The amount of money invested in shopper marketing is nothing to sneeze at.

In many consumer companies, shopper marketing consistently beats out digital for “fastest growing area of marketing spending” honors and, according to Booz & Co, manufacturer spending on shopper marketing has just about doubled-over the past five years.

Currently, it totals $35 billion with anticipated annual growth of 15%.

We’ve got to believe shopper marketers are on high alert as far as finding high quality, reliable, and helpful data and analysis that can inform critical marketing decisions goes.

Interestingly, however, when Shopper Marketing Magazine recently asked shopper marketers at leading consumer companies how they distinguish “good” insights from the not-so-much, there wasn’t a standard definition of “good” or similar means companies were using to filter out the precious gems of information from the chaff.

To bring some futher clarity to this issue, we developed the following 10 questions marketers can ask to evaluate the shopper insights they use to guide their strategies and plans:

1. Can we identify the most profitable group(s) of shoppers to target for our brand?
2. What do we know about the path to purchase for our target shoppers?
3. How does the target shop in our category?
4. What are the key branded touchpoints and their impact on consideration/purchase?
5. Can we tell at which points our target is most receptive to our brand?
6. What about the critical forms of communication and key messages at each stage?
7. Do our insights enrich our understanding of specific shopping occasions at our different retail partners and channels?
8. How does this help our sales force and account-specific planning?
9. Can we identify the most valuable users of our website and/or other company-owned points of distribution?
10. Do they help us integrate with the overall brand strategy and are they actionable across our business teams?

For more on tools and methods to use to ensure shopper insights to answer these questions and more, download our new white paper The 7th Habit of Highly Effective Marketers.

A belated happy 2012 to our readers!

What better way to ring in the new year than with another review of advice for 2012, this time courtesy of AdAge’s legendary ad critic Bob Garfield and co-author Doug Levy.

“Stop living in the past,” wrote Bob and Doug in the opening lines of their New Year’s Day piece, “Ignore the Human Element of Marketing at Your Own Peril,” for what they call the “Consumer Era” is ending.

“Welcome to the Relationship Era.”

“Say goodbye to positioning, preemption and unique selling proposition. This is about turning everything you understood about marketing upside down so that you can land right side up. This is about tapping into the Human Element.”

“The Human Element,” they continued, “is greater than positioning, unique selling propositions and segmentations.” In this new era, companies that focus on the relationships they have with customers and various other stakeholders rather than on hitting the numbers will prosper.

To be honest, we’re not entirely clear why they believe positioning, unique selling propositions, and segmentations are incongruous with cultivating a full, engaging, and mutually beneficial relationship with customers—or anyone else for that matter.

While making their case, Bob and Doug offered the results of some research Doug did among consumers plotted on a two-dimensional map. On the “Y” axis, they charted “trust” and along the “x” axis”, “transactions.”

In the upper right quadrant, we see brands with high trust and high transactions—names like Apple, Toyota, USAA, Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Costco, and Target. In the lower left quadrant, we find brands with low trust and low transactions, and names like Sears, KFC, Motorola, and American Airlines.

A case could be made that Bob and Doug’s map reflects that strong brand equity—an overall assessment of the “good will” associated with a brand—is really what’s in the upper right quadrant. Previous brand equity work has consistently shown that some brands have more equity than market share and others have more share than equity, as we see in the map in the article.

A key finding from some of our work with the concept of brand equity is that “brand distinctiveness” (read, superiority) and “perceived quality” are often, albeit not always, the strongest determinants of overall brand equity. To convince consumers that its brand is uniquely better than a competitor, a firm MUST consistently demonstrate it offers something meaningfully different and effectively communicate that point of difference through words and deeds.

One could also pretty easily argue that the brands that score high on the “trust” dimension have a strong positioning, at the heart of which is solving their target customer’s problems with an exceptional product and service.

The brands that score low on their “trust” dimension, on the other hand, such as AT&T, American Airlines, KFC, and Sears, have NO discernible positioning. They haven’t done an exceptional job of delivering anything particularly distinctive or meaningful. Who knows what they stand for?

Rather than say “good bye” to positioning as Bob and Doug suggest, saying “hello” would seem to make a whole lot more sense.

We noticed in his response to a reader’s comments, Doug further expounded that, “Bob and I see marketing shifting from the Consumer Era (where marketing is about getting to know the consumer so you can reach them optimally, a process that lacks authenticity) to the Relationship Era (where marketing starts with self-assessment, so the marketer knows their true self and communicates with authenticity).”

Certainly, there’s no reason not to do a self-assessment to determine your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Most marketers do this routinely. If nothing else, it’ll help you determine the potential feasibility of delivering on a particular positioning.

At the same time, what’s so inauthentic about asking a target customer about what problem they’d love your brand to solve and how best to communicate the solution to them?

If you want your brand to have some substance and stand for something meaningful, you need to find out what would be helpful and motivating to your target, no?

Our takeaway from Bob and Doug’s article: yes, it’s true that most companies can ill-afford to consistently abuse the relationships they have with their customers and other stakeholders. To make decisions based purely on grabbing market share or revenues at the expense of brand equity does little to foster longer-term profitability and growth.

We dare say most marketers know that.

You’ve still got to build that brand equity in the first place, though. And you can’t do that without a strong positioning and its correlates preemption and a unique selling proposition.

Of all the gift items on your favorite marketer’s holiday list, there’s at least one thing not running in short-supply: year-end advice about key areas of focus for 2012.

Even better—most of it is free.

We’re always interested to read about what different organizations and gurus advise for the year ahead and thought we’d offer up a running list of our key take-aways and reactions to the suggestions they offer.

First up, Forrester Research’s urgence on AdAge.com for CMOs to start “conducting the marketing machine like a finely-tuned orchestra.”

Based on data collected from a little over 50 self-described marketing leaders, Forrester identified four areas on which CMOs need to focus if they want to become expert maestros. Yet we thought one of them really got to the heart of the matter—“establishing a unified view of the customer.”

Certainly we’ve heard marketers talk about “increasing integration” and “improving effectiveness and efficiency” more and more as over-arching objectives for their 2012 plans and programs. With that in mind, Forrester’s advice to get everyone in the marketing organization—and beyond—on the same page as far as who to target and how to reach them makes some really good sense.

In fact, we might go so far as to say if you establish a unified view of the target customer, you could accomplish all the other things on Forrester’s list of must-dos: “stressing customer-centricity;” “synchronizing resources to customer needs;” “differentiating the brand experience.”

The challenges of creating this unified view are not as insurmountable as it might seem if marketers can:

1. Get senior management executives as well as managers from different functional areas—product management, brand management, media, public relations, sales, research and development, operations, and more—into a room and figure out what they need to know about target customers and how they intend to use that information BEFORE collecting new or sifting through existing customer insights.

2. Use that information to guide the development of a market segmentation that describes each group in terms that different functional areas can use to guide decision-making.

3. Select a segmentation that’s easily applied across functional areas and clearly indicates the group or groups that have the highest economic value to the business as a whole.

We’ve encountered many companies over the years that had multiple market segmentations running simultaneously. One financial services firm, for example, asked us for help trying to figure out which one of the 11 different segmentation schemes it had would be the “best” in terms of giving it clear guidance across a spectrum of decision-areas and sales and marketing issues.

In and of themselves, all the different schemes had some good points.

Senior management at the company, for instance, had used a demographic-based segmentation. It could easily find demographic groups in databases, not to mention the marketing and sales organization readily comprehended the demographic-based distinctions between the groups.

Yet even senior management had to admit the demographic groups didn’t differ on the company’s internal measure of economic value—they all looked about the same. Prioritizing marketing investments and R&D efforts when all groups were equally valuable proved an exercise in frustration.

Demographics also didn’t help when it came to giving the firm’s ad agency messaging direction either. As a result, the agency came up with groups based on attitudes instead, and used them to develop a campaign.

Unfortunately, attitudes proved no better than demographics at predicting responsiveness to new product offerings—i.e., not particularly well. The sales team couldn’t really use attitudes to qualify a prospect and tailor a product and service offering that appealed to their specific needs either.

The roots of a disjointed view of the customer often begin innocently enough. In this particular case and in many others, the managers of the different functional areas all want to better understand and market/sell to customers. Especially these days when every budget is tight, who wouldn’t?

Understandably, each department has different information and applicability needs. Unless it’s developed with all end-users in mind, a segmentation will not offer something everyone can use easily and productively to make the most sound, effective, and efficient decisions. The key to “establishing a unified view of the customer,” is, therefore, addressing this kind of situation head on.

Six years ago, with beer sales slumping and wine and spirits consumption on the rise, beer industry executives acknowledged that they’d done themselves in with too many years of ridiculous advertising.

“People will tell you that beer is not sophisticated enough, or stylish enough, to compete with wine and spirits,” Tom Long, Miller’s then chief marketing officer, told the Wall Street Journal at the time.

“Why do they think that? Well, I believe it’s because we told them to.”

It was a fair statement to be sure.

By way of a quick trip down memory lane, after a string of strange and meaningless advertising campaigns, in 2003, Miller boldly acknowledged its brand meant little to consumers and vowed to change things. Strangely, instead of harking back to its history as “the champagne of beers,” or developing a new reason for being, it launched a campaign centered around poking fun of Budweiser.

Bud decided to respond with a spot that referred to Miller as “the queen of carbs” and pointed to Miller’s South African ownership. It went on for at least a year and got quite nasty.

It wasn’t as if the advertising for the big beer brands had been much better before the Miller-Bud brouhaha.

We’d seen the likes of Coors Light’s “Boxing for Boobs” promotion—where women spar to win a boob job—and “Twins” ad campaign.

We’d witnessed Miller Lite’s “Catfight” ad spot, which the company described as “a hysterical insight into guys’ mentality. It’s really a lighthearted spoof of guys’ fantasies,” about women mud-wrestling each other.

We’d also sat through Bud’s infamous flatulent horse and puppy-biting-a-man’s-particulars commercials during and after the Super Bowl.

In other words, the big American beer brands had a pretty well-entrenched marketing approach, what many in the advertising industry referred to as “appeals to the lowest common denominator.”

Now many rightly pointed out at the time that there wasn’t any specific evidence that any of these advertising campaigns had negatively or permanently damaged the beer industry. Likewise, no one could definitively say these commericals specifically caused the decline in sales.

At the same time, it’s hard to believe they were exactly helping the big beer brands fight off encroaching competition from wine, spirits, and smaller regional craft beers whose popularity was on the rise.

To quote the beerscribe.com, “As very little advertising focused on the flavor of the products, such points of differentiation were lost on consumers. The importance of hops and malts was replaced with a relentless series of similar ads in poor taste, each selling an interchangeable widget of a product.”

All the more reason for the industry to do something about it.

At the time, Mr. Long said Miller for one was going to take action. “We’ve marketed our way into this problem. And we can market ourselves out of it.”

Old habits must have proven quite hard to break.

According to AdAge’s E.J. Shultz, as reported in Beer Industry Looks to Rebuild ‘Brand Beer’, as of late last week not too much has changed in the intervening years.

“Stuck in a multi-year slump that shows no sign of lifting…one top executive is bluntly suggesting that the industry itself is the problem for failing to out-market the spirits category.” That “top executive” is none other than Mr. Long, today the CEO of Miller, who has once again has pointed to the industry’s tendency to go for the joke rather than a meaningful point of difference in advertising.

As in 2005, he’s got a lot of folks agreeing with him. According to AdAge, “Distributors interviewed at random at [the National Beer Wholesalers Association] conference seemed particularly frustrated about what they are seeing on the airwaves, with some complaining about image ads that seem to have nothing to do with the product and others saying joke-filled ads don’t seem to be resonating.”

Frank Politano, VP of sales and marketing for Kohler Distributing Co., the largest beer distribution company in its territory, for example, shared his theory with AdAge that “maybe not enough beer commercials are talking about the relevance of the beer and what the beer is about and too many [are] about the joke.” He believes “the consumer is looking [for] more about, ‘What’s my experience? What is the beer about? Why am I drinking it?’”

We’re not sure where the disconnect keeps happening. The industry admits its ads are not motivating. The jokes, bits, and silly gimmicks are more of a mystery than an effective way to communicate what’s unique about Miller, Coors, and Bud. They point to the need for better positioning—giving people a reason to buy big beer brands again.

Yet what ends up on the air? At least in the case of Miller’s recent “Man Up” campaign, it’s just more advertising of the lowest-common-denominator variety.

Now that the industry seems to have come full circle, pledging once again to do things differently, we’re hoping to see some bigger picture strategic thinking about their brands not just another catch-phrase.

Among the many rights Americans often take for granted, the ability to advertise your business in order to build your customer base should top the list for marketers. We spend so much of our time trying to figure out which kind of advertising to use to reach customers, most marketers–us included–forget that even just the chance to have that kind of discussion is not something every businessperson can do.

We were reminded of this often overlooked area of business freedom today on the way into work, listening to a story describing the intent focus Cuban entrepreneurs have on finding compelling ways to differentiate their brands without advertising.

Click here to take a listen to the report by National Public Radio’s Nick Miroff.

“Since Cuba’s communist government loosened its grip on the economy, thousands of small private businesses have sprung up,” Miroff reports. Yet, “advertising is still essentially banned.”

Competition is fierce and the businesses that make it past the first year, according to the story, are the ones that have concentrated on setting their brand apart from the competition.

Whether focusing on a theme, providing an exceptional service, or offering better value, the small businesses mentioned in the story offer a good reminder that it takes a real brand strategy–and not just a big advertising budget–to grow a business.

Why do fewer than 10% of all new products/services produce enough return on the company’s investment to survive past the third year?

Here’s our Top 10 list of reasons new products and services fail to achieve performance objectives:

1. Marketers don’t do a good job of assessing the marketing climate–many factors which impact marketing success are poorly understood; others are ignored all together.

2. All too often marketer’s select a target group based on personal judgement (e.g., “let’s go after the heavy users!”).

3. A messaging strategy which fails to ignite excitement about the new offering.

4. Some marketers actually design a product or service to maximize “appeal,” a sure-fire way to guarantee failure.

5. Marketers go with a pricing strategy which is not based on serious research or sound theory.

6. The advertising campaign generates an insufficient level of new product/new service awareness.

7. The new brand takes more share away from the parent brand than it does from competitors.

8. Over-optimism about the marketing plan leads to a forecast that cannot be sustained in the real world.

9. The marketing plan was not well implemented in the real-world. The gap between what was planned and what was achieved is substantial.

10. Marketers throw in the towel too soon. They pull the new product or service believing it and its marketing plan cannot be revived, when, in fact, there is potential for resurection.

For ideas on improving the ROI of your innovation efforts, take a look at Beyond Luck: Three Steps to Better Innovation ROI.

Yesterday we were on the phone with a frustrated marketing director looking for some help making the case for doing some marketing strategy work on one of her firm’s major brands.

As she described the situation in her division, there was an appallingly low amount of data available about customers and the market in general. She couldn’t even tell us the brand’s market share because no one inside or outside the company kept track of it. She said that when it came time to make decisions about marketing, all anyone could do was make a good guess.

Her situation brought to mind a piece we’d read a couple weeks ago in the New York Times that included the results of research conducted by Erik Brynjolfson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management, Lorin Hitt, a professor at the Wharton School, and Heekyung Kim, a grad student at MIT.

“In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset—the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity,” writes Steve Lohr for the Times. But, “is there any real evidence of a ‘data payoff?’”

According to Mr. Brynjolfson and his colleagues, the answer is yes. “Those that adopted ‘data-driven decision-making’ achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology.”

Based on a survey and follow-up interviews, the study measured the extent to which a company engaged in “data-driven decision making.” The researchers looked at whether a firm collected data, as well as how it was—or wasn’t—used to make decisions, such as whether to develop a new product or service. Explained Mr. Brynjolfson, “the central distinction is between decisions based mainly on ‘data and analysis’ and on the traditional management arts of ‘experience and intuition.’”

Based on these results, along with the surge in software and services to support analysis of vast quantities of data, Mr. Brynjolfson and his colleagues believe the companies that use data as a guide to decision making now are “harbingers of a trend in how managers make decisions.”

Very importantly, this new research “appears to be broader and to apply economic measurement to the impact of data-led decision making in a way not done before.” The results certainly chip away at the mystique of following your gut when it comes to making major business decisions. Which makes us happy. For all the hype and attention, the power of intuition to transform a business from a bit player to an industry leader—to grow sales and profits beyond a board of directors’ wildest dream—is the biggest myth in American business today.

How many times do pure hunches alone lead to legendary success? The answer upon closer inspection: pretty rarely.

Still, we maintain that when it comes to making business decisions, nothing beats a balance of judgment and experience with careful analysis of unimpeachable data. Judgment and experience allow you to see what should be present, but is not. Along that line of thinking, we’d be very interested in finding out if Mr. Brynjolfson and his colleagues could breakout a group of companies from their research that balanced experience with data to see if their productivity gains were higher than companies in the two extremes.

A few years ago, a colleague told us about an incident she had in a marketing class she was taking as part of an MBA program.

Her class was discussing a case on Xerox and the issue of customer satisfaction. Her professor, formerly of the Harvard Business School and McKinsey, asked the class what they thought about the company’s plan to pursue a strategy of 100% customer satisfaction and 100% customer retention to improve performance.

Our colleague bravely answered she thought it was a bad idea. While achieving a higher level of customer satisfaction than competitors would offer an important advantage to Xerox and help performance, she explained, 100% was not a profitable goal—after a certain satisfaction level, to reach 100% offered diminishing returns on investment. Same for 100% retention—why keep unprofitable customers?

The professor laughed out loud at our colleague’s response and, rather condescendingly in her opinion, told the class our colleague was just like “one of the dittering members of the company’s board of directors” who opposed the strategy based on concerns about the link between satisfaction and profitability. According to this professor, Xerox wisely ignored the board and went ahead with the plan.

Today, he said, Xerox is just a few points short of their goal, according to Xerox’s survey of their customers, and is “a model for other companies to follow.”

We found his comments to our colleague particularly difficult to understand given that at the very time he was making them, Xerox was on the verge of bankruptcy. Within months of this particular class, the company had just named a new CEO to turnaround the company and make it profitable again.

Even today, many years after this classroom incident, the professor’s opinions were hardly unique. For over a decade, management consulting firms have continued to preach the virtues of 100% customer satisfaction and retention. The underlying assumption is that all customers are valuable and if we could offer “perfect” service, we can keep them all thus achieving maximum profitability.

Never mind that 100% has proven nearly impossible for the vast majority of companies. Never mind it just doesn’t make financial sense.

Let’s first look at retention. One Mastercard customer makes thousands of dollars of purchases and pays the minimum balance on time each month while another rarely uses the card, but calls ever year to avoid paying the membership fee and at least once a month to demand a lower interest rate. Are both customers of equal value to Mastercard? With limited time and resources, which customer would you tell Mastercard to drop and which to keep?

What about satisfaction? The global norm score for customer satisfaction for any marketer is about 74%, a “C” grade.

Yes, the marketer who improves this grade from a 74% to a 90% or 95% blows away the competition and moves to the head of the class. However, the money and effort required to move from a 95% satisfaction level to the 100% level is often enormous relative to the benefits.

Our research suggests that as customer satisfaction increases, sales and profits increase up to a point. But as the cost of making customers happy moves beyond, say, 92%, the costs associated with increasing levels of satisfaction begin to erode profits.

We should be clear here that we aren’t saying keeping and pleasing customers isn’t critical to success. The questions are who do you want to keep, how far do you take satisfaction, and what will it cost?

Marketers looking to reach the super-influentials in their category may just want to keep blogs at the top of their list of social media tactics, according to the preliminary findings of a first-of-its-kind study released today by Copernicus Marketing Consulting and Research.

An Aegis Media company, Copernicus is a research-driven marketing consulting firm in the business of transforming companies.

Copernicus surveyed a national cross-section of 808 men and women, ages 18 and older, about their blogging behaviors and their personal influence patterns across 21 categories, ranging from products and services such as soft drinks and fast food restaurants to social/cultural topics such as sports and politics. The firm identified five groups that varied in terms of blogging engagement and three groups that differed in personal influence across the categories.

Copernicus discovered that study participants who scored “high” in cross-category personal influence were twice as likely to have posted a comment to a blog they regularly read and/or write their own blog than people who scored “low.”

Though many previous studies demonstrated the wide-spread awareness of blogs and varying levels of participation, no other study done to date has included direct measures of personal influence.

“Many marketers pushed their brands into the blogosphere based on the assumption that bloggers and ‘influentials’ are one-and-the-same person,” explains Kevin Clancy, Ph.D., Chairman of Copernicus. “Now they’ll have some definitive evidence that suggests a relationship between blogging behavior and personal influence across a broad range of categories.”

According to Peter Krieg, President and CEO of Copernicus, most marketers know that in the increasingly important word-of-mouth channel, “the messenger carries more weight than the actual message.” As a result, they regularly seek out “influentials,” also known as the people who tell friends and neighbors what and where to buy and have an impact on an increasing number of purchase decisions.

“And these influentials we’ve found are more engaged with blogs.”

Adds Krieg: “Reaching influentials via blogs—a medium created to disseminate opinions and recommendations—makes it all the easier to share and spread information about your brand.”

While marketers may not reach a sizable portion of the potential market for a product or service directly through blogs, they can still impact their purchase decisions indirectly by getting to the influentials:

• A combined 53% of the study participants who scored “high” in terms of cross-category personal influence also scored “high” in blogging engagement.
• In contrast, 60% of those who scored “low” on cross-category personal influence reported that though they know about blogs, they don’t read them on a regular basis.

Copernicus also found a particularly strong relationship between blogging behavior and personal influence in selected categories. For example, take computers: among those who scored “low” in blogging engagement, only 23% agreed with the statement “I have a lot of opinions about computers and can often persuade other people to accept my point of view.” In contrast, among those who scored “high” on blogging engagement, 59% agreed.

Interacting with those most likely to influence the personal decisions of others in a medium in which they more actively engage can boost the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing efforts, says Clancy.

About the study: The online survey, conducted in May, tabulated the responses of a national cross-section of 808 men and women ages 18 and older. Jennings Consulting Group managed the fieldwork for this study and Tabtec handled data processing and tabulation. Henry Gamse, a Senior Vice President at Copernicus, managed the analytics.

Copernicus evaluated cross-category influence using 63 scales adapted from the academic literature on personal influence. The firm captured measures for 21 different categories including cars, food and beverages, prescription medications, and politics. For each category, respondents were queried about three different indicators of personal influence. Scores were averaged across all categories to derive a metric for cross-category influence.

Things sure aren’t looking too good out there these days. As AdAge.com’s Marissa Miley commented the other day, “In case you weren’t sure, it really is worse than you thought.”

With more than three-quarters of marketers planning to reduce media budgets, according to a recent ANA study, and very likely more cuts on the way, finding ways to make marketing dollars worker harder and better ranks pretty well at the top of to-do lists these days.

If you want to get more from marketing, even with less money to spend, a good place to start is with helping the sales folks sell, not less to fewer customers, but SMARTER to MORE:

1. Tell’ em who to talk to. One of the best things you can do for your bottom line is identify targets for the sales guys.

Now when we say “identify targets” we mean segmenting the market into groups that are distinctly different in terms of their potential profitability for a firm, as well as other characteristics the sales force tells you will help them quickly and easily identify to which group a customer or prospect belongs. Ideally, marketing should be able to tell sales, you should go after buyers in segments A and B because they represent the greatest share of potential profitability. You can ignore segment E and place less emphasis on segments C and D. Taking the time to understand what kind of information they can use to qualify a segment BEFORE you collect an iota of customer data will go a long way towards ensuring sales can and will use what you give them.

1. Give’em good directions. Consider the kind of information in available databases that will help the sales folks get to the people you say they need to get to. Show sales where the folks in segments A and B live and work, for example, along with what they watch, listen to, and read.

2. Tell’em what to say. Depending on the industry, price-sensitive customers may represent as much as 40% or as little as 20% of the total market.

Even in a recession, price may become a more important consideration, but not necessarily the MOST important one. This means that 60% to 80% are not fixated on price and willing to pay at least a little more for a product or service that solves a major problem or addresses an unmet need. With each of the segments, identify needs, problems, pains, and new product/service interests among segments and give sales different scripts to help market the brand, product, or service, and make the most profitable sale.

The end goal here is to make sure sales AVOIDS overselling a Cadillac to customer A when customer A, as you the marketing department has determined, is looking for a Kia. They won’t waste time trying to sell a station wagon to customer B when customer B wants a sports car. Helping sales sell smarter will go along way towards improving marketing performance. And as we said before, these days marketing can use all the help it can get.

If you’re interested in more on the topic of sales and marketing integration, check out our article: 5 Ways Marketers Can Make Friends with Sales

Things sure aren’t looking too good out there these days. As AdAge.com’s Marissa Miley commented the other day, “In case you weren’t sure, it really is worse than you thought.”

With more than three-quarters of marketers planning to reduce media budgets, according to a recent ANA study, and very likely more cuts on the way, finding ways to make marketing dollars worker harder and better ranks pretty well at the top of to-do lists these days.

If you want to get more from marketing, even with less money to spend, a good place to start is with helping the sales folks sell, not less to fewer customers, but SMARTER to MORE:

1. Tell’ em who to talk to. One of the best things you can do for your bottom line is identify targets for the sales guys.

Now when we say “identify targets” we mean segmenting the market into groups that are distinctly different in terms of their potential profitability for a firm, as well as other characteristics the sales force tells you will help them quickly and easily identify to which group a customer or prospect belongs. Ideally, marketing should be able to tell sales, you should go after buyers in segments A and B because they represent the greatest share of potential profitability. You can ignore segment E and place less emphasis on segments C and D. Taking the time to understand what kind of information they can use to qualify a segment BEFORE you collect an iota of customer data will go a long way towards ensuring sales can and will use what you give them.

1. Give’em good directions. Consider the kind of information in available databases that will help the sales folks get to the people you say they need to get to. Show sales where the folks in segments A and B live and work, for example, along with what they watch, listen to, and read.

2. Tell’em what to say. Depending on the industry, price-sensitive customers may represent as much as 40% or as little as 20% of the total market.

Even in a recession, price may become a more important consideration, but not necessarily the MOST important one. This means that 60% to 80% are not fixated on price and willing to pay at least a little more for a product or service that solves a major problem or addresses an unmet need. With each of the segments, identify needs, problems, pains, and new product/service interests among segments and give sales different scripts to help market the brand, product, or service, and make the most profitable sale.

The end goal here is to make sure sales AVOIDS overselling a Cadillac to customer A when customer A, as you the marketing department has determined, is looking for a Kia. They won’t waste time trying to sell a station wagon to customer B when customer B wants a sports car. Helping sales sell smarter will go along way towards improving marketing performance. And as we said before, these days marketing can use all the help it can get.

If you’re interested in more on the topic of sales and marketing integration, check out our article: 5 Ways Marketers Can Make Friends with Sales

Marketers looking to reach the super-influentials in their category may just want to keep blogs at the top of their list of social media tactics, according to the preliminary findings of a first-of-its-kind study released today by Copernicus Marketing Consulting and Research.

An Aegis Media company, Copernicus is a research-driven marketing consulting firm in the business of transforming companies.

Copernicus surveyed a national cross-section of 808 men and women, ages 18 and older, about their blogging behaviors and their personal influence patterns across 21 categories, ranging from products and services such as soft drinks and fast food restaurants to social/cultural topics such as sports and politics. The firm identified five groups that varied in terms of blogging engagement and three groups that differed in personal influence across the categories.

Copernicus discovered that study participants who scored “high” in cross-category personal influence were twice as likely to have posted a comment to a blog they regularly read and/or write their own blog than people who scored “low.”

Though many previous studies demonstrated the wide-spread awareness of blogs and varying levels of participation, no other study done to date has included direct measures of personal influence.

“Many marketers pushed their brands into the blogosphere based on the assumption that bloggers and ‘influentials’ are one-and-the-same person,” explains Kevin Clancy, Ph.D., Chairman of Copernicus. “Now they’ll have some definitive evidence that suggests a relationship between blogging behavior and personal influence across a broad range of categories.”

According to Peter Krieg, President and CEO of Copernicus, most marketers know that in the increasingly important word-of-mouth channel, “the messenger carries more weight than the actual message.” As a result, they regularly seek out “influentials,” also known as the people who tell friends and neighbors what and where to buy and have an impact on an increasing number of purchase decisions.

“And these influentials we’ve found are more engaged with blogs.”

Adds Krieg: “Reaching influentials via blogs—a medium created to disseminate opinions and recommendations—makes it all the easier to share and spread information about your brand.”

While marketers may not reach a sizable portion of the potential market for a product or service directly through blogs, they can still impact their purchase decisions indirectly by getting to the influentials:

• A combined 53% of the study participants who scored “high” in terms of cross-category personal influence also scored “high” in blogging engagement.
• In contrast, 60% of those who scored “low” on cross-category personal influence reported that though they know about blogs, they don’t read them on a regular basis.

Copernicus also found a particularly strong relationship between blogging behavior and personal influence in selected categories. For example, take computers: among those who scored “low” in blogging engagement, only 23% agreed with the statement “I have a lot of opinions about computers and can often persuade other people to accept my point of view.” In contrast, among those who scored “high” on blogging engagement, 59% agreed.

Interacting with those most likely to influence the personal decisions of others in a medium in which they more actively engage can boost the effectiveness of word-of-mouth marketing efforts, says Clancy.

About the study: The online survey, conducted in May, tabulated the responses of a national cross-section of 808 men and women ages 18 and older. Jennings Consulting Group managed the fieldwork for this study and Tabtec handled data processing and tabulation. Henry Gamse, a Senior Vice President at Copernicus, managed the analytics.

Copernicus evaluated cross-category influence using 63 scales adapted from the academic literature on personal influence. The firm captured measures for 21 different categories including cars, food and beverages, prescription medications, and politics. For each category, respondents were queried about three different indicators of personal influence. Scores were averaged across all categories to derive a metric for cross-category influence.

A few years ago, a colleague told us about an incident she had in a marketing class she was taking as part of an MBA program.

Her class was discussing a case on Xerox and the issue of customer satisfaction. Her professor, formerly of the Harvard Business School and McKinsey, asked the class what they thought about the company’s plan to pursue a strategy of 100% customer satisfaction and 100% customer retention to improve performance.

Our colleague bravely answered she thought it was a bad idea. While achieving a higher level of customer satisfaction than competitors would offer an important advantage to Xerox and help performance, she explained, 100% was not a profitable goal—after a certain satisfaction level, to reach 100% offered diminishing returns on investment. Same for 100% retention—why keep unprofitable customers?

The professor laughed out loud at our colleague’s response and, rather condescendingly in her opinion, told the class our colleague was just like “one of the dittering members of the company’s board of directors” who opposed the strategy based on concerns about the link between satisfaction and profitability. According to this professor, Xerox wisely ignored the board and went ahead with the plan.

Today, he said, Xerox is just a few points short of their goal, according to Xerox’s survey of their customers, and is “a model for other companies to follow.”

We found his comments to our colleague particularly difficult to understand given that at the very time he was making them, Xerox was on the verge of bankruptcy. Within months of this particular class, the company had just named a new CEO to turnaround the company and make it profitable again.

Even today, many years after this classroom incident, the professor’s opinions were hardly unique. For over a decade, management consulting firms have continued to preach the virtues of 100% customer satisfaction and retention. The underlying assumption is that all customers are valuable and if we could offer “perfect” service, we can keep them all thus achieving maximum profitability.

Never mind that 100% has proven nearly impossible for the vast majority of companies. Never mind it just doesn’t make financial sense.

Let’s first look at retention. One Mastercard customer makes thousands of dollars of purchases and pays the minimum balance on time each month while another rarely uses the card, but calls ever year to avoid paying the membership fee and at least once a month to demand a lower interest rate. Are both customers of equal value to Mastercard? With limited time and resources, which customer would you tell Mastercard to drop and which to keep?

What about satisfaction? The global norm score for customer satisfaction for any marketer is about 74%, a “C” grade.

Yes, the marketer who improves this grade from a 74% to a 90% or 95% blows away the competition and moves to the head of the class. However, the money and effort required to move from a 95% satisfaction level to the 100% level is often enormous relative to the benefits.

Our research suggests that as customer satisfaction increases, sales and profits increase up to a point. But as the cost of making customers happy moves beyond, say, 92%, the costs associated with increasing levels of satisfaction begin to erode profits.

We should be clear here that we aren’t saying keeping and pleasing customers isn’t critical to success. The questions are who do you want to keep, how far do you take satisfaction, and what will it cost?

Yesterday we were on the phone with a frustrated marketing director looking for some help making the case for doing some marketing strategy work on one of her firm’s major brands.

As she described the situation in her division, there was an appallingly low amount of data available about customers and the market in general. She couldn’t even tell us the brand’s market share because no one inside or outside the company kept track of it. She said that when it came time to make decisions about marketing, all anyone could do was make a good guess.

Her situation brought to mind a piece we’d read a couple weeks ago in the New York Times that included the results of research conducted by Erik Brynjolfson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management, Lorin Hitt, a professor at the Wharton School, and Heekyung Kim, a grad student at MIT.

“In a modern economy, information should be the prime asset—the raw material of new products and services, smarter decisions, competitive advantage for companies, and greater growth and productivity,” writes Steve Lohr for the Times. But, “is there any real evidence of a ‘data payoff?’”

According to Mr. Brynjolfson and his colleagues, the answer is yes. “Those that adopted ‘data-driven decision-making’ achieved productivity that was 5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors, including how much the companies invested in technology.”

Based on a survey and follow-up interviews, the study measured the extent to which a company engaged in “data-driven decision making.” The researchers looked at whether a firm collected data, as well as how it was—or wasn’t—used to make decisions, such as whether to develop a new product or service. Explained Mr. Brynjolfson, “the central distinction is between decisions based mainly on ‘data and analysis’ and on the traditional management arts of ‘experience and intuition.’”

Based on these results, along with the surge in software and services to support analysis of vast quantities of data, Mr. Brynjolfson and his colleagues believe the companies that use data as a guide to decision making now are “harbingers of a trend in how managers make decisions.”

Very importantly, this new research “appears to be broader and to apply economic measurement to the impact of data-led decision making in a way not done before.” The results certainly chip away at the mystique of following your gut when it comes to making major business decisions. Which makes us happy. For all the hype and attention, the power of intuition to transform a business from a bit player to an industry leader—to grow sales and profits beyond a board of directors’ wildest dream—is the biggest myth in American business today.

How many times do pure hunches alone lead to legendary success? The answer upon closer inspection: pretty rarely.

Still, we maintain that when it comes to making business decisions, nothing beats a balance of judgment and experience with careful analysis of unimpeachable data. Judgment and experience allow you to see what should be present, but is not. Along that line of thinking, we’d be very interested in finding out if Mr. Brynjolfson and his colleagues could breakout a group of companies from their research that balanced experience with data to see if their productivity gains were higher than companies in the two extremes.

Why do fewer than 10% of all new products/services produce enough return on the company’s investment to survive past the third year?

Here’s our Top 10 list of reasons new products and services fail to achieve performance objectives:

1. Marketers don’t do a good job of assessing the marketing climate–many factors which impact marketing success are poorly understood; others are ignored all together.

2. All too often marketer’s select a target group based on personal judgement (e.g., “let’s go after the heavy users!”).

3. A messaging strategy which fails to ignite excitement about the new offering.

4. Some marketers actually design a product or service to maximize “appeal,” a sure-fire way to guarantee failure.

5. Marketers go with a pricing strategy which is not based on serious research or sound theory.

6. The advertising campaign generates an insufficient level of new product/new service awareness.

7. The new brand takes more share away from the parent brand than it does from competitors.

8. Over-optimism about the marketing plan leads to a forecast that cannot be sustained in the real world.

9. The marketing plan was not well implemented in the real-world. The gap between what was planned and what was achieved is substantial.

10. Marketers throw in the towel too soon. They pull the new product or service believing it and its marketing plan cannot be revived, when, in fact, there is potential for resurection.

For ideas on improving the ROI of your innovation efforts, take a look at Beyond Luck: Three Steps to Better Innovation ROI.

Among the many rights Americans often take for granted, the ability to advertise your business in order to build your customer base should top the list for marketers. We spend so much of our time trying to figure out which kind of advertising to use to reach customers, most marketers–us included–forget that even just the chance to have that kind of discussion is not something every businessperson can do.

We were reminded of this often overlooked area of business freedom today on the way into work, listening to a story describing the intent focus Cuban entrepreneurs have on finding compelling ways to differentiate their brands without advertising.

Click here to take a listen to the report by National Public Radio’s Nick Miroff.

“Since Cuba’s communist government loosened its grip on the economy, thousands of small private businesses have sprung up,” Miroff reports. Yet, “advertising is still essentially banned.”

Competition is fierce and the businesses that make it past the first year, according to the story, are the ones that have concentrated on setting their brand apart from the competition.

Whether focusing on a theme, providing an exceptional service, or offering better value, the small businesses mentioned in the story offer a good reminder that it takes a real brand strategy–and not just a big advertising budget–to grow a business.

Six years ago, with beer sales slumping and wine and spirits consumption on the rise, beer industry executives acknowledged that they’d done themselves in with too many years of ridiculous advertising.

“People will tell you that beer is not sophisticated enough, or stylish enough, to compete with wine and spirits,” Tom Long, Miller’s then chief marketing officer, told the Wall Street Journal at the time.

“Why do they think that? Well, I believe it’s because we told them to.”

It was a fair statement to be sure.

By way of a quick trip down memory lane, after a string of strange and meaningless advertising campaigns, in 2003, Miller boldly acknowledged its brand meant little to consumers and vowed to change things. Strangely, instead of harking back to its history as “the champagne of beers,” or developing a new reason for being, it launched a campaign centered around poking fun of Budweiser.

Bud decided to respond with a spot that referred to Miller as “the queen of carbs” and pointed to Miller’s South African ownership. It went on for at least a year and got quite nasty.

It wasn’t as if the advertising for the big beer brands had been much better before the Miller-Bud brouhaha.

We’d seen the likes of Coors Light’s “Boxing for Boobs” promotion—where women spar to win a boob job—and “Twins” ad campaign.

We’d witnessed Miller Lite’s “Catfight” ad spot, which the company described as “a hysterical insight into guys’ mentality. It’s really a lighthearted spoof of guys’ fantasies,” about women mud-wrestling each other.

We’d also sat through Bud’s infamous flatulent horse and puppy-biting-a-man’s-particulars commercials during and after the Super Bowl.

In other words, the big American beer brands had a pretty well-entrenched marketing approach, what many in the advertising industry referred to as “appeals to the lowest common denominator.”

Now many rightly pointed out at the time that there wasn’t any specific evidence that any of these advertising campaigns had negatively or permanently damaged the beer industry. Likewise, no one could definitively say these commericals specifically caused the decline in sales.

At the same time, it’s hard to believe they were exactly helping the big beer brands fight off encroaching competition from wine, spirits, and smaller regional craft beers whose popularity was on the rise.

To quote the beerscribe.com, “As very little advertising focused on the flavor of the products, such points of differentiation were lost on consumers. The importance of hops and malts was replaced with a relentless series of similar ads in poor taste, each selling an interchangeable widget of a product.”

All the more reason for the industry to do something about it.

At the time, Mr. Long said Miller for one was going to take action. “We’ve marketed our way into this problem. And we can market ourselves out of it.”

Old habits must have proven quite hard to break.

According to AdAge’s E.J. Shultz, as reported in Beer Industry Looks to Rebuild ‘Brand Beer’, as of late last week not too much has changed in the intervening years.

“Stuck in a multi-year slump that shows no sign of lifting…one top executive is bluntly suggesting that the industry itself is the problem for failing to out-market the spirits category.” That “top executive” is none other than Mr. Long, today the CEO of Miller, who has once again has pointed to the industry’s tendency to go for the joke rather than a meaningful point of difference in advertising.

As in 2005, he’s got a lot of folks agreeing with him. According to AdAge, “Distributors interviewed at random at [the National Beer Wholesalers Association] conference seemed particularly frustrated about what they are seeing on the airwaves, with some complaining about image ads that seem to have nothing to do with the product and others saying joke-filled ads don’t seem to be resonating.”

Frank Politano, VP of sales and marketing for Kohler Distributing Co., the largest beer distribution company in its territory, for example, shared his theory with AdAge that “maybe not enough beer commercials are talking about the relevance of the beer and what the beer is about and too many [are] about the joke.” He believes “the consumer is looking [for] more about, ‘What’s my experience? What is the beer about? Why am I drinking it?’”

We’re not sure where the disconnect keeps happening. The industry admits its ads are not motivating. The jokes, bits, and silly gimmicks are more of a mystery than an effective way to communicate what’s unique about Miller, Coors, and Bud. They point to the need for better positioning—giving people a reason to buy big beer brands again.

Yet what ends up on the air? At least in the case of Miller’s recent “Man Up” campaign, it’s just more advertising of the lowest-common-denominator variety.

Now that the industry seems to have come full circle, pledging once again to do things differently, we’re hoping to see some bigger picture strategic thinking about their brands not just another catch-phrase.

Of all the gift items on your favorite marketer’s holiday list, there’s at least one thing not running in short-supply: year-end advice about key areas of focus for 2012.

Even better—most of it is free.

We’re always interested to read about what different organizations and gurus advise for the year ahead and thought we’d offer up a running list of our key take-aways and reactions to the suggestions they offer.

First up, Forrester Research’s urgence on AdAge.com for CMOs to start “conducting the marketing machine like a finely-tuned orchestra.”

Based on data collected from a little over 50 self-described marketing leaders, Forrester identified four areas on which CMOs need to focus if they want to become expert maestros. Yet we thought one of them really got to the heart of the matter—“establishing a unified view of the customer.”

Certainly we’ve heard marketers talk about “increasing integration” and “improving effectiveness and efficiency” more and more as over-arching objectives for their 2012 plans and programs. With that in mind, Forrester’s advice to get everyone in the marketing organization—and beyond—on the same page as far as who to target and how to reach them makes some really good sense.

In fact, we might go so far as to say if you establish a unified view of the target customer, you could accomplish all the other things on Forrester’s list of must-dos: “stressing customer-centricity;” “synchronizing resources to customer needs;” “differentiating the brand experience.”

The challenges of creating this unified view are not as insurmountable as it might seem if marketers can:

1. Get senior management executives as well as managers from different functional areas—product management, brand management, media, public relations, sales, research and development, operations, and more—into a room and figure out what they need to know about target customers and how they intend to use that information BEFORE collecting new or sifting through existing customer insights.

2. Use that information to guide the development of a market segmentation that describes each group in terms that different functional areas can use to guide decision-making.

3. Select a segmentation that’s easily applied across functional areas and clearly indicates the group or groups that have the highest economic value to the business as a whole.

We’ve encountered many companies over the years that had multiple market segmentations running simultaneously. One financial services firm, for example, asked us for help trying to figure out which one of the 11 different segmentation schemes it had would be the “best” in terms of giving it clear guidance across a spectrum of decision-areas and sales and marketing issues.

In and of themselves, all the different schemes had some good points.

Senior management at the company, for instance, had used a demographic-based segmentation. It could easily find demographic groups in databases, not to mention the marketing and sales organization readily comprehended the demographic-based distinctions between the groups.

Yet even senior management had to admit the demographic groups didn’t differ on the company’s internal measure of economic value—they all looked about the same. Prioritizing marketing investments and R&D efforts when all groups were equally valuable proved an exercise in frustration.

Demographics also didn’t help when it came to giving the firm’s ad agency messaging direction either. As a result, the agency came up with groups based on attitudes instead, and used them to develop a campaign.

Unfortunately, attitudes proved no better than demographics at predicting responsiveness to new product offerings—i.e., not particularly well. The sales team couldn’t really use attitudes to qualify a prospect and tailor a product and service offering that appealed to their specific needs either.

The roots of a disjointed view of the customer often begin innocently enough. In this particular case and in many others, the managers of the different functional areas all want to better understand and market/sell to customers. Especially these days when every budget is tight, who wouldn’t?

Understandably, each department has different information and applicability needs. Unless it’s developed with all end-users in mind, a segmentation will not offer something everyone can use easily and productively to make the most sound, effective, and efficient decisions. The key to “establishing a unified view of the customer,” is, therefore, addressing this kind of situation head on.

A belated happy 2012 to our readers!

What better way to ring in the new year than with another review of advice for 2012, this time courtesy of AdAge’s legendary ad critic Bob Garfield and co-author Doug Levy.

“Stop living in the past,” wrote Bob and Doug in the opening lines of their New Year’s Day piece, “Ignore the Human Element of Marketing at Your Own Peril,” for what they call the “Consumer Era” is ending.

“Welcome to the Relationship Era.”

“Say goodbye to positioning, preemption and unique selling proposition. This is about turning everything you understood about marketing upside down so that you can land right side up. This is about tapping into the Human Element.”

“The Human Element,” they continued, “is greater than positioning, unique selling propositions and segmentations.” In this new era, companies that focus on the relationships they have with customers and various other stakeholders rather than on hitting the numbers will prosper.

To be honest, we’re not entirely clear why they believe positioning, unique selling propositions, and segmentations are incongruous with cultivating a full, engaging, and mutually beneficial relationship with customers—or anyone else for that matter.

While making their case, Bob and Doug offered the results of some research Doug did among consumers plotted on a two-dimensional map. On the “Y” axis, they charted “trust” and along the “x” axis”, “transactions.”

In the upper right quadrant, we see brands with high trust and high transactions—names like Apple, Toyota, USAA, Amazon, Southwest Airlines, Costco, and Target. In the lower left quadrant, we find brands with low trust and low transactions, and names like Sears, KFC, Motorola, and American Airlines.

A case could be made that Bob and Doug’s map reflects that strong brand equity—an overall assessment of the “good will” associated with a brand—is really what’s in the upper right quadrant. Previous brand equity work has consistently shown that some brands have more equity than market share and others have more share than equity, as we see in the map in the article.

A key finding from some of our work with the concept of brand equity is that “brand distinctiveness” (read, superiority) and “perceived quality” are often, albeit not always, the strongest determinants of overall brand equity. To convince consumers that its brand is uniquely better than a competitor, a firm MUST consistently demonstrate it offers something meaningfully different and effectively communicate that point of difference through words and deeds.

One could also pretty easily argue that the brands that score high on the “trust” dimension have a strong positioning, at the heart of which is solving their target customer’s problems with an exceptional product and service.

The brands that score low on their “trust” dimension, on the other hand, such as AT&T, American Airlines, KFC, and Sears, have NO discernible positioning. They haven’t done an exceptional job of delivering anything particularly distinctive or meaningful. Who knows what they stand for?

Rather than say “good bye” to positioning as Bob and Doug suggest, saying “hello” would seem to make a whole lot more sense.

We noticed in his response to a reader’s comments, Doug further expounded that, “Bob and I see marketing shifting from the Consumer Era (where marketing is about getting to know the consumer so you can reach them optimally, a process that lacks authenticity) to the Relationship Era (where marketing starts with self-assessment, so the marketer knows their true self and communicates with authenticity).”

Certainly, there’s no reason not to do a self-assessment to determine your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Most marketers do this routinely. If nothing else, it’ll help you determine the potential feasibility of delivering on a particular positioning.

At the same time, what’s so inauthentic about asking a target customer about what problem they’d love your brand to solve and how best to communicate the solution to them?

If you want your brand to have some substance and stand for something meaningful, you need to find out what would be helpful and motivating to your target, no?

Our takeaway from Bob and Doug’s article: yes, it’s true that most companies can ill-afford to consistently abuse the relationships they have with their customers and other stakeholders. To make decisions based purely on grabbing market share or revenues at the expense of brand equity does little to foster longer-term profitability and growth.

We dare say most marketers know that.

You’ve still got to build that brand equity in the first place, though. And you can’t do that without a strong positioning and its correlates preemption and a unique selling proposition.

The amount of money invested in shopper marketing is nothing to sneeze at.

In many consumer companies, shopper marketing consistently beats out digital for “fastest growing area of marketing spending” honors and, according to Booz & Co, manufacturer spending on shopper marketing has just about doubled-over the past five years.

Currently, it totals $35 billion with anticipated annual growth of 15%.

We’ve got to believe shopper marketers are on high alert as far as finding high quality, reliable, and helpful data and analysis that can inform critical marketing decisions goes.

Interestingly, however, when Shopper Marketing Magazine recently asked shopper marketers at leading consumer companies how they distinguish “good” insights from the not-so-much, there wasn’t a standard definition of “good” or similar means companies were using to filter out the precious gems of information from the chaff.

To bring some futher clarity to this issue, we developed the following 10 questions marketers can ask to evaluate the shopper insights they use to guide their strategies and plans:

1. Can we identify the most profitable group(s) of shoppers to target for our brand?
2. What do we know about the path to purchase for our target shoppers?
3. How does the target shop in our category?
4. What are the key branded touchpoints and their impact on consideration/purchase?
5. Can we tell at which points our target is most receptive to our brand?
6. What about the critical forms of communication and key messages at each stage?
7. Do our insights enrich our understanding of specific shopping occasions at our different retail partners and channels?
8. How does this help our sales force and account-specific planning?
9. Can we identify the most valuable users of our website and/or other company-owned points of distribution?
10. Do they help us integrate with the overall brand strategy and are they actionable across our business teams?

For more on tools and methods to use to ensure shopper insights to answer these questions and more, download our new white paper The 7th Habit of Highly Effective Marketers.