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AS SEEN IN SALES AND SERVICE EXCELLENCE
What You Can Do: This Will Improve Performance
By Kevin Clancy and Peter Krieg, March 2008
Now is a good time to reflect on the past and think about the future. But if you've been in marketing for some time, taking stock could quickly put you in a gloomy mood. The tenure of top marketers remains low; marketers are under the gun to improve performance; and the effectiveness of marketing is disappointing—and getting worse.
Seasoned marketers are looking ahead full of the same anxiety and dread they had last year when programs weren’t working, brands were suffering, and CEOs were taking notice of the failures. Instead of popping an Alka-Seltzer, we have an alternative prescription to relieve marketing performance anxiety.
Here are the top 10 things marketers can do this year to dramatically help themselves, their brands, and marketing performance.
10. Find out which non-traditional media should become a tradition.
9. Stop hating the sales guys.
8. Don’t get hooked on a feeling. Marketers will miss significant opportunities to breakthrough if they eliminate tangible brand positioning possibilities from consideration out of hand.
7. Lose the fear of numbers. Use a check-list of basic requirements for unimpeachable data and thoughtful, relevant, business-oriented analysis and embrace the research, data, information, and insights that can enable you to better respond, adapt, sell, and deliver their stuff.
6. Treat implementation as a priority—not as an after-thought. Poor implementation of a strategy is as much responsible--if not more so--for poor marketing performance as questionable strategy.
5. Stop promoting your brands to death and start building them. In spite of all the millions—billions, if you think about it globally—companies spend each year on "branding" efforts, far more brands are being transformed into commodities than commodities into brands.
4. Chant the mantra, “100 percent customer satisfaction is unprofitable.”
Don’t get caught up in the 100 percent figure to improve marketing performance—spend your money where it matters most that gets you the most back in terms of the bottom-line.
3. Start buying media by hearts and minds, not numbers. In 2008, marketers need to get serious about tracking ad response by level of engagement to establish exactly what the added investment that will likely be required to secure ad time in a highly engaging program, magazine, radio show, website, billboard, etc., will return to them.
2. Walk a mile in your customers’ shoes. Ask companies whether they are customer-centric, and 97 percent of them will say, “Absolutely yes! Everything we do revolves around our customer.” In practice, however, it’s a rare case. Get to know what makes your customers tick, what problems they have, and let insights about them drive your decisions.
1. Market to those who love you—or at least think you’re pretty swell.
If you can’t get to anything else in 2008, make the time to find a profitable target.
Decide that 2008 will be the year you turn the prevailing conventional wisdom that you lead a function of secondary importance on its ear. Take the time to focus on your most profitable customers and prospects, address their biggest problems and most stirring motivations, and execute this strategy in bold, audacious, integrated marketing programs that changes career paths, brand trajectories, and maybe even your entire company.