The Fifth P of Marketing - Passion

Nearly every business school teaches the traditional 4Ps of Marketing including product, price, promotion and distribution or place.  The key is to synchronize strategies to take each of these aspects into account and create results, either in terms of great channel growth or direct sales.  These are the core concepts of Marketing.

In the graduate-level courses I occasionally teach on Marketing one more P sneaks into the conversation - Passion.  Nothing happens in Marketing without passion - and that's a passion to be the change agents of a company, not the holders of the status quo or worse, the historians of the past.

As my class goes through case studies and examples of exemplary marketing one fact emerges: Marketing is as much of a calling as it is a career.  Call it an avocation. 

Marketing is an act of aggression against the status quo and it is definitely about making an impact in the market, all in the name of advancing brands, awareness and eventually Sales.

Passion truly is the fifth P of the Marketing mix.

By - Louise Colombus

Sphere: Related Content

Strengths and Weaknesses of Outsourcing

A recent Deloitte survey revealed many positive findings among outsourcing contract holders, including high satisfaction rates and, in general, achievement of ROI in the specified timeframe. However, a number of negative issues and trends surfaced during the survey as well, as outlined in the survey results.

"Our findings were striking -- fully 83% of all respondents reported that their projects had met their ROI goals of slightly above 25%," asserts Paul Robinson, principal global leader for technology. "Despite this apparently positive result we believe that the true potential of outsourcing is still not being fully achieved. Not only had the great majority of the respondents achieved their ROI goals, but a majority (70%) stated that they were 'satisfied' or 'very satisfied' with their arrangements -- the highest level we have ever seen reported."

However, the survey also highlighted some low lights of the global outsourcing game, among them:

• 39% of the 300 respondents reported that they had terminated at least one outsourcing contract and transferred it to a different vendor in their careers and, of those who reported that they were “Dissatisfied” or “Very Dissatisfied” with their largest contract, fully 50% had brought the function back in-house.
• 61% reported that they had escalated problems to senior management in their contract's first year, with 15% reporting five or more such escalations.
• 53% continued to have to escalate in the second year.
• Only 34% of the executives reported that they had gained important benefits from innovative ideas or transformation of their operations
• 35% of executives, including 55% of executives who were not very satisfied with outsourcing, wished their companies had spent more time on vendor evaluation and selection

Asked what they would do differently if they were able to start their outsourcing projects over, 49% of the executives surveyed said they would define service levels that aligned
better with their companies' business goals.

The dissatisfied respondents noted underestimated scope; higher-than-expected costs; and poor quality communications, service, and reporting from their service providers.

For a full link to the study, click here.

Courtesy - Industry Week

Sphere: Related Content

An Outlook - Call Centre Software Market

The market for call centre software is only expanding. This because companies realize that keeping in constant contact with customers will help them enjoy a steady growth. According to the Everest Research Institute, the market for contact centre outsourcing has grown rapidly to a US$55 billion opportunity. And if a Frost and Sullivan research is to be believed, the call centre outsourcing market is set to reach $27.5 billion in 2013, up from $20.7 billion in 2006. Business Insight opines that Indian Agents Positioning is projected to rise over the next five years, from just fewer than 180,000 in 2004 to nearly 365,000 by 2009.

Having mentioned such wonderful projections, the contact center projects are also likely to feel the impact of recent “temporary” recession. On the other hand, contact center technology remains the best lever for extracting more value from employees and make better use of customer data.

The need for innovation remains, and attempts are constantly on to extend the reach of customer contact and to make it more and more affordable. Few reports suggests that while service has been a key differentiator for a number of companies, how the organization manages and maintains its customer relationships will be of even more important if an organization is to remain solvent and competitive. Hence continuous and sustainable innovation would be required from technology provider.

The idea is not only to drive sales but also to evolve a lasting customer relationship that works for a longer duration with better results. It starts from getting the right calls to evolving the appropriate responses that are required to meet the client’s needs. It would be imperative for call centre to

• improve customer satisfaction levels, thus enabling companies to increase lifetime customer value;
• increase revenue generation by providing business users with the customer information necessary to make relevant offers to each customer; and
• enable companies to cut costs through advancements in operational efficiency.

Contact center and communications technology vendors are well placed to assist organizations in building the customer-centric enterprise. Traditional contact center outsourcing markets are maturing in their adoption of these services. However, newer industries like retail, manufacturing, power, etc appear poised to engage these technologies like never before. According to few reports the largest single emerging vertical investor in outsourcing services through 2012 will be the travel and hospitality sector with next largest portion to be energies and utilities. Hence there might be temporary slower rate of growth however I do see the future promising, provided organization can bring value to its customer and its customer’s customer.

Sphere: Related Content

RX for Marketing: Know Your Customers’ House of Pain

There is a crisis of creativity in many marketing departments today, and that is affecting everything from how enterprise software gets sold to which airlines will survive or not. Too many software companies are caught up in imitating competitors’ strategies, and others out of sheer complacency and the mistaken belief that working the same strategy year in and year out – doubling down on the past in essence – will deliver better results – yet fail to get to their goals.

When it comes to product strategies, this thinking delivers yesterday’s products tomorrow. It’s been my experience that when manufacturing companies run out of new marketing, product, and sales strategies it’s a sure sign they have no idea what the pain points of their prospects and customers are. Instead of taking risks with innovative new products, these companies stay focused on what worked in the past – stuck in a holding pattern of building products for the same pain points, again and again. The spiral continues until the Marketing department isn’t relevant anymore and eventually an entire company.

The bottom line is that Marketing in many companies is inching towards being irrelevant and dragging the entire company with them because they have lost touch with the most excruciating pain points of their prospects and customers.

No Pain No Gain

It’s time for Marketing to quit judging and applauding itself by how it excels on inward-centric metrics and start being experts in their customers’ House of Pain.

In the many forms of independent content lurks the greatest pains any company’s customers face. Yet it’s been the last place they look for feedback, and in the case of the highly publicized situation of Dell’s faceless and bureaucratic response to customer inquiries that were posted to blogs worldwide one can see how quickly pain points partially self-induced get noticed and now, promoted through blogs.

Marketing needs to map their customers’ House of Pain by putting all forms of independent, unstructured content at the center of how they listen to and interact with customers. These forms of independent content include:

• Blogs
• Call Center Logs and Recorded Calls
• Customer Service e-mails and Instant Messages
• Message Boards
• USENET
• Website comment forms

Constructing Your Customers’ House of Pain

Let’s be honest, the customer service e-mail addresses end up in an account that your well-meaning Director of Marketing or Product Management set up four years ago and since then it’s been mentioned. Sins of customer omission abound and it’s no one’s fault – the processes and incentives are in place to actually pay people more to ignore their customers, because they can make more slam-dunking internally defined goals. In a sense, some marketing departments are incented to deliver a terrible customer experience.

Call to Action

Marketing departments need to re-evaluate how they look at their performance and realize that the path to long-term relevance starts by finding their way to the door of their customers’ house of pain.

By Louise Columbus

Sphere: Related Content

Gartner’s Seven Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience

According to a recent worldwide survey by Gartner Executive Programmes (EXP), Targeting, attracting, and retaining new customers remains a top priority for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2008.

To this cause, Gartner outlines seven types of organizational initiatives to boost customer loyalty and satisfaction:

1. Act on feedback, deploy changes and communicate actions to employees and customers - View every customer interaction as an opportunity to deliver brand values.  Standardize on one business feedback management tool across the organization, for all communication channels.
2. Design processes from the outside in - Most process redesign focuses on improving operational efficiencies rather than to improve the customer experience. Yet with every customer interaction, there is at least one "moment of truth" that can disproportionately positively or negatively affect the customer experience.  "Organizations must fix one problem at a time and shouldn’t try to fix all broken processes simultaneously. The best organizations just focus on the worst two or three," says Ed Thompson, research vice-president at Gartner.
3. Act as one organization to ensure consistency – Since customers often interact with many individuals throughout your company, it’s important to ensure that information captured in one interaction is not forgotten in the next channel.
4. Be open - Organizations that want to improve the customer experience often become more open. This could mean offering more channels or extending hours but it can mean much more.  For example, establishing an online community can be one of the most powerful and influential tools for marketing.  Gartner recommends that open organization should follow three tenets:
   • be transparent and clear
   • be open-minded
   • be inclusive
5. Personalize products and experiences - Some personalization options are simple, such as a web site that enables customers to monogram products, while others are more complex, such as tailoring and personal pricing.  However, companies need to consider additional complexity and costs when considering personalization.  Makes sure you evaluate these costs against the sales benefits and longer-term customer experience.
6. Alter attitudes and employee behavior - Employees’ actions are often the most powerful improvements in a customer’s experience. Executive mystery-shopper programs and hands-on manager involvement during peak-demand periods help to educate company leaders about what the average customer and employee are experiencing.  Gartner outlines three primary ways to alter employee behavior:
   • recruit the right types of employees
   • ensure standards such as policies, procedures and governance structures
   • create training programs and incentives that can modify employee behavior patterns
7. Design the complete customer experience - Many organizations have no plan or design for the customer experience.  The experience is experience is unplanned and accidental in its execution -- it “just happens”.  Companies with a focus on selling experiences, such as in the entertainment, education and travel industries, focus on designing experiences ... the brand is an expression of a product or company’s reputation built up over many years. Today, brands increasingly are used as part of marketing communications to create a high-level expectation or promise of a particular quality or customer experience.

By Randy Saunders, Perfect CEM

Sphere: Related Content

Online stress: When writers blog till they drop

They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December. Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style. The pressure even gets to those who work for themselves — and are being well compensated for it.

“I haven’t died yet,” said Michael Arrington, the founder and co-editor of TechCrunch, a popular technology blog. The site has brought in millions in advertising revenue, but there has been a hefty cost. Arrington says he has gained 14kg in the last three years, developed a severe sleeping disorder and turned his home into an office for him and four employees. “At some point, I’ll have a nervous breakdown and be admitted to the hospital, or something else will happen.”

“This is not sustainable,” he said. It is unclear how many people blog for pay, but there are surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands. The emergence of this class of information worker has paralleled the development of the online economy. Publishing has expanded to the net, and advertising has followed.

Even at established firms, the net has changed the nature of work, allowing people to set up virtual offices. That flexibility has a downside, in that workers are always a click away from the burdens of the office. For obsessive information workers, that can mean never leaving the house. Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.

Courtesy: NYT News Service, Economic Times

Sphere: Related Content