Burger King's New Ad Campaign: Celebrity Rich, Positioning Poor

We had high hopes a year ago when Burger King ended its 7-year-or-so relationship with ad agency Crispin Porter. Yes, Crispin’s “unconventional” ad work for the burger chain had generated attention over the years. Some high(low)lights:

As Slate’s Seth Stevenson recounted, “there was the exhumation of BK’s old King character—which, in Crispin’s 2004 update, became embodied by a man wearing a creepy plastic mask. The ginger-bearded King would show up in various contexts, look scary, say nothing, and generally propagate disquietude.”
Stevenson also reminded us of the thoroughly unappetizing Subservient Chicken: “this viral sensation involved a giant chicken in black lingerie, practicing ritual submission in front of a webcam in a seedy room.” Ick.
The “Whopper Sacrifice,” which, as recounted by NYTimes’ ad reporter Stuart Elliot, “incurred the wrath of Facebook by offering Facebook users incentives to ‘de-friend’ their friends on the social-networking web site,” was another gem.

All in all though, it wasn’t the kind of attention BK really needed. In an attempt to appeal to the market segment that the agency believed would fuel massive growth—young male “superfans” who are heavy fast-food eaters—the ads almost uniformly managed to offend or otherwise disengage pretty much every other person in America. As a result, BK’s sales plummeted over the years, so much so that it’s no longer the #2 burger chain in the country—Wendy’s overtook it late last year.

With a new agency installed, however, BK seemed to be headed in a more appetizing direction as of the summer of 2011. The new ads, while not exactly differentiating, at least featured juicy red tomatoes, crisp-looking lettuce, and sizzling burgers without any of the weird campiness that had characterized its previous advertising. True, the new “fresh and healthy” tagline was a tad unbelievable—the featured product was none other than the 820-calorie California Whopper—but at least it wasn’t outright offending anyone.

In the intervening time between last summer and now, BK said it did some research among consumers who reportedly told the chain, “We love the Whopper … but you guys have to catch up in some important product categories specifically salads, smoothies and wraps.’” Subsequently, a new campaign launched earlier this week pushes those exact menu items.

As reported in Ad Age, “Burger King will use a host of expensive celebrities, including Jay Leno, David Beckham and Steven Tyler, to push salads, chicken snack wraps, smoothies, frappes and other menu additions in the hope of climbing out of a prolonged slump.”

“The platforms themselves have been out for quite a while,” senior VP-North America Marketing Alex Macedo told Ad Age, referring to the featured menu offerings, and that’s why BK opted to go with celeb endorsers.

As Macedo explained, “The big challenge is how do you really grab people’s attention? And most of all, how do you get them to taste the product? We chose celebrities to get people’s attention faster and to show the diversity that we have with our brand.”

Though the ads claim that “exciting things are happening at Burger King,” the only sense of any real enthusiasm for anything going on at the restaurant comes from the employees in the commercials reacting to the celebs placing an order. Jay Leno makes a quiet passing comment to, “look at that salad,” as the cashier hands it to him and Mary J. Blige belts out a song in homage to the ingredients in the chicken snack wrap, but Jay’s muted reaction is about as revved up as anyone seems to get about the food now that Mary’s ad has been pulled (at least for the moment) due to a “licensing issue.”

More importantly, these less-than-ringing celebrity endorsements supporting a “we’re all caught up” message, don’t exactly reflect a strong, compelling, motivating positioning. Great to establish BK is at least equal in menu options, but there’s no particular reason offered to go out of the way to BK for a smoothie instead of McDonald’s.

BK still has a ways to go.

The Mysteries of Super Bowl Advertising Never Cease

Many years ago, a new trend in the illustrious history of Super Bowl advertising seemed to have emerged: Advertise that your brand was going to advertise during the game.

We observed that brands seemed to be investing increasing time and expense in pre-game promotional efforts with contests, sweepstakes, and digital campaigns full of teasers about a forthcoming Super Bowl ad.

Generally speaking, the big reveal of the commercial wasn’t until game day. Though sometimes leaks occurred, the audience was still compelled to watch the game on TV.

At the time, we wondered, given all investment companies were putting into getting viewers excited about looking for a commercial—not to mention on the air time during the broadcast—why most of the brands that advertised weren’t putting equal emphasis on getting the best dang commercial on-air.

For reasons that still remain unclear to us, the prevailing opinion among many advertisers was that the Super Bowl was not the place to offer any sort of compelling reason-to-buy message.

Just before the 2006 game, for instance, “the ad world’s most experienced and most Super Bowl-savvy advertising executives,” went on record telling the USAToday that companies SHOULD NOT spend $80 grand per second to actually sell anything because, frankly, selling something has become “almost taboo” during the Super Bowl.

“The game is great for bolstering a brand’s image,” explained Nina DiSesa, then the chairman and chief creative officer of McCann-Erickson, “but not to nail the sale.”

Fast-forwarding to 2012, it was hard to say after watching the ads last Sunday that prevailing opinion on actually trying to sell someting has changed much.

Nor has the emphasis on pre-game activities to “leverage” the relationship with the game and generate interest in watching a brand’s Super Bowl ad.

What struck us as strange–and frankly a little mysterious–was what seemed like the relative unimportance of the game’s TV broadcast to many advertisers.

Rather than wait for a big reveal during the game, many companies released their Super Bowl spots online well ahead of time. As Matt Roush commented in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, “The impact of even the better commercials was largely blunted by so many of them being leaked and disseminated online in advance….The internet once again trumped TV on one of TVs bigger nights.”

Many of the commercials themselves were more “calls to action” to forget about watching the game, just go tweet about the commercial or watch the Coke polar bears on your iPad instead.

Pay $3.5 million for the privilege of advertising during the game’s TV broadcast, but discourage viewer involvement with the program. There just seems to be something wrong with this picture.

Like dutiful children who make it all the way until Christmas morning without peaking at their presents, we actually held out until the game’s broadcast to see what advertisers had in store for us.

After so many years of disappointment, we can’t say our expectations were too high–which turned out to be a good thing.

Audi’s spot selling super bright headlights—a feature the brand has inexplicably focused on in its recent advertising in general—had us scratching our heads. Sure, it broke ranks and was actually trying to sell something, but bright headlights?

H&M’s spot showcasing a muscled David Beckham in his skivvies was another strange one. We weren’t exactly clear to whom the ad was targeted. If it was one for the ladies, we might have suggested something other than tighty whities as the product to feature.

Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” spot was a complete mystery. For the first half of the commercial, we wondered what brand—if any—was behind it. Had the City of Detroit bought an ad? Did GM, Ford, and Chrysler get together to push buying American?

While we felt proud of ourselves for catching the pop culture reference about Words with Friends, the Best Buy ad was a bit of a stretch to us.

We didn’t quite follow the relationship between all the inventors and going to Best Buy to buy a phone and select a mobile service provider. Having had a hard time getting any help or “objective” advice when we’ve gone to Best Buy stores in recent months, we also questioned the credibility of the sales pitch.

In short, we weren’t overly impressed by any of this year’s crop of Super Bowl ads. There were no big winners.

The best we can say is there’s always next year.

Let the Agenda Setting Begin: Our Take-Aways from the Slew of Advice for 2012, Part II

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.

Interview with an Expert: Peter Krieg on the Ever-Expanding Path to Purchase

Debate about the size, shape, direction, and even the very existence of a purchase funnel has raged on for a few years now as marketers work hard to figure out how best to get their target customers to think about, talk about, buy, and maybe even love, their brands.

One recent description we liked, for example, came from Jim Lecinski, managing director of U.S. sales and service at Google, who maintains, “the funnel is now more like a neuron, with branches that let shoppers move forward and backward through the process until they’re ready to make a decision.”

Regardless of where they net out on the funnel issue, however, most agree identifying which among the exploding number of opportunities for marketers to influence the purchase decision will produce the highest return on investment has become a both a critical and often frustratingly complex process.

“The reality is marketers have to pull more levers today than they ever had to before. All of us are consuming media in so many different ways—some people are only online, some only watch TV,” Dina Howell, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi’s in-store marketing arm, told the Wall Street Journal this past April.

“The bulk [are] somewhere in the middle, and that’s what’s making it harder to determine what is the correct formula.”

We sat down with Copernicus’ CEO Peter Krieg to get his thoughts and big picture perspectives on how brands can best market themselves to shoppers as they move through the ever-expanding path to purchase.

Here’s what Peter, our resident retail industry expert and a pioneer of shopping occasion segmentation research, had to say:

Marketing Frayers: Can marketers count on customers following a general direction down the path to purchase anymore?

Peter: The general direction remains the same, yes. Something—an event, a situation, a mealtime, seeing friends with a product, reading an article, business expansion, you name it—inspires a decision-maker to explore the different products and services available. He or she considers the options, makes a purchase, feels satisfied, and–it’s hoped–shares experiences with and ultimately influences others.

What’s changed is the sheer number of potential sources of information that might sway the decision-maker toward one brand or another and one channel or distributor or another. Obviously it’s easier and faster than ever for the decision-maker to access the multitudes of information, compare prices, and purchase locations. It’s also easier and faster for decision-makers to share opinions, reviews, and news with other decision-makers.

What’s also amazing to many of us veteran marketers is whether someone is shopping for a car, computer, insurance policies, industrial products, diapers, or even a toothpaste, they’re investing some amount of time in exploring options…sometimes while they’re already in the process of shopping at a store.

There’s a growing sense that ALL marketers now have to consider, not just what our client P&G calls the first and second moments of truth—seeing the product on the shelf and using/experiencing the product or service after purchase—but all the “store back” and “store forward” moments where any other competitor in the category or industry has the potential to move shoppers toward one brand or another, and one purchase channel or another.

Marketing Frayers: How have you seen companies change the way they approach moving customers through the path to purchase towards their brands?

Peter: Pre- the digital and mobile media revolutions, we worked with clients to understand the effect different types of shopping occasions had on their brands. We’d help them assess the profitability of each shopping occasion and often connected people segments to shopper segments.

We could tell a client, for example, your most profitable segment of people spend 50% of their budget for the category on a “weekend ritual” shopping trip, 25% on a “seasonal” shop, 20% on a “spur of the moment” purchase, and 5% on an “emergency” to give, among other things, some macro-level guidance on positioning for their product or services and innovation efforts.

We could also help them profile each retail location by shopper type to direct in-store merchandising, promotions, displays, etc., toward the needs and preferences of the predominant shopper segments.

These days, however, clients have moved shopper marketing way beyond the four walls of a bricks-and-mortar store…and the digital equivalent of four walls of an e-commerce website. I completely agree with what Dina Howell [CEO of Saatchi &Saatchi X] said–that shopper marketing “isn’t just about cardboard displays anymore—you need to accommodate the way shoppers behave now, and that means online and in stores.”

As a result, we now chart a shopper’s complete path to purchase to identify where and why the client is (or isn’t) on this journey … and where and how an increase in a client’s presence will have the greatest effect on sales, loyalty, and advocacy.

For instance, where and how to they begin their search for a product or service in the category? What information are they looking for? If they’re going to the company’s website, where do they go? What are their digital, social, and mobile media habits? How likely are they to advocate for the brand?

Marketing Frayers: At the start of the year, Booz & Co said manufacturer spending on shopper marketing has just about doubled-over the past five years. It currently totals $35 billion with anticipated annual growth of 15%. What would you say are the key opportunities for marketers to make the most from their shopper marketing investments?

Peter: I’m by no means the first to observe that there’s a great deal of convergence going on as more and more shopper marketing campaigns cut across different media and go beyond the online or offline purchase channel. Integration of shopper marketing with overall branding efforts is something we’re reading, hearing about, promoting, and seeing in action on a much more regular basis than ever before.

With that in mind, the biggest opportunity marketers in general have is to get everyone working against the same target group—the customers they’ve identified as the ones with the highest economic and marketing value to the brand.

For shopper marketers specifically, understanding the “mix” of shopping occasions of the key target group, along with what motivates them to purchase the brand; preferences for online and offline channels or retailers; customer experience preferences and needs; interest in new products and services; and the function and possible influence of traditional, digital, and mobile media along the path to purchase, goes a long way towards improving overall effectiveness and efficiency.

Successful shopper marketing—whether through a bricks-and-mortar or e-commerce channel—still comes down to understanding which customers on which shopping occasions hold the most potential profit opportunity and the ability to translate this information into positive interactions and experiences with the brand at key moments in the purchase process.

There’s a huge opportunity for marketers to arm their sales force and/or key account managers with profiles of the shopper mix at the retailer, e-tailer, and even individual store-level. Connect shopper types with merchandising, promotion, in-store display, experiences, etc., and you’ll go a long way towards cinching the purchase of your brand at a particular location.

Likewise on the ecommerce side, there’s a huge opportunity to arm website developers and managers with guidance to enhance experiences and maximize sales through that channel. We worked with Under Armour, for instance, to profile the different types of shoppers on its website to improve sales via that channel.

Marketing Frayers: What do you think are the big trends in shopper marketing?

Peter: I mentioned integration, though I think that’s a longer-term aspiration.

On the tactical level, product marketers increasingly use both traditional in-store tactics, as well as digital tactics on retailer websites. And mobile just keeps getting bigger. I saw Juniper Research’s forecast that spending on mobile retail campaigns in 2012 will hit $15 billion globally—a 50%increase over 2011!

One of the biggest trends I see is getting some strategy behind shopper marketing efforts.

Everyone knows there’s still a chance to influence a sale at the point-of-purchase. It’s the who, when, and how companies have to solve for now in order to create some competitive advantage along the path to purchase, generate the most incremental sales and profits at the point-of-purchase, and foster loyalty and advocacy beyond it.

Another trend along the lines of strategy development I see more of is product marketers investing more time gathering insights about the shopper mix at different points of distribution. Marketers use this knowledge to improve line reviews with key retailers, to become more fact-based in joint ventures and partnerships, and to figure out which products could be sold in new channels of distribution.

Marketing Frayers: If you had the ear of every CMO in the world for five minutes right now, what would you tell them about best practices for marketing to shoppers along the path to purchase?

Peter: Some marketers call them “touch points”, Google calls them “zero moments of truth,” P&G has their terminology. Regardless of whether there’s ever agreement on what to call all the different opportunities marketers have to influence the ultimate purchase decision, it’s clear that in every category and industry marketers are trying to stay one step ahead of each other when it comes to sustainably persuading decision-makers to choose their brand.

There’s a reason why many marketers have a great sense of urgency for getting a sound strategy in place to guide shopper marketing decisions. As companies increase their budgets for shopper marketing, the pressure will build to demonstrate incremental profits on investment.

The marketers that will be in the best position to do that—and do it consistently—are the ones that pinpoint the customers and shopping occasions that have the highest potential profit value in offline and online distribution channels.

They’re the ones who also get a comprehensive understanding of the critical points along their their target customer’s and shopper’s path to purchase. If your brand isn’t tapping an opportunity to influence a decision-maker at a critical point, figure out why and what kind of fix will generate the biggest return.

To learn more about our shopper insights research and consulting services, visit copernicusmarketing.com/services/shopper-insights.

Hot Off the Presses! New Edition of The Copernicus Mzine

Take a deeper dive into some of the marketing hot topics and business issues we’ve covered on The Marketing Fray these past few weeks in the latest edition of The Copernicus Mzine.

Featured discussion includes:

You’ll also find our featured marketing cartoon and a list of up-coming events.

So have at it!

Let the 2012 Agenda Setting Begin: Our Take-Aways From the Slew of Year-End Advice, Part I

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:

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.
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.
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.

Steve Jobs: Did Going From the Gut Really Work?

A provocative question came up during Kevin Clancy’s webcast for the Marketing Executives Networking Group a couple weeks ago that got us thinking again about an observation New York Times’ columnist Rob Walker made in an article for Fast Company: “The most widely celebrated heroes of capitalism are the Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or Mark-Cuban-types—the ones who scorn what the focus groups and the gurus say and follow their superior instincts into the highest possible tax bracket.”

To paraphrase the question from the webcast, Steve Jobs is reported to have abhorred all forms of consumer research because it reflected the needs, wants, attitudes, habits and preferences of today and not tomorrow. He believed, according to the attendee asking the question, in his gut.

The question for Kevin–how do you explain Jobs’ success when his decision-making approach flies in the face of the more balanced approach of expertise and research Kevin advocates?

Now an argument could be made against the necessity of certain kinds of marketing research in some technology categories that are changing every six months. Jobs may have had a point that if you ask consumers how likely they are to buy a product or service that’s entirely new and never been seen before—as was the case at one point in time with home computers—they’ll most likely tell you that they won’t buy the product.

The fact remains, however, that most categories aren’t changing every six months. Practically-speaking, most new products and services aren’t as radical, game-changing, or so totally breakthrough that potential target customers couldn’t offer some insights into their viability or direction on how to market them most effectively and efficiently.

Interestingly, “everyone thinks of Jobs as the genius who gave us the iPod, MacBooks, the iTunes store, the iPhone, the iPad, and so on,” wrote Nick Schulz in a piece for the National Review Online this past summer. “Yes, he transformed personal computing and multimedia. But let’s not forget what else Jobs did.”

Apple I – failure
Apple II – failed to take off until the floppy disk was introduced
Lisa - “an epic failure”
NeXT computer – a “big nothing-burger of a company”

Even the iconic MacIntosh was not successful initially and Jobs famously got the boot from the division for failing to spur sales.

While we can’t claim for certain that marketing research could have helped avoid those failures or with resuscitating the product when sales proved disappointing, it’s at least safe to say pure gut instinct didn’t reliably contribute to Jobs’ market or career success either.

If we had to account for Jobs’ more recent product and business triumphs, we’d point to his ability to focus the company entirely on consistent delivery of the clear and compelling positioning, “easy to use.”

In all the commentary we’ve read and heard about Jobs, the vignettes about the hard–sometimes viewed as questionable–trade-offs he made in order to ensure that Apple’s products worked seamlessly together and individually were something that anyone without a tech background or engineering degree could operate says to us that this guy understood the power of making a brand stand for something. See our blog post on this topic, “Think Different”.

Instead of “plug and pray,” as we heard one commentator describe other technology products, Apple offered products that were truly “plug and play.”

Was it a gut instinct that led Jobs to “easy to use?” It certainly could have been, though it’s hard to believe there wasn’t some awareness about how other companies were developing and marketing their products, not to mention what users of those products complained about.

In an interview with The Hub a few years ago, Apple’s other Steve—Steve Wozniak—for example, described the early computer market: “Here was the world in 1975, and a whole bunch of people were trying to make money on low-cost microprocessors and build computers with switches and lights—like every computer ever had been.” This knowledge inspired him to do something different and design a computer that a “normal, average” person could use.

Apple’s cult following also affords it a variety of resources as far as finding out what users like and don’t like, would like but can’t find, etc. Not too many companies have a MacWorld magazine and annual trade show event, blogs, and websites independently operated and dedicated to all-things related to the brand and using its products. It’s hard to believe at some point Jobs and others at Apple didn’t tap these sources to at least do some informal customer research.

In our experience, the heroic tales of going on gut feel alone turn out to be much less the stuff of business legend than they first appear. Reports of terrific performance are more often than not greatly exaggerated just as the role of research, business experience, and the market knowledge of the individual are often minimized for effect.

With that in mind, we suspect Steve Jobs made a whole lot more informed gut-decisions, at least in Apple’s more recent history, than ones based on purely on hunch alone.

Interview with An Expert: Kevin Clancy on Improving Advertising ROI, Part 2

Here’s part 2 of our expert interview with Kevin Clancy where he answered questions posed by attendees of his recent Brand ManageCamp “Fresh Thinking Starts Here” webcast series, as well as a few of our own.

Need the background before you read part 2? Read part 1.

Otherwise, we’ll pick up where we left off yesterday….

Q: Does the idea of a revolutionary selling message still apply to smaller brands? How about non-profits?

Kevin: No matter the industry; product or service category; for-profit or not-for-profit; whether your customer is a consumer or a business, finding a revolutionary selling message most definitely applies when it comes to improving the ROI of advertising programs.

Regardless of the size of their budget or market share, I often tell companies to start the search for a revolutionary selling message with an audit of brand perceptions and preferences.

Now, the way a company might go about researching perceptions and preferences among current and potential customers might differ in scale and scope, but it’s still possible. Any firm or organization can ask target customers what they think of a company and its competitors—does it have a clear or fuzzy brand image? It’s also possible to ask which brands they prefer.

Q: Do you think the same message can be used in all forms of communications including advertising, PR, the website, social media, sales force, etc.?

Kevin: If you’re a McDonald’s and you’re spending, for the sake of argument, $300M in measured media, you can afford to communicate a somewhat different message through different media.

But there are very few McDonald’s.

For the overwhelming majority of brands, in the overwhelming majority of product categories, I firmly believe that it should be the same message. It should be the same message in every media and in every communications vehicle. Not just advertising, but packaging, PR, the website, everything.

Q: Do you recommend continued advertising in a market in which you already have a strong presence? We have advertised for 5 years in a medium, but have not had a direct increase in sales as a result (people don’t mention this medium when asked)?

Kevin: There’s a lot of research that suggests that if you cut out your advertising budget in a medium you’re hurt. I’d be wary about cutting it out.

On the other hand, I would work my tail off to make sure that the advertising that I’m using in that vehicle is as strong as it can possibly be. If it is as strong as it can be, you will see the results within three months.

Q: What do you mean by 3-sigma?

Kevin: A statistical term, sigma is a standard deviation from the mean. Putting it into the context of my presentation now, the average ROI of an ad campaign for a CPG brand is negative. For a non-CPG brand, it’s pretty close to 0. A 3-sigma advertising campaign would be three standard deviations away from average, meaning the campaign produces a dramatic, highly positive ROI.

Q: What if you don’t have the money to test alternative advertising ideas? What do you recommend a company do?

Kevin: If you don’t have a significant budget for copy testing, for example, you can bring out alternative ad executions, each expressed on a piece of paper (or screen) as an ad concept with a brief description of what the execution might be in small group discussions or individual interviews [with target customers].

What I sometimes do if a company has absolutely no money is to introduce them to professors at business schools around the country. Often the professors are willing to turn their students loose on the problem. If the company is willing to pay out-of-pocket costs, the professor will get a class of students involved in doing some ad testing or concept testing…or any other kind of testing for that matter.

So a lack of a big budget is not a reason why you can’t or shouldn’t do the kind of things I’m talking about.

Q: How do you find out about online behavior of targets? Do you need to do a large-scale research study?

Kevin: I’m working on the assumption that you have thought about who the best target is in your product category. If you haven’t thought about that before, I’d encourage you to send Copernicus a note and we’ll send you something to read on that topic.

Assuming you know who it is you’re going after, you can do a large-scale survey among 500-600 target group members in your category or a small-scale survey if you have a small budget among, say, 50 people and everyone can do that.

Q: From my experience in CPG, if your demographic is fairly straightforward in terms of age, gender and income-level and things of that sort, you can buy syndicated data [about online behavior of targets] and that’s not always that expensive to buy. There are folks out there that are following lots of different demographics and psychographics on how they are spending their time both online and offline. What do you think of syndicated data?

Kevin: That’s true, there are many sources of syndicated data. Personally, I’m a stronger proponent of spending the same amount of money [you’d spend on syndicated data] and doing a survey among your target customers. The advantage is you get data which is really customized for your brand, as opposed to data which is attempting to work across a broad range of brands.

So I agree with you that you can buy it, I tend to think it’s often better if you tried to customize it.

Q: You hear so much about social media in relation to the idea of “dominating the internet.” The idea is to “dominate” conversation on the web. But you don’t hear as much about updating, designing, fixing the website in order to “dominate.” Why do you think that is?

Kevin: I’m by no means an expert on this topic, though I suspect the newness and novelty of social media as a marketing tactic has a lot to do with it.

Websites had their day in the sun when the internet was as novel a thing as social networks are today. From what I’ve seen recently, however, marketers are increasingly coming back to their websites and evaluating them in terms of untapped opportunities to improve ROI.

Just another reminder, you can read part 1 of our interview with Kevin and/or watch his free webcast on-demand at brandmanagecamp.com/webcasts/.

Interview with an Expert: Kevin Clancy on Improving Advertising ROI, Part I

According to an AdAge report released this past June, 2010’s “spending revival demonstrates that top marketers want to, and will, invest in advertising to drive revenue and build brands.” It issued a prescient warning, however, about a continued upsurge in spending: “marketing budgets could come under pressure if the tepid economic recovery stalls.”

In other words, yielding a highly positive return on investment has not decreased at all in importance; marketing accountability is as important as it has ever been.

With that in mind, we sat down with Copernicus’ Chairman Kevin Clancy last week after his webcast, “Advertising ROI: A Review of Past Performance and Recommendations to Make Dramatic Improvements,” to follow-up on questions posed by attendees and get him to expand on some of the ideas he talked about.

As part of Brand ManageCamp’s “Fresh Thinking Starts Here” webcast series, Kevin shared some top-line findings from recent analysis conducted by Marketing Management Analytics (MMA), one of the preeminent marketing mix modeling firms in the world. MMA found that over the past five years, the ROI of consumer package goods (CPG) television advertising decreased, meanwhile, non-CPG advertising appears to be stronger and even positive.

Kevin quickly turned the discussion from a focus on what the numbers are in the aggregate to how to get the numbers marketers and their programs need to produce to make senior management happy.

He offered three suggestions:

Get a revolutionary selling message. So much traditional and online advertising remains a complete mystery to viewers. According to Kevin, a shocking number of prime-time television spots consist of 27 seconds of an unrelated, irrelevant, perhaps humorous story and 3 seconds of brand mention. Finding and communicating a compelling reason to buy your brand and not another will dramatically improve ROI.
Test your way to a 3-sigma execution. More often than not, companies develop and test too few commercials. While many companies regularly test hundreds of product and service concepts, getting a read on only one, maybe two, ad campaign concepts is pretty commonplace. Expanding the number of ad concepts tested BEFORE developing a campaign will also contribute to a rapid rise in ROI.
Dominate the internet. Very interestingly, MMA discovered internet spending outperformed traditional investments by a margin of 2:1. Figuring out where your customers go, what they do, and want they need in a website will have a tremendous payoff in the form of improved ROI.

The big take-away from Kevin’s webcast: marketers should think as much about the inputs to performance—the campaigns, the plans, the budgets—as they do on assessing the outputs in order to continuously improve ROI.

When we sat down with Kevin, we put to him the questions attendees had and added a few of our own on the topic. Here’s part one of our interview:

Q: How do you actually measure ROI without hiring an outside agency?

Kevin: Hiring an outside agency is by no means the sine qua non for measuring and assessing ROI.

Often, however, it might prove a time and money-saving means for collecting and analyzing different measures of performance. On the other hand, with all of the online tools and software available today, in some cases ROI evaluation can be done in-house.

Regardless of whether you work with an outside firm or do it in-house, very importantly, consider what you need an ROI measurement system to tell you. Ideally you want to know not only how you’re doing, but what to do in order to improve performance.

Q: Is it mostly the CPG companies doing mystery advertising or does it cut across categories?

Kevin: It cuts across all categories—although the fact that the recent work done by MMA suggests that non-CPG advertising has become more effective in the past five years, while CPG advertising has become less effective. That finding could indicate that these silly forms of advertising which you see on your TV every night are more typical of CPG work.

Q: Why don’t most brands today have a strong selling message?

Kevin: This is a question which God will answer for me when I pass on to the next life because I don’t have the answer for it.

When I go to clients and I tell them that the work we’ve done for them in the past year reveals two things—one, you don’t have a clear selling message and two, your ROI is negative—you can’t believe the number of people who say something like, “Well, you don’t understand, we’re not trying to improve sales in the short-run, we’re trying to build up our image for the long-run.”

To which I respond, yes, but—without being too obnoxious here—you’re not going to build up your image by communicating either a non-message or a message that no one understands. You have to give people a reason to buy your brand. That’s what will impact sales in the short-run and help your brand image in the long-run.

Come back tomorrow for part two of our chat with Kevin. In the meantime, you can watch his free webcast by visiting brandmanagecamp.com/webcasts/.

The webcast is free and only requires you complete a brief registration form if you aren’t already registered on the webcast’s host platform, Brighttalk.

Beer Industry STILL Brewing Response to Declining Sales

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.

Think Different

One of the great urban legends in marketing these days is that positioning is no longer a relevant or realistic marketing concept.

We’ve heard a variety of explanations for why telling target customers how your brand is different and inherently better than someone else’s brand is simply an outmoded idea. Many “in the know”, for example, point to the explosion of digital media and say there’s just no way for marketers to control what people think, say, and share about their brands—everything is in the consumer’s control.

We just don’t buy it.

In a cluttered environment where buyers have little time or inclination to ponder product or service decisions, it’s exceedingly beneficial for a brand to have a raison d’être–a reason for being–that’s both differentiating and highly motivating. While it may be true they can’t necessarily “control” what everybody thinks and says about their brand, marketers most certainly can shape the opinion of their target customers by clearly communicating and consistently delivering on a positioning.

We very much doubt Apple Computer—toggling back and forth between the first and second positions in the largest-public-company-in-America rankings—would be where it is today without Steve Jobs’ complete adherence to delivering on the brand’s core positioning, “easy to use.”

In all the commentary we’ve read and heard about Jobs, the vignettes about the hard–sometimes viewed as questionable–trade-offs he made in order to ensure that Apple’s products worked seamlessly together and individually were something that anyone without a tech background or engineering degree could operate says to us that this guy hadn’t given up on the power of making a brand stand for something.

When it comes to the conventional wisdom that you needn’t concern yourself with developing a positioning for your brand, our advice is to ignore it and, in the immortal words of Jobs himself, “think different.”

How To Identify the Most Profitable Targets

We get asked on a fairly regular basis what’s the best way to identify market segments.

Very often, we’ve heard other marketers give one- or two-word answers to this question. Some say demographics, or if you’re more on the B2B-side of things, corpographics. Others say heavy users or “needs.”

As you might expect, we tend to have a longer answer.

We usually suggest considering hundreds of different ways to segment the market using all possible market drivers from category involvement and product preference motivators, to media habits and psychographics and more.

A market segmentation effort, after all, should make it clear which group or groups hold the highest economic value for your brand. By testing all of the potential ways of segmenting a market against rigorous, profit-related criteria, you can create distinct proprietary segments—segments competitors do not know exist—and then rank them by current and estimated profitability.

Aside from spending and market potential, what are some other profit-related criteria we find useful to evaluating different groups?

Here are 10 examples:

Decision-making power
The more responsibility the target has for making a buying decision, the more valuable the target.

Personal influence
The greater the level of influence a buyer has among their family, friends, and acquaintances, the more valuable the target.

Social media engagement
The more active and engaged a target is with different social media, the more valuable the target.

Responsiveness
The more a target responds to a company’s marketing efforts, the more valuable the target.

Problem potential
The bigger the problem the target has that you can solve with products and services, the more valuable the target.

Retention potential
The more likely it is that a target can be economically sustained and, therefore, retained over time, the more valuable the target.

Advocacy Power
The more likely a target is to actively try to sway members of their social network to consider and buy your brand, the more valuable the target.

Media Exposure Patterns And Media Costs
The easier and less expensive it is to reach a target in media, the more valuable the target.

Findability
The more easily a target can be identified in databases, the more valuable the target.

Channel behavior and channel margins
The more a target purchases a product/service through the highest margin channel, the more valuable the target.

For more profit-related criteria, watch Kevin Clancy’s recent webcast “Digital Insights That Drive Strategy.”

Cartoon illustration by C. Madden.

Is Something Different?

When we opened the doors to Copernicus in 1993, we had a driving mission to change the way companies think about and practice marketing. We wanted to prove that marketing should be, can be, is the engine that drives business growth and quickly set out to help firms of all shapes and sizes develop and launch transformational marketing strategies.

As we close in on 20 years in the marketing consulting business, we remain as committed as ever to our original mission. Now more than ever, companies need to grow and the only way to do that is with exceptional marketing and new products/services.

We’ve seen a whole lot change in marketing and business over these past few years, so decided it was about time for us to take the same advice we give our clients when it comes to keeping their brand, products, and services relevant and meaningful to their customers.

We spent a great deal of time asking the question, what do we bring to the table when it comes to helping marketers dramatically improve revenues, profits, and brand equity?

We’d like to share our new answer:

Profit-focused outcomes
Everything we do—from our blog posts, to our speeches and articles, to our work for clients– is geared towards helping marketers make decisions that will yield the highest ROI.

Frontline experience
Thanks to the decades we’ve spent working for companies around the globe, we offer all kinds of advice that is practical, actionable, as well as “expert.”

Business-building ideas
We bring new ideas for growing your business…and show you the best ways to optimize them.

State-of-the-science tools
We continue to push the envelope of marketing research in order to ensure marketers get the best insights and marketing direction.

Senior management involvement
We all get our hands dirty.

Digitally-savvy thinking
We tap into our sister firms at Aegis Media Group—including digital strategists iProspect, Isobar, and Carat—to keep our thinking and tools on the forefront of all things digital, social, and mobile.

Great marketing strategies don’t happen by accident, at least not very often. And you can be sure we’re razor-focused on helping marketers understand what they need to do in order to achieve and exceed even their wildest business objectives.

Take a look at our new website and send us an email or chat with us on Twitter to let us know what you think about it. As always, stay tuned for more insights, thoughts, and big-picture perspectives on marketing and business issues!

Analyzing a Brand's Current vs. Potential Profitability

For most brands, there is a sizable gap between existing market share and total potential share. But how does a company determine what the brand’s potential is, as well as how best to close the gap between current and potential performance?

Indeed, this type of analysis provides an understanding of the profit potential—and limitations—of an existing brand, which is crucial in determining the financial viability of various marketing strategies such as:

Developing retention programs for vulnerable customers
Building programs to expand business among existing customers

NB: the above strategies are often much less costly than the next two!
Creating campaigns to attract new customers to the existing product line
Expanding the product line

This chart depicts a hypothetical brand profitability analysis, showing the brand’s unavailable market share made up of consumers not in the category, your competitors’ best customers, etc.; the current share of loyal and vulnerable customers; and the potential available incremental brand market share.

10 Critical Components of a Marketing Audit

A marketing audit is to the marketing department what a financial audit is to the accounting department.

A comprehensive review of a company’s marketing environment, objectives, strategies, and activities compared to world class standards, the marketing audit identifies operational strengths and weaknesses and recommends changes to the company’s marketing plans and programs to improve performance.

Here are 10 of 25 key dimensions a marketing audit should assess:

Key factors that impacted the business for good or for bad during the past year. Including an evaluation of marketing “surprises”—the unanticipated competitive actions or changes in the marketing climate that affected the performance of the marketing programs.
The extent to which each decision in the marketing plan—e.g. targeting, positioning, pricing, advertising, etc.—was made after evaluating many alternatives in terms of profit-related criteria.
Marketing knowledge, attitudes, and satisfaction of all executives involved in the marketing function.
The extent to which the marketing program was marketed internally and bought into by top management and non-marketing executives.
Customer, distributor, vendor, and intermediary satisfaction based on research among key target groups.
The performance of advertising, promotion, the sales force, and marketing research programs in terms of ROI.
The performance of non-traditional programs, particularly digital offerings, in terms of ROI.
Whether the marketing plan achieved its stated financial and non-financial goals and objectives.
Which aspects of the plan that failed to meet objectives with specific recommendations for improving next year’s performance.
The current value of brand and customer equity for each brand in the product portfolio.

10 Brands That Might Not Find Out If The Mayan Prophecy Turns Out to Be True

We came across 24/7 Wall Street’s predictions for the 10 brands most unlikely to make it to the end of 2011 a couple weeks ago. Some of the picks didn’t surprise us.

A&W Restaurants, for example, has been shrinking slowly but surely for a long time now. Likewise, MySpace has been goofing around with one ill-conceived marketing strategy after another. One of it’s more recent decisions to go after young people looking to talk about movies and entertainment seemed more likely to suffocate than rescusciate the firm.

Others though, like Kellogg’s Corn Pops and SAAB cars were a bit more confounding.

Mostly though, the list got us thinking about the concept of brand equity, particularly how to build and sustain it. In other words, how to best avoid making 24/7 Wall Street’s brand deathwatch.

Though most marketers are unsure how to measure it—there is no universally agreed upon measure—most recognize that a brand’s equity is comprised of different components.

We’ve actually identified seven:

Brand Permeation: a weighted combination of brand and advertising awareness and availability (i.e., distribution).

Brand Distinctiveness: a weighted combination of measures that indicate brand differentiation, uniqueness, and superiority.

Brand Quality: An overall assessment of the brand as a whole and its line extensions in terms of its overall reputation for quality of product or service.

Brand Value: A weighted combination of measures that reflect the extent to which the brand delivers what buyers pay for—often known as “price-value.”

Brand Personality: The extent to which the brand’s image is congruent with who the buyer is or wants to be.

Brand Potential: The extent to which consumers will pay more for, go out of their way for, or are willing to try this brand’s new products, services, or line extensions.

Competitive Inoculation: The extent to which the consumer would stick with the brand in times of adversity or competitiveness.

For more on this topic and suggestions for going about understanding each component’s contribution to overall equity, download our free white paper, Build a Great Brand While Your Competitors Commoditize.

3 Common Reasons a Marketing Strategy Fails to Achieve Objectives

Where did our marketing strategy go wrong? It’s an unpleasant question many marketers have to ask themselves at some point in their careers when a plan doesn’t hit objectives.

The answer we usually hear is, “The product just wasn’t very good.” More recently, “it was bad timing with the economy.” Another popular response, “the competition stepped-up their game and the market climate took a turn for the worse.”

Based on post-mortem evaluations of 20+ years of B2B and B2C marketing strategies, we have some different answers for why marketing strategies don’t meet objectives. Here are three common, but overlooked issues that derailed performance:

Muddled targeting. The targeting decision—on whom to focus marketing efforts—may sound like the most basic of all the decisions a marketer has to make, but it has a profound impact on the ultimate performance of a marketing strategy. Disappointing strategies often have a benign target, such as everyone in the category or women ages 25-45.
Poor planning. Sales problems are often NOT the fault of the product or service. The company just didn’t create awareness/familiarity with enough buyers in the category or industry. It’s kind of astounding to us that, while more and more marketers regularly use technology to test different and numerous configurations of new products and services, very few test an array of marketing plans to ensure they have the combination of strategy, tactics, and budget allocation that can effectively and efficiently hit objectives.
Passable creative. In many cases, the creative executions of the strategy—the ad campaign most specifically—do not consistently or clearly reinforce a brand’s positioning. Improving creative through rigorous development and testing offers a much better ROI than increasing media spending.

We think there’s some good evidence to suggest that marketers need to check their intuition that the product wasn’t right and their hunch that the competition or the market climate is what came between them and achieving marketing objectives.

A great place to start is developing a model–doesn’t have to be sophisticated, it can be back-of-the-envelope of how sales actually occur in your category or industry. The idea is to really consider how well you did at each step of the process and figure out where the potential problem areas really are.

To learn more about developing a model, watch Peter Krieg’s recent webcast, “Setting Clear and Effective Marketing Objectives,” available now on-demand at on our webcast channel.