Insights Blog

Welcome to our new series of posts focused on Product Management Excellence! Product management has been described as "everything," and in well-run B2B organizations, that description may not be far from the truth. But that's tremendous pressure for a single function. In our experience, even top organizations have challenges through their ranks with efficient and effective product management.

The core challenges tend to fall into three areas:

Value propositions are one of the most important contributions marketers make to the growth of their businesses. These critical promises compel customers to choose our offering over the offerings of our competitors. But how is creating a value proposition different for consumer vs. B2B businesses?

We regularly help our clients develop value propositions for their brands and products. Simply stated, a value proposition is a promise that articulates why a customer should buy from you. But, as any seasoned marketer will tell you, there’s nothing simple about it.

When businesses take an “if we build it, they will come” approach, products fail. We believe three core concepts must be carefully considered to develop any effective value proposition—regardless of the product or service, the B2B or B2C context, or the type of organization.

Finally, finally, finally, we come full circle. A new Gallup report highlights what we have been saying all along. Social media is a tool to connect and communicate, but brands will not be rewarded just for showing up.

Most initiatives related to building a better customer experience emanate from the customer experience function. Others come from well-intentioned marketing and strategy groups. For businesses with a retail operation, sometimes it’s the store management function that starts the ball rolling.

Great brands make every effort to control and provide amazing experiences for their customers. (Need some help here? Check out our recent post on How to Make Your Next Customer’s Experience the Best Yet.) Yet as careful and strategically savvy as they can be, many companies drop the ball when it comes to the digital customer experience.

Can you describe the experience your next customer will receive by engaging with your brand? By taking a look at how customers are involved with, use, and perceive your products in the market, you can begin to understand how your brand accrues value. However, doing this research alone is not enough to make your brand stand apart. What you do with this information and how you act upon it become critical in shaping the interaction for the best possible customer experience .

Marketing budgets seem to be under pressure… again. We’ve observed that marketing is often one of the first places companies look to make cuts in an attempt to boost the bottom-line. Driven by the need to prove the value of marketing investments, many leaders have launched metric-related initiatives. However, many such initiatives fail to live up to their goals and are paid scant attention by marketers with overloaded dashboards.

Want to get it right? Here are some principles to aid in the successful design of a marketing metrics program:

In the first three posts of this series, we discussed what it takes for a marketing excellence program to have a sustained impact on an organization. It must have various interlocking components, each designed to address different challenges in getting rapid results while delivering long-term change. Those components are: Design, Implementation, Inspiration, and Measurement. Having already addressed Design, Implementation and Inspiration - in this final post of the series - we will discuss the metrics used to evaluate the progress of a marketing excellence program.

As mentioned in the first and second post of this series, if a marketing excellence program is to have sustained impact on an organization, it must have various interlocking components. Each component is designed to address different challenges in getting rapid results while delivering long-term change. These components are: Design, Implementation, Inspiration, and Measurement. We discussed the role of Design and Implementation in the first two posts. In this post, we will focus on Inspiration – inspiring change, unleashing creative energies, and motivating breakthrough thinking in the program.