The old joke is that everyone knows that half of marketing spend is wasted, but no one knows which half.  Recent data  suggests that marketing waste may be high and increasing.  With the continuing advances in technology and analytics, why is this?

A partial explanation may be due to the erosion of economies of scale in Marketing.  The sources of Marketing economies of scale can by categorized as external (including customer behavior) or internal (operational/production factors).  This post will focus on the external factors, especially marketing communications and consumer media consumption.

History of Marketing Scale

Studies of economies of scale in marketing date back at least to the 1950s, when it was found that smaller automakers like Studebaker were spending twice as much on advertising per car than GM or Ford.  The scale advantages of market leaders like GM or Ford were partially due to mass media channels like television.  With only a handful of networks, audiences were the definition of mass and brands with the broadest offering obtained the greatest benefit from their investment in television advertising.  An upstart brand attempting to target a small segment of customers would be wasting a much bigger percentage of their television advertising spend on an audience outside of their target segments.  This amounted to a major source of scale advantage for the market leaders of that era.

Disruption #1 – Explosion of cable channels

With the arrival of cable, television audiences fragmented across the hundreds of available channels.  For upstart brands, this represented an opportunity to better reach their target demos without paying to reach everyone else.  A major scale advantage of market leaders was eroded, but significant scale advantages remained.  Market leaders could still take advantage of their creative investment.  Creating a great spot still cost the same whether it ran in major markets during prime time or during late night on local cable access.  The market leaders also had significant buying power in negotiating with agencies and ad buyers to get better pricing on the spots they ran.

Disruption #2 – Migration from paid to earned

Opportunities for earned marketing exploded with the internet and ultimately social networking. Marketers of leading brands could no longer rely on their buying power to dominate the primary channels where media was consumed.  Not only did consumers have the power to share content with each other and break the long standing tradeoff of free content in exchange for viewing advertising, but consumers also had the tools to create their own content and distribute it at scale.  Suddenly, leading Marketers’ ability to leverage their scale advantages in content creation and distribution were undermined as well.

Now the key question is if this is the end of the story.  Are Marketing economies of scale dead due to the changes in Marketing communications that have resulted from these disruptions?  In our next post, we will explore the implications for internal sources of economies of scale and assess whether those can continue to provide Marketers of leading brands a sustainable scale advantage.

Managers, do you know the critical role you play in retaining your digital marketers?  I was surprised to learn that 62% of employees in digital media–including your digital marketers–plan to leave their current employer within 2 years, despite 78% claiming they are at least satisfied with their work (20% satisfied, 51% enjoy, 7% love), according to a Digiday study commissioned by Nextmark.  Your interaction with your digital marketers will be key to keeping them onboard.

As you know, digital marketers enjoy their jobs because what they do is creative, dynamic, frequently cutting edge, and often requires innovative ways to market.  At the same time, these loves can turn into sources of frustration if taken to the extreme. The digital world never sleeps and is constantly evolving, and working in the digital world means you can always be “on” and feel that you are constantly catching up to what’s new or different.  This can lead to long hours, some tedious work, and feeling like you’re spinning your wheels, never making progress, and not helping the business.  In addition, many high-performing digital marketers can be victims of their own success and end up being pigeonholed as the “Pinterest person,” when in reality they’d like to expand into a role that’s more strategic than tactical.  Many digital marketers might be looking for a fresh start elsewhere.  This is where managers can play a huge role to retain your top digital talent.

Managers are the primary connection between digital marketers and the organization and directly shape their perception of the organization and their job. Through this influence, you magnify (or diminish) their commitment, thereby serving as a critical leverage point for maximizing the impact the organization and day-to-day work have on retention.  Research from CEB’s Corporate Leadership Council indicates that managers control a majority of the most powerful drivers of employee intent to stay.  You can increase retention most effectively by doing 3 things:

• Connect employee efforts to the organization – The manager’s role as interface between the organization and its employees requires that managers clearly demonstrate how an employee’s work objectives originate in organizational strategy.  Establishing this link has the largest possible impact on employee effort, improving it by 33%, and can improve an employee’s intent to stay by 36%.  However, the connection between work and strategy is only half of the story.  Employees need to understand how their hard work will translate into broader organizational success.  Such an understanding can have up to a 30% impact on discretionary effort and a 34% impact on intent to stay.
• Expand the employee’s network – The work of employees rarely occurs within a vacuum and is often dependent on information and guidance from a broader network.  Employees often do not have sufficient organizational knowledge and visibility to fully establish such networks on their own, so connecting employees to talented coworkers from across the organization is one of the manager’s most important roles. Doing so not only improves performance but also provides a foundation for increased engagement and retention.  Helping employees build internal, job-focused networks that enable them to successfully complete their projects, develop new ideas, stay informed about the organization, and allow them to share their expertise will increase employee engagement by up to 57%.
• Provide credible development plans and give advice – Advising on career development can increases the intent to stay by 37% if done properly. Development plans only work when they signal a “credible commitment” to reaching the goals by taking the effort to customize plans to individual employee needs and provide the necessary resources and opportunities to support the plan’s success.  The organization must make investments to demonstrate that it’s sincerely committed to cultivating the employee’s skills to foster long-term progress.  For your top digital marketers, create development plans that allow them to expand their skills; for example, if one of your top employees is really great at managing your Twitter feed, ask him whether he’d like to branch out into another area, like marketing strategy or planning.

Managers, take some time to invest in your digital marketers, give them a clear path to grow, and help them along that path.  You will have less turnover and be able to build on the collective expertise and experience of your digital marketers and waste less time and resources bringing new marketers into the fold.

You already know you’d benefit from having a mentor.  One of the easiest ways to find a mentor is to join your company’s formal mentoring program.  Ideally, you’d then be matched with someone with whom you can speak honestly about your career goals, and who will help you develop your career.  Unfortunately, these programs aren’t always perfect – you and your mentor may not click, or your company might not even have a formal mentoring program.  And even if you and your assigned mentor have cultivated a great relationship, you know that having some unofficial mentors would also help your career development.  So being able to identify possible mentors is key for career development, regardless of whether you already have a formal mentorship in place.

The first step in developing a strong, informal mentoring relationship is identifying a potential mentor.  As a marketer, your first inclination may be to look within your own small team within the larger Marketing organization.  But there are many benefits to going beyond your small team (and, in some cases, even beyond Marketing!) to find a mentor:

• You get a broader view of the organization – A mentor outside your team allows you to learn what other teams are doing, what their priorities are, and what challenges they face.  This grants you a deeper understanding of your organization, which can help you better know how your role fits in to the whole.
• You can be more honest – Depending on your organization’s culture, you might be hesitant to speak candidly with your boss (or anyone close to your boss) about your future career goals and plans.  With a mentor from a different team, you’ll have more freedom to discuss your goals frankly, and then learn how you can accomplish these goals within your organization.
• You can find new opportunities – The combination of understanding your organization more broadly and being candid about your career goals allows your mentor to connect you to new opportunities that would be a good fit.

In many organizations, Marketing’s role is expanding beyond traditional Marketing duties to cover more strategy, operations, sales, and IT.  Where to find a mentor depends on your individual career goals, the type of business you work for (e.g., a mentor in Sales might make less sense for a marketer at a CPG who is interested in becoming a brand manager; a mentor in Corporate Strategy might be more relevant for her), and your organization’s operations (e.g., if Marketing is, in fact, starting to partner with Strategy more, it’s wise to learn more strategy).

Once you’ve decided which department or team would house the best mentor for you, you need to start thinking about what qualities your ideal mentor would have.   A mentor should be three things:

• A role model – Your mentor should be a high-performer, and he should show that he has initiative and intellectual curiosity.  He should demonstrate “big picture” thinking, and understand the organization as a whole.  Above all, he should be ethical – you want to emulate those who get ahead using the morals you stand behind.
• An opportunity arranger – As someone senior to you who has been at the organization for a while, your mentor will have developed a strong internal network.  He should be willing to share this network with you, and willing to introduce you to co-workers who can also be in your mentor or peer network.  Your mentor should also know of company resources, like formal training sessions or learning lunches, that can help you improve your skills and advance your career.
• A development partner – You’re already getting feedback on your performance from your boss, but a mentor can provide broader career advice.  He can help you explore future career options, weigh further education options like business school, and act as a sounding board for your goals.  In addition, you can hear about your mentor’s career path, and learn from his experiences.

How have you picked the perfect mentor?  Share in the comment section below!

We’ve already talked about why you need a mentor – a good mentor can help you learn more about your company, your role, and opportunities for your advancement.  But what if you’re asked to mentor someone senior to you?

This reverse mentoring system isn’t as crazy as you might think.  Companies like GE and Ogilvy & Mather are using reverse mentoring programs so that millennial marketers teach more tenured workers the basics of new social media and digital platforms.  According to the Wall Street Journal, GE’s former CEO Jack Welch told about 500 senior executives to ask millennials to teach them about the internet.  GE has seen benefits for both the mentors and mentees; the junior mentors are more engaged, and the senior mentees have improved their understanding of the internet.

In addition to becoming more engaged, mentoring a senior-level executive gives you increased exposure to senior management.  Your helping a senior leader allows you to prove your knowledge to him or her, and gives you another advocate within the company (and one who is quite senior, to boot!).  Your knowledge can set the stage for a truly two-way partnership, in which you teach your mentor about new channels and platforms, and she shares her deeper career and industry experience with you.

In marketing, the practicality of reverse mentoring is especially clear.  Consumers are using more new technologies and platforms, and they are adopting them at an ever-increasing pace.  As a millennial marketer, you are in a unique position to offer your expertise with these new channels and platforms to your company’s senior leaders; not only are you required to keep abreast of channels like Fancy and Vine for your day job, but you use them as a consumer to discover products and keep up with friends in your personal life.

But just sharing the knowledge of specific platforms and channels isn’t enough – you have to tailor your advice and your demeanor for this reverse mentoring partnership.  Here are some tips to help you maneuver this relationship that can be extremely rewarding, yet nerve-wracking at the same time:

Have an agenda.  If your mentee is completely new to your channel, you’ll need to start with the basics.  Prepare in advance, and predict the types of questions she might ask you (e.g., How many users does this channel have?  What other brands are on it?  What successes have they seen?  What risks are there?).  Even if you know the channel really well, a mentoring session with a senior executive is not the time to “wing it.”

Keep a level of confidentiality.  It goes without saying that you shouldn’t mock a coworker or his questions; this holds doubly true when you are dealing with a member of senior management.  You shouldn’t tell any of your peers about the areas you’re helping him with (just imagine how awful it would be if you were overheard laughing about the ignorance of a senior leader!).

Maintain your humility.  It’s easy for you to show your smarts – that’s why you got selected to reverse mentor in the first place!  But remember that – while you were asked to be a reverse mentor – your senior mentee has a lot of business experience, and is in the position to teach you, too.  Share your knowledge of the new platforms and channels, but be open to the wisdom she may teach you about broader marketing world.

Marketers, have you been tapped for a reverse mentoring position with your company?  Share your thoughts on it in the comment section below!

As Marketers race to create relevant, resonant messaging that will give them an edge in the Market, the question inevitably arises: “Can we credibly say this?” and the clincher “Do we have the budget to prove it?” Including the right evidence in Marcomms not only validates a claim but also helps you tell a more compelling story. The data these days is part of the narrative, and getting that right can be a critical part of changing how customers think themselves and your product or service.

However, when marketers make tough budget allocation decisions, funding research to substantiate messages or insights doesn’t always make the top of the list.  So, how do we get the research we need without increasing the budget we have?  Well, here are a few suggestions to consider when conducting research on a less-than-ideal Marketing budget.

Be clear on what you need to prove

If you look at the component pieces of your message, what are the assumptions and beliefs you MUST change to get customer buy-in?  Break down the perception shift you’re trying to drive and focus your limited research dollars on reinforcing the pieces that really count.   MLC’s support center on mapping the Mental Model of your customers can help you identify profitable perception shifts you should target.

While you’re at it, beware that not all messaging needs to be proven by intensive research.  Think about what points will take a lot of convincing and which ones will customers more easily accept? You may decide it’s more important to support critical points with a higher burden of proof, but at least know what the low-hanging fruit is.  Ideally, begin by proving points that are both important and (relatively) easy to prove.

Use what is already available

It’s surprisingly easy to overlook the alternate data sources available within your own organization; data from Customer Service, Market Research, Sales, R&D, or  Customer Experience initiatives.  Those functions may be able to provide access to recent customer studies or provide other compelling proof points.

There may also be publically available proof points in trade publications or other online sources that could be repurposed.  Check for any online databases your organization has license to access. Third party research often has the added advantage of being more credible to customers than research funded by your organization.  Just be sure to fully understand the existing resources available to you before fielding—and funding—new research.  For MLC members,  we have some additional guidance on how to compile an Information Inventory.

Balance Cost and Functionality

If you do have to fund new research, keep in mind that, depending on the relative burden of proof for the message or insight you’re supporting, you may need more or less compelling evidence. More compelling evidence doesn’t necessarily have to be more expensive, though. For instance, in our last year’s study Getting Paid for Content Marketing, we found that cheaper qualitative sources such as conversations with SMEs, sales reps, etc. are potent sources of commercially-relevant customer insight. To select the right sources for your initiative, you’ll need to consider tradeoffs between the quality of the data needed to support your message, the relative cost to produce it, and your timeline.

Our sister program CEB Market Insights rated popular insight generation techniques on cost, speed and quality dimensions -  these are presented in the image below. As you brainstorm potential insight sources, rather than immediately eliminating options on the basis of cost you may want to organize them by these dimensions to make more informed, relative trade-offs.

In summary, cheaper, fast-turnaround research is here to stay. Even when budgets are tight, marketers can benefit from a wide range of (sometimes unexpected) sources by consolidating and focusing their research efforts.

The last ten years or so have seen big shifts in, broadly speaking, the way society thinks about the dissemination and exchange of information. Gone, we’re told, is the old model of trained experts telling us what’s what; the new model is one of participatory knowledge creation and information sharing, where a “crowd” of amateurs is capable of producing an output superior to those experts at a dramatically lower cost.

You know what this means, in practice. Journalism is in free-fall, as more peoples’ news needs are satisfied by bloggers, Twitterers, and their Facebook friends; the opinions of experts are regularly ignored or discounted in the face of “evidence” from the “crowd”. Chances are that most of you have participated in some kind of crowdsourced innovation initiative; where you used to pay IDEO or your own R&D department, you’ve outsourced parts of the new product development process to a large group of amateurs.

The sexiness of crowdsourcing has its origin in a number of books – like The Cluetrain Manifesto and  Here Comes Everybody - that stormed their way into the worlds of business and media in the 2000′s. It was an alluring proposition: in a time when money got extremely tight, what better way to maintain output than to get a bunch of amateurs to do the same job, for free? And so media outlets and businesses jumped on the bandwagon and began trusting more and more key processes to the crowd.

But we’ve got some experience with this trend now, and we know it’s not all good. Most spectacularly, we got a big reminder of the failure of crowdsourcing in the aftermath of last week’s Boston Marathon bombings.

You’ve probably heard most of the story at this point, but to recap: in the immediate wake of the bombings, users of popular forum sites Reddit and 4chan began looking for and picking through photographs taken around the marathon’s finish line. They were looking for indicators of what they thought was suspect behavior. Some made sense: having a backpack, wearing a hoodie or hat (so as to hide one’s face), not reacting to the sound or impact of the explosion. But others were bigoted: having brown skin, being “ethnic”, and making hand gestures similar to someone’s idea of radical Islamic hand gestures (??) were all grounds for having one’s picture dragged through the mud on the 52nd-biggest website in the US. In one particularly galling episode, Reddit users spread a rumor that a 21-year-old missing college student was a confirmed suspect.

In the end, the amateur “investigation” proved unhelpful and destructive. An excellent Washington Post story on the official investigation – done by, you know, actual cops – reported that the “wildly irresponsible” internet investigation forced the hands of the pros: they decided to release the images of the bombers, preemptively, to stop speculation online, a decision that likely spurred the brothers’ rampage through Cambridge and Watertown. And make no mistake, the ethos of crowdsourcing is what was behind the investigation: interviewed by the Post, the moderator of the Reddit forum where the investigation took place said:

it’s been proven that a crowd of thousands can do things like this much quicker and better. .?.?. I’d take thousands of people over a select few very smart investigators any day.

So why did this (and many other) crowdsourcing efforts go so wrong? There are a few key problems with crowdsourcing that are either very difficult or impossible to effectively solve:

Crowd composition. In short, problems in composition emerge when the assembled “crowd” doesn’t represent reality. Here, Reddit is an excellent example: the average Reddit user is a “20-something American male“. They don’t have kids, and skew heavily towards unmarried – precisely the group, if you had to pick one, most likely to irresponsibly implicate a missing college student with a grieving family in a high-profile terrorist bombing. It’s not that these people were evil or anything, but different life experiences and different cultural assumptions can introduce significant error into crowd assessments.

Opaque governance. Marketers and media outlets treat crowds as a leaderless mass, but this doesn’t jive with reality. Crowds are “governed”, if not directly by moderators, then certainly by social convention or the design choices of the platform they gather on. Reddit, for example, is governed by a voting system, where every comment can be voted up or down by users. Comments that receive more negative than positive votes are hidden by Reddit’s software. Ostensibly these votes are based on comment quality; but in fact, “the crowd” at Reddit often votes down comments it merely doesn’t like, comments that don’t jive with the mood of the moment. In the course of the site’s “investigation”, comments urging caution and leaving the real investigation to the pros were systematically voted down. Ask the crowd a question, and you may get an answer determined by the crowd’s own rules.

Limited range of crowd thinking. Even if the above problems were solved, crowd participants not actually trained in answering whatever question is asked of them suffer from the eternal problem of the amateur: the range of potential solutions has been defined in advance by experts, media depictions, and advertising, and will overwhelmingly determine what kinds of answers the crowd can give.

Validate with a crowd. Get ideas (but not all of them) from a crowd. But don’t rely on them for mission-critical activities.

Many of our readers know that B2B customers are feeling intensified pressure to make the right purchasing decisions.  With increased C-suite involvement and complex buying group priorities, there is more at stake, so customers pursuing more extensive independent research and due diligence.  Recent studies have substantiated these trends: the majority of B2B buyers say they spend more time researching purchases than they did in the past.  What’s more, 67% of buyers say they’re using a wider variety of sources (on average more than 10!) to research purchases, many of which are not supplier-controlled.

But while customers may feel more secure with so much readily available information, science says otherwise.  To measure the effect of information quantity on decision quality, researchers at the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University measured brain activity across varying levels of cognitive load.  As the researchers gave their subjects more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC dropped precipitously, “as if a circuit breaker had popped.”  (A little background: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision-making and emotion control.  So if those lights go out, your “smart” brain has effectively left the building.)

In other words, with information overload, decisions make less and less sense.  One the one hand, people start making stupid mistakes.  On the other, the brain’s emotional regions (previously balanced by the dorsolateral PFC) run amok, leaving individuals anxious and frustrated.  These two effects compound each other, and before you know it (literally), the attempt at a well-informed decision has been sabotaged by your own well-meaning intentions.

This research may not come as a shock to B2C marketers who have felt the implications of our Decision Simplicity research for a while now.  However, it is an under-recognized issue in the B2B space, one that can explain — at least partially — why so many purchases are stalling despite marketers’ best efforts at informing buyer decisions.

So what can B2B marketers do to help their customers avoid being overloaded by information?

• Less — Less Often — Is More: CEB Marketing has found that in response to excessive emails and other communications from a supplier, more than half of buyers adopted an “Ignore All” mentality.  In fact, 30% said that unwanted supplier contact actually lessened their likelihood of purchase from the perpetrator.  Very few customers want more information from suppliers in their purchase process, so there’s probably room for marketers to rein in the content beast.
• Illustrate — Not State — The Facts: When most buyers are creating their short lists, the most commonly sought out information are case study examples.  Suppliers that can help a buyer envision the solution in their own environment are much more likely to win a long-term customer.
• Orient Around Action: After case-studies, the the next most sought-after information are action-oriented checklists or guides.  In fact, nearly three in four buyers say that tools designed to support the business case for a purchase have a significant impact on their ultimate decision.  So instead of telling your customers what you can do, tell them what they can do (hopefully only with you).

Our 2012 B2C study found that grit – not agility – matters most for marketer success.  Since we presented that research, I’ve often wondered if that concept might extend beyond marketing talent.  Out of curiosity, I recently started looking at branding trends, particularly at slogans.

Some of our readers might remember that back in 1999, Advertising Age published the 20^th Century’s Top 10 Slogans, and De Beers’ “A Diamond is Forever” came out on top.  Created during one marketer’s desperate late-night brainstorming session, this slogan’s power lasts to this day, more cemented in luxury consumers’ minds than the brand itself.  What’s more impressive is that De Beers still features the slogan on every single ad to this day – that’s right, a whopping sixty-six yearrun.

Now, of the top 15 slogans (including honorable mentions) on that AdAge list, only five brands still hold onto their money-making mottos (Maxwell House has had the same slogan for over 90 years since Teddy Roosevelt coined it).  What happened to the other ten?  A simple exercise ought to demonstrate the problem.  Consider these chart-toppers:

• “Does She… or Doesn’t She?” – Clairol or L’Oreal?
• “Tastes Great, Less Filling” – Bud Light or Miller Light?
• “The pause that refreshes” – Coca-Cola or Pepsi?

Though these slogans were catchy, they definitely weren’t identifiable with the brand itself, and thus had no lasting power.  They had low potential for “gritty” application, so in order to keep up brand momentum, marketers had to be agile.

Some might argue that the grittier brands had decades if not a century of market power behind them, and that history – not grit – is the differentiator.  Well, one relatively young brand immediately comes to mind to prove them wrong: Red Bull.  Founded in the early 80s, it has mastered gritty branding as well as the older brands.  For instance:

• The slogan “Red Bull Gives You Wings!” has been in use for nineteen years.  And it’s certainly unsubstitutable: Monster gives you wings? I think not.
• Remember those famously simple adult cartoons of the Moon Landing or Aladdin?  Those have been around since the first Leonardo Da Vinci cartoon in 1992, a full twenty-one years ago.  While everyone was clamoring towards increasingly complex (and expensive) special effects, Red Bull stayed true to its roots.

And it has paid off for them too.  Just like DeBeers and Maxwell House, Red Bull has dominated market share since its inception.  So the next time you’re contemplating a new brand campaign, first think about its potential lifetime value before trying to conform to fleeting trends.  Grit just might give your brand some wings.

A few years ago, the bricks and mortar store was the final stop on a consumer’s purchase journey.   Sure it was an option to buy online, but matching up identical products was cumbersome, waiting time for delivery was long, and the shipping costs nearly made up the price difference.  Then came Amazon and smartphones and comparison shopping apps and free next-day delivery.  Now happy browsers roam the aisles trying, touching, and weighing the merchandise, then leave empty-handed and buy the things they just tried, touched, and weighed from an online retailer.  The phenomenon is so common and widespread that it has a name – showrooming.

Many retailers are declaring war.  Some have taken a kamikaze approach, like the gluten-free grocer in Australia who decided to impose a $5 “just looking” fee on everyone who walks in the door (the list of reasons we think that is a bad idea is lengthy).  Best Buy and Target have taken a more measured approach, recently pledging to price-match offers from online retailers (making permanent a policy they tested out during the holiday shopping seasons).  While online price-matching will shave a bit off their margins, at least it will protect the revenue stream and hopefully generate some additional sales of impulse, non-price-matched purchases.  Though this seems like a good short-term solution, it also sounds like it might prove to be an unsustainable race to the bottom in the long-term.  So what is the long-term solution?

First, it is important to note that the bricks and mortar store isn’t dead.  Recognizing that consumers like to see and touch and try on before they buy, three noteworthy previously online-only retailers,  Bonobos, Piperlime, and Warby Parker, have set up physical locations to enable shoppers to do just that.  And interestingly, while fashionistas in SoHo can actually walk out of the Piperlime store with some merchandise in hand, the Bonobos and Warby Parker locations are literally just showrooms – all purchases are still made online.  These brands are embracing and enabling consumers’ desire to look with no $5 fee required.

Some might argue that this “showroom” model would only work for a small slice of the retailer market (it probably isn’t a coincidence that all three of the examples we found were from the fashion and accessories category).  But let’s put aside some of the very real short term constraints on Big Box retailers and department stores and imagine what such a world would look like.  A few ideas below:

• Stores within a store.  Consumer dollars aren’t the only source of revenue for big retailers.  They also get a fair amount of money from the brands whose wares they sell for things like in-store promotions, end-cap displays, signage, and more – but they could push it even further.  Retailers could “rent out” their floor space to brands to set up small boutiques within a store with the purpose of convincing consumers to buy that brand – from whatever retailer they like, including direct from the brand itself.  The retailer could make additional money on certain products by selling add on services like set-up and installation that no website can offer.

• More private label and exclusive merchandise.  Consumers can only price match things that are available from more than one retailer.  More importantly than that, people like things they feel are unique or special – things it doesn’t feel like everyone else can own.  Retailers could focus more on striking exclusive deals with smaller or more specialty brands to bring their goods to a bigger audience or even with bigger brands to exclusively sell a particular version of a product, including enhanced “special editions.”

• A focus on experience.  What if stores used their space less to house and sell stuff and more to enable consumers to explore, learn, and do?  In-store and warehouse inventory could be reduced (and moved to distribution centers) and the space could be used instead to host relevant services, activities, and events like repair/advice centers, hands-on workshops, fashion shows, design expos, and entertainment events.  Some consumers would likely actually pay to attend and others could be underwritten by the brands featured.

Who knows what the retail landscape will look like in five years or ten years.  The one thing we do know is that the current model is probably unsustainable.  The winners will embrace (even if it is begrudgingly) change and find ways to innovate to help consumers fulfill their intent, the losers will try to hold on to the current model and try to put  up barriers that make it harder for consumers to fulfill their intent.

Organizations often struggle to provide timely and relevant information to salespeople. One way of bridging this gap is by providing real-time mobile support, on-and-off the field to improve process efficiencies. In fact, realizing the value of mobile support for salespeople, a recent CEB Sales survey shows that 46% of sales organizations are increasing their mobile budgets.

In an earlier blog, we had mentioned five key mobile capabilities that companies use or explore to improve sales efficiency—task and schedule management, real-time availability to CRM, access to BI and sales analytics, customer collaboration and interaction, information exchange and remote coaching. Our research shows that the popularity of back-end mobile capabilities like task and schedule management and CRM is fairly high. On the other hand, analytical activities like BI and sales analytics or interactive activities like customer collaboration, internal information exchange, and coaching are less popular, but drive greater efficiency.

To provide mobile capabilities ranging from back-end to analytical to interactive capabilities, we see progressive companies follow a structured path of moving from “Established” to “Emerging” mobile capabilities. Read More »