Here's an interesting post from Atlanta's dBusinessNews Site:
Fiderion, a retained executive search firm with deep experience recruiting Chief Marketing Officers for financial services and technology companies, recently hosted a CMO roundtable event in Atlanta to discuss and debate the future of marketing. Many of the top marketing professionals in the city attended the dinner discussion, which was moderated by Echelon Marketing President Don Neal.
Fiderion Managing Directors Rob Gallagher and Todd Stratton highlight a few noteworthy comments that address why hiring qualified marketing professionals will remain a key challenge for global corporations in 2007.
Your next CMO will wear a pocket protector. “Year after year we’ve seen a 50 percent increase in marketing positions that require quantitative and research expertise. The most highly sought-after marketing professionals today started in one of the heavy mathematical disciplines, like engineering or finance, and moved into marketing later in their career.
Companies today are looking for marketing scientists who can research, build, test and prove their marketing ideas. It is all about achieving bottom line results,” said Fiderion Managing Director Rob Gallagher. In fact, many of the marketing executives at the event agreed that the title of Chief Marketing Officer is truly evolving to one of Chief Growth Officer.
B2C experience still trumps B2B, but B2B is gaining ground. “The increasingly blurred line between B2B and B2C marketing will get even more pronounced,” according to Todd Stratton, who noted that marketing standards in B2B are inching higher as marketing targets in B2B demand the same quality they see as consumers. “In the past, there was a gap in B2B marketing standards compared to B2C marketing, and a general feeling that B2B materials did not need to meet the same high standards. This is definitely no longer the case as B2B communications are on par with their B2C counterparts,” said Stratton.
Time is the ‘Currency of the 21st Century.’ “What used to be measured quarterly is now measured in hours or minutes, and the shorter gestation period requires hiring talented individuals who think and act quickly to achieve strong results,” Gallagher said. “My advice is to focus on finding people who work with the same technologies and resource levels to which you are accustomed. Think about the impact of hiring someone for your team that does not use a Blackberry, instant messaging or Microsoft Excel, for example. The candidate’s use (or non-use) of technology tools will greatly impact their effectiveness and therefore your team’s.” Bring your checkbook.
Hiring qualified marketing professionals with analytical backgrounds is a challenge that will get worse before it gets better. In addition, the marketing executives at the event also spoke at length about retaining and motivating the young, analytical professionals who are clearly from a new and independent generation. The competition for these individuals is fierce. “We are seeing hedge funds and other financial service firms woo top analytical marketing talent with lucrative compensation packages,” said Stratton.
Toyota, Sweden has built a fantastic site.
http://demo.northkingdom.com/ihuvudetpatoyota/index_en.html
I think the asthetics of the design is just brilliant. I do have one reservation. After having created such a 'welcoming' home page, the pages linking the other pages could have been a lot more interesting.
Eric Friedman has an excellent post on how sees the future of advertising. I can't agree with him more. With the increasing number of devices that we have come to own as consumers, advertising is increasingly changing to 'discovering' and 'informing' continously, one customer at a time. Take a look at what he has to say:
I believe that the future of advertising is in providing real time information instead of real time interruption. This is the future of advertising, or what we call marketing 2.0.
Real time information is how advertising will work (and is working) for the next generation. We have been brought up on the idea of instant gratification and having information available to use 24×7 at our fingertips. It is no surprise that advertising is now more precise and targeted to our needs - this is a direct correlation to how we consume information in general today.
The difference between the two is a generic 30 second television spot that appears between segments of your favorite prime time show and a search query performed at 3:00am when you are looking to find some information.
In a world where optimization is not only needed but expected, every display of my ad and subsequent click results in a search engine learning about the relevance of showing it to each user. Engines such as Google and Yahoo use this information to help the user experience and provide the most real time and relevant information possible.
As companies learn that their dollars can be better spent placing their ads in front of people with questions, and understanding that their ad can actually answer these questions, the true shift in advertising dollars will occur. I know we have written about the fall of the television upfront and changes to advertising many times (1, 2, 3, 4) but now the knowledge exists to make these changes possible.
A post on Anita Campbell's Small Business Trends website directed me to - Little Known Ways to Brand on the Cheap: 99 Tips for Poor Web Startups:
“If you build it, they will come.” That might have worked for Kevin Costner in the Field of Dreams, but if you’ve built a good site and are expecting people to just show up, you’ll be waiting a very long time. The days of setting up shop and automatically getting traffic just by being online are over.
Today, if you want to have success on the web you need a unique angle and a reputable brand so that visitors have something to remember you by.
Branding distinguishes you from your competition, and having a unique identity is especially important on the Internet, because buying from a competitor’s site instead of yours is just a click away. But despite its importance, surprisingly, most webmasters have either never heard of branding, or just choose to ignore it.
If you have heard of branding, then you’ve probably heard two things: it takes a long time to see results, and it’s expensive. While that is definitely true about traditional branding, Web 2.0 branding is flipping the traditional model on its head. By using offline and online DIY (do it yourself) methods and some guerilla marketing techniques, you can build, announce, and control your brand without having to spend loads of money.
Check out and bookmark this
post to get all of the details on the 99 tips that should help you on your way.
Greg pointed me to an excellent video on "An Economic Response To Unsolicited Communication" by Marshall Van Alstyne about e-mail spam. While this is about email spam, I believe this has profund implications on:
- How to build a next generation list marketing company
- How the marketing in the future will move from paying to media (to get audience attention) to sharing the monies with media and audience(by paying for audience attention)!
Take a look:
Consumer generated chatter is increasingly becoming an important source of purchasing decisions.
More than 50% of respondents to the Compete study said they used consumer-generated media to make or narrow their choices, 23% used CGM to confirm a decision and 15% used CGM to determine what their top choice should be.
Some key findings from the study:
* 71% of car and travel consumers are influenced by CGM
* Only 35% of the same consumers are influenced by brand
* Auto buyers prefer consumer reviews and ratings over company websites (32%) and car dealers (32%)
* 2/3 of travelers prefer consumer reviews.
Compete estimates that around $2 billion from the Travel Spend is influenced by CGM.
“CGM is money in the bank for marketers who know how to tap into the new currency around CGM,” said Cynthia Stephens, director of marketing at Compete, Inc (in a statement). “Marketers will need to go beyond buzz-tracking tools to analyze and connect with in-market consumers in a new landscape. Companies that follow this course have nothing to fear about losing control of the marketing message.”
MSN has launched demographic search which looks quite interesting to me. In online advertising, the demographics of the user is always in question as there is a lot of 'junk' registered data. Even though this is based on an index file of MSN search users, it can serve as a useful predictor of the kind of sites one would want to advertise.
Here's the link
Business Week has a great article on how customers can be involved and enagaged in every business, if only companies have the intent.
Passionate customers can transform your company. Here's how to make them your secret weapon:
Each week, Greg Selkoe, founder of streetwear retailer Karmaloop, and a handful of his employees gather in his office overlooking Boston Common to review new designs. The group votes on which, if any, of the T-shirts, jackets, and other clothing should be added to the line Karmaloop sells in its Newbury Street store and online.What's worth noting is that the designs are submitted by customers. Since October, 37 designs, out of about 1,000 that have been submitted, have been added to the 33-employee, $4 million company's offerings.
Selling clothing dreamt up by customers is just one facet of a business model that brings customers so far into Karmaloop's DNA that they have become, in effect, extensions of the company's sales, marketing, and product development teams. Karmaloop has an 8,000-strong army of customers who proselytize the brand and get discounts or cash when they, or someone they've referred, make a purchase. Members of this "street team," called reps, also upload images, photos, or artwork to Karmaloop's site to make company stickers or banners other reps can download. "The reps are evangelists for our site," says Selkoe. And they're doing their job: Fewer than 1% of Karmaloop's customers are reps, but their purchases and those they inspire account for 15% of sales.
CEOs have been talking about customer loyalty for years, but entrepreneurs such as Selkoe know that making people truly loyal to your company—to make them really, really like you—takes a lot more than a frequent buyer program. It means nothing less than getting people so jazzed about your brand that they become engaged contributors to your company's sales, marketing, and innovation efforts, and ultimately its success. How does that happen? By knocking down the walls between "you" and "them" and creating a larger, looser community that is inviting to both your customers and your employees.
TechSmith's Weber was such a fervent believer in the power of a customer community that three years ago she persuaded the company's president to create her chief evangelist position. She then built customer advisory panels by including customers so happy with products that they'd written "love letters" to the company over the years, as well as those she found on blogs and through customer referrals. But Weber didn't shy away from the company's critics. Among the panelists is Paul Pival, distance education librarian at the University of Calgary in Alberta, who had written on his personal blog that he found Camtasia Studio, a TechSmith product that records keystrokes and mouse movements made on a computer, slow and difficult to use. "I was surprised she sought me out," says Pival of Weber's overture. "It was a little bit gutsy, but ultimately successful." After getting involved with the company's customer panels, Pival says he realized the product had been improved.
