ANA Marketing Maestros

Recession: Glimmer of Hope?

As a follow-up to my blog, "Is an economic recovery near?" I would like to share with you are new video snippets from the 2009 ANA Building in Tough Times Brand Conference where heavy-weight executives from Dunkin' Donuts, MillerCoors and Wal-Mart shared their insights and best practices in regards to overcoming tough economic times.

Thank you to AdAge for these valuable video highlights. If you have any best practices on coping with the recession, please share in our comments section on this blog, YouTube page, or email me at [email protected]. I'd love to hear from you!

The Psychological Boost of Coffee Marketing

Turning Beer Temperature Into Marketing Gold

Partnerships, Not Brand Renovation, Best Growth Strategy

Garfield's Chaos Scenario

By Will Waugh

I like Bob Garfield. I have followed his writing and reviews for some time. I know his criticisms have hit a lot of nerves (including many of our members) but his insight on the future of marketing are extraordinary and, in many cases, spot on. I did ask him about the future of associations like ours and he was bullish on our role in marketing's evolution. Would he tell me otherwise at our event? Probably not but he is pretty straightforward.

I can't embed the video that Advertising Age is hosting but here is the link of Garfield speaking at our TV Forum a few weeks back. He hasn't posted on his blog Garfield: The Blog in awhile, but the writings are always entertaining and insightful.

Technorati tags: video marketing chaos scenario

Stengel - Communications Specialist in Demand

By Will Waugh

We recently interviewed Jim Stengel, P&G's Global Marketing Officer, for an upcoming publication we have coming out tentatively titled Marketing Thought Leaders: Conquering the Growth Frontier. When asked for his predictions on specialized positions for the new marketing world, he only gave one - a communications specialist role. I thought the definition for this was interesting so I thought I'd share it:

It's someone who is a bit of a consumer researcher and a bit of an advertising agency planner type - someone who is an integrated thinker; someone who understands the communications world. And I think someone who also understands the content world. It's a much more complex planning skill -- strategic thinking you might call it.

There you have it. The world's top marketer on what sort of skill sets a new marketer needs to have. I have talked about content as a killer app  as well as the renaissance marketer and how these traits are neccesary components of the evolving marketing world. The challenge, of course, is finding the talented individuals with a varied skill set across this spectrum. 

Technorati tags: stengel marketing communications

What's on the Minds of Senior Marketers?

By Will Waugh

A survey that the ANA released found the top concerns on the minds of senior marketing executives are "integrated marketing communications" and "marketing accountability". The ANA asked over 100 senior marketers to select from a comprehensive list of subjects to rank their top three issues that directly impact their marketing decisions and plans.

Integrated marketing communications (Wikipedia) jumped from the fourth spot in 2006 to the top of the list this year. Marketing accountability, which had topped the list for the previous three annual surveys, slipped to second place.

The ANA will use these findings to help shape the content of its Annual Conference: The Masters of Marketing scheduled to take place October 11 – 14, 2007 in Phoenix, AZ.

The entire selection of questions is below. The top 4 are switched around but remains consistent with what senior marketers and CMOs are telling us. Integrated marketing being number 1 does not surprise me, nor should it anyone else in this space as the marketing landscape continues to transform. The real question for those of us marketers out there is, should we be concerned that "attracting and retaining top talent" is the least of their worries?

Issue	2007	2006
Integrated marketing communications	1	4
Accountability	2	1
Aligning marketing organization with innovation	3	2
Building strong brands	4	3
Media proliferation	5	5
Consumer control over what and how they view advertising	6	8
Globalization of marketing efforts	7	10
Growth of multicultural consumer segments	8	6
Advertising creative that achieves business results	9	9
Attracting and retaining top talent	10	7

Technorati tags: CMOs marketing IMC

Define Your Marketing Organization

By Michael Palmer

With a New Year upon us, what can we do as marketers to make 2007 a better year? Restore and rebuild our credibility.

Sadly marketing and marketers seem themselves as marketing communications professionals. A MarketingProf survey asked marketers what their primary job was – 90%, that’s right 90%, said marketing communications. If marketers continue to think of themselves as communicators and not strategists, the rest of the world is then going to think the same. And the problem with being a marketing communications professional is?

1. You will not be in charge of your own destiny: some one else, either the sales department or your CFO will determine what your budget is not you.
2. You will be looked at as a tactician, not a strategist: marketing should not be about logos, advertising or brand promotions; it should be all about driving revenues and profits.
3. You will constantly be fighting for resources: sales, R&D and production will out trump when money is allocated because you will be thought of as a support department, not the engine of growth.

Start the year off by first defining the role of marketing in your organization – find out via an audit if need be what your constituents think marketing brings to the table. Do they look at the marketing department as marketing services, or the driver of growth? Once you know that, you can start determining how your going to change and grow the credibility of marketing in your organization. AND if you need help, ask us. ANA has spent the last three years building a model to help marketers "Rejuvenate the Power of Marketing" and we would be delighted to share our insights with you.

Happy New Year.

Technorati tags: marketing organization strategy

New Marketing Professional -- Renaissance Marketer

By Will Waugh

Marketing is changing, we all know that. What is interesting to hear, primarily from our senior marketers and board members, is the sort of talent they are looking for in this environment of continuous reinvention. Companies and brands have already changed the requirements for marketers. They are looking for expansive thinkers and superior problem solvers. The true ‘renaissance marketers’ will be educated in disciplines such as philosophy, behavioral science, applied psychology, history, literary theory, and econometrics (I knew that liberal arts degree would pay off).

I came across some great blogs/stories that play in one way or another into this theme:

• David Armano's brilliant Logic + Emotion, which talks talks about psychology and use of color
• Max introduced me to my new favorite site The New Scientist
• The daddy of all great reading lists from another favorite, Creating Passionate Users
• Rob Field's Marketing Pop Culture looks at how marketing and pop culture has transcended to a level of codependence.

Technorati tags: marketing insights renaissance marketer

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

Why Don't Sales and Marketing Get Along?

First, they compete for the same resource – the money needed to invest behind their initiatives to drive the activity each feels critical to making the numbers.  Sales wants to fund traffic driving promotions while marketing would rather promote brand building efforts that raises the consumer’s value perception and therefore margin.

Second, sales and marketing have a cultural difference.  Sales focuses on individual customers and is therefore willing, almost to an obsession, to build one-off programs, services or products to satisfy a customer’s need.  On the other hand, marketing’s objective is to develop a relevant and compelling positioning that differentiates the brand for a segment of the customer population versus just one customer. So how do you solve this dilemma?

Growth the GE Way

"Before we launched this growth initiative, marketing was the place washed-up salespeople went." Jeff Immelt talking about the organic growth initiative GE has been driving for the past three years and how previously even a sophisticated company like GE looked at marketing. It was a dumping ground for has been sales people. No wonder we don’t get no respect.

Is it all doom and gloom for marketing – Headlines tell us CMOs have shorter tenures today than three years ago, now Jeff Immelt tells us that we are not as valuable as tired sales people?

Do not despair. Jeff Immelt in the same HBR article (pdf on GE website) also said - In a deflationary world you can drive margin through productivity, now you need marketing to get price. There is not only light at the end of this tunnel, there is actually a garden of eden. Marketing it turns out is the driver of organic growth. But to make this happen, marketers must change their thinking. Marketing can no longer be thought of as a creative activity – it must now be viewed as an innovative process. A process that can be systematized to ensure we create a repeatable process that can be spread throughout an organization, driving growth in a number of places. And of course, we have to build the right metrics platform for this process to drive accountability and demonstrate that we are moving in the right direction.

Yes Virginia, marketing is more important than ever. And marketers can have a special place in CEOs' hearts. But they have to earn that place or they’ll be looked at as sales support or worse, washed up salespeople.

How to Be a Better CMO

A recent Brandweek article cited a Spencer Stuart study highlighting the decline of CMO’s tenure. Greg Welch, who heads the marketing officer practice for the executive search firm, said “there are several things behind the turnover rate. First is that CMOs need to do a better job of communicating with all their peers at the C-suite level, making sure everyone understands what marketing can and can’t do for the entire company.”

In our investigation, we’ve discovered that the first and most important step is not helping everybody understand what marketing can do, but building a contract with the CEO as to what he/she expects from marketing.  Writing that contract may mean educating the CEO, but most importantly it means clearly outlining his or her expectations of marketing and at the end of the day, how those expectations will be quantified. 

If the CMO has the impression that he/she is to be a change agent, but that role is not definitely spelled out, the CMO will be quickly surprised to see this tactic come back and bite them, hard.  The role of marketing in each company is different.  It has to be spelled out.  Each party has to know exactly what is expected of the marketing effort the CMO is driving.  Once the CMO establishes credibility, changing the role of marketing is not hard.  But without credibility, trying to execute a change agenda is both difficulty and deadly.  One CMO I recently interviewed said that any new CMO that does anything but listen in the first 90 days of their new job is just asking for problems.  Often the answers are lurking within the company – all the CMO needs to do is to have the skills to ferret them out.

Of course it is critical for CMOs to “do a better job of communicating with all their peers at the C-suite level, making sure everyone understands what marketing can and can’t do for the entire company” – but they can’t do that until they have clearly defined the role of marketing for themselves and the CEO.  Then they’ll be able to clearly share that insight with others within the company.