Insights Blog

Do you remember what it was like when you were a little kid going to a family dinner for a special occasion? All the adults got to sit around the big dining room table talking, laughing, and clinking glasses while you and a couple of your cousins were stuck at “the kiddie table.”

Your marketing framework is a visual representation of how marketing gets done in your business, highlighting a logical flow in which all the various components making up your insights, strategy, plan, tactical execution and measures work together to bring that vision to reality.  There are numerous templates available, covering “optimal” marketing deliverables of all shapes and sizes.

Implementing a marketing excellence program is not a casual matter, or a task for the feint-of-heart. It requires time, commitment, and effort.

But the results are so valuable, it could be the best investment you’ve ever made in your business.

So how exactly is it done?

Balancing the Need for Local Customization with the Need for Scale and Efficiency

By now, we all understand the importance of segmenting our customer base and selecting target segments. In this two-part post, I’ll discuss how to effectively segment in a global market.

Segmentation enables us to better customize our products, services, channels, messaging, and more to align with our target segments’ needs and better penetrate and grow with our customers. We can also better scale our company costs by focusing on a few target segments.

We recently completed a successful segmentation project with one of our major industrial B2B clients’ Chinese subsidiary, which was facing a highly complicated and quickly evolving marketplace. (Read the case study here). As we reflect on that experience, a few key lessons emerged that can be more broadly applied:

We were recently with the cross-functional team of a leading industrial manufacturer working on the go-to-market strategy for one of their new products. As we watched the team create their offering value proposition, we realized the extent to which the product features were driving the discussion, rather than the customer needs. Reflecting on this later, we identified what drives this all-too-common tendency. They were developing a value proposition for a product that was ready to be launched after several years and millions of dollars of NPI investments. At this stage in the product launch, they were not starting with customer needs. They were starting with what the product could do and working backwards to find customer needs that would match those abilities.

Raise Your Organization's Level of Go-to-Market Capability

How good is your marketing?

You certainly know cost, you have some idea of the return, but do you really know how good your marketing is? The authors view is that marketing’s performance can and should be measured and it should be done at regular intervals to ensure improvements are achieved and opportunities are prioritized. Having a common measuring stick, the ability to gauge performance against peers and making the findings actionable are crucial.

Measuring Go-to-Market Capabilities

To read part 1, click here.

To read part 2, click here.

Where an organization stands in terms of maturity can be determined by measuring overall marketing process linkage and five essential go-to-market capabilities: insights, market strategy, annual marketing planning, integrated marketing, and marketing performance metrics. Working with ANA (Association of National Advertisers), EMM has developed a methodology for both B2B and B2C companies that enables the characterization and measurement of the following:

The Levels of Marketing Maturity

To read part 1, click here.

In considering where your organization stands on marketing maturity, it’s important to understand what a maturity model is—and is not. It is not a rigid structure of prescribed processes. Rather, it has three dimensions. First, it describes the differences among typical marketing organizations, from the least mature to the most mature. Second, it provides a marketing framework that the people in the marketing organization can use to understand how and where their day-to-day work fits in the overall operation. Third, it offers an aspirational model, drawing the organization upward as well as a roadmap for getting from one level to the next. This is what it looks like in broad outline:

In our quest for organic growth, we can often be our own worst enemy. In the development of a win share strategy one of the most obvious, critical but often neglected question is – what market are we trying to get an additional share of? When marketers or executives are asked this question their response is usually formed on the basis of their product or service category i.e. we are in the credit card market, the market for inventory finance or the market for car audio systems. Sometimes this is even taken to the next level by adding entry-level, mid-range, premium and super-premium labels before the product/service category.