Insights Blog

Throughout 2009, EMM Group released free marketing resources around several organic growth themes, including Segmentation, “Spend Less, Get More,” and “Winning Share”. Take a look at our Best of 2009 post.

Here's a look back at the most popular Organic Growth Blog articles of 2009.

We wanted to call your attention to a poll being run by Adweek on the best marketing of the decade. They have many categories, but the one that caught our attention is the best marketer of the decade . I think the #1 slot is a foregone conclusion with Steve Jobs getting the well-deserved spot at the top of the list. The rest of the line-up for the top 5 places is still hotly contested.

In addition to the many blessings of family, friends, and health I’ll give thanks for this year, I’m excited to be welcoming back an old friend—marketing with a capital M. Only a year ago, the dark clouds of the economic storm had assembled to drown out the annual family trip to the west coast along with the plans and budgets of many a marketer—including those of my former company, a large financial services firm. The usual banter and debate about the role of marketing, the drudgery of annual planning, hot approaches to consumer insights, the latest social media trends, new ideas for building brand equity, dreams of driving growth, etc. was replaced by far more dire conversations about downsizing, reorganization, recession marketing, even survival. And, of course, the usual industry chorus about the importance of “spending into the recession” was largely ignored. Those were dark days indeed and it was difficult to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Most companies have some sales or marketing capability improvement project running every year. Many of these projects however fail to achieve their desired objectives. Processes are created but not used. Dashboards are published but not leveraged. Training is imparted but does not substantially change organizational behavior. Our experience and analysis of such projects reveals that there are primarily two reasons for these projects falling short of their desired goals. (a) Many of these projects do not approach the capability development from a holistic perspective and (b) the capability development model applied is generic and not sensitive to the differences between demand generation activities and other parts of the organization.

Gaining market share is often top-of-mind for many executives. It is a simple metric to understand and visualize, it is usually tracked on an industry-basis and it usually communicates a sense of achievement when the share numbers are looking good. However exclusive focus on market share can also mask numbers that really count – profitability or long-term brand health. In today’s economic environment, many companies are lured into cutting prices to gain market share. The article in the WSJon H-P’s latest moves is an illustrative example.

Demand is hard to stimulate while marketing budgets stay depressed. How do you deliver demand generation performance while making every buck count? We have just launched a new growth idea on our website to help spark a discussion on this very timely subject. View our new growth idea.

Here are five principles for developing great advertising. While they are not meant to be a comprehensive list of everything you need to do to produce great advertising, doing these elements correctly can help you to a large extent in producing tremendously successful advertising.

Driving organic growth in an organization is not as simple as implementing a strategy or rolling out a new framework. It is a complex multi-component program that usually takes many years to implement. While framework and tools are essential ingredients, the success of the program is rooted in managing the culture change in the organization and creating hunger within the organization for a new, customer-centric approach.

I recently came across a report through RetailWire called "Generating Uplift With the Downturn Generation". It is published by IRI and is based on consumer research conducted by them in March 2009. The research strongly supports the trend of post-materialism that we have been discussing on this blog for the last couple of months. However I do, with all due respect, differ with the author on the conclusions drawn from the research.