Insights Blog

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.

Conventional wisdom dictates that for an organization to become customer-centric, all functions must make meeting customer needs their priority. This is often too simplistic and simply not practical. Each function has its own priorities and goals that are often in conflict with other functions. Manufacturing is charged with production and cost goals, sales has to meet its numbers, product management is trying to meet P&L goals, and marketing is trying to meet customer needs. These goals don’t often line up. And then when financial pressure builds up, customer experience related priorities are often thrown out the window, and everyone puts their heads down to deliver the Quarter or make the number for the year.

It is nearly impossible to navigate the web these days without being inundated by a barrage of clever headlines tempting you to distraction. (Although, let's be honest, sometimes we are looking for a little distraction.) Still, how many times have you gotten burned by clicking though a snappy link only to discover that the content is completely devoid of any substance or only loosely related to the headline?

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 .

by Ralph Cummins

Writing in the New Yorker last month, James Suroweicki submits that despite the widely held belief that a company's brand is its most important asset, brands have never been more fragile. The culprit? The internet. In the age of information, everything is knowable by the consumer. Name your category, and there is an easily accessible, objective resource such as Consumer Reports or JD Power to reveal the truth. Consumer access to this type of information can dramatically negate the traditional value of brands ― historically, brands served as proxies for quality in an information poor environment, as argued by Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen in their book, Absolute Value.

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:

by Sat Duggal

While recently facilitating a workshop with a team of product managers and marketers, we were reminded about the importance of courage in a marketer’s role. EMM Group had been engaged to conduct some fundamental Voice Of Customer (VOC) work in this company’s category. The findings weren’t good. As we presented the results, we could see that they confirmed what the team had suspected. The categories in which this firm leads are facing significant declines because the industry is on the verge of a transformational shake-out. Substantial changes to their business would need to be undertaken if they were to keep and expand their competitive position in the marketplace.

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.