Over the last few months, we’ve surveyed the membership a lot (thank you for helping us out, by the way). And those that we’ve talked to seem to agree on one big thing: 2012 is going to be a year of change. We explored a few things that might change last week.

But no matter what changes, it’ll be important that firms are ready for what’s coming around the bend. Marketing has a key role to play in driving change internally, and to get ready for what might be a tumultuous year, here are a few examples of how member companies have done just that:

International Truck and Engine’s Strategy Support Groups. New customer behaviors and market realities often make it necessary for companies to rapidly implement new strategies – but change fatigue is real, and traditional techniques don’t always create the atmosphere of high employee/manager engagement necessary to push changes through.

International’s marketing and communications teams came up with a novel approach: small “support groups”, designed to help managers internalize strategy and advocate for it with their staff.

Standard Chartered’s Brand Values Activation Team. Shifts in brand positioning are a particularly difficult form of internal change; employees internalize brand attributes even more than consumers do. Typically, companies try to drive internal adherence to new brand standards through centralized communications campaigns – but they believe that such a campaign wouldn’t engage employees well enough to drive new behaviors.

Similar to International Truck and Engine’s small-group oriented strategy, Standard Chartered created a “brand values actvation team” that culls enthusiastic, change-oriented managers from around the organization, and co-opts their passion to spread new standards to the rest of the firm.

Novelis’ Solutions Innovation Gameboard. As markets loosen up, and as recessionary habits begin to fade away, innovation will be a key element of re-capturing wallet share. But a lot of times, innovation efforts are poorly structured – and the result is incremental changes in product or service offerings, nothing that captures the market’s imagination.

Realizing that their traditional innovation process was freezing out the voices of lower-level employees, Novelis’ marketing department developed a game-based ideation session that creates an engaging setting for identifying, evaluating, and further developing a broad range of early-stage ideas from the entire employee base.

MLC members, want to learn more about Marketing’s role in organizational change? Check out our internal communications and NPD/innovation topic centers for the latest cases and studies on these topics.

In December, a day came that pharma marketers have been waiting for for years – the FDA finally began to release guidance on how pharmaceutical brands can and cannot use social media to engage with patients. But the guidance is, well, a little underwhelming. (For a look into the specific actions firms should take as a result of the guidance, Dale Cooke of Digitas Health has put out a regulatory note, it is the best I’ve seen so far)

First, some background, if you’re not knee deep in health-related social media circles. The US Food and Drug Administration, in addition to determining which pharmaceutical products should and shouldn’t be allowed in America’s pharmacies, also regulates the ways in which pharma companies are allowed to market to doctors and patients. Sounds smart, right? After all, we’re talking about potentially-dangerous drugs, here.

As such, they’ve developed guidelines and rules for the use of electronic marketing in a pharmaceutical setting. The only problem is, they haven’t been seriously updated since the late 1990s – and do not account for social media at all. This has put pharma companies in the weird position of being able to use social to broadcast certain messages but unable to have meaningful conversations with their customers, lest a side effect or adverse event is reported, setting off a chain of regulatory red tape.

The FDA listened and, in November 2009, held two days of hearings where pharma marketers, consultancies, doctors and scientific groups testified and gave suggestions on adapting the agency’s guidelines for a shifted communications landscape. And then, we waited – until Christmas Day 2011, when the FDA published this – entitled “Responding to Unsolicited Requests for Off-Label Information About Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices” - in the Federal Register, without even issuing a press release. This particular issue is one small facet of the pharma/social media problem, and it looks as though that the agency, rather than issuing sweeping guideline shifts that acknowledge a new communications landscape, is going to attack issues piecemeal.

But this specific guidance gives very little evidence that the FDA is thinking about social media as a systemic phenomenon, as opposed to a special case, capable of being dealt with with one-off regulations. First, the basic assumption is that marketers will be using social channels to “disseminate product information”, i.e., to advertise. That’s a given, but social offers organizations a lot more than just more space to plaster messages; we’ve talked about how social media trends mirror those in real life, and presumably the ability to listen to consumers better might lead to better health outcomes.

So here’s what I’d like out of future FDA guidances: an acknowledgement that social is a conversational medium, not a broadcast one; that it has benefits for pharmaceutical companies and broader public health outcomes beyond providing a place for Pharma to advertise; and that rigid rules on what Pharma can and can’t discuss in certain circumstances is bound to fail in a landscape where drugs are prescribed for all kinds of purposes.

Maybe we’ll get it, but I’m not hopeful.

Some of you may already know that this year, one of the MLC’s key goals is to help marketers activate their information to generate better insights and improve decision-making.  One key perspective is relates to customer understanding: most organizations already use a variety of market research techniques to better understand their customers.  However, even when they can gather quality information, they have difficulty producing effective business insights.  Why are marketers struggling here?  The answer can be pretty complex, so for simplicity’s sake, we’ll just look at customer understanding within a new product development context.

Traditional research methods – including win/loss analyses, voice of the customer, etc. – don’t usually identify actual problems that customers are trying to solve.  The information is mostly limited to existing offers, revealing little about how customers actually derive value from them.  Then there are the non-product-focused techniques, like focus groups or anthropological research.  Unfortunately, analysis of this type of information often involves a level of “inference,” which means that the resulting insights are open for speculation.  As one might expect, interpretation discrepancies so early in the NPD process can lead to disappointing new product launches.

Let’s see how the marketing team at Reynolds & Reynolds (R&R) is able to overcome these two shortcomings.

First, R&R implements a rigorous methodology, surveying their customers to understand their:

• Jobs – individual activities that combined make up a business workflow
• Desired outcomes – measures of success when completing a job

This allows R&R to move away from a product-centric perspective towards a focus on their customers’ goals and success metrics, giving them a better understanding how their customers actually value their offerings.

Next, they survey their customers again to filter those desired outcomes by importance and satisfaction to identify which are important but underserved.  These then become focal points that align the solutions innovation community, streamlining the NPD process.

The results? In what was considered to be a highly saturated market segment, R&R’s first implementation of the jobs-outcomes methodology was extremely successful.  They uncovered nearly 400 high-importance, low-satisfaction customer goals, leading to a sevenfold increase in the number of solution-worthy opportunities.

Talk about a way to make your customers work for you!

MLC members, to learn more about how R&R did all of the above, read the full case study here.

Happy New Year!  December and January are common times for people to reflect on the year that was and make predictions about the year that will be.  The B2B prognosticators have been out in full force.  Some of them take the easy route, proclaiming 2012 as the year of mobile marketing or the year of content marketing (uh, 2009 called, it wants its title back).  Among the more creative titles I came across: 2012 as the year of “preference-driven multichannel marketing breakthroughs” (that one really rolls off the tongue).   But what do those in the trenches see on the horizon for the coming few years?  To find out, we went ahead and asked them directly.

At the end of last year we conducted a survey of 92 B2B marketers asking them to evaluate some of the big changes looming on the horizon.  From the list of 14 potential shifts threatening to rock marketers’ reality, five emerged as holding the greatest potential for impact on business results (from the survey takers’ perspective).  They were: Read More »

Last month, Corey blogged about a surprising result from MLC’s  social media opportunity survey—that relying on social media vendors to craft your social media strategy actively harms your ability to drive business results with social media.

Here’s another interesting finding from the social media survey—there is zero correlation between social media resourcing and business results.

That may or may not surprise you when it comes to financial resources.  But the result held true for people resources, as well.  That came as a surprise to us, since social media efforts are often so labor intensive.

How could this be? Read More »

For the last few months, the B2B side of our team has been working on the topic of marketing automation – the idea that, using customer data and a little computer wizardry, we can create scalable marketing campaigns tailored to a customer’s motivations, position in the purchase funnel, or any other variable. The verdict? Marketing automation is in its early days, beware of vendor hype, and be smart about the limitations of this kind of technology.

Now that I’ve tempered expectations a bit, I will say that one thing in particular is making me tremendously excited about this suite of technology: the idea that long-tail purchase motivations and special cases can be targeted with much greater ease than is capable with traditional marketing staffs and technologies. In the real world, that means a gradual replacement of general-purpose marcomms with increasingly-tailored communications.

That’s a process that’s well underway at Citrix, a networking and connectivity software company. Marketing noticed that the firm’s quarterly newsletter – a content catch-all that included multiple calls to action and spoke to many different kinds of current and potential customers – was underperforming expectations.

In order to extract the most value out of their marketing communications, the company turned to the best of automation and human judgment to create a lead nurturing program – one that starts with pre-programmed, automated content, but transitions to more tailored, targeted e-mails to convert prospects into sales-ready, qualified leads.

MLC members, want to learn more about how Citrix used automation and judgment to get more from their marcomms? Be sure to check out the full case, as well as the rest of our work on marketing automation.

For the last few months, we’ve been working on our major research project of 2012. As you’ve probably read, it’s all about data and marketing analytics – how companies should use the Big Data consumers generate to create more compelling products, experiences, and messages.

But bridging the gap from data to action almost always requires an intermediate step – testing. And with big, real-time data, the B2C marketing space just might be entering a golden age of testing and learning, as the test-to-results cycle speeds up and decisions can be made faster.

It’s important, though, to keep the possibilities here realistic – tweaking products, experiences, or messages will almost certainly produce marginal results, ones that might be eaten up by the macro factors at play in any business success – technological trends, the economy, that sort of thing. Case in point is Sears/KMart - a company that’s come on some hard times in the last few years, and one that recently announced that it would close between 100 and 120 stores in the coming year. Read More »

If there’s one thing the past few years have been notable for, for marketers, it’s instability and uncertainty. Core assumptions of the craft are being called into question by technological shifts, a growing impetus on globalization is running into geography-specific challenges, and it’s unclear whether consumers and business buyers will re-learn pre-recession habits.

A lot of these are longer-term issues, ones that we might not get clarity on for a few years. But some might be decided in 2012. Here are some things to look out for:

B2B social/digital media.In the B2B space, we think this might be the year that marketers gain a bit more visibility into how to employ social media marketing in the business buying environment. A number of variables are falling into place: for instance, marketing automation technologies are helping marketers use social data and platforms more effectively and a greater percentage of buyers are becoming more comfortable with social media.

I’m not suggesting that we’ll learn “the answer” to all B2B social media related questions, but I think we’ll get quite a bit closer. Read More »

Ah, New Year’s – the time when we step back, reassess, and resolve to do better in the coming 365 days. Most New Year’s resolutions are pretty predictable – stop smoking, lose 20 pounds, finally set up that household budget – but what should marketers, specifically, be thinking about their marketing startegy for the coming year? Based on our conversations, we came up with a few resolutions we’re hearing: Read More »

Americans (and maybe some of our non-American friends) all know the familiar gameshow scene of the Price is Right: Bob Barker (or Drew Carey, if you prefer the new guy) inviting crazed contestants to guess the price of everything from oatmeal to cars to exotic trips to Fiji.  And as the title says, the focal point is price, price, price.

Outside of the gameshow arena, consumers are arguably just as obsessed with price, and this attitude has become a pain point for many a sales representative.  How does a sales rep keep the conversation away from price when that’s all that a customer is thinking about?

Teach them something else that’s right.

Let’s look at a case on truck driver engagement and retention to see how Marketing at Volvo was able to deal with this issue.

Initially, no matter what sales reps went in with…

“We have a better product!  We have more features!  We can address your needs!”

… the customer always brought the conversation back to price.

“Well… a truck is a truck, but hey maybe you can throw in some free chrome bumpers!”

Volvo convened a small group of mid- to upper-level directors in a workshop to brainstorm and develop a new message for the sales reps.  MLC members, read more about the key elements to this workshop here.

They recognized an opportunity to improve driver management for their customers…

“Customers are underestimating how much unsatisfied drivers are costing them.”

… and crafted a pitch that teaches customers the value of Volvo solutions.

“Instead of telling them how our 2,092 square inch windshield will reduce the likelihood of an accident, let’s talk to them about the costs associated with driver turnover.”

Notice that instead of leading with the value of product features and focusing on known customer needs, the new approach leads with issue(s) costing customers money and telling them something they don’t already know about themselves.

And voila, you’ve shown your customers that the price is not the only thing that’s right when it comes to your business!

MLC members, read the full case study here.