Marketing News: February 2017

American Marketing Association

ama.org

February 2017

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February 2017 No.

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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 • Snapshot • Core Concepts

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“Focus on the creative product—not the technology, not the data.”

aMa intelligenCe • The Middle Market • MBA Perspectives • Scholarly Insights

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eXeCutiVe inSightS • Lawrence Crosby • Michael krauss • Don Schultz • Christine Moorman

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Career adVanCeMent • On the Record • Personal Branding

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#offiCegoalS

28 The Revenge of Creative How a new agency is displacing big dogs and Big Data by thinking small.

Deloitte’s First CMO Walks in No One’s Footsteps

Diana O’Brien talks about data, robots, social employees and how to differentiate experiences for Deloitte’s clients.

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Busting Out of the Card Catalog Libraries may still be analog institutions, but their creative staffs are finding ways to leverage both data and their traditional expertise— information sharing—to adapt their marketing for modern communities

FIND OuT MOre aT

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Cover: Photographer: Lisa Predko (lisapredko.com).

Assistants: Jacqueline Ayala, Tom Michas. Model, Hair & Makeup: kelsey Conner. wardrobe stylist: Jacqueline Ayala. retouching: Tom Michas.

Catering: Andrea Donadio

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February 2017

Vol. 51 | No. 2

Letter from the Editor

American Marketing Association

Analytics: The New Normal

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ecoming an expert in analytics, along with the numerous other jobs marketers must master, can feel like a lot to juggle.

In this issue, we explore how data and analytics have changed the marketing field (mostly) for the better.

Hal Conick spoke with Diana O’Brien, Deloitte’s first CMO, about how data is now incorporated into every marketer’s job. “Every company is a data company.

Every company is a technology company.

We’re all rich with data, and we all have many different kinds of technology,” O’Brien says. “The key is to use the data and the technology to create meaning and understanding, so you can make choices and decisions and be more proactive in satisfying your clients’ expectations. You can be overwhelmed by data, and it can overtake you, but the key is to stay focused on the problems you’re trying to solve.”

Sarah Steimer explores how modern librarians have much in common with today’s marketers—they, too, must juggle both creative and analytical tasks and implement data-driven campaigns on a shoestring budget. “Librarians themselves have two enormously

Valarie Zeithaml Chairperson of the AMA Board 2016-2017 Russ Klein, AMA Chief Executive Officer rklein@ama.org Andy Friedman, AMA Chief Content Officer afriedman@ama.org Editorial Staff

Phone (800) AMA-1150 • Fax (312) 542-9001 E-mail editor@ama.org Molly Soat, Editor in Chief msoat@ama.org Michelle Markelz, Managing Editor mmarkelz@ama.org Zach Brooke, Staff Writer zbrooke@ama.org Hal Conick, Staff Writer hconick@ama.org Sarah Steimer, Staff Writer ssteimer@ama.org

important marketing skills working to their advantage: They’re data-driven and creative. But there are obstacles that limit them, be it time, money or professional expertise,” Steimer says.

“The old ways of marketing the library, such as a pamphlet located at the check-out desk or a bookmark slipped inside a paperback, won’t reach the desired customer anymore.”

How have data and analytics changed your job?

Molly Soat Editor in Chief @MollySoat

Vince Cerasani, Associate Art Director vcerasani@ama.org Advertising Staff

Fax (312) 922-3763 • E-mail ads@ama.org Sally Schmitz, Production Manager sschmitz@ama.org (312) 542-9038 Michael Gay, Account Executive mgay@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4421 Nicola Tate, Account Executive ntate@yourmembership.com (727) 329-4437 Jordan Berthiaume, Media Sales Representative jberthiaume@YourMembership.com (727) 497-6565 x3409 Marketing News (ISSN 0025-3790) is published monthly by the American Marketing Association, 130 E. Randolph St., 22nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60601.

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Opinions expressed are not necessarily endorsed by the AMA, its officers or staff.

Marketing News welcomes expressions of all professional viewpoints on marketing and its related areas. These may be as letters to the editor, columns or articles. Letters should be brief and may be condensed by the editors. Please request a copy of the “Writers’ Guidelines” before submitting an article. Upon submission to the AMA, photographs and manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a self-addressed, adequately stamped envelope.

Contributors

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Copyright © 2017 by the American Marketing Association.

All rights reserved.

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Christine Moorman

Lisa Predko

Moorman is the director of the semiannual CMO Survey and the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration at The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

Predko is a Chicago-based commercial and editorial photographer who specializes in conceptual and narrative work. Shooting characters and creating her own vibrant world, Lisa loves using light and color to evoke emotion and hero her subjects.

Without written permission from the AMA, any copying or reprinting (except by authors reprinting their own works) is prohibited. Requests for permission to reprint—such as copying for general distribution, advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works or resale—should be submitted in writing by mail or sent via e-mail to permissions@ama.org.

Reprints in quantity are available by contacting Kristy Snyder at Sheridan Reprints: (717) 632-3535.

Printed in the U.S.A.

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2017 Marketing Trends from CES CES 2017, a consumer electronics tradeshow, showcased what’s next in products and technology and had some highlights marketers need to know about. Here are five of them. social issues, education and travel, among other areas.

“I walked away saying, ‘Brands are really going to need to figure out what the role of VR is and how they’re going to represent themselves in it,’” Kersten says, adding that it will be a huge opportunity for marketers.

“Everywhere you turn there’s a very real, tangible demonstration of how this can be delivered to consumers.

It’s really here and it’s not a novelty.”

Marketers will have to adapt to this technology via storytelling, Sauvage says. They cannot simply take spots that were already filmed for YouTube or TV and shoehorn them into VR or AR.

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aking in all of the new products and technology at CES 2017 is a bit like drinking from a firehose, according to Bob Kersten, executive director of client services at Landor.

After returning from the event, which took place Jan. 5 through 8, Kersten says he’s still processing all he saw from the Las Vegas consumer electronics and technology tradeshow.

Throughout the event, Kersten and Thomas Sauvage, senior strategist at Landor, say they saw new product, service and technology offerings from the likes of Samsung, Sony, Ford, BMW and other brands from across the world.

Kersten and Sauvage shed some light on what marketers need to know about the products of the future and where innovation and marketing may meet in the coming years.

Smart Homes and Wearables was astonished by the technology’s lack of limits for storytelling and entertainment. For example, The Wall Street Journal is dedicating an entire team to VR, but VR also has use for

Sauvage was amazed by the amount of wearable and smart home technology at CES. Brands are adding sensors for security, energy efficiency, muscle fatigue and even attaching sensors to frying pans.

Virtual and Augmented Reality Virtual reality and augmented reality stood out the most to Kersten, as he

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“This was really insane,” he says. “It feels like brands are fighting to help us monitor our lives. … Both brands and [consumers] are turning into data scientists. There’s so much data to help you monitor in real time what you’re doing, how you’re sleeping, how you’re eating; it’s all done at your fingertips. This is where brands are investing a lot.”

This comes with challenges for brands and consumers alike, Sauvage says. This technology needs to have a relevant use for consumers and tangible, accessible benefits. Companies must also keep in mind how many devices consumers will want to buy and if they will be interoperable with each other.

“How will you make sure your vacuum, your fridge, operates with Alexa, which also operates with several other devices?” Sauvage asks.

3-D Audio and Speaking the Search There’s a lot of marketing potential in audio, Kersten says, but he believes it’s currently an area that’s being mostly ignored by marketers.

However, consumers are now waking up to “3-D audio,” which makes audio sound as if it has more depth, in home technology and headphones.

Another aspect of voice and sound that marketing may be able to take advantage of is speech, Sauvage says. Platforms like Alexa are gaining popularity and he believes this will likely change how brands do business with customers, using chat

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bots, AI and voice command rather than live human interaction.

“We’re just at the beginning of this,” Sauvage says. “This could be a completely new avenue for brands that pushes them to really think about what services they’re providing to customers.”

More Collaboration Between Brands Brands will likely start partnering due to demand, according to Kersten. At CES, one collaboration people may not have expected was between Live Nation and Hulu to produce a VR concert from Lil’ Wayne for the Hulu VR app.

“You’re going to see not only more opportunities for partnership, but demand for partnership,” Kersten says.

“If you’re not part of that ecosystem, you’re going to have trouble.”

Not ‘Either/Or’; ‘And’ Kersten says he and Sauvage walked away from CES believing that technological evolution isn’t an “either/or” proposition, it’s “and.” For example, customers aren’t cutting the cord from cable en masse, they’re augmenting it with streaming.

“Autonomous vehicles aren’t going to completely replace drivers,” Kersten says. “Things are just getting more complex in terms of managing your marketing or managing your brand. VR, AR, voice; there are just going to be additional channels and tools to reach and engage with consumers.”

This, in turn, means there will be more complexity in marketing, brand governance and execution.

—Hal Conick

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What Google’s AMP Means for Marketers

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or the past half-decade, every year has been the ‘year of mobile,’ and with every year, mobile keeps maturing.

Mobile-only social platforms are the fastest growing, mobile search has overtaken desktop search and for many people, their phone is their only gateway to the internet. Google is all-in on mobile, and they are tackling two of its biggest problems: speed and data shortages.

Google is looking to speed up the web with their new Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative, also known as AMP. Shortly after AMP was released, Google started to push new features live and is expanding the AMP project to sites outside of news.

If consumers are used to seeing recommended articles at the bottom of just about every article they read,

this provides enough consumer interest to warrant a need for a marketplace developed by Google, leveraging their AMP technology. It would make great sense for AMP to become a content recommendation engine.

This program rewards those already advertising on Google platforms: By taking one of the media garnering an increasing share of budgets, Google is able to bring yet another piece of the marketing budget onto one of its platforms. Couple that with rewarding advertisers who are already active on their owner properties, such as Adwords, YouTube, DoubleClick, etc., and you have that one platform home that all marketers want.

It also helps Google stay in front of Facebook: Quality score could

follow a similar model to what it does today, with a higher preference towards landing page experience, allowing advertisers yet another medium to promote multi-touch marketing strategies and staying in front of Facebook.

Google is slowly expanding AMP into its advertising properties, which provides a tremendous opportunity for Google to combine the inventory within Google Display Network. The targeting of GDN, and the gluttony of content, allows publishers to leverage this platform similar to Adsense to provide another revenue source. The consumer is able to find more relevant content, and marketers are able to reach a larger audience.

—Justin Emig

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ama elections

2017-2018 slate

American Marketing Association 2017-2018 Election

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MA members vote annually on a slate of candidates to hold office on the AMA board of directors and AMA councils. A ballot, candidate information and link to the voting site for the upcoming election will be sent to members electronically on March 1, 2017. The voting site will remain open through 11:59 p.m. CST on April 30, 2017. If you have difficulty voting, questions about voting online or wish to request a paper ballot, please contact Election Services Corp. by e-mail at AMAhelp@ElectionServicesCorp.com or call 866-720-HELP (4357), 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST. The voting process is important, and we encourage all members to exercise their right to vote for the 2017-2018 slate of candidates.

In accordance with AMA bylaws, the nominating committee for the AMA has placed the following names in contention for the indicated offices for 2017-2018 terms, beginning July 1, 2017:

Chairperson of the Board Mary Garrett Mary Garrett led global marketing for IBM from 2009 until her retirement in 2015. She joined IBM in 1981 as an electrical engineer and served in key positions, including vice president of marketing global technology services, P&L owner for the $6 billion small and medium business for global technology services and vice president of e-business hosting. She led teams across the software and services portfolios in 170 markets around the world.

Garrett serves on the board and the audit committee of Ethan Allen Interiors, Inc., a manufacturer and retailer of home furnishings. She is nominated for board membership with Hill-Rom, a global medical technology company. She is an active mentor in W.O.M.E.N. in America, a professional development group aimed at advancing promising professional women and is also on the board of the AMA, serving as chair-elect.

Garrett has extensive experience in the technology industry, including digital transformation, Big Data and cognitive analytics, cybersecurity and cloud computing. She holds a patent for her work in speech recognition. She has a broad international background including Europe and emerging markets in Asia and Africa, marketing expertise and business leadership experience.

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Chairperson of the Board-elect Stacy Armijo, Pierpont Communications Stacy Armijo is senior vice president for Pierpont Communications and general manager of the firm’s Austin, Texas, office. In that role, she leads teams that have garnered numerous campaign awards. She has been named a Woman of Influence by the Austin Business Journal and is winner of the Austin Under 40 Award for Marketing, PR and Advertising.

In addition, Armijo currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the AMA, having previously served on the organization’s Audit & Finance Committee, as president of its Professional Chapters Council and as president of the Austin chapter among other roles in her 13 years of involvement. In addition, Armijo is a lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, teaching public relations strategies in the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations at the Moody College of Communications.

Armijo has also been invited to judge awards programs in her industry, including the AMA Chapter Excellence Awards, the Communication Awards for the Society for Marketing Professional Services and the Business Awards for the Austin Chamber of Commerce.

Armijo earned a bachelor’s degree in public relations from the University of Texas at Austin and speaks regularly about public relations, marketing, leadership and community service.

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2017-2018 slate

VP Finance/Secretary Bill Cron, Texas Christian University Bill Cron is the J. Vaughn and Evelynne H. Wilson Professor in Business and the senior associate dean for graduate programs and research at the M. J. Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University.

Cron’s research has been published in top academic journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research and the Academy of Management Journal.

Cron has served on the board of directors for the Health Industry Trade Association, Park Plaza Medical, Advanced Medical Supply, Southwest Medical Supply, the Midmark Corp. and 24VirtualMD. He has served on four editorial review boards, including the Journal of Marketing and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

He has published more than 80 marketing and sales management articles and manuscripts and has been recognized as one of the top 10 sales and sales management researchers in the U.S. He has also co-authored seven editions of one of the leading sales management texts in the U.S. and Canada, Sales Management: Concepts and Cases. He received the 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sales and Sales Management Special Interest Group of the AMA. Cron has been a member of the AMA since 1977. Prior to serving on the AMA board, he served as president of the AMA Academic Council and co-chair of the AMA Winter Educator’s Conference in 2004. He currently serves as the president of the AMA Foundation and is on the Berry AMA Book Award Committee and the Parlin Award Committee.

Cron earned his doctorate of business administration and master’s degrees from Indiana University and his B.S. from Xavier University.

Immediate Past Chairperson Valarie Zeithaml, University of North Carolina Valarie Zeithaml is the David S. Van Pelt Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

An award-winning teacher and researcher, she was recently recognized as an AMA Lifetime Fellow. She was also acknowledged in Thomson Reuters’ “2014 World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds,” representing scholars in the top 1% of citations in their academic

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fields. She also won the 2012 Bullard Research Impact Award in recognition of the broad impact of research on the field, industry and society; the 2009 AMA Irwin/ McGraw-Hill Distinguished Marketing Educator Award for lifetime leadership; the 2008 Paul D. Converse Award for outstanding and enduring contributions to marketing through journal articles, books or a body of work; the 2004 Innovative Contributor to Marketing Award; and the 2004 Outstanding Marketing Educator Award given by the Academy of Marketing Science.

Among her more than 100 publications are articles that have won the O’Dell Award, the Maynard Award, the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award and seven others.

She is the author or co-author of five business books and the co-author of the leading services marketing textbook.

Zeithaml has researched customer expectations in more than 50 industries and consulted with companies all over the world, including IBM, Kaiser Permanente, GE, John Hancock Financial Services, Aetna, AT&T, Metropolitan Life Insurance and Chase Manhattan Bank. She received her Ph.D. and MBA from the University of Maryland. She served as an MSI academic trustee for six years and is currently chairperson of the board of the AMA.

At-large Members of the Board Three candidates are running for the five at-large board positions and will service three-year terms beginning July 1, 2017. (Write-ins are also welcome.) The candidates are:

Mark B. Houston, Texas A&M University Mark B. Houston is department head, professor of marketing and Foreman R. and Ruby S. Bennett Chair in Business Administration at Texas A&M University. Mark is also affiliated with Arizona State University’s Center for Services Leadership and the University of Münster.

His research on channels, movies and innovation strategy has been published in Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, among others. He is associate editor of Journal of Service Research, associate editor of Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and a member of the editorial review board of Journal of Marketing.

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Houston has served as president of the AMA Academic Council (2012-2013) and has co-chaired the AMA Summer Educators’ Conference (2005) and the AMA/Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium (2010). He has received teaching awards at the national (Academy of Marketing Science), university (University of Missouri) and collegiate levels (TCU’s Neeley School of Business; Saint Louis University’s Cook School of Business).

He has conducted research, consulting and/or executive education activities with many firms, including AT&T, Caterpillar, Dell, IBM, INGAA, Marriott.com and WellPoint.

Prior to joining Texas A&M in 2014, Houston was a chaired full professor at TCU. Houston earned his Ph.D. from Arizona State, his MBA from University of Missouri and his B.S. from Southwest Baptist University.

Mayur Gupta, Spotify Mayur Gupta is the vice president of growth and marketing at Spotify.

Gupta also sits on the board of directors for DentaQuest and D’Addario, guiding the C-suites in their respective digital transformation and growth journeys.

Prior to Spotify, Gupta was CMO at Healthgrades, responsible for marketing, omni-channel solutions business and digital capabilities. He successfully drove the digital transformation of the company while being responsible for the vision, strategy and activation of one of the largest digital marketplace platforms in health care and delivered seamless omni-channel experiences and always-on patient engagement that drive better health outcomes and maximize lifetime value for hospitals.

Gupta was the first global chief marketing technologist at Kimberly Clark. He successfully established a global marketing technology organization at Kimberly Clark with responsibility for building a global, connected digital ecosystem across media, content, data and commerce organizations.

In 2014, Gupta was recognized as one of the “40 under 40” leading marketers in the industry by BrandInnovators and received the CMO Programmatic Award by the CMOClub. Harvard Business Review and the Economist profiled him as the model chief marketing technologist in 2014.

He sits on various advisory boards including IBM’s CMO Council, BrandInnovators and Global MarTech Conferences and mentors a number of startups.

Gupta spent almost 13 years at SapientNitro leading digital marketing engagements for global brands, including Coca Cola, Unilever, ESPN XGames, Mars, Citibank, Chrysler, FIAT Abarth, Motorola, Burger King

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and many others. He led the largest production studio for the company for a number of years before becoming the marketing technology thought leader for one of the North American business units.

Karen Albritton, Capstrat Karen Albritton is president and CEO of Capstrat, a full-service agency using data-backed insights to breed smart creative solutions that work in today’s omni-channel environment. Albritton has been with Capstrat for more than 15 years, leading the agency’s growth and championing innovation in digital, mobile, social and analytics.

Prior to joining Capstrat, Albritton was managing director at FGI, overseeing the firm’s marketing communications group. Before FGI, Albritton was vice president and associate media director at McKinney.

Albritton is an advocate for the marketing profession, having served for five years on the AMA’s Professional Chapters Council as well as speaking at industry conferences and events such as the AMA Nonprofit Marketer Conference, the AMA Leadership Summit and health care marketing training events. She was named 2012-13 Volunteer of the Year by the Triangle AMA Chapter and serves on the chapter’s EPIC past-president’s council.

Albritton is also past chair of the board of visitors for the UNC Children’s Hospital and serves on advisory boards for the UNC School of Media and Journalism and Elon University’s School of Communications. She earned her B.A. in journalism and political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Divisional Presidents-elect President-elect, Academic Council (Unopposed) Vanitha Swaminathan, University of Pittsburgh Vanitha Swaminathan is the Thomas Marshall Professor of Marketing at the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the director of the Katz Center for Branding.

Her research interests include branding strategy, consumer-brand relationships and interfirm relationships.

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2017-2018 slate

Her research explores why consumers are attached to certain brands and how firms can successfully design brand strategies to strengthen brand relationships. She also explores how social media influences brand equity and how brand managers can leverage the power of social media to build stronger relationships with customers.

Her work has been published in many of the discipline’s leading journals including the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Science, International Journal for Research in Marketing and Journal of Consumer Psychology.

She is on the editorial review board of the Journal of Marketing and Journal of Consumer Psychology. In addition to her service on the AMA Academic Council, Swaminathan chaired the 2015 Winter AMA Conference.

President-elect, Collegiate Chapters Council (Unopposed) Delonia Cooley, Texas Southern University Delonia Cooley is an associate professor of marketing at Texas Southern University and the owner/operator of D & C Consulting. She is an adviser to the AMA, and she has coordinated and implemented the International Marketing Exchange Excursion for undergraduate business students to travel to China during the summer, as well as led her chapter to the title of 2016’s Top Small Chapter of the Year. She is also a member of the Collegiate Chapters Council.

Cooley has published articles in the Journal of International Consumer Marketing, Journal of Internet Commerce, International Journal of Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Marketing, Academy of Marketing Science Review, The Online Journal of Distance Education and e-Learning, Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, Journal of Social Media in Society and Southwestern Business Administration Journal. She has also published a book, Are You Making the Right Impression? Preparing NOW for Life after College.

She received a B.S. and is a Master of Health Care Administration and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She received her Doctorate of Philosophy in 2006 from the University of Memphis.

Cooley is a member of the AMA, Academy of Marketing Science, Society for Marketing Advances and a member of the 2010 class of Who’s Who in Black Houston. She currently serves as the Co-Chair of the International Collegiate American Marketing Association Conference.

ama elections

President-elect, Professional Chapters Council (Unopposed) Robin Tooms, Savage Brands Robin Tooms is a partner and team lead for strategy at Savage Brands, a branding agency that helps companies develop and sustain leadership positions by helping them deliver on their corporate purpose. Tooms oversees all brand, marketing and digital strategy efforts for the firm.

A member of the Savage team for more than 19 years, Tooms applies her background of design, development and strategy.

Tooms received her MBA from the Rice University Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business and an honors degree in graphic communications from the University of Houston. She has also taught at the University of Houston in the graphic design program.

Tooms was a recipient of Houston Business Journal’s 40 under 40 award for 2010 and GDUSA’s People to Watch for 2011.

A long-time board member, she has also held the office of president for both the local boards of AMA Houston (2012-2013) and AIGA Houston (2005-2010), as well as serving as a national AIGA board member from 2010 to 2013.

President-elect, Practitioner Council (Unopposed) Robert Welborn, USAA Robert Welborn runs data science research and development at USAA as AVP of data science. He focuses on the areas of machine learning, optimization and high-velocity data problems. He worked for five years in the area of optimizing marketing and sales decisions. He and his team won the 2013 ANA Marketing Analytics Leadership Award and were featured numerous times in Forrester Research case studies and articles.

Welborn is a published economist on the topic of university-industry linkages. Welborn still works with several academic institutions in turning theoretical research into applied decision analytics for USAA with organizations such as the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative and the DMA. Welborn has worked with the World Bank, Perot Systems (now Dell) and Neiman Marcus. He received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University and his graduate degree from the University of California, San Diego.

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Measure Up What happens when a small cookware startup hires professional marketers to run its crowdfunding?

By Zach Brooke | staff writer

 zbrooke@ama.org Goal Have a great idea but can’t get it to market? Since 2008, the answer for many inventors has been to turn to crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo and GoFundMe. Let the marketplace evaluate the merits of your contraption. Seems nice.

Yet not all crowdfunding campaigns are created equal. While some entrepreneurs may turn to crowdfunding as a way to avoid the trappings of marketing, it’s clear crowdfunding platforms can be a potent tool in the hands of a skilled marketer.

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Polygons Design is a small company, headed by Indian designer Rahul Agarwal, that produces a single, small product: the measuring spoon. Agarwal’s creations, dubbed Polygons, are simple shapeshifting kitchen utensils that fold along different angles, allowing cooks to toggle between teaspoon and tablespoon quantities with ease.

“Polygons are inspired by the human hand, the same way it lies flat, but cupping itself to different sizes depending on the amount of the substance it is holding,” Agarwal says.

Reinventing the spoon was merely the start of Agarwal’s quest to bring a new idea to market. To launch, he’d have to raise a good deal of capital, and he needed powerful, persuasive professionals to secure that funding. He reached out to Command Partners, a North Carolina-based agency specializing in crowdfunding endeavors.

Command Partners founder and president Roy Morejon says his company receives more than 100 inquiries a

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day from inventors like Agarwal. He believes good ideas on their own are no longer enough to gain traction, and crowdfunding darlings need a highpowered campaign behind them if they are to achieve their funding goals.

“There’re hundreds, if not thousands, of projects that now launch every single day,” Morejon says. “If you truly want to move the needle—raise significant six, seven figures for campaigns—you need marketing support, period.”

Agarwal says he was drawn to the agency for its crowdfunding track record.

“They had an impressive history and experience in this space, and we didn’t want a good product to be let down by mismanaged marketing,” he says.

The feeling was mutual. “They’re just so cool,” Morejon says of Polygons. “It’s cheap enough where people have that wow factor. It’s really utilitarian where anybody can use it. It makes sense.”

After an initial round of meetings, Agarwal and Morejon decided an external goal of $10,000 was needed to go forward.

Action The Polygons/Command Partners partnership was unusual in the length of time the two parties worked together before launching the funding project.

The initial contact between the two was in July 2015, more than a year before crowdfunding commenced.

They spent much of that time identifying people who were likely to be interested in the campaign once it went live. The earliest steps involved building up a database of prospective customers and influencers.

“Building up our e-mail database is our No. 1 factor of success upon launching a campaign,” Morejon says.

The final list of e-mail addresses they amassed numbers in the tens of thousands, the majority belonging to users fitting into one or more of roughly two dozen personas. Morejon’s team felt that stay-athome moms, people who like cooking and people who like crowdfunding projects would be more inclined to purchase the measuring spoons.

The users behind the e-mail addresses were then blasted with hot Polygon

content authored by Command Partners.

A short video shows the spoons at work, measuring out heaps of spices and dollops of oils. At every turn early in the process, the team asked viewers for their thoughts on improving the product. “It’s not necessarily about vanity numbers of likes and followers, but truly trying to have a conversation with people beforehand, asking them their advice,” Morejon says.

The early feedback suggested there was demand for measuring spoons in metric sizes, which Morejon says never would have occurred to them had it not been for the pre-funding efforts. “The feedback channel is one of those beautiful elements of crowdfunding that you just don’t have putting a product on a store shelf,” he says.

The $10,000 number was a balance of necessity and psychology. On one hand, it was the absolute minimum needed to guarantee that Polygons could be manufactured. But the figure was intentionally set low enough that the goal would be reached as early as possible.

According to Morejon, that’s because people are more inclined to donate to a proven winner than to respond to calls to help reach a threshold while still climbing.

Company

Polygons Design Founded

2016 Campaign Timeline

Crowdfunding went live on October 11, 2016 and continued until November 20, 2016 Results

Raised $1,022,120 from 36,863 backers

answers in action

“Part of our strategy is to build the crowd before the campaign begins, build that groundswell of excitement for the campaign. … People want to feel like they’re not the last one to the party or the first one on the dance floor,” Morejon says. “We want to reach those funding goals within the first day.”

Results The campaign went live on Oct. 11, 2016. The $10,000 threshold was breached almost immediately. By the end of day one, the Polygons Kickstarter banked close to 10 times that amount.

When it closed 45 days later, it had surpassed the $1 million benchmark.

The efforts of Morejon and Command Partners had turned Polygon Design from a wannabe small business hoping to fund a shoestring operation into a seven-figure startup.

The campaign garnered 36,800 individual backers, the majority of whom kicked in between $10 and $12 for a single set of spoons. But larger funders took notice as well, including more than 500 people who Morejon says have expressed interest in wholesaling the product once it’s in regular production.

Eight backers made a pledge of at least $500 in exchange for 50 sets of Polygons.

And one generous patron ponied up $1,000 for 100 customized spoons, though there was a little funny business behind that bid. “That was me. I backed that so I could get product for everyone in my office,” Morejon says.

Agarwal himself was floored by the response.

“Though we’d already gotten a hint of it from the response to the precampaign marketing, the huge support we got from so many backers was absolutely overwhelming and humbling. The funds raised have allowed us to go for an even superior product than earlier planned, and we’re quite excited to get it into people’s hands,” he says.

After securing $1 million for a product that only exists on paper, fulfilling the orders may prove to be the easy part. m February 2017 | marketing news

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core concepts

The Marketer’s SEO Playbook, 2017 Edition Content and coding are the keys to hacking SEO in 2017 with a combination of high-quality content up front and next practices on the backend

By Sarah Steimer | Staff Writer

 ssteimer@ama.org

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here are two routes marketers can take to optimize their websites for search: create the very best content or update the backend of the site so it checks all the right boxes for a query.

Rather than choosing one option or the other, experts suggest 2017 is the year to combine these two efforts. The trick is to have both the best answer to search questions and to do so in a way that complies with the search engine analytics.

Google is the reigning king of query, but many people also perform searches on Facebook and YouTube. Marketing News spoke with experts in these three areas to determine the best SEO practices for 2017.

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Google Russ Jones, principal search scientist at Moz, which builds tools for inbound marketing, says he expects SEO specialists to become more adept at targeting Google’s search features, those items that appear in Google organic results that are not the so-called 10 blue links. Jones says to pay particular attention to related questions, which are a series of questions involving the search term, featured snippets, which includes a summary of the answer extracted from a webpage plus a link to the site, and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Jones says technology is beginning to allow SEO specialists to easily identify

where featured snippets and related questions are within a website, and he expects more and more studies to be released that show how to take advantage of this technology, whether it’s optimizing content or code so a site is more likely to show up in the featured snippets.

“One way or another, SEO [experts] are going to crack that nut,” Jones says.

“And when they do, it’s going to be a big land grab.”

Jones says Google is investing in AMP and it’s available to essentially everyone, plus there is a myriad of plug-ins for Wordpress. He expects a lot of SEO experts to push their customers to adopt AMP on their sites.

These areas will gain attention, Jones says, because they provide an opportunity to jump the competition dramatically. With featured snippets, for example, a website can jump an entire page of search results, and AMP can allow a site to be lumped in at the top with other stories, as opposed to being substantially further down.

Jones says marketers should have a strong technical SEO specialist at their disposal, whether it’s an employee, a friend or a contracted company to take advantage of these technologies. Jones also recommends creating content that

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core concepts

answers both the short and long questions at the same time.

“Let’s say I wanted to create a page that tells you how to cook filet mignon,” Jones says. “I want to answer the short question, which is just a quick, bulleted list that Google can easily pick up and use in the featured snippet. You also want to answer the thorough question, which is all the techniques: how long you let the meat rest or how to pick out the best cut of meat.”

As Google Hummingbird and Google RankBrain get better at identifying related content, Jones says websites will want to grab all related terms and phrases that a site could potentially rank for and make sure those occur in a document.

Jones says it is better to present good content than to dress up irrelevant content. Instead of convincing Google to give a website a top ranking by optimizing a lackluster page, he says it’s much better to build the best content overall.

“It’s not to say you shouldn’t go out and try to push your content, of course you should,” Jones says. “But first thing’s first: be the objective best answer for the query.

Be the best, don’t just seem the best.”

Facebook Expect 2017 to be very heavy on mobile, according to Rocco Baldassarre, search engine marketing consultant and founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Zebra Advertisement. He says the majority of people on Facebook use the site on both computers and mobile devices, and a big percentage use only mobile, versus a very small portion that uses desktop alone. This shift is leading more and more companies to optimize their sites for mobile use.

In terms of paid ads, Baldassarre says Facebook made a move in 2016 to push advertisers toward automatic placements.

He says the option to select this manually still exists, but the system is set up for ads to go automatic. Facebook is pushing the audience network, he explains, which allows advertisers to extend their campaigns beyond Facebook and into other mobile apps. He says people are beginning to understand this shift and break down their campaign by device.

The result, he says, is an increase in the cost per impression.

“One year ago, you could get very good conversions on Facebook for a very low cost, but many businesses are experiencing an increase in the cost per thousand impressions because anybody can do Facebook ads,” Baldassarre says.

“This is going to create an entry barrier for businesses.”

Baldassarre doesn’t foresee any huge changes in organic content on Facebook and expects Facebook to continue to favor content with high engagement. If a business’ post doesn’t perform well in terms of engagement, it will drop to the bottom of a Facebook user’s feed. He expects this to push businesses to seek more paid traffic.

This was done to promote advertising, which makes money for Facebook, Baldassarre says, but with the cost per impression on the rise, advertisers may end up abandoning the platform.

“For organic, what is going to happen is that Facebook is going to figure out ways to boost local pages and local businesses,” Baldassarre says. “For example, if you’re in Miami and you’re searching for something on Facebook, they will adjust the results algorithmically based on your location to get some local boost for businesses.”

Video searches have also received more focus from Facebook in recent months, says Mark Robertson, founder of Tubular Insights, a resource providing analysis, tips and trends for the online video and internet marketing industries. The Facebook app, for example, has a video tab with a recently added search box.

“A year ago, or even six months ago, I would have suggested metadata isn’t as important for Facebook,” Robertson says.

“That’s changing and they want to provide users the ability to find content that they saw on their newsfeed via search. They’ve been notoriously behind the game with search, but they’re focusing much more on that now.”

Robertson says that of the top 25,000 most-engaged videos from the Q3 2016, half of them didn’t have a title. Of all of those, the average description length was about 88 characters. This didn’t necessarily correlate with performance, he says, which makes sense considering the nature of what data is consumed on Facebook: It just shows up on the newsfeed.

answers in action

Although a lot of publishers aren’t focusing on filling in titles or descriptions for Facebook videos, it does affect search performance, Robertson says.

“There are a lot of people now who are going on Facebook and searching for a video they saw last week on their wall or heard about,” he says. “The best practice is—and this goes for pretty much any platform—if they ask you to give them some metadata, leverage it.”

YouTube A few years ago, YouTube changed its algorithm so that the videos that showed up first in a search query were no longer those with the most views. The top videos are now the most relevant and those that drive longer viewing times across YouTube.

Robertson says YouTube has also been testing machine learning and artificial intelligence within its suggested and recommended videos algorithm, and it’s using Google RankBrain for this.

“It really comes down to, in the end, having good video content and in the right format for the viewing audience on YouTube,” Robertson says. “For example, for a brand to upload a video to YouTube that has a 15-second intro on it, with the logo and everything, doesn’t work. For a lot of people, the first five seconds are critical to a video’s success.”

Robertson says another tactic that has been important the past few years is to drive viewership from one video to other videos on YouTube using annotations, playlists or links to other videos. He says it’s no longer always a good idea to link off of YouTube, considering YouTube’s algorithm preferences.

“The cliché of content is queen or content is king is really going to start being the case,” Robertson says. “If you put up a video and it’s not something people watch, it’s not going to do well on YouTube. Or if you do a web page and follow all the best practices but it takes too long to load for someone and they end up going back to Google, it’s not going to do so well. There are some technical best practices, but all those aside, there aren’t as many hacks or special tricks that you can do to fool an algorithm.” m February 2017 | marketing news

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ama intelligence

the middle market

Middle Market Companies Must Improve Cybersecurity Middle market companies talk about cybersecurity, but only 45% have an up-to-date defense plan. How can the middle market protect itself from costly data breaches?

By Hal Conick | Staff Writer

 hconick@ama.org

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n a warm Ohio morning in August, a Ukrainian hacker threw a middle market health care group into complete disarray. It was random and it was swift.

The hacker, known as @PravSector, posted 156 GB of patient data from The Central Ohio Urology Group. COUG claimed the breach impacted 300,000 patients. The leak included full names, diagnoses, telephone numbers, insurance account numbers and postal addresses, all posted in plain text on Google Drive, according to DataBreaches.net.

In claiming responsibility for the breach, @PravSector told DataBreaches. net the leak was politically motivated, a warning so that “no one thought to poison our people with the virus from secret laboratories.” COUG was not involved with any poisonings or secret laboratories, but the hacker wanted to bring attention to supposed “secret trials of virus in Ukraine” by the U.S. The hacker planned similar leaks, adding, “We are people, and we want to live.”

What happened to COUG follows no real-world logic. While this leak may seem purely random, COUG isn’t alone and will soon be joined by more victims in this seemingly random act of hacking.

According to NetDiligence/McGladrey’s 2015 Annual Cyber Claims study, middle market companies—those with revenues between $50 million and $1 billion— account for nearly half of all cyber claims.

Cybersecurity is still a relatively new issue for middle market companies,

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but the impact is dire. A 2016 report from The Ponemon Institution found the health care industry alone has likely suffered $6.2 billion in losses from data breaches. Of those health care companies breached, 79% have been hit twice or more and 45% five times or more.

“You can get really paranoid when you think about that stuff,” says Thomas Stewart, executive director of the National Center for the Middle Market.

“But if you don’t get paranoid, you can make careless mistakes.”

Companies worrying about cybersecurity extend beyond health care and into the rest of the middle market.

Manufacturers, car dealerships, law firms, banks and others now store more data online than ever, making these businesses susceptible to a series of hard-hitting breaches. Reliance on data will only grow, and with it the threat of breaches, as online data production is expected to be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009, according to technology provider CSC. The Middle Market Under Attack Brian Beyer, co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Red Canary, says middle market companies must stop thinking they are “too small to be targeted.”

“We primarily protect middle market companies and there are plenty of bad things targeting the middle market,” he says.

As ransomware, phishing and other simplistic hacks have become prevalent, Stewart says larger companies have

become better at cybersecurity; they’ve invested more and protected themselves.

Meanwhile, middle market businesses have found themselves “under attack,” especially those with large amounts of data.

The National Center for the Middle Market recently launched its Cybersecurity Resource Center to collect cybersecurity best practices. Stewart wants to create a “one-stop shop” for getting started in better protection online for the middle market.

More centralized information for the middle market may be a good start toward improvement, says Jacob Koering, attorney at Miller Canfield and co-founder of the firm’s cybersecurity and data privacy practice. Koering says the most common problem he finds in middle market companies is a dearth of concise, reliable information on cybersecurity best practices. Most firms are aware of potential issues but aren’t sure how to prioritize legal and technical problems.

“Navigating those issues requires knowledge of the technical capabilities of the company and its marketing and data retention needs, as well as the legal obligations and potential legal exposure related to the retention and storage of that data,” Koering says.

To start the improvement, NCMM released a survey of middle market cybersecurity that found: • 86% of middle market firms say cybersecurity is important for their business, but only 22% have cyber insurance to protect assets from a breach.

• 45% of firms have an up-to-date strategy, while 30% of firms say they have no strategy.

• 75% say they haven’t been a victim of a hack, while 16% say they have, and 9% “don’t know.”

However, Stewart says there’s one thing they know about this third set of statistics: they’re incorrect. Companies, on average, don’t realize that they’ve been breached until about a half-year later, he says, so the number of those breached is likely higher.

There’s also some good news in the NCMM numbers. Sixty-one percent of middle market financial services

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companies say they have a current and annually renewed cybersecurity plan.

The same is true for 54% of health care companies. Additionally, 49% say they talk about cybersecurity as part of the overall strategy at the board level with cybersecurity experts at the table, while 37% say they talk about it at the board level without cybersecurity experts.

“They may still not have a policy in place as you saw, but I think that’s a decent number,” Stewart says. “These numbers are probably getting better all the time.”

While spending on cybersecurity may seem like throwing money down a black hole, NCMM’s report tells a different story. Companies that rated cybersecurity as “extremely important” saw revenue growth of 7.8%, while those that deemed it “very important” saw revenue growth of 4.7% and those who rated it “not

important” saw growth of 3.9%. The average breach costs approximately $4 million, per the Ponemon Institute, so it isn’t surprising to see companies saving money even when spending on cybersecurity.

Here are four tips for middle market organizations to improve cybersecurity.

Have a Plan Koering says middle market companies must first have a plan to improve cybersecurity, including knowing what data they collect, why they collect it, where the data is stored and how the data is used.

“Then, set up policies and procedures to protect the data consistent with best practices and legal obligations,” he says.

Stewart says finding a plan can come from assessing risk, followed by assessing the people, process and technology. This

ama intelligence

may mean bringing in outside help, hiring more employees or improving training, among other options. With any plan midmarket companies make, Stewart says assessing risk and planning for protection is a good way to start.

Beyer says visibility across the company and having the ability to interpret everything that is collected is an essential step in planning for cybersecurity.

“You don’t know what you don’t know about, so how can you prioritize which steps to take to improve your security?” he says. “Get a base-level understanding of what is happening in your environment and what threats you are facing so you can improve your security accordingly.”

Employees Must Be Secure Ironically, Stewart says, technology is February 2017 | marketing news

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the middle market

likely the most fretted-over cybersecurity threat, but also the easiest to secure. It’s the phishing attacks, carelessness about passwords, laptops left in taxis and other human-based errors that lead to the worst leaks.

Just consider the attacks that built one of the biggest storylines of the 2016 U.S presidential election. John Podesta, former chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, gave his account information away via a phishing attack. So did retired four-star General Colin Powell.

Phishing attacks—or messages made to look legitimate but sent maliciously to obtain secret information—aren’t easy for everyone to spot, so training employees on what to look for may need to become the new normal at middle market companies.

Who gets access to what data can also be an issue, Stewart says, as can the company’s familiarity with the FBI or other agencies that need to be notified once an attack occurs. “You should already have these contacts,” Stewart says.

Additionally, Beyer says allowing users to have local administrative rights is a “surefire way to get your company breached, regardless of all the shiny new security solutions you buy.”

Negligent or malicious employees are the reason for more than half of cybersecurity events, Koering says. The best way to avoid this kind of breach is to educate and train employees on cybersecurity practices. And training employees doesn’t mean executives or ownership can skip out, he says.

“Since executives and ownership often have access to more critical data and are

more visible, and therefore more likely to be the target or subject of a phishing attack, compliance with cybersecurity best practices is even more critical for those individuals,” Koering says.

Cover Legal Risks Businesses now hold more sensitive data online, which means more potential legal risks. Koering says there are different liability levels for breaches— including civil, regulatory and criminal— depending on the size of risk. For example, civil liability states that risk of loss increases on a per-record basis because of plaintiffs’ attorneys using class-action lawsuits as an enforcement mechanism, Koering says. Since these lawsuits are expensive, there must be a significant number of breached records to bring about litigation.

“For middle-market companies, therefore, the risk of civil liability is generally small until the number of compromised records is sufficient for a contingent-fee attorney to take notice,” Koering says. “Once they do, the cost of mitigation of damages has averaged over $185 per record. … Thus, in general, the more records, the more risk, in terms of costs of mitigation and potential civil liability.”

Regulatory and criminal risk depends on regulatory and legislative environments, Koering says. President Donald Trump’s choice of Dr. Joshua Wright to lead the transition of the Federal Trade Commission may signal a weakening of enforcement capabilities of the FTC, the body that has thus far led

Allowing users to have local administrative rights is a surefire way to get your company breached, regardless of all the shiny new security solutions you buy. Negligent or malicious employees are the reason for more than half of cybersecurity events.

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cybersecurity regulation. Less enforcement from the FTC is likely good news for small and middle market companies, he says.

“At the same time, we’re seeing increased legislative activity from the states regarding data privacy, especially in Delaware and California,” Koering says.

“That activity, in turn, raises the possibility that state-based data privacy enforcement and litigation may grow to compensate for any decrease in federal enforcement.

Unless that legislation includes more incentive to litigate, it is unlikely to increase the risk of cybersecurity breaches for small and midsize firms with limited numbers of data records.”

Protect the Crown Jewels Some security can be one-size-fits-all, but Stewart argues that companies must protect their “crown jewels,” or data so valuable that any leak would be critical.

“You can’t be 100% safe. We know that,” Stewart says. “But the question is: What do you want to protect to a 99% degree of certainty? How do you interact with total risk management? Have you also talked through with your lawyers all the things that you need to do beforehand?

Obviously you want to protect customer data, your personal data and yourself from litigation risk.”

This is an area that will make executives paranoid and keep them up at night, Stewart says, but there must be a measure of vigilance in protecting the crown jewels. “You can’t be causal about it,” Stewart says.

Breaches, like the one that happened to COUG, happen all the time. The problem is that not many get publicity, Beyer says, especially not as much coverage as the Target, Home Depot and Anthem breaches that affected millions. Middle market breaches tend to be in the vein of a pharmaceutical company that loses its prized formula or a financial institution that loses customer trust, Beyer says.

“In the middle market, these types of breaches can be devastating, even crippling,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t take a galvanizing event before executives start making changes. But I think most executives think it couldn’t happen to them.” m

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mba perspectives

How Marketers Can Harness the Power of Hope in 2017 The powerful emotion can help brands build connections with consumers

By Osman Ansari, Jennifer Y. Chen, Manjunath Pai, Aditi Sharma and Matthew Schroeder

H

ope is a powerful human emotion. As the world becomes increasingly chaotic, individuals are now looking for hope more than ever. Research published by Deborah MacInnis and Gustavo E. de Mello in the Journal of Marketing suggests hope is a positive emotion evoked in response to an uncertain but possible desired outcome.

People look to politicians for hope, as well as to nations, communities, families and spirituality. Increasingly, however, people are placing their hope in brands.

Hope, either expressed verbally or through behavior, is one of the most recurring human emotions and cannot be deemed irrelevant or unimportant during the process of designing unique customer experiences. For example, the fans of the Manchester City Football Club (MCFC), prior to its acquisition in 2008, had very little hope of ever witnessing their beloved club reaching the glory it once held many years ago. That is not the case anymore.

With the help of an injection of resources and new management, MCFC has been able to craft and deliver hope and, as a consequence, build a global brand worth nearly $2 billion.

How can brands and marketers be custodians of hope and craft this powerful emotion in a way that enhances consumer experiences? According to MacInnis and de Mello’s research, there are two primary paths:

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Turn Impossibility into Possibility

The first tactic that marketers can use to craft hope is to make possible a wanted outcome previously perceived as impossible. Specifically, marketers can accomplish this goal through three strategies. The first is to suggest possibilities in the product itself. This typically comes in the form of new innovations or designs deemed revolutionary, where consumers perceive that previously unattainable outcomes are now possible.

ama intelligence

The second is to suggest possibilities in the person, so that control resides in the consumer.

The third is to suggest possibilities in the process. Through this strategy, achieving a goal is seen as impossible if a consumer does not know where to start.

During its revitalization, MCFC chose to craft hope by suggesting new possibilities in their product. It invested nearly £1 billion on new players over a three-year period, including superstars such as Robinho de Souza and Samir Nasri. Through these investments, MCFC assembled an attacking force comparable to any team in Europe.

2

Enhance Yearning

Customer experience designers can also induce hope by increasing consumer yearning for an outcome. This can be done in two ways: The first is to enhance the outcome’s perceived importance.

The second is by increasing the degree to which an outcome is associated with a favorable goal.

MCFC enhanced yearning by listening to its fans’ fantasies and pursuing outcomes that contributed to those fantasies. MCFC used social media extensively, as well as a dedicated fan-listening site and Fanzones to listen to what its fans wanted and cocreated the brand to match their desires. MCFC fans hoped that the club would once again become a force to be feared within Europe.

When brands create and craft hope to their advantage, they can reap the benefits. Consumers that place their hope in brands are much more loyal to them and forgiving when performance is below expectations. In fact, one study suggests that consumers will deliberately ignore or rationalize poor performance when they have high hope in a brand or outcome.

Increased hope also decreases the persuasion a brand must use to convince consumers to try their product.

MCFC is a prime example of how a brand can craft hope in order to build an ultimate customer experience and brand loyalty. By taking into consideration the methods above, brands can form deep lasting relationships with consumers. m February 2017 | marketing news

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scholarly insights

Check ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ Defaults, or automatic opt-ins, are a good way to upsell consumers, but are they ethical?

By Mary Steffel, Elanor Williams and Ruth Pogacar

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n Belgium, 98% of people are officially willing to donate their organs when they die. Conversely, in the U.S., only 28% of people are on record as organ donors, despite 85% of people saying that they want to be donors. Why is there such a huge difference between the two countries? Evidence suggests that a major reason may be whether the default option is to be an organ donor.

In Belgium, organ donation is a nationwide default unless people choose to opt out, whereas U.S. policy is the opposite—organ donation is not the default, and people have to opt in if they wish to be donors.

Defaults are a powerful and increasingly common way to influence choice, which has sparked controversy regarding how to ensure that they are fair and appropriate. Critics argue that using defaults to influence people’s choices without informing those affected is unethical because defaults can nudge people to spend money or divulge personal information without their explicit knowledge or consent.

Others, however, worry that disclosure might render defaults ineffective— even defaults designed to help people, such as those meant to encourage organ donation, increase retirement savings or decrease calorie consumption.

In our recent article “Ethically Deployed Defaults: Transparency and Consumer Protection Through Disclosure and Preference Articulation,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research, we asked whether it is possible to make consumers aware that a default has been set to deliberately sway their choices in a certain way without rendering it ineffective and undermining the potential good it can do. Further, what do consumers themselves think about the ethicality of defaults intended

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to influence their choices when the purpose and effect of the default is, or is not, disclosed? Finally, if transparency doesn’t reduce default effectiveness, how can marketers and policymakers protect consumers from defaults that are not in their best interests?

Defaults Remain Effective Even When Disclosed To investigate whether defaults can be effective when disclosed, we presented participants across a series of experiments with decisions in a variety of domains to see how defaults and disclosure of those defaults would influence their choices.

In one experiment, participants were offered hot chocolate either with or without whipped cream by default. Some of these participants were shown a sign about why this default had been chosen; for example, the sign that participants read when no whipped cream was the default noted that people are more likely to choose an option when it is the default and no whipped cream was the default so people would be more likely to choose a healthier beverage.

We found that disclosure of the default’s intent made no difference—people still overwhelmingly chose whatever beverage topping was the default, whether it was whipped cream or no whipped cream.

In fact, across a variety of contexts— including financial decisions, privacy permissions and energy savings—we found that people’s choices were equally influenced by what default had been set regardless of whether the intentions of a default were made transparent.

Disclosure of Defaults Influences Perceptions of Their Ethicality In another experiment, we found that disclosure does influence perceptions of the ethicality of defaults. Participants were

asked to select energy-saving apartment amenities that were either included in a hypothetical apartment’s rent by default or were not included but were available if the person opted in. Participants were told that the landlord wanted tenants to choose the upgrades either because he would like to save energy and help the environment or because he wanted to qualify for a tax break and put some money back in his pockets. Finally, the landlord disclosed how the default was intended to influence renters’ choices either before or after people made their decisions.

The results showed that people appreciated the openness of a disclosure, even if the disclosure revealed that the default was set for selfish reasons. When the person who set the default disclosed up front why it was configured the way it was, respondents felt the choice was more ethical and were more interested in working with the default-setter again in

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the future than when they found out about the nature of the default after the decision had been made, even if the default-setter’s motive was to “put some money in his own pocket.” However, disclosure did not affect participants’ choices: they chose more amenities in the opt-out conditions than in the opt-in conditions.

Counteracting the Influence of Defaults If disclosure cannot protect consumers from defaults that are not in their own or society’s best interests, how can we prevent consumers from being exploited? One reason defaults remain influential even when people know they are being nudged is that people may treat the default as a reference point to which they compare other options. Because the default has already been selected, the decision ends up being about reasons for keeping the default instead of reasons to reject it.

This “reference dependence” is a powerful bias because it leads people to focus on the advantages of the reference point over its alternatives and is rooted in basic cognitive processes that people have little ability to control. Disclosure does not make defaults less effective because once a default becomes a reference point, people do not know how to stop treating it that way.

Given that defaults lead people to focus disproportionately on reasons to choose the default, encouraging them to consider the default and its alternative simultaneously may help them evenly consider the alternatives and make them less susceptible to bias.

To test this idea, we asked people to list reasons they might prefer the default and or its alternative before they chose. When people listed their reasons, they were less influenced by defaults. This is good news. It suggests that prompting people to

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explicitly consider their preferences for all options before making a decision can help them resist unwanted influence.

Overall, this research shows that marketers can disclose why they made a particular option the default—and even be transparent about their intentions— without making defaults less effective and without undermining the potential good they can do. Transparency can also lead consumers to perceive defaults as more ethical and increase their willingness to work with default-setters in the future.

However, disclosure alone does not seem to protect consumers from defaults that are trying to take advantage of them, so it may also be necessary to encourage consumers to consider the pros and the cons of both the default and the alternatives before making a choice. This balanced articulation of preferences can reduce the influence of defaults and help people make less-biased choices. m February 2017 | marketing news

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executive insights

responsible modeling

A Modeler’s Lament Marketers must be careful not to let their models become malleable to suit their theories

By Lawrence A. Crosby

 lawrence.a.crosby@gmail.com

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quote from Kurt Lewin, the father of modern social psychology, is indelibly written into my brain: “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” Lewin saw theories as immensely helpful not just in understanding behavior but in generating new ideas to solve problems. I fear, however, that Lewin’s message is often lost in this age of Big Data and analytics.

Sophisticated software tools search mounds of customer data for patterns of regularity, leading to thousands of poorly controlled micro “field experiments.” Actions (e.g., targeted offers) that seem to work, for some reason, are repeated until they stop working, for some reason. Empirical prediction trumps explanation. It is a process that creates little learning, limits creativity and ultimately produces waste.

People say that I am a bit “model happy.” Yes, I’m one of those people

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who draws circles, boxes and arrows on the white board to explain why customers are acting the way they are and what can be done to improve results.

Experience has taught me that marketing phenomena are complex, that data can be misleading, and things are not always what they seem.

Models can help sort things out.

They can serve as an application of theory to explain a problem, or a way of capturing observations to help build a theory. In either case, they are abstract, often visual, representations of cause and effect that can be tested for their fit with reality. When the fit is strong, the decision maker can have more confidence that doing X will lead to Y. When the fit is weak, marketers should conclude that they don’t really understand the situation, e.g., the theory is flawed, it’s the wrong theory or perhaps the measures are bad. Under any

of those conditions, caution is needed since actions may not produce their intended results.

For many years, I served as a customer experience consultant to a large power utility company. Like most power companies, this utility was beholden to the local public service commission when it came to seeking rate hikes. The commission, in turn, was sensitive to the feelings of customers regarding how well they were being served, especially when it came to the core element of power quality and reliability. To better understand the mechanisms at work, we undertook research that sought to operationalize a simple model: the direct power outage experience of customers influences their perceptions of power reliability, which influences their willingness to support (or at least not object to) a rate increase.

We tested the model by appending electric circuit data to customers’ survey responses. By knowing what circuit a customer was on we could objectively determine how many momentary and sustained power interruptions they had actually experienced in a given time period. The model testing proved that we were only “half right.” Yes, perceptions of power reliability explained the willingness of customers to support the utility.

However, there was no link between customers’ actual outage experience and their perceptions and intentions. Instead, many customers were found to be heavily influenced by media reports regarding the outage experience of others (“… 10,000 customers are without power for the third day in a row …”).

To be clear, these findings did not stop the power company from continuing to invest in reliability improvements at a reasonable pace. But the findings did help avoid an over-investment in bricks and mortar and led the utility to reallocate some of those resources to public relations and citizenship programs. m Lawrence A. Crosby , Ph.D., is the retired dean of the Drucker School of Management, a regular AMA columnist since 2000, and currently President of L.A. Crosby & Associates, Inc.

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at c-level

The Undoing Project The author of Moneyball presents marketers with a challenge to check their bias in decision-making

By Michael Krauss

 michael.krauss@mkt-strat.com

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hat makes a great data-driven marketing leader?

Some say you need knowledge and expertise of cutting-edge computer hardware, state-of-the-art software and facility with the most advanced statistical techniques.

After reading Michael Lewis’ newest book, The Undoing Project, a Friendship That Changed Our Minds, I’m convinced the most important thing we marketers must understand is how the mental rules of thumb—or heuristics—we use when making decisions can bias our decision-making.

We may think we are highly rational, left brain-leaning and deeply knowledgeable in statistical methods. Yet, as The Undoing Project explains, we consistently and systematically make errors in judgement and decision-making.

If you’ve not heard of the “representativeness heuristic” or the “availability heuristic” or the idea of “anchoring” and how they influence us, even the best data-mining algorithms may not advance your marketing aims.

What Lewis has written is an entertaining and educational book that describes the lives and academic work of two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Lewis’ storytelling is remarkable in bringing to life and making relevant a series of highly complex concepts that govern our decision-making.

He simultaneously provides the reader with a powerful biography of the psychologists and case illustrations from the worlds of sport and medicine

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that manifest the impact of their groundbreaking research.

The Undoing Project is a fun-to-read book that even the marketer with only a casual interest in data analytics will find hard to put down. For those interested in delving deeper, Lewis has provided a series of references and citations sufficient to power the motivated reader to become an expert in the mind’s influence on decision-making.

The book begins where Lewis’ 2003 best-seller, Moneyball, left off.

In Moneyball, Lewis explored how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane revolutionized baseball by applying data and analytics to the game.

In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how Kahneman and Tversky’s ideas are transforming the practice of medicine, modern finance, economics, professional sports and, of course, marketing.

Lewis begins by describing the journey of a committed data and analytics pioneer: Daryl Morey. The general manager of the Houston Rockets, Morey is a self-proclaimed geek who sought, with some success, to build an analytics engine to improve player screening and recruiting for his NBA team.

“Morey’s job was to replace one form of decision-making, which relied upon the intuition of basketball experts, with another, which relied mainly on the analysis of data,” Lewis writes.

“One of the first things Morey did after he arrived in Houston (in 2006) was to install his statistical model for predicting the future performance of basketball players.”

Morey’s analytics model improved the Rockets’ performance. “The players

he’d drafted performed better than the players drafted by three quarters of the other NBA teams. His approach had been sufficiently effective that other NBA teams were adopting it,” writes Lewis. And the Rockets’ performance was consistently strong.

Yet, there were consistent and systematic errors. Poor decisions made because of the ways that our minds work. For example, in the 2007 draft, Morey’s model favored Marc Gasol, a 22-year-old, seven-foot-one-inch center playing in Europe. “The scouts had found a photograph of him playing shirtless. He was pudgy and baby-faced and had these jiggly pecs. The Rockets’ staff had given Marc Gasol a nickname: ‘Man Boobs,’ ” Lewis writes.

Morey chose not to draft Gasol, who went on to become a two-time NBA All-Star. Morey said, “I made a new rule right then. I banned nicknames.”

The problem, we learn from Lewis, is a tendency that Tversky and Kahneman called “representativeness” in their article, “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases,” published in Science in 1974 and one of the most often-cited academic papers of all time.

The same phenomenon that caused the Rockets to pass on Gasol was true of Harvard basketball player, Jeremy Lin. “He lit up our model,” said Morey.

The problem was, “The objective measurement of Jeremy Lin didn’t square with what the experts saw when they watched him play: a not terribly athletic Asian kid,” reports Lewis.

“At the bottom of the transformation in decision-making in professional sports—but not only in professional sports—were ideas about the human mind and how it functioned when faced with uncertain situations,” writes Lewis.

Despite the fact that the Houston Rockets and Morey were writing the book on applied analytics in basketball they were making systematic errors. And they are not alone.

Lewis describes the impact Tversky and Kahneman’s article had on a young high school student named Don Redelmeier. Redelmeier, Lewis explains, went on to became a physician

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and to co-author academic papers with Tversky, including, “Discrepancy between Medical Decisions for Individual Patients and Group,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1990. “ ‘Watch any NBA game,’ Tversky explained to Redelmeier, and you saw that the announcers, the fans and maybe even the coaches seemed to believe that

basketball shooters had the ‘hot hand.’

Simply because some player had made his last few shots, he was thought to be more likely to make his next shot.”

Lewis writes. Tversky collected data on NBA shooting streaks to see if the “hot hand” was statistically significant and found it was not.

“Tversky had the clear idea of how people misperceived randomness. […]

executive insights

People had incredible ability to see meaning in these patterns where none existed,” Lewis writes.

Today, Redelmeier is a physician at one of Toronto’s most important trauma centers, Sunnybrook Hospital. In part, his job is to check the understanding of the specialists for mental errors. Lewis shares a frightening and powerful story of how an accident victim with multiple injuries nearly died due to this decisionmaking phenomenon.

Lewis explains that ER doctors observed the accident victim with a wildly irregular heartbeat. Before passing out, the victim told the ER physicians she had an overactive thyroid. The treating physicians were about to administer drugs for hyperthyroidism to the patient until Redelmeier arrived in the ER. Lewis reports that Redelmeier, “Asked everyone to slow down. To wait. Just a moment. Just to check their thinking and to make sure they were not trying to force the facts into an easy, coherent and ultimately false story.”

It turned out the patient had a collapsed lung which, if left untreated, would have killed her.

“It was a classic case of the representativeness heuristic,” said Redelmeier. “You need to be so careful when there is one simple diagnosis that instantly pops into your mind that beautifully explains everything at once.

That’s when you need to stop and check your thinking.”

If that story moves you as a marketer, you should read Lewis’ The Undoing Project.

You might follow that with a reading of Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 best-seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Then you might want to proceed to the other academic journal articles described by Lewis in his book.

Reading The Undoing Project, you’ll realize the biggest challenge we have as decision-making marketers is our own human fallibility, not our capacity to process and analyze the data. m MICHAEL KRAUSS is president of Market Strategy Group based in Chicago.

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executive insights

next practice

Student Turns Teacher Chinese marketing once imitated Western practice. Now it’s trailblazing with ideas and methodologies, and Western marketers should take note.

By Don E. Schultz

 dschultz@northwestern.edu

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’ve spent considerable time speaking at conferences, conducting seminars, working with agencies and clients and teaching at various schools, colleges and universities in China. In almost every case, the assignment was to help Chinese marketers and advertisers get up to speed on what was being done in the West— how we planned, developed and executed advertising, brand and marketing communications programs.

The people I worked with were eager to learn. They asked challenging questions, were enthusiastic and willing to try new things, even though the Western processes and approaches often made relatively little sense to them given their background, culture and available systems. Some questioned why marketing and advertising was conducted the way it was, but they accepted what the West was doing as the “coin of the realm.”

The managers I worked with were always in a hurry. They were anxious to see results and returns from their marketing and advertising programs.

Based on their copying of Western principles, sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they failed. They never gave up.

I have followed the development of Chinese marketing, advertising and communication closely over the years since. Yet, during a visit last December, I found a noticeable change.

No longer do Chinese managers ask about Western best practices, procedure or developments. They have less and less interest in Western concepts or even examples of whom they should emulate.

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Today their comments and discussions are more about describing how and in what ways they believe their marketplaces will develop and how they are planning to respond. Their focus is all about how they plan to advance marketing, advertising and communication following a Chinese model or a Chinese “pathway”—an approach based on interactivity, networks, platforms and other technologies they are developing, not on the historical ways the West has developed them. In short, no more borrowing from somewhere else.

Former students are becoming the new global advertising and marketing teachers. That’s a radical change from only a few years ago when I conducted the first marketing course in the Tsinghua Executive Management Business Administration (EMBA) program. Then, I was trying to explain the 4Ps, Hierarchy of Effects, segmentation and basic product positioning to groups of 40- to 50-yearold managers who were running as fast as they could to catch up to the 20th century marketplace. Their goal was to offset—or at least understand—the tools and approaches being used by Western companies to enter and establish footholds in the Chinese market.

Today, that all seems to be behind them.

Those who greeted Western marketers at the turn of the century have been replaced by younger marketers whose educational backgrounds are from major MBA, communication and engineering schools around the world. They are setting the agendas for today’s marketing and communication development based on

what they are currently developing for the global marketplace.

Here are some of the headlines I took away from two weeks of conferences and seminars with Chinese companies:

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There are far fewer operating managers in their 40s and 50s in China. Most are in their 20s, and

a growing number are women. There clearly has been a changing of the guard in terms of who is driving marketing and advertising in China. It doesn’t seem to be based on diversity mandates, but on skills and capabilities.

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Technology is the key. It’s

driving everything from mobile to media planning to measurement.

The Chinese are not just exploring and exploiting the edges of technology to develop new processes and systems, they’ve already found them. Using those findings, they’re expanding and exploding many of the marketing and advertising concepts that have been sacrosanct in the West for years.

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Theory is seemingly irrelevant.

It just takes too long to develop. If a network or process or system works, use it because those same concepts teach that another wave with more sophistication will soon follow. That’s why speed is so important in China. Get your program up and running before you’re made obsolete.

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Everything is global, or at least perceived to be global. When

you have a market of 1.3 billion people, you think in large numbers. Mindboggling numbers of customers gathered, served and satisfied in minutes and hours, not months or years. Other than regulation, borders mean nothing. When your focus is on digital, the internet and mobile, you think in terms of markets, not national boundaries.

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Scale is critical, but it comes with the territory when you are in a digital/interactive marketplace.

Ramping up takes hours and days, not weeks or months. Traditional marketing is simply too slow for the Chinese today.

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Make no small plans.

Everything is a new horizon.

The Chinese, because they have limited background and experience in traditional marketing, have few embedded systems and marketing traditions to break down, replace or accommodate. Thus, they move in many different directions at once. There is no marketing or communication history, so the common Western management dictum, “That’s not the way we do it here,” simply doesn’t exist.

Most marketing and advertising is a green field, just waiting to be explored and expanded.

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There is a lot of money to be made and lost. The Chinese

don’t plod into a market. They gallop.

Sometimes they are wrong, but when they are right, they are hugely right.

The stakes are high, but the rewards seem to be worth it.

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No longer do Chinese follow the doings in Cincinnati or Bentonville or even Madison Avenue.

They consider the advertising and marketing developed or done in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Beijing and other Chinese cities to be “au courante.”

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There seems to be an incubator or startup on every corner.

Some will make it. Most won’t, but all will likely disrupt traditional models to the chagrin of Western marketers.

Before you start to think that I have just been dazzled by a batch of new technologies and am waxing eloquently on them, I’ll remind you of a prediction I made somewhat like this about five years ago. I wrote and presented a think piece paper for the 2012 Beijing Forum titled “The Marketing and Communications Implications of Social Media: A New Digital Silk Road?”

executive insights

In that paper, I argued that what was developing along the China-Western Europe axis was similar to what had occurred almost two centuries before.

Then, it was silk and weaving and porcelain and gunpowder that were being developed in China and then shipped over land to Europe, disrupting markets all along the way. Today, it is systems thinking and network development, artificial intelligence and sophisticated marketing and communication algorithms that are flowing out of China and into the rest of the world. And they’re changing everything they touch along the way.

Yes, the students have now become smarter than their teachers. Let’s just hope we can accept that change and learn from them. m Don E. Schultz is a professor (emeritus-in-service) of integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University.

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social media

The Social Media Mulitplier Effect Smart companies are finding uses for social media beyond advertising and consumer engagement. They’re using it to brand-build from the inside out.

By Christine Moorman

 moorman@duke.edu

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ver since marketers started putting up Facebook fan pages and creating Twitter accounts for their brands, they have recognized the benefits of social media. Here are channels that help them directly engage with customers, build brand affinity and share content such as articles, photos and videos at low cost.

Marketers continue to make social a priority and will boost their social media investments from 10.6% to 20.9% of budgets over the next five years, according to the most recent results of The CMO Survey.

But social media is moving beyond just marketing. According to the survey, more than a quarter of marketers say their companies will make social media investments for activities that typically fall under the human resource department’s purview—such as employee engagement and talent acquisition. We interviewed leaders from a range of organizations to get insights into the nature and effect of these investments.

We discovered what we call the social media multiplier effect: Social media investments impact important employee and customer activities that spill over to benefit the organization in many important ways. Below are some examples of the social media multiplier effect, and brands that are getting it right.

Igniting Employee Engagement Employee engagement is the foundational element activating the

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social media multiplier effect. Our research reveals six ways organizations use social media to create, nurture and express this engagement:

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Bringing the brand to life: Given

its public status, social media offers employees an opportunity to represent the company’s brand to the outside world. Reebok recently launched #fitasscompany, an externally focused social media initiative that encourages employees to show how they live the brand’s promise in their work and play.

Posts such as “See ya soda” or “See ya never body contouring! We honor our bodies & earn the muscles we create!” allow employees not only to live the brand but also to develop it in authentic ways.

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including video of Clara Maersk and Maersk ships involved in the rescue of more than 3,000 Vietnamese fugitives in 1975. In the first 11 months, Maersk Line attracted more than 400,000 people to its Facebook page—many of whom were its own employees participating in this public forum who not only learned a great deal about the company, but shared photos from Maersk ships around the world.

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Crowdsourcing an electronic water cooler: Internal social

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Fostering an internal community: Even beyond

media networks can improve employee communication across roles, functions and geographies, especially in large complex organizations. For example, Best Buy created Best Buy Connect, which aggregates tweets, feeds and blogs from across the Best Buy digital communities and delivers them to a centralized location where employees can learn from one another to solve customer problems.

information, internal social media helps build communities by fostering communication, comaraderie and collaboration within companies. L’Oreal launched the #LorealCommunity to give

Building brand ownership:

Social media use also encourages employees to manage the company’s brand as if it were their own, meaning that through their publicly shared stories and content, they take full responsibility for the success of the company. As one Reebok manager posted, “That’s my #FitAssCompany!”

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Sharing the company’s story:

Maersk Line, a Denmark-based shipping company, used social media to share the company’s rich history. Photos from the company’s digital archive were selected to tell the company’s story,

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employees the opportunity to share their successes and positive experiences with one another both inside and outside of work through Instagram.

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Creating thought leaders: Social

media can be used to tap and support a few budding thought leaders who might otherwise go unnoticed.

Even C-suite executives with status can emerge as thought leaders using social media. For example, Peter Aceto, CEO of ING Direct Canada, has evolved to grow with the brand over his three years using social media.

How the Social Media Multiplier Pays Off While the direct effect of social media on customer outcomes, such as increased engagement or referrals, has received more attention from practitioners, the pathway through employee engagement is less understood. Here are four different human capital outcomes that can result:

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Enhanced talent acquisition:

When current employees are active on social media, potential employees notice. They notice the brand and see that the company trusts its employees to act on its behalf and share their voice.

For millennial candidates, this trust is valued and plays a role in job decisions.

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Improved employee retention:

When social media investment in employees fosters brand engagement and ownership, employees find work more rewarding and fulfilling. Engaged employees are more attentive and vigilant.

They look out for the needs of their coworkers and the overall enterprise because they personally own the result of their work and that of the organization.

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Increased employee productivity: Social media-

inspired collaboration and best practice sharing improves employee productivity. In fact, 39% of workers believe access to social media results in increased productivity. Time and frustration are saved when employees can cut through problems using support from social media.

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Enriched company culture:

Social media investments that serve employees and ignite their engagement help build and reinforce a company’s culture. Company culture, in turn, drives the talent acquisition and employee outcomes we have discussed.

executive insights

Social media engagement programs are not without risk, and many of us can quickly recall at least one story of employee activity on social media gone wrong. Organizations that recognize this and create programs that include training and social media policies to guide employees, as well as governance and work flow to manage risk, create a better environment for employees and leadership to achieve success.

The power of social lies in acquiring and delighting customers.

Engaging employees in social media creates an indirect but equally powerful pathways to impact. These benefits, in turn, spur crucial human capital outcomes linked to talent attraction, productivity, retention and culture, which benefits customers, employees and the bottom line.

There is no way to firewall part of the company from the effect of social media—that’s the social media multiplier effect. m Christine Moorman is the T. Austin Finch Senior Professor of business administration at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and founder and director of The CMO Survey.

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The Revenge of C r eative

H o w a ne w agen c y i s di splaci ng bi g do gs an d b i g data by thi nki ng small

By Zach Brooke

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Much of the industry kicked into high gear, putting together proposals. At stake was more than $700 million of ad spend hyping supermarket staples such as Betty Crocker, Cheerios, Nature Valley and Yoplait. By the time the dust settled at the beginning of December 2016, 72andSunny and Redscout, both owned by marketing holding company MDC Partners, were tapped as agencies of record (AOR). Three other shops—Joan, The Community and Erich & Kallman— were named as “preferred U.S. project-based agencies.”

For San Francisco-based Erich & Kallman, the announcement capped off a year ripe with winning.

Well, three-quarters of a year.

The indie ad shop had only announced its formation that April, weeks before word of the General Mills agency review trickled out. By the time it became a preferred project provider for the food giant, it had already landed other highly sought clients, including Chick-Fil-A, which choose the Bay Area startup over five rivals after dumping The Richards Group, its AOR for the past 22 years.

a s t s p r i ng , G ene r a l M i l l s s ent s h o ckwav es t h r o ug h t h e a ge n cy world with the a nnoun c emen t i t wa s la u nching a re vie w o f a l l i t s cr eat i v e part ne rs fo r U.S. re ta i l b r a nd s . L ucr at i v e part ne rship s wi th p ow er p l aye r s Mc C a nn, Sa atchi & Sa atc hi a nd W i ed en & K enned y we re a ll u nder e xa m in at i o n, a l l p ut on no tice with a terse stat emen t r el ea s ed b y the c om pa ny a nd attr ibut ed t o no o ne i n pa rt icu lar: “ We have a r es p ons i b i l i t y t o e nsu re we have the righ t a g en c y pa rt ner s to con tinu e gr owing o ur b us i nes s , a nd a ge ncy r e vie ws a re a r o uti ne pa rt o f ru nning a su cc e ssfu l bus i nes s t o d ay.”

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A S TAR IS B OR N To agency managing director Steven Erich, success was welcome, but not altogether surprising. He formed the agency with co-eponymous creative director Eric Kallman after decades spent playing midwife to marketers’ gestating brand identities.

That’s given him some strong hunches about what the people who place ad orders are looking for.

“I’ve always thought, ‘Why does the world need another advertising agency? There’s plenty of them,’ ” Erich says. “I didn’t want to do something that just didn’t make any sense.”

Bucking much of modern marketing thinking, Erich wanted his agency to eschew the drive toward Big Data, as it was neither he nor his partner’s forte.

“Everything that was happening in the industry was around the tech-based stuff—data learning and programmatic, [with] much more data analysis at the center of the offering and things that were focusing on media,” he says. “If analytics is gaging how people are using the products or buying the products, that’s fine. … Where I’ve not seen it successful is deciding what advertising is successful and what’s going to move the market.”

Erich and Kallman saw themselves as experts of the artistic side of advertising. Pathos, ethos and logos subtly working within a captivating mise-enscène. And, Erich says, these experts are most absent in today’s ad world.

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“We don’t really think creative work has gotten better in the past few years. In fact, it’s gotten worse,” he says. “We thought there might be an opportunity to focus on the creative product. Not the technology, not the data, but the engagement of consumers. We have that going for us.”

It’s clear the partners are on the same page. While with another agency in 2010, Kallman espoused a similar philosophy on YouTube’s “Show + Tell.” “There’s no way to sway anything, except with creativity and except with ideas,” he says. “It’s almost like the solution for advertising … is to want to be more creative, because now you’re just trying to make something people want to look at or watch just as much as the actual article or program or whatever it is.”

Kallman most recently spent time at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, filling the role of executive creative director. Before that he held the same position at Barton F. Graf and was a copywriter at TBWA/Chiat/Day and Widen + Kennedy, where he notched a towering career highlight when he co-created “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign for Old Spice.

Erich spent the bulk of his career at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, rising through the ranks as an account manager and later managing director, before being named president at the start of 2014.

It was at CP + B the pair met one another. Kallman was looking for an exit from Barton F. Graf and was going through the interview process at CP + B. The outfit liked him and extended a job offer. Erich made a personal pitch for him to join corporate headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. But in the end, Kallman declined and decided he’d rather return to his native San Francisco.

About 18 months later, both men were free agents, having left their respective places of employment. They arranged a phone call to discuss career prospects.

“I thought [Eric] would take another big role at a big ad agency, but he was interested in starting his own thing, and I had been investigating starting my own agency,” Erich says. “I immediately said we should do something together. I think so [highly] of his work, and I thought it would be a unique and powerful combination.”

The pair spent a few months canvassing contacts to assess interest in their vision. Receiving affirmation, they moved forward. By the time of the official unveiling in April, they had already completed work for MTV and were pitching Chick-Fil-A.

E r i c K a l l m a n (l eft ) a n d S t ev en E r ic h (r i gh t ) w er e t w o w el l -p l a c ed a d ex ec ut i v es w h en t h ey m et i n ea r l y 2 0 1 4 t o d i s c us s a j o b o p p o r t un i t y. B es t k n o w n fo r c r ea t i n g “ T h e M a n Yo ur M a n Co u ld S m el l Li k e” c a m p a i gn fo r O l d S p i c e , K a l l m a n h a d a c c um ul a t ed a l a r ge n u m be r o f i n d us t r y a c c o l a d es . E r i c h w a s n o s lo u c h h i m s el f, w o r k i n g h i s w a y up t h e ladde r t o b ec o m e p r es i d en t o f “A g en c y o f t h e D ec a d e,” C r i s p i n P o r t er + B o g us ky.

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F or one of i ts first big accounts, E rich & Ka l l ma n channeled the “ craz y genius” of l a r ge r - than-life historical figures lik e Lu d w i g von Beethoven (above) in a series of sp ots hyping Chick -F il-A’s break fast sa nd w i ch, the Egg White Grill.

Du sti n Br i tt, media manager at the r e sta u r ant chain, praised the comme r ci a l s, say ing, “ These ads embrace the r e a l i ty o f what people are think ing. … We he a rd from our customers, and we sa w i n ou r sales, that chick en and Chick Fi l -A w e r e n’t top-of-mind for break fast.

The se a d s challenge that idea in an hone st, b u t lighthear ted and funny, way.”

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EX TR AOR D IN ARY P OP ULAR ILLUS IO NS A ND THE FAD N ES S OF C R OWD S Just because Erich & Kallman are creative, it doesn’t mean their work is overwrought or high-concept.

Quite the opposite, Erich says. More than anything else, they prefer to make ads that are sure to be talked about.

“The work we’ve done in the past is not niche, award-winning or things that are inherently personal or one-on-one. It’s very broad, water-cooler kind of stuff,” says Erich. “It’s work meant for people to see and react to and share and then hopefully move them to purchase or the [desired] action.”

While others may be looking to nurture a personal bond with a consumer, Erich & Kallman want to be quoted. The way they see it, the more intimate the ad, the less people talk about it with one another. “The work that we do is meant to be broadly appealing and shareable because it’s a better way to spend your money. Your media buy increases much more if people are going to share with other people,” Erich says.

A lot of the time this means being funny. The ads they created for Chick-Fil-A hyping its new Egg White Grill breakfast sandwich, for instance, feature famous historical figures such as Michelangelo and Amelia Earhart scoffing at critics who called them crazy right before they went on the change they world. When Apple did something similar two decades ago with its “Think Different” campaign, it was all about somber hero worship. The Chick-Fil-A spots are playing for laughs, depicting Beethoven bragging in song about being the greatest composer of all time, and Thomas Edison gloating about the success of the electric light.

“Their feeling was, especially with breakfast, they needed the work to not look like Chick-Fil-A ads,” Erich says. “The work that we did got people to notice that [Chick-Fil-A had] a [breakfast] part that they didn’t know about, or forgot about, and that there was this new product that they had never heard of and they needed to consider.”

Another example of this line of thinking is borne out in a recent spot for ONEHOPE Wine, a California social enterprise that sells wine and coffee and donates the proceeds to charity.

Instead of creating an earnest web ad laying out the emotion behind the philanthropy, Erich and Kallman decided to go funny. They created an arrogant fictional pitchman named Charles

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Many brands are wary of how t h e cr e a t i v e s a u s a g e i s m a d e .

Faircloth who has everything from a dinosaur egg he uses as a doorstop in his guest bathroom to a fleet of hovercrafts he’s never even seen, and hawks ONEHOPE to “normal people” as a token gesture of giving back.

“The humor wasn’t part of the brief, but it was to get people to notice the brand,” Erich says. “It’s got very quotable stuff in there. You find yourself quoting what this dude is saying to other people. …

It’s just a goofy, fun spot, and they loved it.”

S MA L L MAT T E RS Waxing defiant in the face of Big Data aside, there is another huge trend that Erich & Kallman has working to its advantage: size. A statement by the General Mills COO Michael Fanuele, given after the preferred project partners were named, praised the virtues of bite-size boutiques like Erich & Kallman.

“In looking to round out our roster, we met with dozens of interesting agencies and were wildly impressed by the breadth of talent out there. The industry is teeming with small agencies of every variety doing really powerful work,” he said.

Some might bristle at being called small, but there’s a compelling argument that this is where a lot of the industry is heading, and Erich and Kallman view the descriptor as the cornerstone of their pitch process—which shouldn’t be surprising, considering Erich was part of the creative team that developed the Small Business Saturday campaign for American Express.

As he sees it, small is lean and nimble in ways the big players can’t be. One of their clients, Gusto, an online HR services platform, reached out to them with a request to put together a campaign at nearbreakneck speed. Six weeks after making the initial contact, the campaign went live on the internet in the form of a series of spots staring actress Kristen Schaal as a deluged human resources manager forced to perform a variety of roles to keep her company running smoothly.

S i n c e i t s i n c ep t i o n , E r i c h & K a l l m an h a s w o r k ed h a r d t o m a k e s p eed a c a l l i n g c a r d . W h en o n l i n e h um a n r es o ur c es p l a t fo r m G us t o n eed e d a w eb c a m p a i gn fa s t , i t r ea c h ed o u t t o E r i c h & K a l l m a n . Si x w eek s l a t e r, t h e a gen c y c o m p l et ed a s et o f w eb v ide o s p r o m o t i n g t h e b un d l e o f o r g a n i z at io n al p r o d uc t s o ffer ed b y t h e c o m p a n y, w it h t h e h el p o f a c t r es s K r i s t en Sc h aal.

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Ca l i f or ni a - b ased social enterprise ONEHOPE W ine does a lot of good. But w he n the y were look ing to tell their stor y thr ou gh a new adver tisement, Erich & K a l l ma n created a spot featuring an u tte r l y d e testable spok esperson, fictional w i ne r y ow ner Charles Faircloth. ONEHOPE CEO Ja ke Kloberdanz praised the video, w hi ch w a s engineered to be quotable a nd sha r e d among viewers, as something “w e ’r e a l l proud of.”

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“That would be very difficult at a larger agency. It’s doable, but it’s very much against the normal process,” Erich says. “Our process is very streamlined. We don’t have a lot of people involved.

We work with the best talent we can hire. And there’s not a lot that can get in the way.”

Erich & Kallman can respond rapidly in large part because the founders set up the agency to handle a lot of individual project work. With just six employees at the core of the agency, the close-knit group can get on the same page quickly. In boom times, extra work is outsourced to well-established freelancers.

“Freelance is stronger than it’s ever been,” Erich says.

“It’s arguable there might be more talent outside of agencies than inside of agencies.”

Small is also trustworthy, or at least less suspicious.

After the Association of National Advertisers’ bombshell report came out last year alleging that some large agencies were hiding discounts from clients, many brands are wary of how the creative sausage is made.

“Absolutely, agencies are taking a hit. There is a call for more transparency, and it is a hard time to be an agency,” Kallman says. “[With] the most honest, transparent big agency in the world, just because they are that big, there are going to be some doubts [from clients], even if there’s nothing going on.”

Add it all up, and what companies like Chick-Fil-A and General Mills are deciding is that small shops such as Erich & Kallman are a better value for their marketing dollars, which is exactly what Erich suspected heading to the agency-ownership stage of his career.

“There might be an opportunity where an agency that’s billed on project work, that’s billed on speed, that’s very creatively focused and that uses talent that’s out there now might have a place in the market,” Erich says. “We’re not going to steal business from everybody. But we think there might be an opportunity in the marketplace for somebody like us.”

Winning project work from General Mills is a good sign there is. Currently, Erich & Kallman has General Mills CCO Michael Fanuele singing its praises, telling Marketing News, “Obviously Steve and Eric are massive talents, two of the best in the industry, but the entrepreneurial energy of their own agency is turbo-charging that talent with a wide-eyed ambition and ferocious pragmatism. It’s personal for them now—and that’s only good news for the rest of us. Their creative muscle and agile model are sure to deliver treasures for us.” m

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2017

AMA Conference

BETTER MARKETING FOR A BETTER WORLD February 17-19, 2017 Orlando, FL

The marketing discipline is fragmented. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were one place to get the latest thinking on the field’s most pressing problems?

The 2017 Winter AMA Conference is a big tent event that brings together scholars from around the globe to answer today’s biggest marketing questions. You’ll get high-level discussions about cutting-edge research from academics across the marketing spectrum.

Gain insight. Get access.

Create Better Marketing for a Better World.

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Busting Out of the Card Catalog 36

MARkETING NEWS | FeBruAry 2017

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Libraries may still be analog institutions, but their creative staffs are finding ways to leverage both data and their traditional expertise— information sharing—to adapt their marketing for modern communities

By Sarah Steimer

FeBruAry 2017 | MARkETING NEWS

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“

Spoiler

Alert!

Dumbledore dies on page 596.”

This message, which appeared on a billboard in Arkansas, wasn’t really a surprise (the Harry Potter books and movies had been out for years), but the messenger provided the shock value: It was an advertisement for the local public library.

Once upon a time, libraries never had to market themselves. If you wanted to know something, they were the only game in town. They had a monopoly on knowledge that lasted for centuries or longer; however, it was a trust busted by the advent of Google, Amazon and numerous other internet resources. Suddenly this well-known entity was tasked with doing something that was once entirely unnecessary: It had to vie for our attention.

“Libraries realized they had to transition the way they were functioning in their communities because the world was changing around them,” says Ben Bizzle,

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CEO of Library Market, a solutions firm for libraries.

“It’s impressive to see an industry this large, that has been what it’s been for so long, embrace that and make that transition.”

Librarians themselves have two enormously important marketing skills working to their advantage: They’re data-driven and creative. But there are obstacles that limit them, be it time, money or professional expertise. Plus their audience is no longer on site. The old ways of marketing the library, such as a pamphlet located at the check-out desk or a bookmark slipped inside a paperback, won’t reach the desired customer anymore.

When Google and Amazon Inc. debuted in the mid-1990s, it was time for the library to move out from behind the desk and into people’s lives.

If libraries were going to spend their funding on collections, events and other resources, the audience needed to know they existed.

“As funding has become tighter, people have realized that it’s really important to have good data usage and users who feel like the library is meeting their needs,” says Mary Mackay, marketing director at the American Library Association. “It’s no longer just a question of libraries pushing out information about the programs they’re offering, it’s more [about] community engagement.”

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A poster from the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library advertising an event.

Photo: Courtesy of Ben Bizzle

COMMUNITY STATISTICS

A public library’s audience is its community, and that community can vary widely. Mary Beth Mulholland, director of marketing at the Chicago Public Library, can attest to just how varied and dynamic that group can be. Her library system has about 80 locations, one in every Chicago neighborhood, and each neighborhood’s needs can be completely different. In addition, each patron within those neighborhoods requires different outreach.

CPL was looking to launch a campaign for its digital skill-building program for those with limited or no technological skills. The library typically aims to incorporate a digital element in its marketing efforts, such as social media or e-newsletters; however, those lacking digital skills weren’t likely to see such ads.

“We backpedaled from that and couldn’t do any digital advertising,” Mulholland says. “We focused that campaign around the [Chicago Transit Authority] and print advertisement, which we hadn’t done in a really long time.”

Some of the most objective data sets libraries have at their disposal are basic demographics, which can be free and easy to access. Kathy Dempsey, conference chair for the Library Marketing and Communications Conference and founder of Libraries Are Essential says she often advises libraries to use U.S. Census data.

“Everything is free at census.gov,” Dempsey says. “A very simple start that a library can do is look at their population area, get all the addresses within it and check their patron database against those addresses to see what percentage of people in their service area actually do have library cards.”

Public libraries are often under city or county management, and those associations have a slew of geographic and demographic data that’s free for the libraries to access. While the specifics of what cardholders check out remains private, libraries can track how much patrons check out and what type of media they access. A March 2016 report funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services used 2014 patron and checkout data to group top library users by lifestyle, interest, preference and behavior. The report, “Core Customer Intelligence: Public Library Reach, Relevance, and Resilience,” pulled this market segmentation data from 10 public library systems across the U.S.—a tactic often

used by major corporations. One of the study’s unexpected results, according to Library Journal, was the number of single-adult households that are core customers, which included both middle-class and so-called struggling households. The study also found Latino households to be one of the fastest-growing population groups among library users.

Should a library’s budget allow, there are also products that provide a snapshot of specific communities. Analytics On Demand (AOD), a data solution from Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is intended to help libraries quickly and easily learn more about their users and communities. The platform allows libraries to upload their existing data—such as number of checkouts per household—and combine it with some other information from the U.S. Census Bureau and Experian, which specializes in consumer and business credit reporting and marketing services.

The user chooses the geographic area to view, which can be narrowed by zip code, city or even driving distance from the library.

“What we wanted to do was take a look at the data any given library has access to,” says David

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Posters from the American Library Association’s READ campaign, featuring David Bowie (1986) and Octavia Spencer (2015).

Ziembiec, western region district manager at Gale and co-founder of AOD. “Once we were able to find that out, we then asked the question: How can we turn that data into an actionable insight? It’s really no different than how a business would do this.”

Ziembiec says the Patron Profiles app is the cornerstone app on the service with 99% of AOD customers using it. The app provides libraries with a report that details where their patrons live, average household incomes and other details, such as Mosaic groups, a segmentation created by Experian that describes lifestyle information. With this report, marketers can anticipate the behavior, attitudes and preferences of various customers.

Sacramento Public Library was an early adopter of AOD. Amy Calhoun, communications and virtual services manager at SPL, says one of the most notable improvements in the library’s marketing efforts since using AOD has been the open rate of its e-mails.

Anyone who opens a library card or opts into the e-mail list receives newsletters from the library. When the library sent out e-mails to this general list detailing summer reading programs or other services, the open rate was about 12%.

SPL then decided to use the Mosaic profiles from the Patron Profiles app to sort its e-mail addresses.

To promote tech classes or the library’s e-book collection, SPL only e-mailed those considered techsavvy or early adopters. The result was an open rate of 30% to 40%.

“We’ve learned that, rather than just going by zip code or even blasting the whole list, we want people to find the e-mail relevant and open it,” Calhoun says.

“Even if it’s a segmented list, the higher open rate is important to us. Not only is it serving us better, but it’s serving them better. They’re finding the e-mail more relevant.”

There may be data aplenty at the disposal of a given library, but from there, the momentum can often slow. Nancy Dowd, project lead for LibraryAware at NoveList EBSCO Publishing and co-author of Bite-Sized Marketing: Realistic Solutions for the Overworked Librarian, says the next step can often take a very sophisticated marketing strategy. Talking about community profiles means creating unique content for those groups and finding the appropriate communication channels to reach them.

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Photo: Courtesy of the ALA.

COMING UP SHORT

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Photo: Courtesy of CPL

Librarians receive little, if any, formal marketing education.

The onus to gain marketing expertise falls on the librarian.

“Data is a first step,” Dowd says. “Developing the mindset that your library is really going to respond to the needs of your community is something else.”

Dowd says librarians tend to think in terms of creating programs and collections that they believe are good for the community. The missing piece is actually reaching out and connecting to that community.

For example, while working at the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library in Arkansas—of “Dumbledore dies” fame—Bizzle says he noticed a local bar and grill lacked drink coasters, so he asked if the library could make some for them. The coasters included spoofs of book titles (for example, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Malfunction” or “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Parlor”), plus the library’s web address. Bizzle figured people play on their smartphones while they wait for their food, so why not give them a website to visit?

Libraries can sometimes get overwhelmed with demographic information and other community statistics, and Dowd recommends starting simple.

The Mamie Doud Eisenhower Public Library in Broomfield, Colorado, was an early adopter of AOD technology and has used it to better target those without library cards and focus its online marketing as well. There’s still a lot more the data could be used for, says Kathryn Lynip, manager of collection and technology services at the library.

“We’re basically still at the very start of this, and it would be beneficial for us to have someone that’s dedicated to this,” Lynip says. “It’s a great tool, and we’re just barely touching the surface of what we could be using it for if we were a little bit more targeted and more knowledgeable.”

In November 2012, Library Journal surveyed library professionals from 471 public libraries and found 77% of respondents completely agree that library marketing increases overall community awareness of the library.

Despite this, less than 20% of all libraries reported having a marketing plan in place, and only 11% of those were current and up-to-date. The survey also

found 47% said they measure the effectiveness of their communications and 46% of respondents said evaluation/measurement is “a great idea, but we don’t have time to do it.” To Lynip’s point, the need to market isn’t lost on librarians, but their ability to do so is often the missing piece, whether because of a lack of time or expertise.

Librarians receive little, if any, formal marketing education. Dempsey says she performed a small survey of accredited library schools in the U.S. a few years ago, but of those 40 or 50 library schools, only one taught a full-semester marketing class as a core part of the curriculum. Another handful of them had a full-semester marketing class as an elective while many library schools cover marketing for a week or two under a management course. The onus to gain marketing expertise falls on the librarian.

“That’s why [the Library Marketing and Communications Conference] has taken off so well,”

Campaign art from Chicago Public Library’s 2015 summer learning challenge.

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Event promotions from the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library.

who never had that formal marketing class and suddenly need to catch up. To combat this gap, many libraries are starting to bring in an outside marketing perspective, those without a background in library science but expertise in fields such as information technology or public relations. These insights are adding value to the library and its programs and resources.

“These tools are great, but we still need to know how to use them,” Lynip says. “Yes, librarians should be in libraries, but we could also be bringing in people from other professions to partner with us.”

THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS

Libraries, at their core, specialize in the sharing of knowledge. Whether that means bringing in outsiders with new skill sets or sharing best practices among themselves, libraries have found ways to pull promotional concepts from a variety of communities.

The American Library Association has led a number of campaigns over the years, most notably the Celebrity READ Campaign and the @your library campaign. Its most recent effort is Libraries Transform, which just entered its second year. More than 3,700 libraries and supporters have joined the awareness program, many of which are small and rural libraries, Mackay says.

“A lot of big urban library systems have programs in place and professional marketers, but small libraries with few people on staff are less likely to have a marketing professional, so they need support, resources and tools,” Mackay says. Libraries can join the campaign for free and download various tools and materials related to the effort. “One of the most important things we provide is a chance for people to find others in similar situations whom they can network with and then share ideas, as well as using tools and resources. ALA is an important hub for that networking and connection.”

Jeff Julian, director of the ALA Public Awareness Office, says much of the success the Libraries Transform effort has had is driven by how individual libraries have used the campaign locally. Julian says the ALA turns these ideas into items for the campaign toolkit so others can pull from their success.

“I always talk about the campaign in three ways: that it can be used for awareness, it can be used for impact and it can be used to illustrate value,” Julian says. “This is a plug-and-play marketing campaign. If you don’t have a marketing department, if you don’t even have a marketing person, which is the reality for a lot of libraries, this campaign is ready to go.”

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Photo: Courtesy of Ben Bizzle

Dempsey says. “People get out of library school with all their knowledge of cataloging, technology, databases, information search and organization, but then they get into the day-to-day and they realize, we’re doing all this great stuff and no one is using it.”

Dempsey’s book, The Accidental Library Marketer, describes the number of people who work in libraries

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Libraries succeed in marketing when their data is humanized, when they review their insights and reach out to meet the subjects.

Julian says the ALA also wanted the campaign to be flexible so libraries with well-established brands or big marketing departments could use elements individually or to illustrate a program.

The trends section of the Libraries Transform website provides some general insights and data, and Julian says individual libraries have localized some of this national information. For example, more than a quarter of U.S. households don’t have a computer with an internet connection, according to Libraries Transform. Some libraries localized this number to reflect their own communities and used it in their own campaigns.

Julian says the ALA considers what external partnerships make sense as well, and they look to organizations that have similar values, missions or goals that the ALA or local libraries can work with to spread and amplify their messaging.

The Chicago Public Library won the 2016 John Cotton Dana Library Public Relations Award for its 2015 program, “Rahm’s Reader’s Summer Learning Challenge: Explore and Soar,” thanks in part to collaborations. The program was designed in cooperation with the Museum of Science and Industry and was promoted through a variety of channels, including social media and branch librarians visiting schools. CPL also receives nonprofit rates for advertising on public transit and has a pro-bono partner in marketing agency FCB Chicago.

“We have a private funding partner, the Chicago Public Library Foundation, and that public-private partnership allows us to not only leverage the programmatic dollars, but be a little more flexible with our marketing and outreach abilities,” Mulholland says.

There are other examples of small and large partnerships at work across the country. The Louisville Free Public Library, for instance, wanted to reach out to patrons in their 20s. To do so, the library partnered with a coffeehouse and a brewery for its adult reading program.

“It’s a perfect partnership,” Dowd says. “They might not have the connection to their 20-somethings, but the bars and the coffee shops do.”

Libraries often share their marketing success stories at events or via online platforms. AD/LIB, a Tumblr-

esque website, is intended to spark inspiration and features advertising, marketing and branding efforts by libraries or campaigns. It includes posters and art from Banned Books Week, a library relocation flier and infographics.

FINDING SUCCESS STORIES

Finding the ROI for library marketing can be a puzzle because libraries don’t sell anything, nor do they promote with coupons that can be automatically tabulated. The defining outcome is added value.

“Much of what librarians do is personal service and helping people with particular problems—be it employment, trying to fix their résumés or learning a new skill so they can get another job,” Dempsey says.

“You just can’t measure that sort of stuff.”

Libraries succeed in marketing when their data is humanized, when they review their insights and reach out to meet the subjects. Bizzle says libraries must have an understanding of the effect that marketing has on the value of the services they provide. He says ROI for libraries can be measured in increased utilization and increased value.

Guerilla marketing is an excellent example of insight and action meeting, as it pushes the librarian and their libraries into the community. “Outside The Lines” is a weeklong campaign that brings libraries out to the community. The 2016 event, which included 264 participating organizations, sent book bikes gliding through neighborhoods and books to the beach and block parties where neighbors had a chance to meet.

Dowd says what may scare many libraries away from marketing is trying to do extensive community profiles and being overwhelmed with information. She says libraries can start with small insights and move from there. It’s much more important to get out and engage.

“Outreach is about going to the schools and participating or setting up interactive locations, putting books on a bike and riding out into the neighborhood and having people come and browse,” Bizzle says. “It’s more of fitting in rather than being behind a table and talking.” m

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Deloitte’s

First

CMO

Walks

No One’s in

Footsteps

Diana O’Brien, Deloitte’s first CMO, is still trying to bring disparate organizations within Deloitte together, but she’s thought a lot about data, robots, social employees and how to differentiate experiences

By Hal Conick February 2017 | marketing news

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There’s

no

pressure

to follow in anyone’s footsteps for Diana O’Brien. She’s taken the reins as Deloitte’s first CMO. It’s a different job than O’Brien expected, as the majority of her focus for nearly two years has been on breaking down disparate silos within Deloitte.

It seemed natural to her to bring the silos under one umbrella, O’Brien says, but, “what I didn’t appreciate when we first started was how powerful an engine we would be in championing our clients by capitalizing on the powers we have now that we’ve brought some of these groups together.”

O’Brien became CMO in March 2015 after working for Deloitte in various roles since 1985. She has pushed out new campaigns, adopted new data technologies and served as the voice of the customer in Deloitte’s C-suite. Marketing News spoke with O’Brien about her time as CMO thus far and her plans for the future.

How has your role at Deloitte evolved?

I’ve had a long career at Deloitte. I joined our consulting practice in 1985. For most of my career, I’ve served clients, so I’m a very client-oriented CMO. Five years ago, I took the responsibility to build

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Deloitte University. That’s our leadership center in West Lake, Texas, for all of our professionals to invest in their development and create an environment where they not only will be given the opportunity to grow their leadership skills, but to concentrate and spark ideas with clients and their colleagues.

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That’s a touchstone of our culture today. That was an incredible experience that was unexpected in my career, as was becoming the CMO.

It seems like each company has its own definition of what a CMO is. What’s your vision for CMO at Deloitte?

We define my role as a champion for clients and a driver of growth. We have a responsibility to build Deloitte’s reputation, and we do that by creating powerful experiences, unique insights and, ultimately, building lasting relationships with our clients. In my organization, I have a number of leaders that have market eminence and industry sector eminence who are bringing the insights to our clients to help them solve issues that they face.

When you couple what they do—which is build solutions—with the brand, [Deloitte’s] creativity and innovative mindset, our policy understanding, corporate citizenship and investment, all of those things really create a differentiated experience. That’s what enables us to help the business grow.

Are you able to work easily with other executives in the C-suite? That has been a challenge for many marketers.

I wouldn’t say that’s been my experience at all. There are some CMOs who are unfamiliar with sitting in the C-suite, but at Deloitte we view marketing as a growth driver, not a cost center. I’m solving problems with my colleagues. I connect the dots across what our customers need the most, what our brand needs in the market place and what our chief talent officer and risk officer might say our conduct would be. I’m connected to every part of the C-suite. The advantage the CMO has, if they embrace it, is that they are closest to the customer. They have the deepest insights and they have the people and relationships to be in touch with the marketplace and understand what’s needed. If they can translate that into the language of their C-suite peers, they become an invaluable resource for problem solving and ensuring the experiences defined in the brand are what they create.

You’re able to be an advocate for the Deloitte customer?

That’s what any good CMO really is: the advocate for the customer. That’s relatively new. It started to change in the last couple of years. CMOs have been embraced and [companies see] them as someone who can solve problems and unite the C-suite, rather than being tactical.

Tell me about your new “Look Again” ad campaign and your acquisition of creative ad agency Heat?

Heat was an acquisition we made at the end of [2015].

It’s a tremendous asset that allowed us to become closer to a full-digital agency. We always had a strong practice in supporting [marketing], but we didn’t have the advertising component. Being a chief storyteller is a big part of what you need to have in order to serve as CMO. Our acquisition of Heat was critical for this.

We have a long history based on trust and integrity, but we also have a very large practice that helps transform businesses to be more innovative and insightful. We weren’t as well-known for that, and we wanted to establish a creative platform that helps us communicate that to our clients as well as to our professionals. We formed an agency model within our own organization to take full advantage of Heat. We wanted to eat our own dog food. What we’re advising our clients to do and what we want to do ourselves [is use] Heat, our digital agency, to help us craft a creative platform for our future. It’s a creative platform to emotionally connect to how we behave in the marketplace and arrive at some of the best solutions that our clients need.

“Look Again” was our first foray into TV advertising in a while. It’s the essence of what Deloitte is looking at.

We will look further to find the solutions you need. We will look within, we’ll look behind, we’ll look forward, we’ll look around to give our people the tools to ensure our clients are moving forward with things that are important to them. TV wasn’t the only thing we did; it was a piece of the story.

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TV advertising has dropped off a bit in recent years, but advancements are still being made in the use of customer data and segmentation. As CMO, how do you make use of data?

When searching for customer insights, marketers have different philosophies.

Some start with a problem, some go fishing for insights. What route do you take?

Every company is a data company. Every company is a technology company. We’re all rich with data, and we all have many different kinds of technology. The key is to use the data and the technology to create meaning and understanding, so you can make choices and decisions and be more proactive in satisfying your clients’ expectations. You can be overwhelmed by data, and it can overtake you, but the key is to stay focused on the problems you’re trying to solve and your goals. Then, you can organize and synthesize data in ways that give insight around your customer’s behavior and preferences. You understand performance more deeply and you get realtime feedback on your brand KPIs. That’s what allows you to exceed your customers’ expectations.

You have to be scientific about it. You have to know the problems you’re solving and organize data to answer those questions. You have to look at data in a holistic way and look at surface trends. Both are important.

Those trends can tell you things that you might not be thinking about when you’re just focused on solving a problem, such as “What are the preferences of this client segment over that segment?” When you look at trend data, you can see that people who buy “this” tend to buy “that.” Those are things you might not have asked a question about. We use data scientists, research and analytics to look at the data, so you can find different answers depending on where you’re looking.

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How do you navigate omni-channel marketing at Deloitte?

Omni-channel is a non-negotiable. You have to be where your clients are, and you have to deliver consistently to them. We understand that you no longer create a relationship with your clients by just having in-person relationships. That’s still important, and we don’t diminish that, but there are digital and social aspects we have to embrace. You have to use digital, social and physical in combination. It’s not to say you invest in all of them equally. You have to start with where your clients are, what’s needed to bring solutions to that segment and how to optimize that channel for that particular client segment. That’s how you meet expectations in ways that are value-creating. You’re giving it to them in ways they can digest and they most want to experience.

Are there other ways to get in touch and stay in touch with customers?

We have a number of programs that focus on the customer experience. We bring together the physical

Omni-channel is a non-negotiable. You have to be where your clients are, and you have to deliver consistently to them.

and the virtual, engaging the customers throughout.

We might use virtual reality to help them experience something. Customers will be in the physical setting and we may be able to have a facilitated dialog right there. We have robots we’re testing now that we put into individual sessions. If I’m in an immersive session with someone, the robot can be present and it could bring people, say a certain executive from one market

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or an executive from Asia or Europe, into that setting in that moment, and allow you to engage with them.

That’s the real-time feedback that executives have received when we create these personalized experiences our clients are interested in.

What’s the most important thing you’d like to see accomplished as CMO? The legacy I’d like to leave is for all 80,000 professionals at Deloitte to be unleashed as ambassadors of who we are, what we are and be able to express that in the marketplace every time they’re interacting with our clients. My No. 1 job is to make sure they’re all ambassadors of our brand.

Is that tough to do? Everyone has a different personality, so I imagine it takes a certain level of trust.

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It definitely takes trust, but in the 24/7, unscripted world you have to trust people to make the most of every moment and make extraordinary experiences.

Our purpose is to make an impact that matters; we want you to make an impact that matters with our clients, our people and within the communities where you live.

We’ve conducted enough research to know there are behaviors that we respond to and bring out when we’re at our best. Things like walking in someone else’s shoes and showing empathy. You understand through the client’s eyes. You ask questions that demonstrate that you understand and you’re willing to listen and lean into their issues. Another is to show up and be fully present—physically, emotionally and intellectually.

Show undivided attention. Get into the trenches with them. Get on a plane if need be. Be there for them if they need you. These are things that I think stem from personality. They stem from behaviors of the kind of culture you want to have and the kind of people you want to be around. m

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Directory of Marketing Research Providers

Qualitative, quantitative, focus groups, online surveys, modeling and sampling. Marketing research impacts every level of business from the products and services that are developed to the prices that are set.

Since the information gleaned from marketing research can set the course of your marketing plan, finding a qualified market research provider to deliver accurate and relevant results is important.

The AMA's Directory of Marketing Research Providers can help guide your choice of research practitioners. Whether you are seeking a full service research firm or someone that specializes in a specific research technique you can find information on leading firms in this special Marketing News directory!

AN ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT TO THE FEBRUARY 2017 ISSUE OF MARKETING NEWS. COPYRIGHT 2017 BY THE AMERICAN MARKETING ASSOCIATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 52 MARKETING NEWS | FEBRUARY 2017

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Directory of Marketing Research Providers INDEX TO THE

Directory of Marketing Research Providers FULL SERVICE B2B International Blueberry Marketing & Sensory Research Decision Analyst Esearch.com, Inc. Furman Roth The Institute for Sensory Research Morpace, Inc. Rabin Research Company Reckner Facilities Reckner Healthcare

ADVERTISING

CONSUMER RESEARCH

PRODUCT RESEARCH

Decision Analyst Doyle Research Associates, Inc.

B2B International Decision Analyst

CUSTOMER LOYALTY

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH

B2B International

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION B2B International Customer Lifecycle, LLC

FIELD SERVICES Direct Resource, Inc. Reckner Facilities Reckner Healthcare

HIGHER EDUCATION Furman Roth

INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH

Decision Analyst Furman Roth

B2B International Decision Analyst Direct Resource, Inc.

ANALYTICAL SERVICES

LOYALTY RESEARCH

Decision Analyst

B2B International

BRAND/ BRANDING RESEARCH

MEDIA/ COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

B2B International Morpace, Inc.

Research USA

BUSINESS TO BUSINESS RESEARCH

MODELING & PREDICTIVE RESEARCH Decision Analyst

B2B International Customer Lifecycle, LLC Direct Resource, Inc. Research USA

ONLINE RESEARCH

CAREER / EDUCATION

PRICING RESEARCH

University of Georgia/MRII

B2B International

B2B International Blueberry Marketing & Sensory Research Decision Analyst Doyle Research Associates, Inc. Esearch.com, Inc. The Institute for Sensory Research Morpace, Inc. Rabin Research Company Reckner Healthcare

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH B2B International Blueberry Marketing & Sensory Research Esearch.com, Inc. Rabin Research Company Research USA Reckner Healthcare

RETAIL Furman Roth

SEGMENTATION B2B International Customer Lifecycle, LLC

SENSORY RESEARCH Blueberry Marketing & Sensory Research The Institute for Sensory Research Reckner Facilities

TRAINING / EDUCATION University of Georgia/MRII

Doyle Research Associates, Inc.

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Directory of Marketing Research Providers

B2B International is the largest business-to-business market research company with offices across North America, Europe and Asia. Research services include branding, customer loyalty, needs assessment, product development, pricing, advertising / communications, market sizing and market entry.

B2B International counts 600 of the world’s largest 1,500 companies among its client base. The company serves a wide range of sectors including manufacturing, construction, chemicals, IT / technology, financial and professional services, healthcare, and education, among others.

B2B International White Plains, New York Chicago, Illinois newyork@b2binternational.com www.b2binternational.com

Decision Analyst is a global marketing research and analytical consulting firm, serving Fortune 500 corporations, advertising agencies, and consulting firms.

Decision Analyst conducts multinational marketing research studies on marketing strategy, market segmentation, product optimization, advertising testing, package optimization, new product concept testing and forecasting, website optimization, and customer experience optimization. The firm blends qualitative research, secondary data analysis, surveybased research, econometrics, and advanced analytics (modeling, simulation, and optimization) to solve the most difficult marketing problems.

Decision Analyst Arlington, TX jthomas@decisionanalyst.com www.decisionanalyst.com

Blueberry is a full-service market research consultancy, combining expertise in marketing research, product research & sensory science.

Delivering a complete portfolio of traditional, breakthrough & proprietary market research solutions, we work across the entire product innovation pipeline from the early concept/prototype development phase through commercialization. Clients include manufacturers of food and beverage, home care, and personal care products and financial services institutions. Let’s talk about your innovation landscape.

Blueberry 1600 Manor Drive Chalfont, PA 18914 267 954 0440 info@blue-berry.com www.blue-berry.com

Direct Resource, Inc. specializes in delivering marketing research solutions that gain insight into customer thinking and opinions.

With over 28 years dedicated to Marketing Research Field Management, we understand what research strategy and methods lead to successful project outcomes. We use a customized approach and have extensive quantitative and qualitative expertise, especially in International Research, B2B and many industry segments.

Direct Resource welcomes the opportunity to partner with you on your next research endeavor.

Direct Resource, Inc. Chicago, IL Bridgid Michaud, President bmichaud@direct-resource.com (312) 566-0810 www.direct-resource.com

CLC is a global research consultancy working with B2B/B2C companies to plan and conduct research to accurately identify and measure requirements for customer acquisition, satisfaction and loyalty, share of wallet growth, and retention.

We help organizations get better business results through improved integration of research findings into day-to-day operations.

With reach to more than 3 million individuals in 160+ countries, we conduct strategic qualitative and quantitative research in multiple localized languages on a worldwide basis.

Customer Lifecycle, LLC Chicago, IL | Nationwide kaferenz@customerlifecycle.us www.customerlifecycle.us

Qualitative research specialists: experienced, curious, smart, and strategic. Solutions for all stages of the product lifecycle. Small enough to provide personalized service; large enough to innovate and collaborate to meet clients unique needs. Equipped with a toolbox of proven and forward thinking methods that allow for creative study design and transformative insights.

Methods include face-to-face, ethnography, online, mobile, social media analysis. Industries include consumer goods, automotive, home improvement, healthcare, youth, boomers/ seniors, food service, education.

Doyle Research Associates, Inc. Chicago, IL – Portland, OR – Boston, MA kdoyle@doyleresearch.com www.doyleresearch.com

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Directory of Marketing Research Providers

Esearch.com, Inc. has provided on-line market research since 1995. The company was one of the first to develop an online research panel… and it continues to be one of the best.

Our panelists have provided opinions on everything from food items to political scandals – and many other products and services in-between.

Esearch.com, Inc. Los Angeles, CA janet@esearch.com http://www.esearch.com

Furman Roth has been a pioneer of integrated advertising services since its inception in 1968. The agency is known for creating success stories and growth for its clients, many of which have become household names.

The team at Furman Roth is a group of relentless perfectionists who work passionately to ensure that every piece of marketing they create is always working towards increasing brand recognition, sales, and strengthening brand equity for clients.

Offices: N ew York, NY and Englewood Cliffs, NJ

Furman Roth info@furmanroth.com furmanroth.com

Located outside New York City, ISR is a nationally-recognized, full-service sensory research organization. We provide sensory panels, sensory testing facilities (food/bev booths and sink booths) and client-site sensory solutions.

We are one of the most experienced scientific sensory research organizations with 15+ years’ working with food, beverage, home care & personal care manufacturers. Our approach links established sensory & scientific methodologies with strict quality controls to provide reliable research results for confident decision making.

The Institute for Sensory Research 450 Mamaroneck Avenue Suite 410 Harrison, NY 10528 914 696 5155 info@sensoryguidance.com www.sensoryguidance.com

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Directory of Marketing Research Providers

About Morpace Inc. As a group of inquisitive researchers, Morpace views each of our client’s initiatives as a journey to connect with consumers and deliver an interpretation of what they think and feel. To our clients, we are Truth Seekers – a designation that comes with the understanding that “data” is about much more than numbers…it’s about incorporating the human element that drives the numbers, which makes us valuable partners.

Our band of truth seekers are scattered around the world in Los Angeles, London, Shanghai, and in our global headquarters in Detroit. They are experts in automotive, financial services, healthcare, and retail & consumer goods, helping clients make smarter decisions in three core research pillars: Brand, Product Development and Customer Experience.

Morpace is an established company, supporting our clients since 1975. Though not one to be complacent, our clients have honored us by making us one of the fastest growing U.S. – based research organizations. Our industry recognized our organization naming Morpace as the 2014 CASRO Research Organization of the Year, while our commitment to employees helped to identify Morpace as a 2015 Top Workplace by the Detroit Free Press.

Invite Morpace to help identify the humanity in your data that only a real “Truth Seeker” can find. Go on a journey with us by visiting www.morpace.com.

Reckner Healthcare is one of the most trusted research companies, serving the pharmaceutical and medical industries for 25+ years. With our internally-managed and verified healthcare panel, we deliver access to physicians, healthcare professionals, payers, decision makers and opinion leaders across the United States and around the world. We provide complete healthcare fieldwork solutions, including recruiting, programming, fielding, and hosting for qualitative and quantitative research projects.

Reckner Healthcare 1600 Manor Drive Chalfont, PA 18914 215 822 6220 healthcare@reckner.com www.recknerhealthcare.com

Full-service b2c and b2b marketing research services for packaged goods, financial, healthcare/ pharmaceuticals, services, insurance, entertainment, and new technology industries. Service principles: high quality work, on-time delivery, creative study designs, strategic insights, competitive prices, exceeding expectations. Study types: concepts, segmentation, product use/sensory, names, packages, product design, advertising, customer satisfaction, awareness/ attitude/usage, tracking, pricing, problem detection, promotions, positionings, promises. Data collection techniques: Internet/ mobile, telephone, central-locations, mail, and in-person. Qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

Domestic, international.

Rabin Research Company Chicago, IL USA melster@rabin-research.com www.rabinresearch.com

Founded in 1972, Research USA is a Chicago-based firm that specializes in providing high quality, affordable survey research to publications, associations, and corporations. We are known throughout the industry for working closely with clients, achieving high response rates, and providing timely, accurate, and useful results.

Services include questionnaire design, survey mailing and hosting, data processing and analysis, and reporting.

Methodologies used for conducting surveys include mail, web-based, hybrid, telephone, and focus group.

Research USA Chicago, IL 1-800-863-4800 sales@researchusainc.com www.researchusainc.com

With 25+ years’ experience, Reckner Facilities provides state-of-the-art, product and sensory testing facilities, located in the Milwaukee, New York and Philadelphia markets. Our facilities provide commercial test kitchens, food/beverage booths, personal care/sink booths, home care rooms (washer, dryer, toilet), multipurpose and focus group rooms. Specialties include product testing, iHUTs, CLTs and sensory evaluations.

Highly-tenured personnel, exceptional client service and flexible field services.

Reckner Facilities 1600 Manor Drive Chalfont, PA 18914 215 822 6220 info@reckner.com www.recknerfacilities.com

The University of Georgia offers three online certificate courses designed to teach the Marketing Research Core Body of Knowledge (MRCBOK©). Over 8,000 practitioners have enrolled in these programs from 104 countries. The Principles of Mobile Marketing Research explores emerging Mobile techniques and how they can be applied to market research. All courses are updated regularly to reflect the newest methods and approaches.

AMA is a proud supporter of the Principles programs.

University of Georgia|MRII Pam.Bracken@ georgiacenter.uga.edu www.principlesofmarketresearch.org Athens, Georgia | Ann Arbor, Michigan

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career advancement

on the record

Survey Says: CMOs Seeking Tech-savvy Creatives and Content Marketers in 2017 The latest research by The Creative Group finds 12% of respondents want to add staff, but finding qualified applicants isn’t so easy

By Zach Brooke | staff writer

 zbrooke@ama.org

T

he latest edition of The Creative Group’s biannual survey of marketing and hiring executives shows hiring remains relatively static.

Heading into 2017, 12% of the 400 marketing executives surveyed indicated they planned to add staff to their departments, a point higher than last year.

The largest concentration of anticipated hires will have experience in web design and production. Content marketing followed at a close second, and print design and production clocked in at number three on CMO wish lists.

Interestingly, more respondents are reporting it’s harder to find creative professionals today than when last asked in June 2016. Midsize companies are finding it the hardest of all to onboard qualified personnel: 70% of respondents with 50 to 99 employees report it is either “somewhat challenging” or “very challenging” to fill open roles.

Hiring challenges are coinciding with a trend toward freelance outsourcing to help offset the creative workload.

Fifteen percent of ad executives and 11% of marketing managers are looking to increase their reliance on temps or independent contractors during the first half of the new year.

Finally, while no respondents say they have any plans to downsize, 20% reported they were leaving open

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positions vacant, a number that’s down a bit from the last survey but still double what it was a year ago.

For more insights on how advertising and marketing executives are planning to staff their teams, we spoke with Diane Domeyer, executive director at The Creative Group.

Q

Why are executives reporting that it’s more challenging to find creative professionals?

A

The unemployment rates for certain creative roles—including marketing specialists and managers, market research analysts and designers— are below the national rate. So supply is low, but there is also increasing demand for creative professionals, given a greater business focus on design thinking, customer experience, web and mobile projects and advertising strategy. Job opportunities outnumber qualified candidates and, as a result, companies have to work harder to attract and retain the talent they seek. Many hiring managers are also looking for people with specific, high-demand skill sets, and these individuals may be reluctant to leave stable positions.

Q

Why do midsize companies have the greatest difficulty hiring people?

A

Midsize organizations often don’t have dedicated recruiting or human resources teams to help them identify potential hires. This means it’s up to the business owners or employees to find and recruit new talent, which can be hard to handle on top of their regular work duties.

Q

Does it surprise you that marketing is becoming a bigger part of the gig economy?

A

Agencies and in-house departments have long relied on a mix of fulltime employees and freelancers to manage fluctuating workloads and control costs. Freelancing is becoming a more attractive career option for creative professionals, particularly those with in-demand skills, like user experience

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on the record

designers and content strategists.

These professionals are highly sought by companies of all sizes, so they can easily move from one project to the next without lapses in employment.

Q

Looking at the numbers, we see there is a bit of a freeze on new hiring at some places. Any guess as to why that is?

A

Companies that have been in hiring mode now need to onboard and train new employees and may be waiting to evaluate productivity gains before adding staff. Hiring may also be limited by the supply of available talent.

Q

It’s interesting that the hottest job in the creative field is more tech-focused than

anything else. What kind of background do creative executives indicate they want from designers?

Is this something that general marketers can transition into, or are they frozen out of these jobs?

A

With more and more digital projects on the horizon, employers are on the lookout for tech-savvy professionals.

In fact, according to The Creative Group Salary Guide, positions requiring digital expertise, like front-end web developers and mobile designers, are seeing the greatest salary gains.

No matter what specialty you’re thinking of pursuing, gaining digital skills will increase your marketability and open doors to more opportunities.

Even if the positions you’re interested in don’t require skills such as front-end

career advancement

coding or search engine optimization, acquiring them can give you an edge in the job market.

Q

Content marketing is the second-most challenging job to fill. Any idea what could be causing hiring managers headaches there?

A

Again, it’s a matter of supply and demand. The number of available candidates is simply smaller than the number of employers hiring. Many companies are also being inundated with résumés—many of them from applicants who don’t meet their qualifications.

Working with a specialized staffing firm can help streamline this process, as they can narrow the list of candidates for employers to choose from. m February 2017 | marketing news

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POSITIONS OPEN ACADEMIC FACULTY MICHAEL F. PRICE COLLEGE OF BUSINESS, The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma. The Division of Marketing and Supply Chain Management at The University of Oklahoma announces a senior faculty endowed position. The opening is for a highly accomplished Professor of Marketing to fill its prestigious Helen Robson Walton Centennial Chair in Marketing. Candidates with a research emphasis in channels of distribution and related business-to-business marketing topics are desired, including inter-organizational governance and boundaryspanning interfaces; relational ties, franchising, and other collaborative arrangements; channel dynamics and multichannel decision making; distribution planning and strategy, and asymmetric dependence, power shifts, conflict, coordination and cooperation. Compensation will be competitive for a tenured senior endowed position. It begins August 2017. We expect the successful candidate to be a nationally recognized scholar, with a strong empirical and theoretical background and an established record of excellence in research and teaching. We also expect the Walton Chair to play a leadership role within the division and the

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college and are therefore seeking individuals with demonstrated evidence of academic leadership skills.

The University of Oklahoma is a Carnegie-R1 comprehensive public research university offering a wide variety of undergraduate, graduate, continuing education, and public service programs.

OU became the first public institution ever to rank #1 nationally in the recruitment of National Merit Scholars.

Its 2000-acre Norman campus houses 12 colleges with approximately 800 faculty and 22,000 students.

In addition, eight medical and health-related colleges are located on the Health Sciences Center campuses in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

Courses leading to a BBA, MBA, and Ph.D. are offered.

MBA classes are offered in Norman and Oklahoma City. Norman, Oklahoma is a culturally rich and vibrant city of approximately 100,000 people, located within 20 miles of Oklahoma City.

A city with outstanding schools, amenities, and a low cost of living, Norman is a perennial contender on “best places to live.” This position is a nine-month appointment. A doctorate is required in order to be considered. First screenings will begin immediately and continue until the position is filled. To apply or schedule an interview, please send a letter of application, resume, and names of three references. Nominations of strong candidates are also

To place a classified ad in Marketing News, please contact Jordan Berthiaume at amaprint@yourmembership.com or call Jordan at (727) 497-6565 x3409. To post your job on AMA's online job board, go to http://jobs.ama.org.

appreciated. The University of Oklahoma is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. Protected veterans, individuals with disabilities, women, and minorities are encouraged to apply. Jack J. Kasulis, Ph.D., Ruby K. Powell Professor of Marketing, Director, Division of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, Price College of Business, The University of Oklahoma, 307 West Brooks, Norman, OK 73019-4001, Voice Direct: 405-325-5916, Email: jkasulis@ou.edu. For more information, please refer to these web sites: http:// www.ou.edu/price; http:// quickfacts.census.gov/ qfd/states/40/4052500. html; http://www.ou.edu/ dam/provost/documents/ facultyflipbook.pdf; http:// www.ou.edu/publicaffairs/ oufacts.html.

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Coordinate cross functional teams of product managers, marketing and sales to develop and execute channel specific marketing strategies for branded and private label products. Specific responsibilities include: Design process management – manage creative budget and relationships with outside creative agencies and suppliers in the US and Europe; Develop promotions and sales material with the sales team; New product development – identify

opportunities through market research and manage through development and launch; Forecasting, volume and budget tracking; and Coordinate bid and tender submissions for private label projects. Bachelor’s in Marketing or Marketing Management and 3 years experience in client and project management in a marketing and design firm working with cross functional teams required. Familiarity with European design and print agencies. Full-time.

Must have proof of legal authority to work in the United States. Email resumes to TPagano@imsfood.com.

International Marketing Systems, LTD, 2 Corporate Drive, Suite 136, Shelton, CT 06484.

SOUTH FLORIDA SECURITY GROUP INC of Miami, Florida seeks to hire a qualified Marketing Director.

A Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration specializing in Marketing or foreign equivalent degree required. Must be bilingual in Spanish and English: Must hold a Valid CAM Licensure issued by the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

Requires 12 months of experience as a Marketing Director. Salary is $118,500.00 per year. Requires travel throughout Dade, Broward, and West Palm Beach Counties. Mail resume to South Florida Security Group Inc., 2615 W Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33135.

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personal branding

How to Stand Out As a Marketing Job Applicant Having a strategy for finding, applying to and landing the job you want is critical in an ever-crowding applicant pool for sought-after marketing jobs

By Tom Gimbel | CEO, LaSalle Network

T

he marketing and ad tech industry is valued at more than $110 billion according to U.S. aggregate revenue data. Revenue has increased every year since 2010. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 9% increase in employment for marketers through 2024, 2% above the average growth rate of other industries.

Marketing is becoming one of the most promising industries to make a career in, and it’s attracting a lot of strong candidates, which means it’s harder than ever to stand out.

Pre-application: Take a selfinventory.

Before you apply, you need to know what you have to offer. Don’t fail at knowing you. A healthy self-knowledge will help you convey to a company why you’re a good fit for them. You have to know the kind of environment and culture you thrive in. Do you need a quiet environment? Do you like working on group projects? Are you looking for a certain level of autonomy? Understand what motivates you, and reflect on what type of manager and leader gets the best out of you.

Ask yourself what type of work you enjoy most. An agency role might be

career advancement

best for someone who prefers working with multiple clients and interacting with different personalities and cultures.

Others work better with a deeper knowledge of one client at a time.

In-house roles may be better for this individual. Be honest with yourself about what you’re looking for and why you want it.

The research phase: Target companies that fit.

Thoroughly research companies before applying, which means going beyond reading their website and scanning social media. Talk to employees. Read stories their company leaders were quoted in.

Dig into what the culture is like. Does it align with what you want? Do you have the skills required? What are the key words in the job description? If it mentions proficiency in graphic design, a high-demand skill for marketers today, be honest about your ability. If you don’t have much experience with it, enroll in a course. Sharpen your skills.

Don’t waste your time or the employer’s by embellishing.

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Your marketing résumé: What do you bring?

In the marketing industry right now, we’re seeing a skills gap on the technical side and a high demand for digital proficiency.

A survey of employers by the Economist Intelligence Unit revealed that candidates who are strong with HTML and CSS coding, data analytics and graphic design are getting ahead. If you’re weak in those areas, and they are important components of jobs you are applying to, invest in yourself. Take a course, shadow another marketer, pick up a book at the library.

Start to learn and expand your skill set.

Your résumé is your calling card. As a marketer, your résumé is held to a higher standard. There should be no spelling or grammar errors. Take time to ensure the formatting is consistent and tenses are correct. Triple-check everything. Ask someone else to proofread it, too.

Your résumé should mesh with the research you’ve done on the company.

The more work you’ve done in the pre-application phase, the easier it will be to align with what hiring managers are looking for. If you noticed in your research that a job description uses certain key words, use them. Don’t embellish, but accurately describe your experience. When employers are looking at hundreds of résumés for only a few seconds each, seeing those words that show a fit right off the bat can put you at the top of the list.

Before you submit, step into the hiring manager’s shoes. What would make them pass on your résumé given the job description? Find the holes and fix them.

Your résumé should mesh with the research you’ve done on the company.

The more work you’ve done in the pre-application phase, the easier it will be to align with what hiring managers are looking for. Don’t embellish, but accurately describe your experience.

The interview: Be bold and win the job.

Asking good questions makes you stand out. Don’t miss the opportunity.

Ask the interviewer if he or she has any hesitations about your background. Then, address them on the spot. Be open about your weaknesses and what you’re doing to work on them. This shows self-awareness, a critical skill for marketers that is hard to convey on a résumé.

Ask what made the last person in this role fail or succeed. If it’s a new role,

ask what characteristics a successful candidate should have.

Another way to stand out is to come with ideas. Prepare opportunities for the company to grow their brand, suggestions of things the company could do to improve or successes they can build on.

Be prepared to discuss how you would implement your suggestions if hired.

If done right, it’s respectfully bold and shows two crucial skills marketers need

to have: critical thinking and problem solving. It reflects that you’ve put time in to research the company and understand what it’s doing. If it’s good, it can lead to substantive conversation in the interview that demonstrates your vision and elevates you above the pack.

If you have a portfolio to back it up, bring it. If you don’t, try to build a body of work, even if it’s freelance samples that show your ability. m

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advertisers’index

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Quick source for contacting the suppliers in the February 2017 issue of Marketing News.

2017 AMA Media Kit ....................... inside back cover URL: h ttp://www.AMA.org/mediakit 2017 Winter AMA Conference / Better Marketing for a Better World ............... p. 35 URL: h ttp://www.AMA.org/winter AMA’s Face to Face Training Series .................... p. 57 ttp://www.AMA.org/FacetoFace URL: h AMA’s Marketing Resource Directory ................... p. 5 Ph. 1-888-777-6578 ttp://marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org URL: h AMA Members-only Webcasts . ........................... p. 50 Email: savdic@ama.org URL: h ttp://www.AMA.org/MOW AMA Whitepapers ......................................... pp. 49, 55 Email: sales@ama.org ttp://www.AMA.org/whitepaper URL: h AMA Virtual Conference Series ............................ p. 51 Email: anelmes@ama.org

Directory of Marketing Research Providers .......................................................... pp. 52-56 Email: sales@ama.org B2B International . .................................................... p. 4 URL: http://www.b2binternational.com InsightBee ..................................................... back cover URL: http://www.insightbee.com Marketing News ...................................................... p. 63 Email: sales@ama.org URL: http://www.AMA.org/mediakit Research USA ........................................................... p. 21 Ph. 1-800-863-4800 URL: http://www.researchusainc.com SalesForce . ...................................... inside front cover URL: http://www.salesforce.com University of Georgia / Market Research Institute International (MRII) ................................. p. 3 Ph. 1-800-811-6640 or 706-542-3537 URL: http://www.marketresearchcourses.org

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#OfficeGoals A peek inside the marketers’ offices that make us drool

Stephan Camenzind, founder of Evolution Design “Google Israel opened its doors to an [86,000 square foot] office space in Tel Aviv in December 2012. It is a new milestone for Google in the development of innovative work environments: nearly 50% of all areas have been allocated to create communication landscapes, giving countless opportunities to employees to collaborate and communicate with other Googlers in a diverse environment that will serve all different requirements and needs.

“There is clear separation between the employees’ traditional desk-based work environment and those communication areas, granting privacy and focus when required.”

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Images: Itay Sikolski

Interiors: Evolution Design

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