Tag Archives: BI

Off the Marketing Richter Scale

Brand Management, Customer Experience, DataBase Marketing, Marketing thru Operations, Web Analytics

Man, what a month in Marketing land.

First, you have one of the largest Ad Agencies in the world admitting their business model is broken, because agencies are not in charge of the fundamentals of Branding – service, innovation, engagement, and execution.  I would add the same thing could often be said of the client side; MarCom people spend way too much time on “Com” and not enough on “Mar” – is it time for a realignment?

Then, in an even more spectacularly unexpected move, you have C-Level folks at 2 gargantuan Advertising Agencies (though both part of WPP) co-writing an article declaring that Brand and Response are the Same.  Here’s the opener: “the value that brands bring to a company’s total business value is exaggerated.”

Holy Branding Batman, that’s one heck of a thing to say for an Ad Agency, know what I mean?  But they are absolutely right, the nature of a Brand has changed, this ain’t the 1960’s.

This is how they get to “the singularity”:

“What was once sales is now enhancing the brand expe­rience, because through direct marketing technology and strategies, a brand can reinforce its ability to listen, customize and learn from the consumer. This is not just direct marketing, its direct engagement with every potential customer, sometimes at the moment they’re introduced to the brand.  In fact, in a world of compressed consumer decision-making, direct response is now a potent form of brand­ing.”

I love it when you talk that way.

Let’s be clear on this.

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Sales or Profits?

Analytical Culture

Seems the previous post (Best Seller Gone Bad) really hit home for people; perhaps we should drill into  this a bit.  So:

1.  Is the impact of your work evaluated against Sales or Profits?  (example)

2.  Do you think this evaluation approach is correct for your job and company?  Why? 

3.  Would you change this evaluation method if you could?

4.  What is holding you back from trying to make this change?

Personally, I always choose Profits if I can; the leverage is so much higher than Sales.  It’s much easier to generate $5 in Profits than $5 in Sales for any given $1 in budget, because there is generally so much waste in the Marketing system.

Update: OK, how about answering this question – when your work performance is evaluated, what percentage of this measurement is based on qualitative factors?  quantitative factors?

NCDM 08: What was Hot?

DataBase Marketing, Measuring Engagement, Web Analytics

With two very intense days of 5-track sessions going at NCDM 08, it was difficult to pay attention to everything that was going on.  Still, by picking up handouts from sessions I did not go to, I could get a sense of what the hot topics were this year:

1.  Web Plays Data Friendly – Almost every session had a web component in it, the BI folks are getting it done.  The data is coming off the web / out of web analytics and into the data warehouse so everybody knows what is really going on. 

Much of this work is being done by the big service bureaus, not the companies themselves, as far as I could tell.  Web Intelligence, baby.

2.  Media Mix Models – which typically show online Display advertising as a poor choice for allocating marketing budget to when you are also running offline media; the yield is quite poor versus almost every other media.  Search, as you might expect, Rocks on Productivity, though TV still rules for Productivity and moving the needle.

The implication here is you’d be much better off running TV to generate / amplify Search behavior than running Display to do the same.  Offline for Awareness, Online for Intent / Desire. 

3.  Contact Optimization – I’ve written before about what ultimately happens when you don’t have a Contact Strategy.  At some point, BI will measure the bottom line impact of every division in the company pounding customers with the division’s own contact strategy (Hint: you are driving your customers crazy).  Then, move all customer contact to a centralized model which controls contact by source of new customer and value generated, measured through controlled testing.

This movement should not be surprising, given the whole “customer in control” and “social” movements which onliners give so much lip service to but never take action on.  Well, not never, but rarely.

4.  Measuring Engagement – yes, Engagement.  OFFLINE, as well as online.  The overwhelming message was this: it does not make any sense, and actually costs you money, to keep pounding your customers with any kind of communication when they don’t respond / interact.  You can measure dis-Engagement, and when you see it, you should stop communicating – online or offline. 

And these folks proved it, over and over, with real math.  See related #3 above.  If you’d like to see a detailed e-mail example of this concept, check out this case study.

And of course:  Models and more models.  Like Hierarchical Bayesian and Disaggregate Discrete Choice.

Boy, I love it when you talk like that.