. m

CMOs need to better understand their customers since customers have other choices.

Get out and constantly talk to customers. Ask about their stories.

Understand them better than any survey or research project could ever tell you.

PARNA SARKAR-BASU is a tech advocate, corporate marketing strategist and founder of Brand and Buzz Marketing, LLC.

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ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the April 2019 issue of Marketing News.

2019 AMA Marketing + Public Policy Conference ....................................... p. 17 URL: a ma.marketing/MPPC 2019 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education Conference ............................................ p. 11 URL: a ma.marketing/highered2019 2019 AMA Training Series...................................... p. 25 URL: a ma.marketing/ts

AMA Professional Certified Marketer® Content Marketing Program . .................................................................. p. 19 URL: ama.marketing/PCM-CM AMA White Papers ................................................. p. 27 URL: http://www.ama.org/white-papers AMA’s Marketing Resource Directory .................................................................. p. 52 URL: marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org

AMA Bootcamp — Digital Marketing ......................................... inside front cover URL: a ma.marketing/bootcamp19

Collegis Education ..................................... back cover

AMA Bootcamp — Marketing Management . .................................. inside back cover URL: a ma.marketing/bootcamp19

Marketing News ...................................................... p. 55 Email: sales@ama.org URL: mediakit.ama.org

URL: CollegisEducation.com

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#OfficeGoals

A peek inside the marketers’ offices that make us drool

One of the company’s early office design decisions was moving to an agile model where staff sit wherever they feel most productive. This move allowed them to reduce the office size by 1,500 square feet while increasing collaboration and social areas. This included a café, large communal entry and stepped meeting zone that can facilitate everything from coffee nooks to movie nights.

There is no receptionist; guests register on a touchscreen in the entryway.

While almost all spaces can be reserved, there is also a quiet zone for focused work. Interior design firm Unispace created this space from one that traditionally would be used for IT or storage, as it has intrusive duct work. Instead of hiding that equipment, Unispace made it a divider and used the system operation, in conjunction with furniture, as white noise.

Unispace exposed the columns and floors down to the original terracotta and partially enclosed them with a wire mesh. Hanging melted globes serve as a transition point between the café and workplace. A graffiti artist created a mural weaving vibrant colors with Archetype’s branding and New York icons.

Interior design: Unispace

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CHRIS COOPER

ARCHETYPE’s New York home is wired differently.

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