Happy Customers Everywhere: An Evening with Prof. Schmitt and Friends (5/2/12)

Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership presents One Happy Book Launch: An Evening with Author Prof. Bernd Schmitt Co-sponsored by the Columbia Business School Alumni Club of New York Wednesday, May 2, 2012 6:30pm – 8:30pm Cost: $20 ($15 for Columbia Business School alumni) Hosted by: Edelman 250 Hudson Street, 16th Floor, New York, NY

Join us for a wine reception with author, Professor Bernd Schmitt, and a special discussion with leading marketers on their efforts to create happy customers and organizations.

	Bernd Schmitt Robert D. Calkins Professor of International Business, Columbia Business School
	Julie Cottineau Founder, BrandTwist; Former VP of Brand, Virgin USA
	Peter DeNunzio President, Customer Loyalty, Aimia US
	Owen Rankin Executive Vice President, Brand Stewardship, Edelman

Includes: Food, wine, special snacks and a free raffle for copies of Happy Customers Everywhere

REGISTER AT: http://happycustomerseverywhere.eventbrite.com

About the Book:

Every business knows that the best customer is a happy customer. They return time and again, bring their friends and family, and deliver tons of free advertising via word of mouth and social media. But in order to grow that loyal base, you must be keenly aware of your customers’ needs and preferences. Drawing on the latest research in the exploding field of positive psychology, SCHMITT offers three unique approaches any business can use to turn a casual customer into a committed fan:

• The Feel-Good Method: Use the experience of pleasure and positive emotion to hook new customers, and watch those feel-good moments transform a casual customer into a committed loyalist
• The Values-and-Meaning Method: Attract passionate customers by appealing to their core values, like being socially responsible, protecting the environment, or living a simple life
• The Engagement Method: Get customers to notice a unique or limited offer, immerse them in the experience, and have them share it with friends and family.

Schmitt shows marketers, brand managers, and entrepreneurs how to design an authentic and successful campaign that will reach, grow, and sustain a devoted base of customers.

CFOs…They’re Just Not That into You

It is often said that those in the finance department and those in the marketing department come from two different planets! Because of long standing accounting principles and practices, marketing is often relegated to being just a cost line item rather than a value-generating activity.

Natalie Mizik, former Associate Professor of Marketing at Columbia Business School, now at Kenan-Flagler Business School, and Doron Nissim, Professor of Accounting and Finance at Columbia Business School, took a closer look at the implications of current accounting models and their representation of marketing activities. In their article, Accounting for Marketing Activities: Implications for Marketing Research and Practice, Mizik and Nissim found that common accounting principles and practices have led to distortions of marketing contributions in financial reporting. In addition, some experts feel that marketers don’t adequately communicate how their expenditures benefit the bottom line. Together these factors affect perceptions of marketing’s value, which can impact everything from marketing budgets to influence and practice.

To mitigate the negative light financial reporting can cast on the perception of marketing, Mizik and Nissim recommend marketers play a more active role in the financial reporting debate. According to them, providing “consistent, observable, quantifiable and verifiable information” on marketing spend and its results, and sharing financially-based performance metrics can improve the process of evaluating marketing efforts and lessen the conflict between the finance and marketing worlds.

A recent study released by the Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA) confirmed the need for a robust set of ROI measures to improve  marketing’s standing within a company. The BRITE-NYAMA Marketing Measurement in Transition Study, Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data, found that 70% percent of marketers say that their marketing efforts are under greater scrutiny than in the past. ROI metrics are critical to addressing the concerns about the contributions of marketing initiatives. However, more work is needed to develop a common understanding of ROI metrics even within marketing departments. The study revealed that although marketers see the value of ROI measures, there is confusion about the meaning and significance of ROI among marketers.

Marketers will need to continue to refine their understanding of ROI and develop consistent metrics, often specific to their own organization, in order to get CFO’s turned on to the results of marketing efforts.

BY KIM SHIFRIN

New Study: Marketers Struggle with “Big Data” & Digital Tools

The Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA) are pleased to release the results of a major new study on the changing practices of large corporations in:

• data collection and usage,
• marketing measurement and ROI, and
• the integration of digital and traditional marketing.

The BRITE-NYAMA Marketing Measurement in Transition Study was authored by David Rogers, Executive Director of BRITE, and Columbia Business School Professor Don Sexton. Results were first released at the Center’s fifth annual BRITE conference on May 5, 2012. The findings have been reported in numerous publications, including the top front-page story of Ad Age.

The study’s results focused on 3 main findings:

1. The failure of “Big Data” for marketing
2. Marketers are quick to adopt the newest digital tools, but struggle to measure them
3. ROI – marketers know they need it, but cannot agree on its meaning and implementation

The full report can be viewed at http://j.mp/MarketingROIstudy.

FINDING: THE FAILURE OF BIG DATA FOR MARKETING SO FAR
The researchers found that marketers’ desire to be data-driven is not yet matched by a consistent effort to collect the data necessary to make these real-time decisions. 29 percent report that their marketing departments have “too little or no customer/consumer data.” When data is collected by marketers, it is often not appropriate to real-time decision making. 39 percent of marketers say that their data is collected “too infrequently or not real-time enough.” Furthermore, marketers today are still much less likely to collect new forms of digital data like customer mobile device data (19 percent collect it), and social media data (35 percent), than they are to collect traditional customer survey data on demographics (74 percent) and usage (60 percent).

FINDING: MARKETERS ADOPT NEW DIGITAL TOOLS, BUT STRUGGLE TO MEASURE THEM
Marketers are also struggling to measure the impact of the newest digital tools, despite the widespread adoption of these applications. 51 percent of marketers said they use mobile ads (in-app, or SMS); 85 percent use social network accounts (brand accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Foursquare). Yet these tools are among the least likely to be measured for ROI despite their profusion of data. Only 14 percent of the social networking users are tying them to financial metrics, and only 17 percent of those using mobile ads are tying them to financial metrics. By contrast, 41 percent of email marketers measure their results with financial metrics. In addition, as number of marketing tools expands, the challenge of measuring and comparing them grows. 60 percent of companies report that comparing the effectiveness of marketing across their different digital media is “a major challenge.”

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FINDING: ROI – MARKETERS KNOW THEY ALL NEED IT, BUT CAN’T EVEN AGREE WHAT IT IS
The study also revealed that there is confusion about the meaning and significance of ROI among marketers. Specifically, 31 percent of respondents said that they believe simply measuring the audience you have reached is “marketing ROI.” 57 percent are not basing their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis, and 28 percent are basing marketing budgets on gut instincts. 21 percent are using financial metrics for “little” or “none” of their marketing budget and seven percent are spending most or all of their marketing budget with “no metrics” at all. However, marketers are under pressure. 70 percent say that their marketing efforts are under greater scrutiny than in the past.

CONCLUSIONS: FIVE IMPERATIVE ACTIONS FOR CMOS
After its analysis of the dynamic and challenging environment for marketing today, the report recommends that Chief Marketing Officers should focus on five key leadership imperatives: Set objectives first; Design metrics to ensure marketing is linked to these objectives; Gather the right data for those metrics; Communicate to the entire organization what your objectives are and how they are being measured; and Evaluate and reward employees in part on how well objectives are achieved.

Read the complete findings and conclusions at http://j.mp/MarketingROIstudy.

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METHODOLOGY
253 corporate marketing decision makers, director-level and above, were surveyed online between January 27 and February 8, 2012. These professionals are employed at large companies (90 percent have a global annual revenue of over $50 million; 45 percent are over $1 billion). Respondents were from b2c and b2c companies in diverse industries. The study was made possible with support from Research Now and GreenBook.

ABOUT THE RESEARCH PARTNERS:

The Center on Global Brand Leadership was founded at Columbia Business School in 1999 and has grown into the leading global forum on brands. The mission of the center is to turn the research and intellectual capital of academia’s foremost thinkers on branding into practical tools and insights for real-world application. The Center has worked with a wide range of sponsor companies to develop a variety of thought leadership including: conferences, case studies, videos and webinars, and sponsored research. The Center’s flagship BRITE conference on brands, innovation, and technology presented was founded in 2008 and is presented each spring at Columbia University. BRITE ’12 speakers included John Hayes (CMO, American Express), Marc Speichert (CMO, L’Oreal USA), and Bob Garfield (host of On the Media, editor for Ad Age).

The New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA) helps marketing professionals navigate to success in today’s dynamic business environment. We serve the marketing community by giving members opportunities to push the boundaries of marketing, expand their skills and exchange ideas with other experienced professionals. The BRITE/NYAMA study is one example of how we are contributing to the advancement of marketing.

Research Now is the leading global online sampling and online data collection company. With over 6 million panelists in 38 countries worldwide, Research Now enables companies to listen to and interact with real consumers and business decision makers in order to make key business decisions. Research Now offers a full suite of data collection services, including social media sampling, and operates the Valued Opinions(tm) Panel and e-Rewards(r) Opinion Panels. The company has a multilingual staff located in 24 offices around the globe and has been recognized for four consecutive years as the industry leader in client satisfaction.

GreenBook® brings stimulating, practical, and timely resources to marketers and market researchers on both sides of the table. Through its targeted multi-media platform, GreenBook offers effective marketing and lead generation opportunities to businesses that communicate with buyers and users of market research.

Why Bob Garfield Is Channeling Shakespeare

Not just a famous Shakespearian quote, “To thine own self be true,” according to Ad Age editor, Bob Garfield, is a maxim to which marketers should adhere.

Garfield, host of NPR’s On The Media and author of the forthcoming The Human Element, explains that in this new “Relationship Era,” it’s critical to “look inward” rather than mold your business to the public’s “often fickle, shortsighted tastes.

In a recent Ad Age article, Ignore the Human Element of Marketing at Your Own Peril, Garfield claims that marketers in the “Consumer Era” strove to get into the heads and hearts of consumers by asking them what they wanted, attempting to deliver it, and seducing the target audience to buy it through advertising. However, in today’s world, companies need to continually communicate their “essential self” or brand purpose via relationships with all stakeholders.

Garfield calls these relationships the “human element.” In this new era, customers (as well as vendors, stockholders, and employees) are not “conquests” but rather members of a community, looking to a company’s inner reason to decide if it merits adoration (or, potentially, hatred). The digital revolution has ushered in an age in which consumers are evaluating companies all the time across numerous conversations that go well beyond the latest advertising slogan. According to Garfield, these conversations “are about your brand’s essential self—which behooves you to think very hard about your essential self.”

See Bob Garfield speak about the Relationship Era and the Human Element at our BRITE ’12 Conference (March 5-6, NYC).

REGISTER NOW! 

BY KIM SHIFRIN

Relevance Over Reach, says GE Digital Chief

Many marketers are singularly focused on collecting impressions. Not so for Linda Boff, Executive Director of Global Digital Marketing at GE. In an interview with Fast Company’s 30 Second MBA she explained that brand building is not about getting the most number of eyeballs, but about talking “to people in the most relevant way possible.”

Boff, named BtoB magazine’s “Top Digital Marketer of the Year” for 2011, looks beyond pageviews to measure campaign success. In a co-authored blog post on Harvard Business Review, Boff writes that a more useful metric “would be actively engaging” with a specific subset of relevant potential customers. She explains, “[digital tools] have enabled focusing on smaller, more meaningful segments,” a practice GE calls “micro-relevancy”—content that is delivered to the right audience, not just the biggest.

Boff acknowledges that GE “think[s] really hard about who [they] want to talk to.” This careful consideration of the target, in combination with digital technology, has allowed GE to reach “the right audience with the right offer at exactly the right time.” Something that has far more impact on business results than solely accumulating impressions.

See Linda Boff speak about building relationships with customers at our BRITE ’12 Conference (March 5-6, NYC).

REGISTER NOW!

BY KIM SHIFRIN