InsightIQ Blog

At the recent Forrester Customer Experience Forum, Principal Analyst Dave Frankland spoke about the four tenets of breakthrough marketing accountability: organizational alignment, cross-functional business processes, value-based metrics, and communicating results. In addition to these core components, here there are some other things which are also critical to establishing marketing accountability:

As a frequent flyer one of my pet peeves is the presentation of credit card offers by flight attendants on behalf of their financial services partners.  I feel bad for the flight attendants having to sell this stuff, presumably to get commission to supplement their incomes.  However what really irritates me is the assumption that I am willing to listen to or am even remotely interested in hearing yet another credit card offer, especially when they know I am a captive audience.  

So I want to start a “do not solicit” list for frequent flyers (I am only half kidding) which would prohibit this annoying interruption.  It seems like the worst form of untargeted marketing.  Surely the airlines and their partners have learned the lesson of the past several years that the more relevant and timely your offer, and the more personalized its presentation, the better your chances of conversion. 

There has been a lot of buzz about customer engagement agencies (CEAs) and the role they'll play helping companies address marketing challenges.  But what is a customer engagement agency and what capabilities does a firm need to have to call itself one?  We've put together this short flash video to share our thoughts on the topic.

Have you taken the time to look around at what's happening across many business organizations lately?  The typical IT and Marketing departments have gone through a dramatic change.  The last few years have been quite a renaissance for these groups.  Gone are the IT operations and development groups.  Most of these roles have traveled the less-expensive-yet-not-always-faster outsourced direction.  Now, there are more clouds than switches.

At Quaero we are often asked to help marketing organizations that feel like they are “inefficient”.  Sometimes what I find is that they are, in fact, fairly efficient, but that their marketing investments are not “effective”.  In other words they execute well but do not get good outcomes.  By the same token, I work with companies who are effective – they get good marketing results – but who collectively tear their hair out every time they work together on a marketing program because they are so inefficient and it’s therefore so hard to get things done. 

Recently, CSG Systems commissioned a study of 260 consumers nationwide between the ages of 24 – 49 with Frost & Sullivan to investigate consumer impact of positive and negative customer service, including:

• Identifying the positive and negative customer service experiences that drive consumers to take actions such as changing service providers, to recommending a service to a friend. 
• Learning how customers receive communications from their cable operators today and which channels they are most likely to use when buying new products and services.
• Identifying customer willingness to share personal preference information and receive targeted advertising.

I recently attended a fabulous webinar sponsored by CustomerThink, part of their Social Business Executive Summit: How to Win in the Social Economy. The specific session that I am referring to is, "Best Practices to Create Online Communities to Engage Customers and Increase Loyalty." During this webinar, Jason Mittelstaedt from RightNow Technologies spoke about social media as part of the customer experience.

Jason mentioned that most companies who are engaged in social media (SM) strategy are taking a very silo'd approach rather than viewing SM as part of an integrated brand experience. So many marketers are worried about capitalizing on the social experience that this becomes an inevitable result - jumping on the tools because that's the easy part. Marketers know that they have to be a part of the conversation or they will be left out so they jump.

I recently attended the Neolane Evolution 2010 in wonderful Paris and I was impressed by the number of attendees. I had the opportunity to talk to a number of them about the challenges that they are facing in marketing today. It was also a great opportunity to hear from marketers about the interesting things and areas that they are exploring, as well as how they are leveraging Neolane.

Here are some of the broad themes that I heard at the conference:

One of the things that struck me most at the recent Unica MIS conference was how far some of the participating organizations have gone to create a progressive and expansive approach to marketing.  They have consciously and deliberately invested in strategies, analytics, processes and technology that move them away from broad-based outbound marketing to a more real-time and interactive mode of customer engagement.  That contrast between “marketing” and “engagement” came across very clearly to me and I believe is something that all organizations should be thinking about. 

A colleague of mine has two chidren - ages 8 and 5 – with no plans to increase the size of her brood.  So you can imagine her surprise when she received a box from a leading baby food manufacturer that contained five samples and a letter, which welcomed her to their loyalty program and indicated that she would be receiving additional samples and offers in the coming months. And, then they came – direct mail pieces with diaper samples, coupons and other goodies - at least eight in total.

Talk about an expensive “mistake” for the manufacturer. Who knows how my colleague ended up on this particular marketing list, which was obviously geared towards a particular demographic (i.e., women with babies), but I'm pretty sure she wasn’t the only one who ended up on the list erroneously.

Which leads me to the topic of this blog post – how do companies avoid these marketing blunders, which can be costly in terms of both reputation and hard dollars?  The answer will be revealed in the video clip below.

We are thrilled to announce that Quaero is a 2010 American Business Awards Finalist in the category of Website/Blog. Quaero's blog, InsightIQ, has been recognized for excellence in this category. The American Business Awards were created to honor the achievements and positive contributions of organizations and business people worldwide so we are honored to have been named a finalist.

Thank you to our bloggers, our readers and congratulations to all 2010 American Business Award Finalists and Winners!

Not too long ago, a client with a leading edge reputation and revered loyalty program contacted me to discuss how we can help them re-affirm their direct marketing vision.  They are staffed with long tenured and notable marketers, but were seeking a fresh perspective of the initiatives and capabilities they might consider to drive the very best customer experience.

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of high performance computing and an example of why it is relevant in marketing.  This article will serve as the foundation for many other articles I will write.

What is High Performance computing?

High Performance computing or HPC is the use of a supercomputer or computer clusters to solve complex problems that involve an astronomical number of calculations.  Supercomputers or computer clusters are simply aiming to achieve one goal: wicked-fast computing.  They try to achieve this by adding more processors which adds parallelism.  Parallelism gives the system the ability to do multiple calculations simultaneously.

Customer Analytics in many environments provides significant competitive advantages, which culminates in minimizing waste / costs while maximizing revenue.  Many times one of the largest barriers in analytic adoption is the lack of understanding of the analytic outputs, which hinders the proper strategic application of the analytics - both short-term and long-term.

Marketing Operations is a term that has been in common use for several years now.  It has become synonymous with improving and automating direct marketing processes to achieve maximum throughput at minimum cost.  Given the tough economic conditions that have prevailed over the last few years, the focus for work in the marketing operations area has naturally been on being more “efficient," meaning doing more with the same resources or less.  As the economy slowly recovers however, marketers are beginning to think beyond the efficiency of the next campaign or branding initiative and are focusing in two related areas – (i) the changing nature of the marketing they are doing (or should be doing), and (ii) redefining or enhancing marketing operations to support those changes.

A big component of lead management strategy in B2B marketing is the process of building relationships with your prospects and engaging a prospect with meaningful dialogue that moves them through the sales funnel until they are ready to become a customer.

By now we are all familiar with the online media business model. It’s all about hits – well sort of. First, we have to remember that media companies have two groups of customers: 

1. Those who consume their content.
2. Those who purchase rights to advertise alongside their content.

When you purchase advertising in print newspapers, the rate card will often include demographics and circulation data.  This provides the marketer with information about who their ads are targeting.  This is far from perfect. The advertiser cannot select to target say, only affluent subscribers, or those looking to purchase a car.

I recently worked with the marketing team in a large global organization.  They engaged us to help them to become (in their words) more “efficient”.  Their hypothesis was that both the efficiency problem and its solution lay somewhere at the intersection between their processes and their marketing systems.  However we quickly discovered that people had very different definitions of “efficiency.”

Over the first few months of this year a lot of attention has been paid to quality-- the auto industry is a perfect example of this top-of mind awareness.  This led me to reflect on the steps one of our clients is taking in the arena of campaign quality.  We've recently helped them insert a quality assurance process into their campaign management operation.  The early results are looking good.  Here's a bit of background on the evolution of quality control in campaign management.

As I just returned from this year’s Unica MIS, I have been thinking about my favorite features in Affinium Campaign.  Picking my top 5 was not an easy task, as there are so many features you can take advantage of.  I could literally list out 20 different features that can optimize your marketing campaigns. 

In addition, I am not even scratching the surface on advanced customization that can be put in place in Campaign, and on the Campaign Server.  Below I am listing out my top 5 features that you can take advantage of in Affinium Campaign to efficiently run your marketing campaigns.  I plan on doing a separate blog entry for each one listed below, and will expand appropriately. 

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) is one of my favorite informational database sites.   They publish an extensive library of data warehousing and business information (BI) related articles covering a variety of topics.  Wayne Eckerson writes a particularly interesting weekly blog called, "Wayne's World".  Wayne focuses his blog on BI and analytics (sorry, not the 90's comedy film!).  I found his post in April 2010, 12 Characteristics of Effective Metrics, to be a very accurate assessment of how companies can get the most out of their business metrics.

The 2010 Forrester Marketing Forum focused at a high level on adaptive marketing.  What does that really mean?  Responding to the market, performance based decision making, or understanding and integrating emerging platforms such as social?  Triple yes, and the Forum covered them all.  But all of these tactics, while making a marketer more efficient, may not necessarily make them more effective. 

When most people talk about innovation, they are often referring to the development of new or improved products, a la the iPad.   However, innovation with regard to processes and entirely new business  models are often much more impactful.  Famous examples of this are the lean manufacturing techniques pioneered by Japanese companies, the supply chain revolutions led by Dell and Wal-Mart, offshore support and development driven by Indian oursourcing companies such as Infosys and online retail shopping experiences from Amazon, e-Bay and myriad smaller online retailers.    Innovation in marketing can likewise help to transform businesses.  

Forrester’s Marketing Forum, as I wrote in the recent post, Forrester’s Marketing Forum – Are You Planning to Attend, was intended to deliver value to attendees through a variety of means – content, networking, council meetings and analyst 1-on-1s.

So did it deliver? Yes, it did. Quaero folks onsite spoke with peers, clients and analysts, all of whom agreed that the content will help to shape the decisions they make back at their companies.

Why was it so powerful? A lot of it had to do with the content and theme. Adaptive Marketing: How to Design a Flexible Marketing Organization to Thrive on Change felt particularly relevant as we start to see a light at the end of the recessionary tunnel.

Here are some of the things we learned:

In a previous post I discussed the need to purge customer data stores with customer data we are not using.  Even after this de-cluttering exercise you may still find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of data that you have at your disposal.  As a result you may find yourself in an ongoing cycle of analyzing and reporting out on the same data in an attempt to derive new insights, but to no avail.  Rather than taking an open-ended approach hoping to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, I suggest you borrow a page from science and take a more hypothesis driven approach.