We’ve spent quite a bit of time here on Wide Angle talking about innovation; it’s our position that Marketing – by virtue of its superior understanding of the customer – should play a more important in the innovation process at most companies. Lots of our recent research has focused on the problem of generating radical innovation, and it’s a topic we’re seeing members ask more and more about every year.

Realizing this, CEB has focused the latest in our Executive Guidance series on the problem of generating breakout innovation. The research team has identified 4 ways that innovation processes are broken in the corporate world:

First, downsizing and reorganization have weakened ideation networks. Top-down change – while perhaps a net positive for the organizations undertaking it – have had the side effect of disrupting the complex webs of relationships upon which true innovation relies.

Second, budget and headcount pressures have sharply reduced the ranks of mid-level innovators in typical organizations. Between 2010 and early 2012, he average tenure of mid-level innovators fell from 10 to 12 years in role, and their average age fell from 39 to 36. With less experience on the job, innovation networks have naturally suffered.

Third, as companies have adopted a more global posture, they’ve dispersed the innovation function across their footprint. Firms are shifting funding and resources to emerging markets to get closer to new customers in those regions, as well as take advantage of inexpensive local labor. The result, again, has been a weaker web of the relationships that support collaborative innovation.

Our team has identified four steps that will help fix the problem:

So, you may have noticed that Wide Angle’s gone a bit quiet over the last few weeks (and if you haven’t noticed, you should read us more often!). It’s because we’re presenting brand-new research on June 7 into what drives effective marketers. We’ll have much, much more on the research in the coming weeks – but, for now, suffice it to say that one of the key problems we’ve identified with marketing teams – both as currently constructed, as well as how they’d be constructed in marketing leaders’ dreams – is a signature lack of focus.

As we’ve been hammering out this work across the last month or so, we’ve developed a lot of shorthand, and one of my favorites is our go-to word for the bright, shiny objects that distract marketers from focusing on real economic results. We’ve been calling those things “Pinterest”, after the white-hot social network much loved (and obsessed over) by CPGs and retailers alike.

Now, this is probably a bit unfair to Pinterest, who have made an excellent product that clearly excites and inspires people. And it’s entirely possible that the nascent platform will evolve into something that’s very, very important for marketers in terms of connecting with their customers. But it’s entirely too early to make that call now – Pinterest has only become popular in the last six months or so.

That hasn’t stopped the hype machine from doing its thing. A range of studies by social media agencies have come out in recent weeks, all touting Pinterest’s performance as a conversion machine. A study by SteelHouse, a marketing firm, showed that Pinterest users are twice as likely as Facebook users to buy things they see on the respective platforms. A few weeks before that, Shopify released an infographic, detailing how Pinterest spurs its users onto more buying. It’s been making the rounds in marketing circles online since then:

The main thing we’re supposed to take away here? Pinterest is super-popular, growing ever more popular, and is a better e-commerce channel than Facebook. But note the big, unexamined assumption here: that Facebook is a good baseline for activities designed to maximize conversion. As anyone that’s been following the social commerce space lately knows, that’s not true; Facebook is a notoriously poor driver of financial outcomes for brands (it may be more influential in “softer” aspects of the consumer buying process, though). And, if you actually dig into the numbers, you find that in April, Shopify stores realized 320 conversions from 262,943 visits to the site from Pinterest. That’s a conversion rate of 0.12%, and marginal revenue of around $25,000 across a network of over 25,000 stores. I don’t know the combined revenues of all of Shopify’s member stores, but for an average retailer, that would be a relative drop in the bucket.

But judging from online chatter and our own search logs, Pinterest is occupying a space in marketers’ imaginations that’s much, much bigger than its current impact on financial outcomes. A key skill for marketers in the digital era is the ability to keep things like Pinterest in perspective – and we’ll tell you a bit about the marketers capable of doing that in the next few weeks.

B2B readers of our blog will know that, for the last year or so, we’ve been harping on one central, unavoidable fact about today’s sales and marketing landscape: the fact that nearly 60% of a typical customer’s purchase decision is complete by the time they contact your Sales department. It’s a figure with enormous ramifications for B2B marketers; if you primarily rely on Sales to introduce key messages into the marketplace, you should know that upwards of 3/5 of a typical customers’ purchase decision happens with hardly any input from you, at all.

Why is it happening? There are some cyclical factors; tight organizational budgets mean more pre-purchase scrutiny, for instance. But there’s a big structural driver behind the phenomenon, as well – it’s the elimination of information asymmetries thanks to the internet and buyers’ greater sophistication with it. With a click of a few buttons, buyers can know all sorts of things that used to be much harder to learn: peer reviews, price comparisons, and more are all available for anyone and everyone. And that’s a structural factor that – absent some cataclysmic return to the Dark Ages – is going to stay with us and likely accelerate.

This means two things for Marketing and Sales. First, Sales must become more assertive in challenging assumptions prospective buyers form as a result of doing their own research. We call this approach the Challenger Sale – a methodology designed by our sister program for sales leaders, the Sales Executive Council. The Challenger approach is proven to lead to more effective and sustainable selling – and while most of it is up to Sales to implement, Marketing has a key role in providing Sales with messages with which to challenge customer assumptions.

We’ve detailed a range of solutions to this challenge on our new online resource, Marketing’s Role in the Challenger Sale. We hope that marketing organizations will take away three things from our work: Read More »

It’s well-established that there are serious, serious returns to be had by investing heavily in Big Data – new commercial opportunity identification, offer/message targeting, improved customer value metrics, and purchase path acceleration are but some of the fruits of a strategy focused on getting the most from disparate and growing data streams.

But it isn’t exactly easy or cheap to extract value from this data. First, the data is often disparate and unstructured – meaning that it comes from different places and that data sets don’t have “common denominators” allowing them to be easily matched up with one another. Secondly, the expertise required to do that work isn’t exactly growing on trees; in the Big Data space, most analysts are masters-level statisticians, computer scientists, and mathematicians at least; many hold PhDs. And finally, the computing power needed to get great insights from Big Data can be expensive.

So, you can probably see where this is headed. Expensive machinery, manned by expensive people, all in the service of a vague-but-potentially-revolutionary goal: a returns-focused businessperson’s nightmare. And, accordingly, many of our members are running into internal skepticism when it comes to rolling out data and analytics products.

To help you get started, we’ve created a brand-new Data and Analytics Resource Center, designed to provide marketing leaders with a blueprint for developing a robust analytics function in as short a timeframe as possible. For the full plan, you can check out our Quick Start Guide, but we’ll summarize our findings briefly here:

Set long-term goals and strategy. Building a sophisticated analytics capability takes years. It’s important to set clear expectations for short versus long-term deliverables, and to start capturing the right data ahead of time.

Get quick wins to boost buy-in. Here’s a key element of any successful analytics ramp-up: a steady stream of quick wins – early results that are easy to achieve – is crucial for securing continued investment in analytics as well as boosting marketers’ appetite for data, a key prerequisite for impact.

Start building data assets and infrastructure. The most advanced analytics requires years of well-captured and fully-integrated data. After setting analytic goals, most companies realize they don’t yet have the data needed.

MLC members, for much, much more – including how some of your peers have accomplished each of the three key strategic elements of analytics roll-out above – please check out the full resource center.

(This post was originally featured by several of our sister programs; we’ve adapted this for a marketer’s perspective.)

For many years I looked to Bill Lumbergh from Office Space as an unofficial source of advice on the topic of things managers shouldn’t say. (If you remember, Bill started just about every conversation he had with an employee with the words “I’m gonna need you to…”)

But we now have an updated list of phrases that should never pass a manger’s lips thanks to workplace expert Liz Ryan, who recently blogged for BusinessWeek about the 10 things only bad managers say.  Among the most groan-inducing:

• “Who gave you permission to do that?”
• “I don’t pay you to think.”
• “I’ll take it under advisement.”

What’s the common denominator behind these infuriating catchphrases? Clearly, there’s an element of micromanagement at play – and even folks with a few days of business experience know how frustrating micromanagers can be. And when you think about the stress of modern marketing – dealing with a plethora of channels, a never-ending list of organizational stakeholders, and a huge stable of agencies – a supervisor or manager with a penchant for being overbearing is the last thing anyone needs.

So what are progressive organizations doing to ensure that supervisors and managers are being good leaders? For starters, they’re looking at the role that supervisors/managers play in driving employee engagement.

As it turns out, manager/supervisor quality is the number one driver of a marketers’ engagement with her employer. Not only is it number one, it’s far and away the biggest driver:

What’s more, baked into those “direct manager quality” factors are a range of things that could broadly be said to be anti-micromanagement: manager traits like “sets realistic performance expectations”, “places employee interests first”, “provides job freedom”, and “encourages employee development”. Simply put, micromanagers are proven destroyers of employee engagement.

It goes without saying that the ten phrases above are not recommended ways of driving employee engagement and development in the marketing organization, but below are resources to help build trust and ensure that supervisors and managers are doing their jobs effectively:

Driving marketer engagement. Our study of 150+ marketing organizations reveals what organizations can do to improve engagement and retain the best of the best.

Driving global development. As our companies’ footprints have expanded, so have our marketing teams – but global outposts sometimes don’t get the same development focus as the corporate mothership. Here’s how GE develops global talent.

Assess and close skill gaps. Marketing today requires a range of expertise that it didn’t require even a few years ago. Here’s how Microsoft evaluated its entire marketing team and systematically identified and closed key skill gaps.

In marketing, we’ve long known that one of the most innovative companies in the world won’t be found in Silicon Valley but in the Twin Cities. 3M – a brand that revolutionized several industries and one that markets some of the most ubiquitous office products in the world – is, on a patent basis, one of the most innovative companies in America and is consistently recognized as such.

We know why computer scientists and hackers innovate – they’re in new fields, they’re ultra-passionate about their careers (and likely would be doing something computer-related even if they weren’t employed at Apple or Facebook or HP). 3M’s employees are passionate, no doubt – but the secret to their innovation success is a strong culture of risk-taking, high tolerance for failure, and rewards for high achievement. That’s according to Robert Brands, a consultant and author who wrote Robert’s Rules of Innovation: A 10-Step Program for Corporate Survival, a guide to fostering a culture of innovation in any organization. 3M, according to Brands, takes the long view – investing in longer-term, disruptive innovations with the hope of big payoffs down the road.

It’s an approach I think most people – including MLC – would endorse for driving the development of innovations with a high chance of payoff. But it’s interesting to see how this core insight into the mechanics of innovation plays out in the case we have profiling 3M’s approach to its innovation portfolio.

Here’s the basic story: upon the arrival of a new CEO, 3M undertook significant changes in its innovation management process by adopting Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) – a data-driven methodology designed to provide a common language for NPD throughout the company, and to sharpen R&D’s focus on customer needs. But DFSS had serious limitations when it came to technology platform development – an area 3M saw disproportionate profits coming from in the future. So they developed a new methodology, Technology-DFSS (T-DFSS). Contained within that is a methodology called Product Migration Planning, which contains 3M’s core innovation approach in a nutshell: aim for big, breakthrough innovations – but use your work to generate a steady flow of financial returns, insulating the work from cost pressures.

To learn how Product Migration Planning works, check out the full case – there’s much, much more there. But the basic idea is so sound and yet underappreciated by companies going for big returns from innovation.

MLC members, for more on NPD and innovation, check out our topic center, as well as our recent work on generating breakthrough innovation.

One of the biggest challenges for global brands is managing an ever-expanding agency roster for maximum brand, customer, and commercial impact. With a range of different mandates, incentives, and personalities, managing agencies is one of the toughest parts about marketing; getting competing firms to play nice with each other in the service of a larger brand vision can sometimes feel impossible.

Of course, some companies do it better than others; together with their agency partners, they’ve created models and strategies designed to diffuse conflict and incent cooperation. Here are some of our personal favorite ways brands have herded agency cats for maximum impact. For the full list, check out our agency management topic center.

Drive collaborative behavior. One of the biggest challenges inherent in managing an agency roster is that many firms are in fact competitors; they have every incentive to be less than fully cooperative with other agencies you’ve hired, in the hopes of getting a bigger slice of the agency spend pie. Mars, the candy and snack food manufacturer, solved this problem in a unique way: it deployed a 360-degree evaluation survey to gain transparency into collaborative behaviors, asking agencies to rate each other on six key dimensions of collaborative behavior.

Get a deeper understanding of customers. As brands find themselves able to target their efforts to smaller and smaller pieces of the consumer pie, marketers are naturally wondering: are my agencies prepared to speak in a deeply authentic manner to those target segments? And, if they’re not, how can I best find and integrate specialist agencies without disrupting my relationship with my lead agency? Toyota solved the problem by working with their lead agency to find another that specialized in the target demographic, and clearly defining roles and responsibilities to avoid damaging their relationship with their lead agency.

Simplify the agency interface. In working with a long list of agency partners, brands face all kinds of difficulties. They know that agency collaboration is strongly correlated with idea quality, which is in turn dependent on the commitment of individual agency employees – but they’re unsure of their ability to motivate agency players. Agency employees face a very-different set of incentives and pressures than do client employees, which makes getting everyone on the same page much more difficult. Coke solved the problem by creating a “virtual agency” for its push around the 2008 Olympics, inviting employees from a range of agencies to come to a place with different – and brand-friendly - management structures, cultures, and evaluation criteria.

Ensure more efficient production. As working with agencies becomes more complicated, many brands are finding that a key failure point in the process involves the production phase. Often notably slower than the rest of the creative development process, many brands lack the visibility and technical expertise required to improve it and improve marcomm production. Exxon-Mobil solved the problem by employing an outside party to oversee the agency production staff’s activities, in the process providing a valuable source of informal training for agency staff which drives longer-term efficiency.

Amplify the brand. Two-pronged messaging can be tough to execute, particularly when the prongs don’t naturally flow from one another, and particularly when one of the prongs is a newly-conceived brand campaign. Seagate solved the problem by creating standardized brand message maps, linking product-level messages to brand-level messages in an easy-to-use document, driving agency uptake and execution.

You may have noticed some recent sparseness in posting here at Wide Angle. Sorry about that! But there’s a good reason for it: half of the MLC team is hard at work preparing our major research product for the year for B2C marketers. (For a high-level overview of where our research is taking us, check out our work in progress page). To make a long story short, one of the key things we’re finding is that winning B2C marketing teams are best capable of linking the ever-shifting landscape of consumer behavior – the new social networks we try, the things we do in the face of economic uncertainty, the volatile list of celebrities we worship – to real, sustainable business value. Read More »

As brands adapt to the new reality of a global marketplace, they’re increasingly finding that products and services that work in one locale and culture might not make much sense in another. So they’re increasingly engaging in localization – adapting their product mix to local tastes and preferences, but trying to maintain the same core brand image in all markets. It’s a tough challenge – one that leads to a lot of mistakes, for sure, but also some curious (and likely effective) new products from brands Westerners thought they were familiar with.

Fast and casual food brands are no exception; around the world, they’re experimenting with their menus to hit the precise combination of consistent brand delivery and tailoring to local tastes. Here are some of our favorite localization efforts in the fast food space:

Domino’s Bacon Groovy Pizza (France). Gosh, that sounds delicious! With a variety of pizza ingredients Americans might not be quite used to – including creme fraiche, roast chicken, and barbecue sauce – the Bacon Groovy Pizza manages to hit France’s love of pork but retains Domino’s image as a decadent, high-quality pizza purveyor.

Starbucks’ Dragon Dumplings (China). Starbucks has jumped into the localization game, too, by selling sweet glutinous rice dumplings called zongzi at their outlets in the Shanghai area. Zongzi, a delicacy served during the Dragon Boat Festival in late spring, are popularly called dragon dumplings in English. The dumplings are a perfect example of localization – they fit Starbucks brand image to a T, but in a way that endears the brand to the local population.

McKrocket (Netherlands). The McKroket is a deep-fried beef roll, served on a bun with hollandaise sauce. I don’t think I need to explain anything more; pick one up on your next trip to Amsterdam.

Burger King’s Chicken Nugget Burger (Germany). This is one of the more curious ones on the list. I mean, with three chicken nuggets, lettuce, mayonnaise and hot curry sauce on a bun, it sounds delicious, but don’t the chicken nuggets fall out? What happens then? I’ll just have to go to Germany to find out (and, German readers, if you’ve had this delicacy, let us know in comments what you think).

Taco Bell’s Potato and Paneer Burrito (India). India has to be a tough market to sell fast food in, particularly for a big global company. Much of the population doesn’t eat meat, and a significant portion don’t eat pork. If you’re taco bell, how do you fix it? Potato burrito! This one uses paneer, the fresh Indian cheese, for a bit of local flavor; other than that, it’s all tex-mex, with salsa, Mexican rice, and a warm flour tortilla.

MLC members, for more on managing a global brand, check out our Global Marketing Resource Center.

(This is a guest post by Alexandra Chiou of the Sales Executive Council, our sister program for heads of sales. Visit the original on the SEC’s blog!)

You know that your best sellers succeed by teaching customers something new about their business. But what sales messages are your sellers sharing with customers and prospects? And how do you know when you have an insight versus a catchy but fleeting idea?

Our most recent findings from this year’s new research study (which SEC members can access here) reveal that many companies struggle to discern thought leadership from true insight. They often arm their sellers with newsworthy sales messages that grab customer attention but have little lasting impact, and alone are insufficient to create a sense of urgency that translates to customer action.

While we all know and agree that insights are the key to successful selling in a complex environment, companies struggle to generate commercial insights and to know what good insight should look like.

So what exactly is insight anyway?This year’s new SEC research reveals the key ingredients and a basic definition of commercial insight. We think of it as having a few key components. The first component is:

• Be credible/relevant – Demonstrate an understanding of the customer’s world, substantiating claims with real-world evidence.

While every insight must have this baseline requirement, it alone is insufficient—you’ll merely have a catchy idea that probably won’t stick. And that is thought leadership in a nutshell – food for thought, but unless it really reframes customers’ current thinking, they will most likely move on to the next new and shiny thing they see. That’s where the next two differentiators come into the picture:

• Be frame-breaking – Disrupt the customer’s current logic, revealing an underappreciated aspect of the customer’s environment or a flawed assumption.
• Lead back to your unique strengths – Refer customers specifically to areas where you outperform competitors.

This last component, while not important to the customer, is especially important for you as the supplier. If your commercial message meets the first two criteria, but it doesn’t lead back to you, you have just done some free consulting that may benefit your competitors—you have a sharp message, but it’s not commercially viable for you.

MLC members, learn more about the characteristics of effective customer insights by visiting our insight generation topic center,