ANA Marketing Maestros

Marketers: What is Your Legacy?

When James Schlesinger became the new secretary of defense, his most ardent desire was to leave a legacy behind. He wanted to people to know that he had not only occupied the “SecDef” seat, but had made a difference. To find out how to do that he sought the counsel of a number of people, but one in particular, Colonel Richard Hallock. Richard was a paratrooper, a highly decorated combat hero and a person who understood the hollowed Pentagon halls well. Especially the potential pitfalls. More importantly, Hallock understood how the institutions like the Pentagon can quickly swallow you up by engaging you in so many projects, you end up being known or standing for nothing in particular. Hallock sat Schlesinger down and said, “You must understand that if you want to leave a legacy it is vital for you to make a decision about what you want that legacy to be. If you don’t make that decision, and make it early in your tenure, you will have no legacy. Because even after several months on the job you will become so caught up in the business of the Pentagon, so enmeshed with the generals, so overwhelmed with the scope and enormity of the job that it will be too late.

As a marketer, what will your legacy be? What few projects will you pick and put the full weight of your office behind them? How will you guide your legacy projects and nurture them? If you determine from the very beginning what your legacy will be, then and only then can you force them through the bureaucracy. And you will have to force them through the bureaucracy especially if you wish to be a change agent. The world only embraces change agents when they have succeeded. Not the ones who are in the process of driving change.

Burger King: Using Social Currency

Russ Klein, Burger King’s CMO, told us of social currency. This is a very interesting concept. He said "when they know you more than love you" you have an unremarkable brand – one people don’t want to talk about, share with their friends or go out of their way to buy, promote, recommend. What’d BK do? They got down and partied. They ingrained their brand into the fabric of their core customers by giving them something fun to talk about. They returned to social relevance by providing consumers with interesting content and by surrendering their brand to their customers. This is the ultimate in listening; giving your customers the opportunity to tell you in their own content and words, what they feel about your brand. This is how to make friends. I’ll bet most of you remember seeing the King score an NFL touchdown, or the subservient chicken perform. Did you talk to a friend about those ads? I know I did. That’s social currency – that’s making your brand relevant again.

Customer insight is king (no pun intended). With it, a brand can become relevant and differentiate itself in a meaningful and compelling way – the result, you’ll see a substantial increase in your organic and very profitable growth. Talk to your customers, every day and in every way. Let them help you, help yourself.

Consumer Insights - What a Concept

Frankly I was both surprised and at the same time reassured that a simple but so compelling and relevant message was reiterated at our Annual Masters of Marketing Conference earlier this month. That message – customer insights are the key to success. AG Lafley showed us several very specific examples of how P&G now listens better and then uses the insights they’ve gained to change the way they market. As he reiterated at this conference "The Consumer Is Boss" – he first told us this in 2000 when he was once again our keynote speaker.

Why am I surprised? – one after another, each speaker in turn said much the same thing. Listen to your customer, they will tell you what they want, when they want it, and how they want it. Pretty simple, huh. Must not be or why would each of our speakers, who when asked to demonstrate how they have reinvented marketing at their organization, first touted both their need and ability to listen to customers. Dave Thomas, Wendys’ founder often said "Simple is hard". It must be.

Why was I reassured? – because the same message "listen to your customers, let them tell you what they want" was not only repeated, but also each of the CMOs who illustrated how they expertly reinvented their marketing efforts demonstrated how "listening" paid off. How by better understanding their customers they were able to rebuild, rejuvenate and reinvigorate their brands and their company’s organic growth efforts. Becky Saeger, Charles Schwab's CMO, focused the Schwab brand on being approachable, trustworthy, and consumer centric. These are critical aspects the Schwab Company had walked away from and the industry had abandoned. Then to me the brilliant part, was the way Schwab communicated their brand reinvention message in terms I could understand, the way I would talk. Again they listened to their consumers and talked to them as if they were friends, not clients. What a concept.

Open Post to All Marketers -- Why Blogging Matters

Sorry about my tardiness on the open post; I was vacationing for my first anniversary (legitimate excuse).

Below is the brain child of Eric Kintz over at HP -- a group perspective from some bloggers on why the blogosphere matters for marketers . Without further ado...

Introduction

Technology has enabled customers to dramatically change their attitude towards marketing. As a result, they are tuning out in increasing numbers and talking back. Customers are shifting massively their entertainment and information consumption away from traditional media to the new web space.

Marketers are responding by shifting their advertising to web properties, but online advertising is struggling to gain trust. According to a recent Forrester survey of US households, only 6% trust search engine ads and 2% online banner ads. Customers trust themselves and each other in influencing their perception of a brand. Yet few marketers have embraced blogging, although it supposedly enables a more personal and two-way interaction with the brand.

So does blogging matter? All of us are senior marketing executives in established corporations but we also share a common passion for blogging. At the initiation of Eric Kintz at Hewlett-Packard (www.hp.com/blogs/kintz), we decided to all get together to share our thoughts about the opportunities and challenges of this new marketing frontier.

Join the conversation.

David Armano - Creative VP - Digitas – Logic + Emotion(http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/ )

Peter Blackshaw - CMO - Nielsen Buzz Metrics – Consumer Generated Media(http://notetaker.typepad.com/cgm/ )

David Churbuck - VP Global Web Marketing - Lenovo – Churbuck (http://www.churbuck.com/wordpress/ )

Dan Greenfield - VP Corporate Communications - EarthLink – Bernaisesource (http://bernaisesource.blog.com/ )

Eric Kintz – VP Global Marketing Strategy - Hewlett-Packard – Marketing Excellence (www.hp.com/blogs/kintz)

Will Waugh – Senior Director, Communications - ANA – Marketing Maestros (this one of course )

New Products: Why they Fail

ANA's latest title, New Products: The Next Big Marketing Revolution written by Robert Schulman is now available. This thorugh examination of new product development lays out the scope of the problems in creating successful new products, and more importantly explains the process you need to follow to avoid these pitfalls.

I have included an excerpt which is a checklist on the Top 10 Reasons New Products Fail. Please take a look and pass it around. Thanks for letting me plug our publications business.

CMO Roundtable: What Is the Role of Marketing?

In a recent HBR article, Jeff Immelt, GE CEO said  “marketing at GE was a place where old salesman go to die.”  His purpose for sharing this quote was to demonstrate how far marketing has come as a sophisticate element in driving the organic growth for GE.  Marketing at GE today is one of the three critical factors (taking risks and innovation are the other two) for growing GE at its record pace.

What is the role of marketing?

At ANA’s Annual Masters of Marketing conference, we asked three CMOs (Tom Haas – Siemens, Cie Nicholson – Pepsi, Becky Johnson – Brinker International) this question.  Their answers:

• Tom said marketing is a contributor of growth, a catalyst to get the right people to the table.  Marketing at Siemens has to drive sales, educate people as to what the sales process is and help the sales team deliver the right message to the sales influencers.
• At Pepsi, marketing is a growth driver explained Cie.  Marketing is all about driving consumer pull, innovation, differentiating their products through image and strong brand positioning.
• Becky Johnson (pictured above with Randy Rothenberg) explained that marketing has undergone a transformation at Brinker.  It was part of restaurant operations, but has now moved to being its own entity, responsible for communicating with the restaurant operators what value and difference Chili’s brings to the marketplace.

Marketing is different in each organization.  The key to being a successful CMO is to clearly define how the organization you work for sees marketing.  The three CMOs above have done that and that’s why each has, or will be in their position longer than 24 months.

New beat blogger Burt Helm at the BusinessWeek site Brand New Day shares his thoughts of the Annual Conference:    Day One    Day Two   Day Three

Engagement Is...

I have to defend my colleague Mike Palmer and slap my pal Steve Rubel on the knuckle. I think what we have is a "failure to communicate". Let’s not get caught up in semantics but remember that the past chair of the ANA board, Procter & Gamble Global Marketing Officer Jim Stengel, has talked publicly about how media – and marketers – are changing but measurement has not caught up. That is where the need for an additional metric to eyeballs was born. Call it engagement, call it Project Apollo, call it whatever you want but applaud the industry for looking beyond what exists today and recognizing the need to have a dialogue about the future.

And as you heard loud and clear last week at the ANA Masters of Marketing Annual Conference, marketers were saying that they are "letting go" and engaging in a dialogue with their consumers. It is no longer the marketer telling the consumer "you will buy our product and this is why". Instead, marketers are now talking with consumers since technology and new media allow us to do so. But since our CFOs and CEOs demand accountable metrics, we need to be able to respond to that request. The engagement metric work going on in partnership with the ANA, the AAAA, the ARF and key advertisers and agencies, is a solid first step.

Great read over at Open The Dialogue, where they don't agree with Steve or Michael.

A New Way of Thinking: People Versus Consumers

As marketers we think our job is to sell to a specific demographic. The What do we sell, Who do we sell to, and How do we sell them. Jim Stengel, P&G global CMO and past chair of ANA, suggests that marketers need to stop thinking of their customers as segments and start thinking of them as people. To do this, we need to engage with people by talking to them, listening to their needs, then acting on their needs. But act in a way that allows our customers to have control over the interaction, the engagement. We need to be more empathetic, more in touch. And as a number of speakers at our annual Masters of Marketing conference  said, being in touch means giving up control. Engagement is the act of listening, sharing, creating a dialogue. It is not a one way conversation which we control.

People versus consumers. What an insightful change in the way we act, think, manage, market. The benefits will be enormous. People are personalities with wants and needs, desires and hopes, dreams and visions. You interact and engage people; customers are profit targets for which we have to affect a behavioral change. For some this may be a subtle change, but it is one I think has the potential to substantially impact how we can engage people and how they will engage with our products and brands.

Rubel You're Wrong: We Should Care About Engagement

Normally lucid and very informative, I think Steve Rubel is this time misinformed. Engagement is about connecting to people. I think Steve understands this because he suggests in the Oct 9th issue of AdAge that "marketers who want to see engagement find the right communities, build programs that empower people to connect, then get out of the way". But in the paragraph just prior to his illusive statement, Steve writes, "As marketers, we shouldn’t care about brand engagement."

On the ANA stage at our annual meeting last weekend, AG Lafley said quite clearly that marketers need to put things into the consumers’ hands, then let go. Engagement comes from the letting go part. What marketers should care about is learning how to engage. We marketers have been control freaks for too many years. We need to let go, because only then will the consumer engage in our brand, in the community our brand can create, and with each other with our brand at the center.

Engagement is a great moniker for marketers. They need to learn to invite, welcome, encourage, open up their brands by letting go and allowing their consumers to engage in the way the consumer wants. Then measure how they’re doing so they can do more of the good stuff, and less of the ineffective stuff.

So marketers, listen to Steve when he says ".. to see engagement, find the right communities, build the right programs, then get out of the way." This is the sage advice we expect from Steve.

Also: View some videos and read more on the subject at Engagement by Engagement.

Annual Conference Highlights

Thanks to the contributing bloggers for their Annual Conference penmanship and another first time for the ANA -- member bloggers. We also had a social network, some nice video stream from our partners at AdAge and Brandweek (courtesy of DragonFly), and a host of other contributions, listed here as of this post:

A special thanks to our bloggers (The New Maestros), who for one, made outstanding contributions and added valuable insight (as well as made my job easier):

Amber Alexander, Charles Schwab

• Linda Kaplan Thaler
• Jim McDowell, MINI USA
• Lawrence Flanagan, MasterCard USA
• Ken Romanzi, Ocean Spray and Fran Kelly, Arnold Worldwide

Alex Gerson, NFL

• Stephen Quinn, Wal-Mart
• Russ Klein, Burger King
• Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo!
• Lisa Baird, NFL and Bob Baird, Philips DAP

Manish Shrivastava, The Home Depot

• A.G. Lafley, The Proctor & Gamble Company
• Becky Saeger, Charles Schwab
• Sony's Mike Fasulo and Chris Fawcett, Sony Electronics and Brad Brinegar, McKinney
• HP's Gary Elliott
• Time Inc.'s Ann Moore

Thanks also to Max at AttentionMax  and Steve at Micropersuasion for their coverage.

Advertising Age has a comprehensive report on the featured speakers and Brandweek discusses A.G. Lafley's remarks. Stuart Elliott over at the New York Times (sub required) also reviews the outcome of our top event as well as a whimsical look at some highlights (Marketing Maestros is mentioned!). MediaPost also rings in here with several looks at themes and speaker outlooks.