Marketing Tactegy

The Full Measure on MeasureUp (4 of 4)

MeasureUp is a great conference for all things marketing ROI and return on marketing investment ROMI put on by the IIR.  They put on some great events and I highly recommend you take a look at their site for some upcoming events.  To summarize this series of 4 posts the Measureup conference there were a few major points that I came away with:

1. Marketing Mix Modeling may have peaked. Marketing Mix models have provided great insight over the years, but lately many have been shown to only deliver short term insights. When used in a competitive, mature category, such as, for the Oreo brand, MMMs typically deliver short term insights in that temporary price reductions can increase sales. Unfortunately, they also lead to loss of brand value. MMMs don’t include the long term brand value that can be destroyed through continuous price actions. Consumers simply get trained to always buy on ‘deal’.
2. Social media although is growing and is important for many brands, it still has a long way to go to be a major contributor for some of the top consumer brands. For the rest of us, though social media can still drive a lot of brand engagement, it can be measured and will continue to grow in importance.
3. Analytics and measured insights are becoming more and more important in marketing decision making. Marketers are finally embracing analytics and using them to their advantage. There is still a long way to go, but it is progressing swiftly.

There were many more insights and I hope next year you’ll have a chance to participate as well.  Just let me know if you would like further information on any of these topics.

The Full Measure on MeasureUp (3 of 4)

Here are continuing remarks and key notes from the MeasureUp conference.  This is the third in a series  (You can also read my Twitter stream at #ROMI)

1. Melanie Davis, Director of Marketplace Insights at American Express had some great insight as to how American Express uses modeling to support their brand.  They analyzed their presences on Twitter and Facebook with the goal to track online buzz compared to their competitors (primarily bank credit card issuers) using share of conversation and sentiment.  It was modeled using Structured Equation Modeling to determine how online buzz drove their funnel (Awareness, Engagement and Consideration, Conversation, Loyalty and Usage).  This is a great example of using the community engagement funnel (described in our social media white paper.  Download now.  One of the other interesting findings was that even though there was a lot of buzz it was relatively small compared to the number of purchased impressions made using traditional media.
2. Building a business case for marketing, social media and ROI were discussed in my session. With Ted Molter, Director of Marketing at the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park and Nick Popielski, Director of Marketing at Atlanta Gas Light Resources.  Both had compelling stories on how they were able to drive analytics and numbers into their marketing organizations with some astounding results.  Nick Popielski showed how ROI was the only way to get the attention of the C-Suite and provide a solid foundation for the marketing business case.  Understanding the causes of churn led to significant growth in their net customer base.  Ted Molter spoke primarily about online marketing ROI showing how online media including social media was able to drive high conversion rates and ROI.  The numbers reached into the 1,000% range for ROI.
3. Ed Keller of Keller-Faye provided some great insight on their TalkTracker tracking survey.  This service provides both on and offline measurements of word of mouth.  Social media must be looked at from an online and offline perspective when comparing online and offline word of mouth conversations.  77% of them still take place offline according to studies and research conducted by Keller-Faye.  They estimate that over 3.3bn brand conversations take place every day in the US alone.  The top talked about brands are:
   • Coca Cola
   • Verizon
   • Walmart
   • Pepsi
   • AT&T
4. Ellen Stone, SVP of Marketing at the Bravo Network gave probably the most complete discussion on calculating ROI for social media.  There is no question that social media marketing can be very effective at driving buzz and delivering value for Bravo network.  They were using a number of fascinating tactics to drive buzz and deliver incremental viewers to their programming.  This was especially true for the launch of new programming.
5. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to capture the name of the presenter from Publicis, the agency for Denny’s restaurants.  My apologies.  Nevertheless he had some great statistics from their superbowl campaigns.  Denny’s super bowl offer of a free breakfast after the 2008 Super Bowl was wildly successful driving value and sales for the brand.  Unfortunately the advertising campaign was not sustained after the first quarter and it lost its momentum that could have been easily and cost effectively sustained.  Here are a few interesting facts:
   • Add-ons and late arrivals paid for the cost of the ad and the food at the 1,500 Denny’s restaurants
   • 2 million guests enjoyed the meal
   • Restaurant locater on the web was a key metric to determine interim success.  The ad delivered over 14,000,000 hits to website in 12 hours.  It generated over 2,300 news hits, 500 newspaper articles.  It was even mentioned by Jay Leno and Jon Stewart.  “Denny’s” became the 2nd most googled word.
   • Many guests heard about the free meal through text, calling, Facebook and mass emails to friends
   • It took over a million chickens to lay the eggs required.
   • Through this ad, Denny’s was able to meet its financial goals for the quarter.

Still more to come. Stay tuned for the next installment. Let me know what you think of the insights gained.

The Full Measure on MeasureUp (2 of 4)

Here are continuing remarks and key notes from the MeasureUp conference.  This is the second in a series  (You can also read my Twitter stream at #ROMI)

The second day focused more on optimizing traditional media.  The keynote was from Avanish Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist at Google, Inc.  He is also the author of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day  and Web Analytics 2.0 

Avanish is a lively, engaging speaker.  Definitely worth the price of admission.  His primary message relating to web (and of course, Google analytics) is get started, make mistakes, learn and improve.  That is, learn to be wrong but do it quickly.  He provided an impressive array of tools that could be used to quickly analyze the impact of web-marketing on conversion and web design.  There were so many examples of using google analytics to increase conversion it was hard to keep up.  Here are a few:

• How to reduce bounce rates by pointing to design flaws
• How to use experimental design to continue to optimize page layout and design.

With the keys to the kingdom Avinash was able to show that sites could easily be significantly more effective.  One of his thought provocations was, “don’t have opinions, have hypotheses.” 
Avanish also introduced a new term, Hippo decision making.  The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.  How often is this true when there are no analytics to back up the conversation and decision making. 
His last bit of advice was to continuously ask for feedback from your consumers about their experience with your website with the following three simple questions:

• Why are you here?
• Were you able to complete your task?
• If not, why not?

Here are a few more notes from the other speakers:

1. Scott Deaver, EVP Strategy for Avis Budget Group had a few good insights about his business. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to catch his entire talk but he mentioned a few interesting comments concerning metrics:
2. • Linear metrics
   • On/off metrics
   • Good enough metrics

   He left us with the statement “Don’t fall victim to the tyranny of the measurable.”

3. Dominique Hanssens has a fascinating message in that great marketing doesn’t just drive revenue and profit but it also drives the share price. If marketers can get it right, they can deliver long term incremental share prices. He also pointed out a few potential flaws in the valuation on the stock market. For example, he found that differentiation was not well understood (that is, not reflected in the stock price) but awareness and brand equity was. He also found that customer satisfaction clearly has a long term impact. It would be interesting to find out though whether positive customer satisfaction has a long term impact on share price, but does a negative have a short term impact. For example, how does the negative impact of the recalls for Toyota impact the share price? Is it a long term impact as well or has it hit the stock price in a short term way.
4. Lisa Wellington of Coca Cola and Greg Michaels of Kraft provided some great insights into their methodologies relating to marketing ROI and ROMI. Coca Cola puts the rest of us to shame when we look at how they have a comprehensive system applying globally. They are a big user of Baysian regression, pooled models, conjoint testing, copy testing and scenario planning with highly granular models, looking to understand the relative influence of brand, flavor, pack type, pack size and region. Even in the face of the imprecise nature of the data, they are still able to make great decisions to drive their business forward based on good consumer and modeling insights.
5. Kraft, not far behind showed how modeling has helped them to drive great decision making with their brands. Greg’s point of building a good model now as opposed to a perfect model later illustrates how they are able to use modeling to structure the decision making and conversations marketers have when they endeavor to build their businesses. One of the books he recommends is The Black Swan by Nasim Taleb.
   
   One of the interesting points highlighted by Lisa Wellington related to the great social media divide. Although social media wasn’t discounted for its value to help many brands, the problem is that it is still, for some of the major global brands, such as Coca Cola and American Express miniscule. For Coca Cola in particular, even though it has one of the largest followings on Facebook (5Million, I believe is the quoted number), that represents less than 0.1% of the world population (their target audience). Traditional media is still very valuable and will remain that way for a long time at reaching the masses when and where they want to be reached.

Still some great more insights from the conference. Stay tuned for my next post.

The full measure on MeasureUp (1 of 4)

The MeasureUp conference in Chicago was the latest version of the former ROMI Conferences and it had some great insight on measuring, proving and improving marketing and social media ROI (You can read my Twitter stream at #ROMI). MeasureUp is a great conference for all things marketing ROI and return on marketing investment put on by the IIR. They put on some great events and I highly recommend you take a look at their site for some upcoming events.

The first day was primarily on social media and some of the interesting marketing and customer service applications being employed.  There is certainly a lot to understand with social media but each of the presenters provided some valuable insight into social media strategy, tactics and measurement.  The second and third days emphasized traditional media marketing ROI with some social media ROI sprinkled in.  One of the things that I’ve found, now that I’ve trained a few thousand marketers around the world in just about every vertical, is that in order to measure marketing ROI and ROMI you must first have a good understanding of marketing strategy and tactics.  This is definitely the case when we start to measure the response to social media marketing.

Here are some of excerpts from the first day of social media:

1. Social media is very valuable for customer service and support. PitneyBowes’ Aneta Hall had a great presentation on how their company has been able to effectively utilize social media to minimize the number of calls to the call center. This is both true for ongoing support issues and for support events, for example a postal rate change requiring updating of the postal machines. Hall calculated that PitneyBowes was able to deflect about 50,000 calls to the call center and at $10 per call, represented a savings of about $500,000. Please visit a series of podcasts on a pre-conference workshop with Aneta Hall.
2. Measuring the ROI of innovation is a fascinating topic. Luisa Uriarte, Partner at Maddock Douglas and Ainslie Simmonds, VP, Innovation at Maddock Douglas gave some interesting insights in their three by five process. Just developing new brands and products without doing your homework can lead to disaster, both for the brand and your career. Their process systematizes the research and decision making in order to reduce risk and increase returns. Where their process leaves off our agent-based modeling can deliver some great insight to make certain the new product gets properly launched into the marketplace.
3. Esmee Williams, VP Marketing of AllRecipes, one of the top recipes communities boasts 2.5bn pageviews per month. They are #1 18 million pieces of user generated content and are now #1 in the number of iPhone recipes. It is a great site for the food category, because when users make comments they are more often than not going to make a brand mention. They use a unique method of measuring message association and purchase intent in order to deliver higher quality advertising to their advertisers. In addition to their consumer centric approach they also have branded subpages where brands can build sub communities. Advertisers have many options with which to reach the community. It can be done through relevance, effectiveness, videos, traditional banners, sponsorship (editorials and user generated content), branded profiles, widgets (users can give and get widgets) and newsletters.
   
   AllRecipes’ research illustrated which types of advertising delivered the highest purchase intent scores between banners & newsletters (mid level purchase intent), sponsorships (low purchase intent, profiles with (high purchase intent) and without a logo (low purchase intent) and give (high purchase intent) & get (mid level purchase intent) widgets. (If you would like a white paper on the ROI of Social Media which uses the concept of a community engagement funnel.  Download it here now.)
4. Matt Moog of Viewpoints Network which manages the ratings and reviews for Sears.com provided some fascinating insight on how to optimize the use of ratings and reviews in an e-commerce site. The question asked ‘is a reviewer more valuable than a customer because they drive sales because of their reviews?’ For Sears.com, for each review it drives 4 visits (=readers) per month or 48 readers per year. Matt’s contention was that it may actually be that the ratings and reviews are so valuable to drive conversion of other visitors that the reviews themselves are more valuable to the company than had that reviewer actually made a purchase.
   
   Matt made the comparison of reviews creators that will write content and have 150 Facebook friends, thereby delivering 150,000 impressions, versus the cost of paid search to deliver 150,000 impressions.
   
   Ratings and reviews can be used in many ways. They can be used to change the assortment and improve customer service. By coordinating with search to reviews can be written based on what visitors are searching on to help them more easily find what they’re looking for.
   
   In my opinion ratings and reviews are one of the hidden gems in social media strategy and tactics. By fully utilizing ratings and reviews marketers can easily increase conversions without having to develop new marketing initiatives. Combined with some of Matt’s tactics, ratings and reviews can then be improved even further.
5. Scott Chappell of Sessions College of Professional Design gave some great insight on targeting specific messages through specific social media channels. Sessions College is selling something very different from a consumer packaged good. It is a two year commitment. He also showed how you can increase the number of touches to a prospective student without having to risk an unsubscribe, nor having to risk a de-friending. Instead of being able to email a prospect only once a week or once per month, with Twitter and the combination of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn Sessions College of Art and Design may reach out to some individuals up to 48 times in one month.
   
   He also showed how you can use different social media channels to deliver different types of messages. He focused primarily on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, each focusing on messages of Culture, Industry and selling with little overlap between them.
   
   Of course social media comes with its challenges. Those outside of marketing wish to use their social media assets to do more than engage. They want sales. For example their blog has 33,000 subscribers. He has to constantly protect this engagement channel from those in the organization that wish to change it into a selling channel thereby violating the trust of the subscribers and devaluing what has been built up over the last few years.
   
   If you would like to hear a pre-conference interview with Scott please click on the link.

There are 3 more posts on this topic.  Please stay tuned.

Haiti and Twitter - Interesting analysis

As I have mentioned to many of you we are close to completing our book project on the ROI of social media and we decided to take a quick look at trending topics and thought about what the response was in the Twitterverse.

Below is a chart from Trendistic.com – I think you’ll like this application.  Anyway, this chart shows the level of 'Haiti' activity once the earthquake hit.  It hit about 4:30PM local time or 2:30 PM EST.  

 

It took about 2 hours for news of the event to hit the Twitterverse (this is our estimate), because you can see when CNN latched on to the catastrophe story they, too, became a major topic in the Twitterverse.  So within the time CNN (here, used as a proxy for all news sources) picked up the story, about 3% of the tweets had a mention about Haiti.  The next day, they continued with the story and it was obvious how big of a disaster it was.  Haiti traffic exceeded 6% and then generally has leveled off to the 6% level for the last few days, with various ups and downs.

 

Also, of course is the incredible response using mobile donations (Text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross).  Already, the 90999 text message has delivered millions of dollars to relief for those in Haiti.  I hope you, too, will also contribute.  In the near future I will look at this 'campaign' as well to discover some interesting insights.

Check us out here for some upcoming events.

Let me know what you think

The top 3 Marketing Inventions/Innovations

Last week I kicked off a short survey of what the top 3 marketing inventions/innovations are.  The answers break down into a few categories.  You may disagree with my classifications, but here are the results:

Historical (not listed in historical order)

• The Internet
• Television & radio
• The Gutenberg printing press
• The wheel
• The microprocessor
• Fire

Market modeling related

• Predictive modeling/churn modeling
• ROMI/ROO, MMM, Return on Brand Investment

Great marketers

• Steve Jobs
• Guy Kawasaki
• Mark Cuban

Technology and tools

• Internet (also mentioned above)
• LinkedIn
• Spell Check
• Personalized broadcast Integrated email and CRM
• Internet
• Social Media
• Twitter
• Online advertising
• Infomercials
• FSIs

Marketing Concepts

• Understanding consumer behavior
• Value appropriation
• Adaptation to new technologies
• Fully integrated Marcom processes
• SPIN
• Unique Selling Proposition
• Lead nurturing
• Strategy
• Retention
• Innovation
• SWOT Analysis
• Ansoff’s Matrix
• The art of differentiation
• Become part of the customer’s life
• Continuous product innovation
• Listen to the customer
• Alphabet soup:

The 4Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion)

The 3Cs (Customers, Channel, Competition)

The 4Cs (Customer needs, Cost to customer, Convenience to customer, Communication)

+3Ps (People, Process, Physical evidence)

The 4Rs and a P (Referrals, Retention, Repeat business, Reactivation, Prospecting)

The 16Ps

• AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action)
• Changing people’s attitude

Blatant self-promotion

• (none repeated here)

It’s great to see the diversity of input on various marketing terms and techniques.  I also like the historical references which make it all possible.  It is also a pretty good list of different concepts that marketers feel strongly about.

As for the three top marketers offered, they represent sources of great ideas and to stay abreast of hot new topics we should be following their blogs and other writings.

Thanks to everyone that provided feedback.  Let me know if you have any other thoughts.

It’s not share of voice it’s share of conversation

I was just working through a social media strategy session and realized that many companies still don’t quite realize the value of social media and that it’s not just about running a good (or bad) social media campaign.  It’s about understanding the strategy for your social media, including short and long term results.

Competitive social media strategy

Looking at social media isn’t about Twitter, blogs or Facebook.  It’s about how your actions compare to the competition and how you can deliver your share of conversation.  Just as it’s about market share in the physical world, it’s about share of conversation in the social media world.

Share of Conversation

Share of voice sounds like a great outcomes metric, but voice implies a one-way conversation, not to mention the fact that it is already used to measure the value of traditional media in a competitive market.  Social media is about engagement and a two-way conversation.  There is value being transferred from the brand and value being provided by the consumer.  There is a conversation taking place and it needs to be the goal of social media activities to determine an effective strategy to improve the share of conversation.  Once that has been done, the social media strategy can start to determine how to increase share, beat the competition and do it in a way to drive brand value and market share in the physical world.

I’d love to hear from you to see if this makes sense.  Just let me know.

DemandROMI partners with iFusion Marketing and Resultrek to offer valuable Marketing Workshops

My company DemandROMI has been offering workshops on topics concerning marketing ROI, marketing effectiveness and social networking and other critical topics and we have decided to partner up with two great firms to offer new value to our audiences.

I think you’ll find them very interesting and I hope you will be able to attend.  For more information, please visit www.immergize.com – immerse and energize yourself to drive extraordinary returns for 2008.  There are four offerings:

• Social Media Marketing
• Marketing ROI for B2B and Consumer Marketers
• Success in Asia
• Product/Brand Strategy

I hope you’ll find time to attend.

Surround-Sound Marketing

Surround-sound, or 360 degree or integrated marketing campaigns have become hot topics in the last few years and have enabled marketers to design and deliver very effective marketing campaigns.

Surround-sound marketing and psychologics

Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart describe the process in detail in their book ‘What Sticks,’ but let me give a brief overview here.  At a high level the interaction between media is more than just providing multiple touches about a specific message.  The idea is that the messages are reinforced between each other.  In particular, the concept of ‘psychologics’ means that, for example, a print ad actually helps the mind conjure up the imagery of a corresponding, previously viewed TV ad.  Because of this the value of the print ad is actually higher than the value of a print ad where there was no corresponding TV imagery.  This is probably the reason why many non-TV ads are improperly attributed to TV because they trigger the mind to conjure up the images from the TV commercial.

If, for the moment, we leave aside the active or passive exposure to a media type and if we assume that the viewing of a commercial on television delivers the most imagery, because it has both video and audio components, then it should be that a single viewing has the largest influence.  Radio has only an audio component.  Print has a visual and written component (and sometimes odor), but does require more active participation to read and absorb the message in the ad.  In this case in order to get the biggest bang for the buck out of a surround sound marketing campaign, then the most imagery oriented ad should be run first followed by the other media.

Traditional media analytics may be wrong

This has a lot of implications to help marketers improve media buying and flighting.  It also has implications of how marketers measure the results of their surround-sound marketing campaigns.  Simply correlating impressions of the various media elements to bumps and wiggles in the outputs may provide incorrect conclusions as to what is working and what isn’t.

We now need to know which consumers actually saw one ad only, two ads from different media and so on.  Only with this detailed viewership model can we truly see how effective one media channel is versus another.

If you have any comments on this I would love to hear them.  Please let me know.

Ingredient Branding

I have been invited to participate in the early stages of a hot topic called ingredient branding.  The topic comes about because of the effective marketing of such brands as ‘Intel Inside®’, Dolby®, Teflon® and Stainmaster®.  Each of these brands is purely a component or ingredient combined with many others to deliver a final consumer or business product.  This field of study is just starting up and should lead us to some interesting marketing applications as we determine the value of the ingredient brand. 

The Choice Model

Consumers make choices along three dimensions: 

1. The utility derived due to the preferences for the attributes
2. The utility derived due to the preferences for the brand
3. The disutility of price

With ingredient brands the preference for the brand bifurcates into two sub-dimensions:  The preference for the brand of the product and the preference for the inclusion of the ingredient brand.  How many consumers (or businesses) would pay more to have the same capabilities in a Dell® laptop with Intel Inside® or with AMD® inside?  In this case we are looking at understanding a two by two matrix, where the choice is between Dell and some other brand each with either Intel or AMD inside.

The Channel Choice

In a similar way consumers make choices of a channel based on the expected value of a brand purchased in one channel versus another.  I used to work with an upscale marketing professional that would brag that he bought such and such brand in such and such store.  When I asked ‘why didn’t you buy the same product in Wal-Mart and save 25%’ the answer was typically ‘I don’t shop at Wal-Mart’, or ‘they don’t provide the same level of service’ and so on.

So in some respects the product and the brand have different values based on the ingredients and based on the channel where it is offered.

I will keep you up to date as we learn more on this fascinating topic.  If you have any specific questions or comments about ingredient branding, please let me know.  I look forward to hearing from you.