By definition, personalization can be as simple as directly addressing a recipient by name, but experts say that this tactic creates indifference among recipients of e-mail marketing and can easily become problematic if its source data isn’t clean (e.g. filling out an online form with a fake name or all lowercase letters).

Experts agree that in the current and next e-mail marketing arena, rich data, sophisticated automation and real-time tailoring are table stakes. Often consumers have handed over all the information marketers need to give them what they want. Marketers must leverage it. Here are three ways to do that.

1. Root yourself in data.

“For any kind of personalization, the most essential component is data on your subscribers,” says Keith Sibson, vice president of product and marketing at . All the traditional information marketers use to segment an audience can be leveraged to personalize e-mail, and that data and its application fall on a spectrum of complexity. Basic targeting for gender, location and age are important, but used in isolation they can be problematic. April Mullen, senior marketing strategist at Selligent, a marketing automation provider, offers a personal example of when e-mail personalization goes wrong. “Somewhere along the way, a marketing model has shown that because of my current state it must mean I’m about to become a mother,” says the 30-something, Midwestern wife. “I receive so many baby e-mails. ‘Time to buy a stroller or a car seat.’ This is so far off from my current reality.” False assumptions can turn a consumer off from a product or brand, says Mullen.​

​Effective personalization relies not just on demographic segmentation, but on behavioral data, and most companies are moving toward this practice says Loren McDonald, vice president of industry relations at digital marketing provider Silverpop. “It’s not about tailoring content. It’s about triggering a single e-mail to a single person at a moment in time,” he says. “We’re not tailoring a message and crossing our fingers that they’ll find it relevant based on who they are. It’s their behavior they’ve initiated that triggers a message designed specifically in response to that person.”

An abandoned shopping cart could indicate a lack of follow-through, or the fact that that consumer needs to sleep on any purchase decisions. In either scenario, an infrastructure needs to support the gathering and leveraging of that behavioral data so that the response is timely. McDonald acknowledges that bringing together customer data—be it from online forms, CRM data, website interactions or a host of other sources—is the single biggest challenge to marketing teams. “A few years ago, [a 360 degree view of the customer] was a dream … but to compete now, that’s really becoming a must-have,” he says, and “If you can get all the data you need, then the question is whether you can sync that up with e-mail in real or near-real time? … In the old days, a lot of things were done in back process. Every 24 hours all the data would be captured and sent out. … That’s no longer good enough.”

2. Automate for scale.

Whether you’re a marketing team of one or a full-fledged department, effective e-mail marketing relies on automation. The cost of manually responding to customer cues (such as abandoned carts or anniversaries) is missed opportunity. In the time it takes to manually identify the right targets for a birthday promotion or a reminder to register for a conference, those would-be conversions have moved on.

Automation allows marketers to respond with context, which is a critical element for maintaining relevance, says Alison Lindland, senior director at e-mail marketing platform Movable Ink. “Context is a huge determinant to willingness or ability to purchase or take action,” she says. “Time of day, location, the device you’re on—these tend to be things marketers don’t have in their power, but … [automation tools can help marketers] understand about 32 elements of context and employ that as logic.”

Selligent’s Mullen is seeing bigger budgets for CMOs to beef up their data capabilities, and that’s a good trend. “E-mail has reestablished itself as the workhorse of marcom,” she says. “We’re seeing the most traction when investment is made into a data ecosystem that can provide automation to the marketing stack.”

3. Humanize the brand.

E-mail has increasingly become a business communication channel as personal conversations move to texting applications, experts say. But just because the subject is business, the tone doesn’t have to be. Brands can delight their customers by humanizing their e-mail with simple touches. “We’ve focused on the human as this customer prospect,” McDonald says, “but what about you, the brand? How can you bring that alive?”

He points to an e-mail from a global airline that is sent to passengers on its limited flights from the United Kingdom to the U.S. Two days before the flight, customers receive a note from the chief flight attendant on the trip, including restaurant recommendations, weather forecasts and local points of interest. “We’re talking about all this technology, but at the end of the day, e-mail works best when it’s one-to-one,” McDonald says. “Although most people understood the technology behind that message, passengers would still print out the e-mail and talk to employees about it on the flight.”

The potential is high and growing for marketers to capitalize on e-mail marketing as a personalized, direct communication channel. To play at this table, there is a bit of a buy-in, but the returns will show as customers begin viewing your campaigns not as spam but as a special delivery.

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Job hunting is seldom fun. Getting rejected for a coveted position is bad enough, but most professionals understand the special kind of frustration that comes with being ghosted by hiring managers. Now, in the age of employment review social sites, job rejections are no longer just bad news for candidates, they are hazardous for companies as well. Disgruntled applicants vent on sites like Glassdoor, reflecting poorly on everyone.

Combating this trend are HR consulting firm and software company , which have teamed up to launch , a job skills and search platform that employers can offer for free to candidates who they don’t hire. Courtny Cloeter, partner and U.S. growth leader at Mercer, explains why Candidate Care is a win-win for applicants and employers. 

Q: What services are included in Mercer CareerArc Candidate Care, and how long are rejected applicants given access? 

A: The Mercer Career Arc Candidate Care system is a robust online platform designed to give the candidate an edge in their career search. The service lasts for six months for the end user from the date they activate. Users of the service enjoy unlimited access to many critical features including notification of open job alerts and access to a job search engine with millions of opportunities, integration with social networking sites that support the job search (including LinkedIn), résumé and cover letter guides and workshops, video interviewing practice, innovative skill assessment tests, networking assistance and industry research databases.  

Q: What does the networking assistance feature look like? 

A: The networking assistance module enables candidates to optimize their social media presence and leverage research tools to uncover their next job opportunity through access to industry associations, LinkedIn and Facebook social media profile guides.

Q: How does Mercer Match work?  

A: Mercer Match is a game-based, neuroscience platform that is a standalone product we have integrated into the Candidate Care platform to provide additional resources for the declined candidate to leverage when understanding marketable skills and new career opportunities.

Q: Do rejected candidates have access to job postings not listed on public job aggregators? 

A: Yes, in addition to integrating job postings from web aggregators, the Mercer CareerArc Candidate Care Platform also boasts proprietary job listings from enterprise customers and access to network and research databases with links to associations to further discover career opportunities outside of the platform.

Q: How many businesses are currently using Candidate Care? 

A: There are currently 37 companies utilizing the platform. Through continuous engagement and education with HR leaders on the importance of employer brand … we expect continued interest as HR leaders continue to act as employer brand stewards for their respective companies. 

Q: How many rejected candidates are making use of Candidate Care? Can you share a percentage of eligible candidates who use the service? 

A: There are tens of thousands of candidates who have accessed the system. Activation rates vary from organization to organization depending on the marketing and communication efforts with the declined candidate population.

Q: Can all types of businesses use it, or would it only work well for employers in certain fields? Would a health care worker, a paralegal, a marketer and a teacher all benefit equally from Candidate Care? 

A: All businesses can benefit from protecting their employer brand and providing their declined candidates with a career transition system to support their job search. The platform is built with adult learning principles in mind and is flexible for all industries of work and all job types, from hourly, part-time and entry-level workers to director and executive-level job seekers.

Q: What feedback are you hearing from clients and candidates?  

A: The feedback we have received from job seekers and clients has been overwhelmingly positive. The platform star rating is currently 4.3 out of 5 based on job seeker feedback. A global consulting firm has already had more than 500 declined candidates rate the application 4.7 out of 5. 

Q: How likely is it that a candidate is declined for reasons that can be addressed by making use of the career resources? 

A: The resources in the platform are designed to significantly improve the steady state of existing applicants and have been vetted and utilized by workforce development associations and state governments in their retraining initiatives for unemployed workers.

Q: Do you follow up with rejected candidates to see if they are employed by the end of the complimentary period? 

A: Yes, we conduct surveys and connect with end users to gain insight into their platform usage and success in landing a new job. 

Q: What about following up with rejected candidates to see if they’ve posted about the employer that rejected them?

A: Yes, we have features on our product roadmap to help organizations hear directly from candidates via social media and encourage those that had a good experience to let those employers know.

Q: Mercer and CareerArc report rejected candidates are three times more likely to post negative reviews of a company online. Where is that figure coming from?

A: According to our 2016 Candidate Experience Study, nearly 60% of candidates have had a poor candidate experience, and 72% of those shared that experience online or with someone directly. This provides a tremendous opportunity for employers to be proactive rather than reactive in addressing their potential candidate pool. Frustrated candidates are taking to sites like Glassdoor and commenting about employers on social media, describing the interview and application process, the way they were treated or if they received a response to their application at all. Many never get notified.

Q: Other research shows 40% of companies already neglect to inform declined applicants of their status. How will adding this extra step decrease this number or distinguish companies that use Candidate Care? 

A: The introduction of Candidate Care will enable organizations to solve two challenges with one solution. At once, they can update their application response processes and communication while also offering a tool for declined candidates. This will truly separate these organizations from their competitors, as they will be seen as organizations that care about their talent community and go the extra mile.

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By the time a new product or service concept gets to market, it may not even resemble the original idea. If that’s the case, then design and development would be critically important, but not the original idea. Beyond that, others would contend that what matters most are the marketing resources a company puts behind a product, since even bad ideas can succeed with enough marketing muscle—or so the thinking goes. 

This is certainly more than just an academic question. If the raw ide​​​a isn’t that important to success, then companies can forgo any rigor in idea screening early in the innovation process. If, on the other hand, the raw idea is an important determinant of success, then most companies would do well to increase the level of rigor and resources they put into testing ideas early in the process. 

Does the Raw Idea Matter? 

To gain insight into the importance of the raw idea, Professors Laura Kornish and Karl Ulrich of the University of Colorado and Wharton, respectively, have published a research study that relies on data from the community product development website Quirky. 

Quirky specializes in consumer products that retail for under $150. Each week, Quirky runs contests in which more than 100 ideas are submitted by community members. The best ideas, described in text and images, are selected for development. Members earn points for contributions to the development process and then earn money for points and product sales. Given its structure, both the original ideas and product sales via the Quirky store are publicly available. 

The paper, published in the February 2014 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, presents results of an investigation of 160 products in the Quirky store. In addition to the raw idea description and product sales, the research team used two separate panels of consumers and consumer products marketing and product development experts (none of whom were familiar with the Quirky products) to get ratings of the quality of the raw ideas. 

Consumers rated ideas (without price information) using a 5-point purchase intent scale: 1 = “definitely not,” and 5 = “definitely.” Experts rated ideas “on a 10-point scale on the basis of anticipated units sold.” 

The analyses revealed that higher quality raw ideas do generate more sales. In fact, the results indicated that a one standard deviation increase in the average purchase intent rating by consumers (.0841 on the 5-point scale) led to a 51% increase in sales. And the strength of this relationship was even stronger for products that had been on the market longer. 

Expert ratings also performed well at predicting sales, but not as well as consumer ratings. Further, expert ratings did not perform well at predicting other market outcomes such as units sold, but consumer ratings did. So, while expert ratings have some merit, consumer ratings were more predictive. 

The Raw Idea Does Matter. Now What? 

Perhaps the key implication of the research is stated succinctly by the authors: “Because a good idea leads to a greater level of success, there is value in accurate selection.” Indeed, the results make it clear that “higher-fidelity screening in the earlier stages may be worth the investment.” 

In particular, the research shows that companies should incorporate consumer ratings into the evaluation of raw ideas. And the research shows that a simple purchase intent measure is useful for consumer evaluation.

By its very nature, innovation is uncertain. As such, it is critical that a company spend as little as possible as early as possible to learn as much as possible. Having a consumer panel use a simple measure to rate a range of candidate ideas to determine which should move forward into development fits this description. 

Most companies have lots of ideas, but they don’t know which are most valuable. This research indicates that getting consumer input early in the innovation process can be immensely valuable. 

Although companies might be hesitant to expose early concepts to the market, there are two things to keep in mind. First, the sample of consumers need not be large and can certainly come with confidentiality protections. Second, every company has a ready pool of employees who, themselves, are probably like target consumers. 

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Although not a direct conclusion of the research, this also points to the importance of having a solid understanding of customer needs when generating ideas. It also points to the importance of having these needs front and center during design and development so that the fundamental value in the raw idea is maintained during the development process. 

While this study was narrowly focused on the question, “How important is the raw idea to market success?” the question could also be framed as:

• How important is the front-end of innovation to market success?
  
• How important is the idea generation process to market success?
  
• How important is a solid understanding of unmet needs to guide idea generation? 
  

To all of these questions, the research answers: “Very.” 

The post Does the Original Product Idea Always Mean Go-To Market Success? appeared first on ���������.

​While the alignment of sales and marketing sometimes seems an insurmountable goal, Ray Kemper, CMO of B-to-B lead-generation agency Televerde, finds joy in the challenges of bringing together the two teams. 

Over his career, Kemper has worked in a variety of roles and come to enjoy the flexibility that comes with his marketing career. He’s worked as the global director of marketing for Bing Search at Microsoft, senior director of channel marketing at AT&T Mobility and now is the first . “We’ve had directors of marketing and marketing activities, but as the company continues to grow and expand globally, the stronger establishment of the marketing functions at Televerde was critical,” he says. 

More than anything, Kemper touts the necessity of common goals between sales and marketing. It’s critical, he says, to agree to a common source of data, a common goal and a common language. Marketing News caught up with Kemper to learn a bit more about how sales and marketing can efficiently and effectively come tog​​​ether.

Q: You’ve been in the game for about 20 years. Have you seen the way sales and marketing work together change? Has your view of how they interact changed over time? 

A: It really has. The traditional silos are breaking down between sales and marketing. I think as so many marketing technology tools have come aboard, I’ve definitely seen a lot of change. … Marketing technology allows marketers to be much more focused on the impact and the results that their activities are having. The data and the analytics have led a really strong focus on alignment with sales based on what’s driving the quality sales leads and the ones in particular that are most likely to convert.

Q: You said in a blog post, citing research from Marketo, that aligned teams are 67% better at closing deals and 20% better at growth in annual revenue. This makes aspects like software integration and communication seem essential, but many marketing and sales departments still aren’t  in tune. Why?

A: Analytics has made that understanding of what the levers of growth are [stronger], so marketing is more focused on that now, but I think there are a lot of key issues in alignment. At Televerde, we conduct sales and marketing alignment workshops with our clients as part of our demand generation and sales acceleration solutions. Honestly, our success in contract renewals depends upon alignment with sales and marketing. If we are generating a sales pipeline with our teleservice sales development agencies and integrated campaigns, it’s only going to be successful if that sales person that catches it converts on that sale and shows that ROI.

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There are [a couple of] primary issues on alignment. One is just agreeing to a common language. [What is] a lead to marketing, sales might not think that’s a lead. The common language of what a lead is, what an inquiry is, what a qualified lead is, what an accepted lead for sales is—agreeing on a common language is definitely a place to start. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It needs to be clear, simple and intuitive. Common language is a big foundation.

The critical piece is alignment of goals. Traditionally, sales has a goal and marketing might have an influenced goal, but at the end of the day if sales misses or marketing misses, one or the other will have to make up for it. It’s better to set the tone at the first of each year to jointly adopt an overall goal and work backwards to see which channel will influence which part of this goal.

You’re always focused on the overall goal versus the different components. 

You can mix up the components of the channels that are delivering in order to reach that goal. That’s where the focus is. It forms the teamwork instead of saying, “Oh, you didn’t meet your goal, I’m going to finger point” as we reach the end of the year.

Q: So it’s more of a focus on the process versus the outcome?

A: That alignment on the overall revenue goals allows you to just focus on the levers that drive that revenue and the growth you need. [You need] a clear understanding of what’s going to help you reach that goal.

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Q: How did you align the two departments when you first came to Televerde? Did they have a good common language and common goals?

A: That’s one of the very first things I did when sitting down with the head of sales: we looked at what the overall goal and what the levers of driving that revenue are. [I wanted to set] the tone for how we would do it together, and [figure out] how to help marketing as well as sales drive that goal.

Today, there are so many ways to get leads and [many ways] we touch customers or potential prospects. … That alignment between sales and marketing is even more important with all the new channels of information and the way clients are self-educating along the buyer’s journey.

Q: Does that kind of environment mean sales and marketing departments need to stay flexible and reassess to figure out new ways to appeal to consumers?

A: Absolutely. I think the open communication is key as well as alignment goals at the first of a fiscal year, but ongoing meetings between sales and marketing with the health of the sales pipeline at the tip of the agenda and for discussion is key to the focus. … 

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When you meet with sales, I’d recommend that’s done weekly or biweekly, to discuss the health of the sales pipeline and activities that are going to drive leads. It really maintains that communication level.  … By looking at the health of the sales pipeline, you can also look at what may be breaking down and what has been your traditional conversion rate from a marketing-qualified lead to a sales-accepted lead to a sales-qualified lead to a closed one. You’re able to see where there might be some challenges along that pipeline.

Q: That makes sense, taking it point by point to have a full view of the progress. 

A: That kind of structure is pretty key. … Before the marketing technology was fully there, for marketing a lead was an inquiry—a “contact us” form—coming in. For sales, a lot of times those would be unqualified leads that were tire kickers. You need that level of … inside sales support before it gets to your sales team to qualify and nurture a lead until it’s ready for your sales team to act on it. Particularly with all of the avenues for generating leads these days, that additional layer really makes a difference.

The post 10 Minutes with Ray Kemper: The Joy of Sales and Marketing Alignment appeared first on ���������.

Sales enablement is one of the most complex and common challenges facing businesses, and without a plan to achieve it, . Tech-based solutions and CRM systems make claims of solving for sales and marketing misalignment, but seasoned consultant Christine Crandell, president of (NBS), says enablement starts from the top down, with both an acknowledgement that the customer is in control of their journey and a willingness to accommodate that path.

Her methodology, which she refers to as the “Seller’s Compass,” grew out of necessity. As a CMO at technology company Ariba during the company’s customer-focused turnaround in 2007, she found it difficult to promise to her CFO that the marketing team could deliver in revenue what it was allotted in the budget. Four years spent unraveling that Gordian knot, as she calls it, and she emerged with a process for customer alignment that works for every sector from higher education to B-to-B. Marketing News caught up with Crandell to learn how sales and marketing teams can find their true north. 

Q: You’ve been with NBS for 20 years, helping companies improve customer retention by focusing on expectations. How have you seen the challenge of sales enablement evolve over that time period alongside the evolution of customer expectations?

A: Let’s go back 20 years. There was a very different environment at play in which the salesperson was very much viewed by the buyer as the source of information. We didn’t have the wealth or breadth of the Internet we have today. We didn’t have the access to information that we have today. In many ways, particularly in the B-to-B world, those salespeople were the conduit for information to buyers—and that was everything from in-depth analysis to white papers. There were tight relationships between vendor and buyer because it was symbiotic. If we look at what’s happened since then, it hasn’t just been the rise of the Internet and the ubiquitous nature of information. It really has been also a backlash from buyers who spent a lot of money on technology in the 1990s and early 2000s … only to find it didn’t work, they didn’t get the ROI, and, in many cases, there were personal consequences as a result. There was this skepticism that started to rise, meaning , as [their] primary confidant, as [their] primary coach to help [them] be successful. [They] now no longer need the salesperson because [they] can now turn to [their] social graph, [they] can turn to the Internet, and [they] can get access to the information that the salesperson doesn’t even have access to. 

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That was the fundamental pivot that happened in the economy when the buyer, who really was always in control and just never knew it, basically said, “I now no longer need the salesperson, I now no longer trust marketing, I now no longer trust the salesperson. I will forge my own experience. I will make my own decision.” That is the environment we’re in today. We went from an environment in which the salesperson had very clear role, and the value chain was very clear, to a role today in which marketing and sales have a very secondary role as it relates to that buyer achieving their particular outcome.

Now, for sales and marketing, the enablement part of this is not about generating more content, and it’s not about generating more tools. It’s really about gaining credibility and trust in the eyes of those buyers, and doing it on their terms. That is a very different game than it was 20 years ago.

Q: The suggests salespeople build trust by delivering an experience customers expect. How do marketers build trust when consumers have come to expect content marketing, they have the literacy to recognize it, and they often disregard it as advertising? How do marketers approach this new educated and somewhat wary consumer?

A: Let’s shift from seeing the world through the eyes of the vendor to seeing the world through the eyes of the buyer. … That wariness is symptomatic of vendors that really don’t get it. Even though the customer controls the relationship, there is this belief, and it’s very prevalent within the customer experience management technology space, that you, the vendor, can actually craft the journey your customer will go on. That’s total nonsense. That’s why [customers are] getting bombarded with all of this

[content]

. Because the vendor has bought into this belief from customer experience software and CRM vendors. The vendors who are actually very successful step back and say “I get it.” 

A while back, I had spoken with the CMO of HP Software. He’s very progressive. I said, “What is it you guys are doing differently in terms of marketing?” and his response was, [they] stopped fighting the customer and trying to control the customer. … [They asked customers], “What is the journey that you go on, and how can we play in that journey?” And that is the fundamental shift that companies need to make. This is where sales and marketing have a completely new role in this relationship. It’s not looking at it through the eyes of the vendor, but it’s stepping back and saying, “I need to go understand and walk in the shoes of my customer.” … Companies that do that are seeing phenomenal growth without additional significant investment in product features. … The customer will reward you for aligning and understanding what they want to achieve and enabling [them to achieve it]. 

Q: In your experience, where does the understanding of buyer experience and customer expectations break down in organizations?

A: There [should be] no line between the border of my company and my customer. … [I should] engage in co-creation with [my] customers on everything from marketing to company strategy to products. Organizations that have a philosophy that comes from the CEO, that’s baked into their culture, have a much more holistic understanding of the customer and the sales-marketing partnership to enable that customer is very fluid and very effective. In the case where the philosophy of the CEO is that [enablement] is a marketing thing or a sales thing … you see the rub between sales and marketing because the ownership of that customer relationship has been delegated to some part of the company that really doesn’t [oversee sales and marketing] nor the engagement with the customer.

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Q: There have been differing opinions about to whom sales enablement reports within a business, especially on small teams. Who should take the lead on sales enablement: marketing or someone else? Is this an initiative for more than the sales and marketing departments?

A: If you have a very strong and seasoned CMO who is progressive and has a relationship with the CEO in which the CEO truly understands the role of marketing, which is a very strategic role, then it makes sense for that project to be initiated by marketing because they’re able to have much broader access to customers. Marketing tends to have a much broader view of the customer lifecycle. In cases where marketing is relegated to nothing more than tactical execution of activities often defined by what sales wants, you may have the sales organization be in a much better position. I find that to be a minority. In those particular cases where marketing is not very strong and sales rules the roost, what you find is that your customer service and your customer support organization are in a much stronger position to undertake this understanding and to push it from the back-end up into the sales process.

Q: It seems much of the friction in sales enablement does come down to finger pointing. What are some of the biggest contributors to the disconnect between marketing and sales? Are they the same among small and large operations?

A: The skills you hire in marketers are different than the skills you hire in sales, and as a result, they are motivated differently and they have a very different language. When salespeople talk about a lead, they may have a very different mental definition of a lead than a marketer. That marketer could be talking about an enquiry, an MQL (marketing qualified lead), or SAL (sales accepted lead). We wind up having the case of Venus and Mars where we may be using the same language, but we’re really two very different people, and we have two very different languages. 

The other source of this disconnect is compensation. Sales is driven by the deal. I call them revenue junkies. Marketers aren’t compensated that way. They might have a base salary, and they might have a bonus that may or may not be tied to some metric that sales is compensated on. … A lot of companies today are giving marketing a quota, and they’re drilling that quota down to product marketers and demand generation [marketers], to tie what marketing needs to focus on, their performance and their bonus compensation, more closely to what sales is also being compensated on.

The third [source of friction] is cultural. In many organizations, sales gets this hall pass on bad behavior. Anything goes because they bring in the revenue, and marketing is often the stepchild—especially in budgeting where you have a zero-sum game. There’s this annual debate that says, “If we don’t put this money into marketing, we could hire this many more salespeople.” It sets up this adversarial relationship between sales and marketing. What I’m seeing in some companies is that budgeting is done at the market level, and sales and marketing create their consolidated budget as one entity. Marketing has input on what revenue numbers should be for a product or market, and sales has inputs on what the route to market should be and how much ought to be invested in repeat business versus new acquisition. That is a way of starting to tear those barriers down.

The next piece is in the business planning process. Often marketing and sales are measured by very different KPIs. In best practice, you find that there are shared metrics. … It could be number of new customers, it could be reduction of churn by a certain percentage. Having these shared objectives usually causes these two organizations to resolve their differences in language, compensation, touchpoints—who’ll do what when and who’s accountable to whom for what—and that gets them on the road to actually functioning as one team.

Q: The majority of salespeople feel marketing does not enable sales. suggested 60-70% of marketing-produced B-to-B content isn’t used. Is the traditional role of the marketer in line with the business objective to generate revenue? If not, should the next generation of marketers be thinking differently about their contribution to the business? Do you think it’s up to marketers to redefine their role?

A: I absolutely do. We all talk about how sales isn’t very productive and [there’s] this huge debate about how predictive analytics has made sales lazy, but we don’t talk about marketing. There’s this plethora of tech and new approaches, everything from ABM (account-based marketing) to you name it. It really comes down to the marketer not taking the easy way out and starting to ask the tough questions. That’s my biggest beef with marketers: Just as they are pointing the finger at sales and saying, “Sales is waiting for the predictive analytics to tell them which deal to go chase,” marketers are equally sitting there and saying “My marketing automation system said this campaign performed, so the leads ought to be closed, and I’m not going to question the results.” Marketers are not questioning what the technology is telling them, and they’re not questioning what they’re hearing from customers. In fact, many marketers never go out on sales calls and never go out and talk to the customer. … Until they go and do that, they’re not going to magically fix themselves. There’s a lot of blame that needs to sit with marketers because they aren’t undergoing self-reflection to see how they can improve themselves.

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Q: How can marketers incentivize sales to use enablement materials and marketing-generated content?

A: Generally, if sales doesn’t use what marketing produces, no amount of arm twisting will convince sales to use that tool. It’s just a bad tool. It misses the mark. I always chuckle when I see sales enablement platforms that have baked-in gamification as a way of getting salespeople to use the tool, because if it was really worthwhile, salespeople would be using that tool. What’s often missing in this equation is teaching sales how to effectively use that tool. Marketing populates the sales enablement platform with videos, form letters, content, and a lot of stuff gets stuck out there. What doesn’t happen is that granular use case that says if you have a buyer in this industry, that fits this persona, that’s in this particular part of the journey, and has asked these questions, then this is the playbook and these are the pieces you ought to use and for whom you ought to use them. It becomes a decoder ring for the sales organization, but that’s often what’s missing. 

Q: If marketers aren’t providing the right information in their materials, what are they offering that’s not lining up?

A: Classically what will happen—and this is my beef with lead scoring—[is that marketers will] have all these campaigns. In some cases leads may be journey-based, in many cases they’re not. And just because a prospect attended two webinars and downloaded three white papers, they accumulated the points that have been set in the marketing automation system and reached that lead threshold. That gets flipped over to sales. While sales may see Joe Smith at XYZ Company, what’s missing is context. What is this company about? What do we know about Joe Smith? How should we have that first conversation?

Q: What questions should sales be asking of marketing and what questions should marketers ask of sales to create the best materials and resources?

A: One of the questions marketing should ask of sales is, “What is actually happening in that interaction between the salesperson and the customer? In essence, repeat for me what happened on that last sales call.” Half of it is just guiding sales to make sure they find out not just what [the customer’s] problem is and [his] budget, but [his desired] outcome and how [he is] measuring success. The questions need to be focused on the customer, not what sales did or did not do. What behavior is creating a positive reaction in the customer and what is creating a negative reaction? Marketing needs to ask sales what content the customer asks for. And when sales gives the customer a white paper, what is the reaction? They need to draw in sales to get feedback through the eyes of the customer on marketing work and whether it was actually helpful [to sales].

On the sales side, they need to go back to marketing and say, “Before you give me this lead, I need a full background on this company. What’s their past interaction with us? Have they been on our website? What did they engage in? Did they download white papers? Did they do a webinar? Did they come to our trade show? Can you give me a longitudinal history of our engagement with the customer? Can you give me a profile of this buyer? … Equip me to have an intellectual conversation about emerging issues for the customer.”

Q: You’ve talked about the best sales enablement as a product of strong marketing leadership. In organizations where marketing is a small shop or doesn’t have a C-suite representative, is it possible to optimize sales enablement?

A: It’s easier to do in a smaller company because it’s easier to communicate. … Having a small team, you can get everyone in the room once a week and start to change that conversation. Everyone can focus on what happened to the pipeline this week, what happened to orders that closed this week, what happened to outbound calls to prospects, how many of them were fruitful, and what it was that the call center needed. Marketing can come in and say, “Sales, what is it that you need to be more successful?” It’s much easier at a smaller company because the conversation doesn’t involve hundreds of people. People can very quickly figure out how to do one or two things differently, see if they work, and move forward. The key is a CEO who is very supportive of experimentation. By sales and marketing figuring it out themselves, they learn to appreciate each other and place less focus on who did what wrong, and more on what happens to that customer and how they make that customer happy.

The post How to Solve For Sales Enablement, Once and For All appeared first on ���������.

Twenty years ago we presented a process-learning perspective on what was needed to ensure that America continues to be a winner in free trade markets and a shining city on the hill. Drawing on how Great Britain lost its lead in was the creation of well-paying jobs through superior commercialization of innovation. 

Since then, individuals such as Michael Porter have been outspoken about the need for a major public policy-driven innovation initiative, but little action has resulted. Interest in the topics of learning and innovation has actually declined in public discourse over the past 11 years, as meas​​​​​ured by Google trends. It should have increased instead. 

Meanwhile, the world moved on. The extraordinary growth of Asian economies, in particular China’s, over the past 20 years has dramatically changed the challenges and raised the stakes. According to the World Bank, in terms of port container traffic the Chinese economy has grown logistically from being about equal to the U.S. in 2000 to being four times larger in 2015. 

Judging by these traffic flows, a lot more experiential learning is being done in the Chinese economy​—and it’s not just learning how to move containers. It is learning how to develop, market and distribute new products to the market. Learning-by-doing has made many sectors of the Chinese economy more capable and competitive than their counterparts in the U.S. This enormous learning advantage gained by active international traders, many of them from Asia, appears to have been insufficiently recognized by the political and business leadership of the U.S. Failure to learn because of not doing will lead to diminished results for the U.S. economy. It will bring lower wages and greater income inequality to the United States over the next several decades. We propose a number of public/private sector initiatives that can be implemented rapidly by a new administration to rebuild the nation’s competence and confidence in its process-learning capabilities and commercialization of innovation. 

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​

How the Business World Has Changed

Much pivots from innovations in transportation, communication and logistics. The key trade barrier that reduced competition between national economic enterprises was the prohibitive cost of transporting products safely to far away destinations. The impact of this trade barrier has shifted due to lower tariffs and better information flows. Declining energy prices contribute to low transportation costs. Innovation has led to higher trade volume. Research has found a positive and statistically significant correlation between innovation and export. Manufacturing and distribution quality control were supported by the innovation of at-a-distance systems controls, such as ISO9000 certification and performance contracts. 

As collateral effects, these breakthroughs have accelerated the learning of foreign suppliers, and created cheap and seamless logistic flows between low labor cost (LLC) economies and Western markets. Marketplace technology transfers between developed and developing economies now occur at a breakneck speed. Online tools are the new reality that permits the legal transfer of ideas from innovator to imitator at almost no cost and in real time. Beyond that, the Internet has empowered the theft of intellectual property estimated to cost US companies more than $300 billion per year. 

American business ideas support America’s competitors. American higher education transfers its newest thoughts and practices to the world’s knowledge workers as a deliberate business development strategy. American multinational company managers increase owner profits by transferring ideas and added-value processes to their global supply chains and operations in LLC economies. Sadly, the transfer prices typically charged are based on the cost of knowledge replication rather than that of knowledge re-generation, thus providing very little recovery of investment capital.    

The Learning Curve Advantage of Imitators

Transfers to offshore imitators reinforce those who already possess a steeper learning curve than the original innovator. An imitator’s learning curve is always steeper than the original innovators’ learning curve. However fast we move into new fields, the rest of the world will catch up faster. In terms of a learning curve, in many technologies U.S. businesses are at the top, while Chinese businesses are half-way up and thus learning faster. 

 Also, American firms often follow traditional and conservative improvement methods. Many Asian companies, in contrast, find innovative ways of dealing with new issues, letting them climb even faster. 

The advantage, however, flips when American innovation frequency creates new firms, markets and learning curves. Then, American companies are on the steep part of the learning S curve while Chinese and many other Asian start-ups are still at the fermenting stage. Younger firms have more to gain than older firms from increasing sales through exports. Sadly, however, U.S. intensity of start-up activity of firms is declining—or tepid at best. In some quarters there is expectation of a growing firm founders gap, which causes the U.S. to fall behind.  

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Strategic constraints can, if understood well, also help the success of the underdog. We’ve established the benefits that Asian imitators can obtain from American innovators. There is, however, no prohibition of an imitation strategy by U.S. firms. We already do so with Indian products and services, such as the radio (1895 in Calcutta) and the discovery of water on the lunar surface (2013), and Chinese products for the Fourth of July fireworks (7th century A.D.), or, in the future, with the Beijing Electron Position Collider (BPEC) (2016). Any firm or industry that can position itself on the steep part of the S-curve through imitation, can have an advantage. The bottom line: Imitation strategies can work for American firms too.

Experience Curves and Exports

In studying the effect of experience, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found costs on value added go down 20-30% every time cumulative output doubles. BCG attributes this decline to greater managerial, production and logistical expertise arising from greater product experience, leading to lower costs. Small firms can rapidly decrease their high initial costs, since their cumulative volume tends to be small and can be doubled and redoubled quickly. Thus, a good way for a new firm to compete with an established one is to increase sales volume rapidly, thus quickly lowering its costs, even if this strategy hurts short-term profits. 

Exporting can be a key strategy for new and young firms to do so. By selling outside the domestic market to more customers, small firms gain more rapidly in product experience and decrease unit costs, and are better able to compete with established larger firms. Larger firms, on the other hand, do not have as much to gain by increasing their sales volume through exporting, as they have already obtained earlier significant cumulative outputs in the domestic market.  

The Enterprise Development Dynamic

The effects of logistics innovation, accelerated technology transfer and learning advantage loomed large in the 1980s when American supply-chain capabilities leapt forward. The actual cost of distribution as a percentage of GDP declined while the quality of service went up. Distribution bundlers such as FedEx flourished. Many companies rerouted their supply chains through LLC economies to stay price competitive and increase their profits. Otherwise, they were outcompeted and investment dried up. 

This shift is not unexpected according to Vernon and Wells, whose product cycle theory concludes that profitable innovations require large quantities of capital and highly skilled labor. Innovating countries increase their exports while competitors exercise downward pressure on prices and profit margins.

For mature products, manufacturing is completely standardized. The availability of cheap and unskilled labor dictates the country of production. Profit margins are thin, and competition is fierce. Exports peak as the LLC countries expand production and become net exporters themselves. 

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In today’s digitally driven, non-sequential world, alignment does not need to be the ultimate goal.​

Initiation of production in the United States and the moving of factories abroad can be done by the same firm. Transfer of production locale may mean a job loss for employees but is not necessarily a loss of competitiveness for the firm. Yet, without any planning for transition, the value of unemployed workers quickly races toward zero. This is unacceptable and explains why re-shoring must become a new preference. Currently, the dynamic progresses through these steps:

1. Western engineers and managers set up production lines that meet desired quality standards in LLC economies. Western technology and manufacturing innovation that fit with the LLC worker skills, work ethic and costs are transferred to new supply chain partners.
   
2. With increasing manufacturing experience, both costs and quality defects go down (i.e. the experience curve). Supply-chain partners innovate processes that increase quality and reduce costs continuously.
   
3. Goods supplied by supply chain partners start to be sold in the LLC domestic economy at low prices, encouraging local market and brand growth. Source nations such as China,  India, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil create new, powerful brands of world class.
   
4. The new brands are marketed and sold in other emerging markets where they often outcompete established Western brands.
   
5. The new brands absorb share and profitability in Western economies.
   
6. New brands become of higher quality and outcompete established brands.
   

The above development dynamic expands around the globe. Highly motivated, education-focused workers and companies will likely design and deliver lean products and services to global markets than those less motivated, interested and educated. 

Reality creates not just a labor market problem but also a capital market problem. Investment may continue to flow through and greatly enrich Wall Street, but it will pool where the action is: the “main road” of People’s Republic of China, where markets, jobs and capital are created. 

New patterns of trade have, often seamlessly, integrated U.S. interests even without effective industrial policy. Localized competitiveness is used to encourage innovation. The U.S.’s economy remains large, variable and vibrant, and its consumers are loyal to domestic products. In consequence, any decline tends to be gradual without vision of the abyss. But the slow, intermittent nature makes the situation highly insidious. Like the slowly cooked frog, who does not notice the rising heat, there is no alarm to trigger broad-based sacrifices in support of decisive action. Some possible remedies include:

1. Rapidly increase the number and proportion of new firms.
   
2. Encourage and assist with the cost of training process improvement expertise. Highlight innovations that have system wide effects.
   
3. Sponsor research and training centers focused on supporting new processes, such as Big Data analysis through cross-collaboration, for example, between the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the International Trade Commission and the Agency for International Development.
   
4. Have public and private sectors jointly create pop-up research centers that better train process improvers, and domestically distribute insights of companies that innovate successfully.
   
5. The Commerce Department should assert its communication role by patronizing an annual case competition with key examples of how international business obstacles have been creatively overcome through process innovation.
   
6. The U.S. Commercial Service should identify key global innovators, from whom it can acquire process information and distribute, such as a clearing house or seminar coordinator both for American innovators and imitators. Government servants had to learn for more than a decade that service exports are just as good as exports from manufacturing plants. Now, they must learn to appreciate American imitation and support it as an information clearing house, perhaps even through export fireside chats. While we strongly support the gathering and distribution of targeted information focused on interested firms, we do not support the selection of winners and losers.
   
7. There is need for an ongoing thrust in support of innovation. Maybe through an Innovators’ Day when firms can brag a little and crown their key contributors to innovation. There could even be innovation competitions in schools, reminiscent of spelling bees and an annual school district innovation runoff. 
   

There is nothing demeaning about supporting business. Government, firms and employees need to write a new history. Training and support of knowledge workers who help to commercialize American innovation, imitation and incubation is crucial. The goal is to increase American knowledge workers’ likelihood of producing innovative goods that outsell global competition, allow America’s economy to adapt and move into newer fields quicker and more successfully than anyone else, and ensure that the American economy profits from freer trade. 

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Innovation scholarships can be awarded to local students and faculty with the best commercializing innovation ideas for the three business sectors most important to each state’s economy. Of crucial importance is not to let such awards become captive to one interest group. Rather, there must be an early cross-fertilization between fields, for example venture capitalists, successful academics, service experts and engineers.  The sponsorship of a meaningful number of scholarships would consume only a fraction of the savings achieved by forthcoming U.S.-based closures in Europe. 

Each team will nurture a start-up business venture around the central innovator’s idea. Higher education should be expected, using its own endowment funds, to invest in a portfolio of job-creating business ventures. These should be limited to two years for any given project and end with a major attempt to secure crowd funding. Concurrently, a series of innovation and imitation presentations, starting at the local level and continuing upwards, can enlighten and encourage supporters and participants. Such collaboration between fields and facility has already been applied quite successfully in Germany. 

Our findings indicate the necessity for and a benchmark of some key terms: trade deficit, export promotion and competiveness. They reflect the positioning for the U.S.’ international business policy actions and outlook. While the apparent loose correlation between the three factors in general appeals for a partial linkage between them, we find the downslide, which occurred for all three factors during the past 11 years, to be quite troublesome. 

In sum, we recommend a sustained decade-long deployment of government and higher education resources to provide incentives which encourage planning and training for the facilitation of creating younger and more internationally oriented firms. The firms then must be provided with dedicated workers and a supportive broad-based educational infrastructure, and successful management capable and willing to innovate, imitate and internationalize. The youth of this nation must again think of progress in terms of internationally commercializing its work. After all, they are the future.

The post Securing America’s International Business Future appeared first on ���������.

Children under 13 have long been personae non grata on social networks. They’re prohibited from joining the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat by terms of service. Sure, some youths can easily lie about their ages, but what they see on those platforms isn’t intended for them.

Enter . The Danish toy and entertainment behemoth spent two years developing a social app that would appeal directly to pre-teens while passing muster with concerned parents and international regulators. The final result was , a social network open to everyone but designed primarily as a space for users under  13 to share their LEGO creations. No audio, full video (the site allows stop-motion), text-based communication or identifying usernames or images are allowed, and parents must consent early and often to whatever their child sees and does. 

For its efforts, LEGO has won approval from parents and consumer groups since going live on January 31. But to better understand how the site operates, Marketing News spoke directly to , LEGO Life’s creative director.

Q: For close to two decades now, LEGO has been much more than a toy. What steps did the company take to become the omni-channel media company it is today? Why go in that direction?

A: Like every successful brand, we recognize the world is changing around us and understand how to adapt while keeping true to our core principles. We have always had fun and construction at the core of our play experiences. Whether it’s playing with physical bricks, video games, apps, watching movies and videos or reading magazines, we have evolved to be where the kids are. As time, media and technology change, we have found ways to successfully deliver on our play promise of creating fun, playful experiences that inject humor into the narrative.

Q: How about setting up the social network, LEGO Life? What were the goals of the app from a marketing perspective, especially when you already have games and content on Lego.com?  

A: We know that children have long reveled in the pride of sharing their LEGO creations with their peers and family. Until now, the primary means kids had for sharing were either in-person with friends and family or through the LEGO Club Magazine. The centerfold of our Club Magazine was the main spot for group sharing of kids’ creations and these community pages were the highest-rated pages for 10 years.

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By introducing a digital platform to facilitate and further this tradition, we can exponentially increase the amount of kids who can share their creations and the amount of times each child can share. Also, kids can give and get feedback and inspire each other to keep building. 

Our biggest challenge before we launched was whether or not kids would contribute to the platform. We wanted to make sure the content was LEGO-focused and knew there could be challenges around what kids might share. To our delight, kids have been contributing thousands of inspirational builds and content to our platform at an extreme rate. We’re happy the experience has been received so well.

Q: You already have, which is aimed at children aged 5 to 9. You recommend older children download the LEGO Life app. Why the differentiation? 

A: The LEGO Club magazine goes out to all 6 million members of LEGO Club across 18 markets worldwide—all of whom are enthusiastic LEGO builders and many of whom submit photos of their creations hoping to be chosen for one of a limited number of spots in the magazine dedicated to showcasing their LEGO creations. This same audience can now join LEGO Life which will allow all club members the opportunity to share as many of their builds as they like as often as they like.

Q: You have an entire section on Lego.com devoted to digital safety. How can parents teach young children about potential dangers in the fun LEGO Life online space? 

A: The LEGO safety pledge adheres to UNICEF standards and is a method for parents to talk to their kids about digital safety while establishing a shared commitment to ground rules for online social behavior. In addition to the safeguards around sharing personal information and content moderation, we added a specific digital safety section for parents that conveys our approach to digital safety and illustrates the ways in which LEGO Life focuses on the safety of their children.

Q: What do parents need to be assured of before giving their children permission to use the app, and how did you alleviate those concerns?

A: We understand that the No. 1 concern among parents when it comes to social networks and other digital environments is safety, so naturally we kept this at the heart of the development of LEGO Life. We implemented as many safeguards as possible to prevent children from sharing personal information, images of themselves and anything that could allow other users to identify and locate one another. For example, the LEGO Life name generator uses a random three-word mix to create a display name so children can choose from silly names like DukeCharmingShrimp or CaptainNoisyBadger. Additionally, the LEGO Emoji Keyboard was created to keep communication simple, universal, safe and fun. Children can only comment on each other’s posts through a keyboard of recognizable LEGO emojis and elements,minifigure faces and stickers. You can express a world of opinions with a simple smile or heart.

Q: What kind of feedback have you been getting from parents since LEGO Life launched?

A: Recently at the LEGO World event in Copenhagen, we asked parents and kids what their opinions were of the app. Parents approve of the app because they know and trust the LEGO commitment to safety and fun. Kids told us the app inspires them to build. This is exactly what we were hoping for.

Q: How does the “visualized hashtag system” work in the app? 

A: The LEGO groups are the LEGO Life version of hashtags. Groups are arranged around areas of interest (animals, vehicles, heroes, etc.), LEGO themes (NINJAGO, Star Wars, etc.) and seasonal/regional topics (New Year, Valentine’s, etc ). Once kids follow a group, they will see updates from their favorite characters and themes within their LEGO Life feed, including interesting builds, imagesand challenges. Groups will expand as LEGO Life membership grows and trends and interests take shape.

Q: Can you link to anything outside of the network from within the app?

A: The only items we currently link to outside of the app are other LEGO apps. Before a user can visit these apps, we put a parental pop-up/check to ensure that users know they are about to leave the app. 

Q: Aside from creating a safe digital space, what notes did the app have to hit to remain consistent with the LEGO brand?

A: The main goal in developing LEGO Life was to give kids a safe space where they could inspire and get inspired to build more with LEGO bricks. Every aspect of LEGO Life embodies the sense of play, creativity, and humor inherent in the LEGO brand. 
Q: Can you say how many users are active on LEGO Life, and what percentage are 13 or under? Is membership meeting or exceeding company estimates?

A: We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response so far and just crossed the threshold of 1 million downloads by our fans. In our first week, we became the No. 1 children’s app in each launch market, and we have been very pleased with the enthusiastic response we are receiving from parents and kids alike—both in the comments they are sharing and in the volume of LEGO creations they are uploading to LEGO Life.

Q: A lot of the social content on LEGO Life is created directly by LEGO. What does your content team look like and what are its goals? Are they a bunch of social media and design experts playing with LEGOs all day?

A: LEGO Life is a healthy mix of user-generated content and content created by our editorial teams. These editors are highly dedicated to their craft. They spend each day reviewing activity within the app and adjust their editorial strategies to maximize user engagement. They coordinate campaigns across all our product groups and themes and suggest the best ways to reach our audience from a mix of challenges, articles and videos. They also build and play with a lot of LEGO bricks! Ultimately, the goal is to strike the right balance in engagement and inspiration to ensure a steady stream of user-generated content and community.

Q: What about the content monitoring team? How big is it, and what is it looking for?

A: Every post to LEGO Life is monitored and viewed by a human. We use image detection software for an initial review and then, based on the content, it will receive varying levels of review from our team. The main requirement for posting is that the content must somehow be LEGO-relevant—and brand-appropriate, of course. 

Q: Why put this all in an app and not make it a separate website accessible from a browser?

A: The goal is to provide an experience that kids can enjoy wherever they are. We know that more kids today have their own tablets or mobile phones and they expect to have this kind of experience available to them. They also are much more app-centric and less motivated by branded websites. 

Screen shots from the LEGO Life interface.

Q: Have you thought about incorporating advertising or sponsored content at all? 

A: LEGO Life does not have any third-party advertisement, nor are there plans to include any.

Q: What about co-branding? LEGO Life includes Batman, Star Wars and Minecraft Lego sets. I think I saw the legal portion of the app mentioning Angry Birds characters. How do you determine what other brands can enter the app space? Are there any limitations on who can enter the space and what they can look like? 

A: The LEGO Batman, LEGO Star Wars and LEGO Minecraft content we produce within the app is based on licensed themes that are part of the LEGO universe. If we currently produce a LEGO set for a certain license, there is a good chance at some point you’ll see a group or content based on that theme within LEGO Life. 

Q: It’s been reported that you’re looking into the possibility of adding in-app chat functions as well as allowing users to upload narrated video. Do you have any updates on if and when those features might be added? How about any other features not currently part of the LEGO Life experience? 

A: In terms of in-app chat and user video, those are ambitions we have for the future, but we need to make sure we take the appropriate time to develop them in a safe, responsible and fun way. LEGO Life is an agile project in every sense. Our development roadmap can change based on the way our users are engaging in the app. We may have plans to bring in a new feature, but if we see kids are using the app in surprising ways, we will prioritize development of features that benefit our users’ habits. Every day, we see new ways kids are using the app, and it’s been a pleasure to see the builders of tomorrow inspiring each other. 

The post LEGO’s Kid-friendly Social Platform Earns High Marks for Safety and Engagement appeared first on ���������.

In today’s digitally driven, non-sequential world, alignment should not be the ultimate goal. Instead, business leaders should be working to unify the entire prospect-to-customer lifecycle by moving from a functional or process view of marketing and sales to an experiential view. 

One of the unintended consequences of todays’ customer experience (CX) movement is that it has become largely synonymous with the post-sale servicing of the customer. Once marketing has done its job creating brand pull, filling the funnel with qualified leads and the salesforce accepts.

 At a minimum, research has shown that today’s buyer values—beyond  price and product functionality—are characterized by a universal interest in simplicity, emotional gratification and a frictionless experience.

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Fame creates a status and emotional connection to the brand that would otherwise be lacking if it focused only on product characteristics.

How can you go about internally unifying the strategy, practices, touchpoints, policies and metrics that ultimately influence the type of journey a (prospective) buyer will experience when discovering, researching, selecting, consuming and hopefully advocating your brand? Below are a few interventions:

1. Unifying the experience: Institute cross-functional governance. 

First, it is incumbent upon the front office functions (marketing, sales and service) to create a collaboration mechanism to devise, deploy and monitor the prospect to customer experience. This can take the form of a formal management position such as chief experience officer or chief customer officer, or creating a formal “Office of the Customer” with representatives of the business functions or informal steering committees.

2. Develop the story: Utilizing design thinking methodology, start by exploring and brainstorming answers to the following questions:

a. What does a day in the life of a typical buyer look like? Where do they go for information? What do they want to know? What motivates them and what do they value?

b. What words and phrases would we hope they would use to describe their journey to a friend?

c. Where across that journey can we best differentiate ourselves? 

3. Create the playbook: Based on the above, develop the elements of the plan including:

a. A buyer/user experience statement: This is distilling down the essence of what doing business with you should feel like and the emotions you want to evoke.

b. Buyer personas: Based on your market research inputs, create a narrative that describes characteristics of the ideal customer in terms of demographics, motivations, channel preferences, usage patterns and support requirements.c. A journey map: For each persona, lay out ​the activities that correspond to that “day in the life,” along with the touchpoints, inputs and desired outcomes for each moment of truth.

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4. Engineer and actively monitor the experience: While a lot of creative thinking should go into the design, an equal amount of rigor should go into the engineering of a gratifying, simple and frictionless experience. 

This should include investment in a platform that enables you to:

a. Capture the voice of the customer on an event-driven basis, meaning soon after an interaction with the company, whether pre- or post-purchase.

b. Apply predictive analytics, and analyze the structured and unstructured information you collect to determine cause and effect of various actions and predict the impact of operational adjustments on your customer-perceived performance.

c. Add a customer KPI dashboard to your operational metrics. Whether you use a customer effort score, CSAT measure or the Net Promoter Score, track and publish these data across marketing, sales and service. 

d. Engage the customer. Rather than simply looking at aggregated customer scores, get into the weeds and use your intelligence to actively engage and close the loop with the customer when the system alerts you to a problem. 

Every product and service category holds out the promise and potential for winning the hearts and minds of buyers by delivering a superior experience. But to do so requires you to stand above the functional silos and design your operating system from the outside in. Only then can you become a true “experience maker” and reap the associated rewards.

The post Can Focusing on Customer Experience Unify Marketing and Sales Functions? appeared first on ���������.

This spring, we unveiled the ���������’s first ever intellectual agenda in our almost 80-year history that features what we believe are the “seven big problems” confronting marketing. The seven big problems will drive content for the entire ��������� community: a multi-faceted and diverse group of professionals in marketing and sales, academic researchers and educators, and collegiate marketing hopefuls.

The ���������’s intellectual agenda seeks to serve as a big tent source of guidance and inspiration that includes both theoretical and applied knowledge that will ultimately provide actionable insights, frameworks, tools and resources for the ��������� community. We’ve created a living document that can evolve along with the ��������� community, the ���������’s scholarly outlets, and the field of marketing itself. This agenda fuels new initiatives and encourages conversations between industry and academe.

A devout belief that “thinking” is what defines the human experience drives our intellectual agenda. In that vein, part of what you value is the ability to actually stay above and apart from the din and the fray that might influence your ability to be actionable. And that’s what the seven big problems aim to address—how you can best be both objective and action-oriented.

You have a life pulling you in different directions in what is arguably the most distracted and distracting society in history. You want to see your work come to life in the marketplace. Because knowledge is not power. Power is knowledge applied. The seven big problems provide all of us with critical context. Context matters. Context is the last frontier for marketers who know that mobile ubiquity and wearables powered by the Internet of Things are closing in on the holy grail of contextual understanding.

Will the seven big problems be an overnight inflection point in terms of the content and research that is generated by the collective ��������� community? No. But what it will do is put a stake in the ground on the belief that context and managerial relevance matters to us, because it matters to marketers.

–Russ Klein, ��������� CEO

Bernard Jaworski discusses the 7 Big Problems in Marketing

Effectively Targeting High Value Sources of Growth.

With all the fascination with new marketing concepts, digital technologies and new tactics, there continues to be one foundational issue that is proven and reproven to have a disproportionate impact on the value you create for your business: identifying the highest value source or sources of growth for your brand, product or service. Choosing the wrong target, or one of less value, will certainly lower your growth and return-on-investment potential. It might even fail completely. Traditionally we called this market segmentation but lately many of the most successful marketers refer to it as “demand landscape mapping.”

There are two critical questions to understand about this subject: Why is this so critical, and how can I do it much better? There are five questions that dive much deeper in to the “why?” as we leave the door open on the “how?”

Can one product please everyone?

This is a simple enough concept: How do you find the market that is most interested or in need of what you have to offer? Or if you are a new brand, find a need that is not adequately filled and create a better “mousetrap.” The key is to recognize that some people won’t be interested in you no matter what, and that’s OK. Find the ones that are.

Find more answers in The Organic Growth Playbook

What segments provide the most value potential for your company?

This plays into today’s data-rich marketplace. Analyze the options and look for the one that has the most value to you, meaning it’s large and profitable enough for you to realize your financial goals, it’s reasonable from a competitive intensity standpoint and has a bright future.

Which segments are cost effective and easy to reach?

This one is not so obvious to most marketers. Even if you’ve found a larger and profitable segment that your product fits in perfectly, it may be very fragmented or very expensive to reach or serve.​

How can you create a clear target that focuses on the motivations that affect customers’ decisions, upon which you’ll build your marketing program?

Understand the drivers of purchase so you can begin to select the tactics most likely to effect the behavior you desire. 

How can you position your product or service against something or someone?

When it comes down to developing your behavior, influencing tactics positioning is key. You have to know who you are aiming at to position it successfully. Usually you will be replacing something already in that person’s repertoire.

The role of marketing in the firm and the c-suite.

There is a long history of debate between how academic researchers conceptualize “marketing” and how that is reflected in the activities firms may engage in and how they organize to accomplish these activities. Thus, academic views and corporate practice concerning the role of marketing within the firm have often been out of alignment. However, as the world has become flatter, governments have increasingly shaped policy, supply chains have globalized and “customer demand” (not supply) is the limiting factor on corporate growth, it’s clear that from both perspectives the role of marketing within the firm needs to be carefully reexamined. 

We need to explore what is possible, as well as what is already happening in some firms. For example, in some firms, marketing has lost power within the firm even though one of its fundamental roles is to represent the voice of the marketplace in firm discussions. In others, marketers have grown in stature and been given new responsibilities for a wider array of insight- and demand-generating activities.

Relevant questions include:

What are marketing vs. non-marketing issues and tasks?

Has the scope of marketing activities and tasks expanded or has it contracted? Recent evidence suggests that most information is no longer controlled by the marketing function, but is now controlled as an organizational asset under the responsibilities of the analytics or IT group, and that has shifted the balance of power within the organization. Is this the case, or is the evidence to the contrary?

How should marketing tasks be organized within the firm?

When should organizations centralize marketing activities, and when should they decentralize them and push marketing activities into the businesses? Is there an optimum balance? And if there is, what determines what is optimal vs. non-optimal? Firms such as have “atomized” its core platforms to over 80 business units and pushed marketing to the front lines. Other organizations have increasingly centralized marketing to share cost and services. What is the right model? Does it depend on industry and customer context?

What does a “world-class” marketing organization look like?

 chain of chicken restaurants has recently reorganized with the most senior “marketer” the chief brand officer. In turn, the CMO, guest experience and PR areas report to the chief brand officer. Some organizations do not even have a CMO, assuming that the growth function can be done with other organization-wide resources. What is the best structure? Or does it depending on the competitive context or other factors?

Some CMO’s are being given responsibility for building the organization’s marketing capabilities.

How do I build my company’s marketing capabilities? Is it more about finding and keeping the right people, or more about building a standard tool-kit? In either case, should I build or buy? If I decide to build what is the right “roadmap for change?” Do I invest in training? If yes, what is the right form and design of these initiatives?

How do I attract the best marketing talent?

What does it take to keep the best marketing talent? How do I stop people getting “stale in the saddle” but keep them engaged in the same area long enough to benefit from their experience?

Who is/should be representing marketing in C-Suite conversations?

Does it have to be a CMO? What are viable alternatives, if any?

What is/should be the role of the CMO?

Voice of the marketplace? Demand generation? Growth champion? Innovation-driver? Capability-builder? All of the above? What are the costs and benefits of different CMO roles under different conditions?

What is the impact of the changing role of marketing within the corporation?

The digital transformation of the modern corporation. 

Digital issues focus on pressing managerial problems at multiple levels of analysis. Our belief is that marketers have taken a very narrow view—examining social media, Big Data and the transformation of marketing communications. However, at the C-suite level, corporate executives are focused on much larger issues of business model change, survival and future competitive advantage. This is very evident in the world of banking and retail. However, even traditional industrial firms such as GE are transforming themselves from “dumb” to “smart” within the Internet of Things.

Key questions include:

How will winning firms compete in the future?

In almost every industry, firms are moving from products to information and service businesses. It does not mean “products” disappear. Rather, they become the vehicles and platforms for information-based businesses. Nowhere is this more evident than in health care. We are seeing the migration of patients from hospitals to homes, with attendant monitoring and care through information-rich technologies.

How do the firm’s interfaces with marketplace (e.g., communications, salesforce) and within the organization itself (e.g., internal crowd-source innovation, gamification of learning and development, flattening of the organizational hierarchy) change as a result of digitization?

Our key point here is that the entire organization is changing, not just the interfaces with customers. Structures, processes, workflow and decision right are being transformed due to digitization.

How will it/could it affect my business model?

What are the types of new business models that are emerging? Is one type of business model superior, or does it depend on context?

What should impact the way I communicate and interact with customers?

Formerly this was largely a one-way communication; now customers are taking control of the products, services, interfaces and communications. It is shared communication, not only between the firm and customers but between actors in the marketplace (e.g., customer to customer).

How do I use social and other digital media to both generate new insights about my customers and competitors?

Can I also use it to track my marketing performance?

How do I figure out the scale and scope of what is possible for my company as a result of existing and emerging digital technologies?

Generating and using insight to shape marketing practice.

There is a fundamental debate that is unfolding concerning the role of Big Data and analytics within firms. However, this data orientation (or obsession) may obscure the differences between data, knowledge and insight. An argument could be made that while our data and knowledge are rapidly growing, our actual insight is not. What does it mean to have a customer insight that can be leveraged in the marketplace? This problem could be addressed by new methods, but we are more concerned with unique, different information that leads to competitive advantage. How do organizations collect, share, store, transmit and “use” this insight? More broadly, in our knowledge-based economy that leads to competitive advantage rather than a traditional view of products, routines, capabilities and assets. At an even higher level, how do we know we know?

How can we generate new and better customer insights?

This is not just about methods and techniques, but it’s also about looking around the corner and visualizing the future.

How can I best capture my customers’ experience?

We have all learned the tools of end-to-end mapping of customers’ journeys. What is unique about these journeys? Is it only about pain points, or about surprise points? What is more important?

Can we also identify competitor insights?

Almost all of the focus to date has been on customer or consumer insights, but channel-partner insights? Supplier insights? When are different types of insights more or less valuable, and why? 

Who should be doing this in our organization?

Folks have argued that market-driven companies are not marketing driving companies. If this is the case, what is the role of marketing in gaining new insights? Does it drive the process? Simply aggregate views from other areas? Is it a catalyst function?

How do we ingrain insight-driven approaches into all of our business processes?

Most of the focus to date has been on generating insights, and it’s clearly not an easy thing to do. How do we make sure that we fully and quickly exploit the insights we do manage to generate? 

Who has cracked the “insights code” and how did they do it?

What are the best insights tools and frameworks for us to use?

What firms have developed a “great machine” to take insights and deploy them quickly for revenue growth?

Dealing with an omni-channel world. 

The 1990s were marked by a back-office revolution in efficiency, systems and re-engineering. As we transition into the 21st century, the key revolution is the front-office interface with customers. It is no longer a simple mix of brick and mortar integration, or even “bricks and clicks” integration. Rather, with the advance of social media, mobile media, always-on communications, the Internet of Things and multi-channel markets, the new catchphrase is “omni-channel.” What do we know about this world? Is it truly different than multi-channel? How might solving the “last mile” problem change the game in traditional industries such as consumer packaged goods—and who is going to do this? Amazon? Do the traditional theories and approaches work in such an omni-channel world? What new capabilities do firms need to put in place to take advantage of this world?

How do I figure out how and where my customers and prospective customers want to buy from me?

The fundamental problem is not the maximization of a particular channel, but the interfaces that link between channels. Think of these as drop offs and hand-offs between channels. Where do we see the drop off occur? Is there a standard pattern across industries?

What is the right mix of customer interfaces?

Keep in mind that many of the interfaces are no longer under the firm’s control (e.g., Yelp), so how can we stay in front of these messages. Can we shape the debate?

How does this work across countries?

In many cases, the technology in developing countries, or the political infrastructure, are at odds with integration in a world economy. How does the political, economic and social context shape the ability to integrate a global company?

How do I organize to coordinate across channels?

The fundamental problem in most cases is the way the company organizes, rewards and manages profit and loss groups. A particular activity may be in the best interest of the overall firm, but not in the best interest of a particular business unit or group. How does the firm reward the unit that appears to be losing out?

What are the implications for in-store sales personnel?

How enabled and accountable do they need to be in terms of awareness, knowledge and access across channels? Put simply, do in-store personnel need to be experts on mobile, websites, call centers and other touchpoints that the firm is using to reach out to customers?

How do I develop an omni-channel strategy for my brand?

Are there general rules of thumb, or is every firm different? What is best practice, what is worst practice and what is next practice? What are the implications of omni-channel for selecting channel partners?

How is omni-channel changing B-to-B markets?

Are there unique challenges in the B-to-B world that we do not see in the B-to-C world?

Competing in dynamic, global markets.

While terms such as “hyper competitive” or “fast moving” have been around for a number of years, the speed of change—at the customer and competitor level—is accelerating at unprecedented levels. At the customer level, this is reflected in “location-based” marketing based on mobile apps, real-time tracking of customer behavior, and continual advancement of new, nimbler competition. For many industries, at the heart of this change are smart products, smart applications and interconnected devices as well as an increasing willingness of firms to develop ecosystems of partners rather than go it alone. 

In many industries, the new and nimbler competition may be from firms based in second-world or even emerging economies. What are the implications of dealing with such non-traditional competitors? Conversely, the biggest growth opportunities for many firms are in emerging marketplaces, with unfamiliar customer needs, channel structures and even institutional set-ups and political systems. What does dealing with such new and dynamic markets mean for the marketing function? Does marketing continue to be the key interface for the inflow of marketplace information and the outflow of market-informed products and solutions?

How can I compete with eco-systems vs. individual rivals?

There has been a great deal written on the shift from “go it alone” competitive dynamics to an increasingly networked world, where platforms compete against platforms. We see this most readily in the technology sector, but it is also apparent in most other sectors. What does a good ecosystem of players look like?

How can we better predict competitive shifts in our marketplaces?

To paraphrase Peter Drucker, the best way to predict the future is to create the future. How do firms shape the future? Do they do it alone, or in concert with others? What can we learn from this process?

How can I compete with global rivals I have never even heard of?

This is one of the most significant concerns of big global players: Who are the new-to-the-world players that will emerge? How do I spot them early? Do I acquire them, or attack head to head? What does it take to make such foreign-market acquisitions work? How can I make sure that I fully exploit them?

If my firm is mid-sized (or even small), how do I globalize quickly?

What country marketplace characteristics provide the best guide for growth potential that I can tap (vs. just size)? How can I access such markets both in front-end customer acquisition and back-end logistics and delivery? How do I organize to make that happen? Trend analysis has been around for a while. Is it keeping pace with marketplace dynamics? When and why is it not? What can be done to bridge such gaps? For example, how can I better predict where and when new technologies may take off?

How do I organize to monitor and predict changes in my marketplace?

Is this marketing’s job or someone else’s? If so, who? What are the costs and benefits of different approaches to doing so? Is simply trying to become more agile and respond quicker when changes occur a viable alternative to trying to better predict marketplace dynamics and change?

Balancing incremental and radical innovation. 

Firms need to compete in two time periods: the present and the future. How does one balance this dual, or ambidextrous, orientation? How do we fuel necessary innovation in the present, while investing in disruptive technologies, business models, partnerships, and customer experiences that set the course for the future? How do we foster innovation beyond the product—to the organization, networks, financial models, distribution channels and other forms of innovation—that can accelerate competing for the future? Can we and should we balance over time by sequentially switching our focus from radical to incremental (e.g., behave like a tech business and build new “platforms,” then add “modules”) rather than trying to do both at once?

How do I successfully incorporate design principles into my organization?

Pepsi and other firms have done a wonderful job of incorporating design principles into their organization, not just to redesign products but also to look at systems, processes and workflow. What can we learn from Pepsi and other firms that have successfully deployed design thinking? What is the dark side of design thinking? What does it create in terms of unintended problems for the firm?

How should we think about creating “platform” products?

It is not enough to have successful products. Successful firms think in terms of platforms, franchises and ecosystems. Think about American Girl. They are not simply products, but an entire ecosystem of products, information, brands and retail experiences. What are the lessons learned?

What are good ways to build prototypes and “fail fast”?

What do great firms do in this area? Can large firms like GE practice lean-start up models, or is it almost impossible for large firms to implement? Do large firms need to implement things differently?

How do I make sure we learn the right lessons from market tests?

How can I conduct such tests in a “fail-fast” way and still keep my intentions below the rivals’ radar?

What are good innovation metrics and how do I integrate them?

How do you differentiate between number and quality of innovations? Which, if any, innovation metrics should I build into reward and evaluation systems? For whom? Which innovation metrics may have unintended consequences? What are they? How can such negative outcomes best be avoided?

How should I organize to enhance innovation outcomes in my firm?

What determines when I should make vs. buy? Is there a viable business model in which I can effectively outsource innovation and just buy the ones I see as successful? Can I still “win” financially by making such purchases and acquisitions? If so, how?

Firms like Netflix, or even personal brands such as Madonna and Justin Timberlake, have successfully managed across two time periods

In effect, they have re-invented themselves to “fit” into a new competitive space. What can we learn from these firms or brands?

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Online dating isn’t perfect. No website has found the magic method of creating a love connection. Just ask Mark Brooks, who has worked in and around the industry for two decades. “This is a total virgin science,” Brooks quips with a restrained laugh from his deck in Malta. 

, an agency that provides strategy, marketing, business development, and media relations for companies in the online dating world. He’s worked with websites like  and and has seen the industry through multiple eras, from the early days of online personals to companies scrambling for mobile relevance.  

Competition has grown along with the size of the industry. Reports say there are anywhere from 2,500 to 8,000 online dating platforms worldwide, all with their own unique claim or angle to attract users. Pew Research Center reports that while few users were online dating in 2005, . This equates to roughly 48 million people. Pew also recently reported that the share of 18-to-24-year-olds who use these platforms has nearly tripled from 10% in 2013 to 27% today. Even the boomers are getting in on the action, with online dating user share doubling from 6% in 2013 to 12% today. 

The stigma of meeting your soulmate through a website is dwindling by the day, experts say, especially for millennials and Generation Z. Melanie Shreffler, senior editorial director of “” by Engine Group, which looks at emerging trends and youth behavior of people ages 14 to 34, found that platforms are looking to give a more realistic experience to win over more users. “People want the other person [they meet] to be real and not just some online façade,” she says. Opportunities for the younger crowd to join an online dating service can be found in the numbers, such as the juxtaposition of 83% of young people Cassandra surveyed preferring to meet a potential partner in person but only 40% having ever actually asked someone on a date face-to-face.

While it’s growing, the industry is “sort of being squished,” with the majority of growth seen at large businesses and smaller apps, leaving a large middle section open, Brooks says. 

Squishing aside, the increased interest has meant huge revenue.  and poised for even more growth. Industry marketers have proverbial dollar signs in their eyes and are trying to figure out how they can become relevant to users in unique ways. While some online dating platforms fit neatly into niches, others cast a wide net for the hearts of every single person in America. 

, the wildly popular dating app in which users “swipe right” to note interest in someone, or “swipe left” to reject them. Those who both swipe right on each other can begin a message conversation. Tinder is the game-changer, as it has severely reduced the stigma of online dating with its ease of use and gamification, many professionals agree. According to Brooks, Tinder’s explosive popularity changed the face of internet dating with its launch in 2012. The app grew from college campuses, Brooks says, as the company used a marketing program to entice “campus connectors” (or the “popular kids,” as he deemed them) to spread the word. 

“It doesn’t take much,” he said. “It’s such a hotbed on campuses that you can get these things to take off on campus with the right story and the right product. [Tinder is] a very, very compelling product. It’s one of the few dating apps that’s truly sharable. For some reason, apps are more sharable in online dating. You wouldn’t generally talk about Match, but on Tinder, you’d just show it around and talk about the experience.”

How do these dating platforms grow? Brooks says it’s something that isn’t often discussed, but the traditional way is for these websites to spend their way to growth via pay-per-click advertising and paid acquisition, as well as SEO and content marketing. Companies with more money are able to advertise on TV where they can “go big or go home,” he says. 

Marketing has been a true difference maker in the industry, playing a key role across each site that has reached a critical mass of users. How have these marketers made a difference and created a service few ever thought they would need? Marketing minds from multiple online dating platforms, some old and some new, weigh in on how they plan to thrive with a fickle and ever-changing demographic.

Classic and Conservative 

In 2000, Grant Langston was asked to be a copywriter for a new startup website. It was just for six months, they told him. He hesitated before taking it; the job was in Pasadena and he was pretty comfortable at home in Los Angeles. Sixteen years later, he’s the vice president of brand marketing for that startup, eHarmony, .

How did eHarmony grow from a startup with no users to a mammoth with 45 million users? It certainly didn’t happen overnight. In fact, things were pretty bad in the first couple of years, Langston says, as the company relied solely on PR and online marketing and could initially only manage a “small trickle” of users. With its minute base, eHarmony became “good at apologizing and asking people to hang in there” while competitors continued to enter the market. 

Then, in 2003, the company started airing its first radio ads. The ads featured real couples talking about how they met on eHarmony. After about six months, the team translated that storytelling model to TV—and it was a hit. Langston refers to TV as eHarmony’s “magic formula,” a method that helped them gain more users than any other medium at the time.

TV advertising, however, is a fickle beast and was not without its hurdles. Anyone who has heard of eHarmony has likely seen its TV commercials, which were similar to its radio spots: Couples talking about their experience with the site and how they’re still together. While this worked beautifully for years, with a huge response rate, Langston says they ran variations on the same spot from 2003 until 2009—something he says “was a pretty bad mistake, in retrospect.”

“Back then, the theory was you wanted everything to be integrated. You wanted one campaign that spoke to everybody,” Langston says. “We would shoot one series a year, one package of commercials a year. Everything we did from every platform, from every channel, was that exact same ad. Essentially, we just burned out America on the exact same thing.”

Response rates hit rock bottom. “It was a crisis here,” Langston says, adding that the company started trying other methods that did not work. Then, perhaps serendipitously, there was turnover at the top of the company. Langston was asked to take over the company’s advertising direction and told his superiors it was essential for the company to start putting several campaigns into the marketplace at one time instead of having all of their proverbial eggs in one basket. “Let’s get more creative,” he says.

Evolution happened in subtle ways, such as making the TV spots humorous, Langston says, and the response rate ascended. Now, television accounts for approximately 70% of eHarmony’s lead generation. It’s a numbers game, he says. TV registrations have a dramatic velocity for the company. Those who come to eHarmony by way of TV register faster, subscribe faster and take the questionnaire faster. It creates an emotional and motivating connection to the audience, Langston says. 

Although TV is the main route eHarmony has taken to winning market share, Langston says they still do radio ads, keyword testing, display ads and digital video—they just bring in less money than TV. Social media, however, has become a key player in eHarmony’s marketing strategy in the past five years. They’ve learned how to monetize it in a way they never imagined possible, Langston says, gaining nearly 300,000 Facebook fans and just more than 44,000 Twitter followers. 

Langston says the advent of the Tinder era has helped business, giving their priced model even more legitimacy and clout by keeping the focus on its model of creating long-term relationships rather than hookups. “You have to stay connected. We just don’t ever want to change who we are and what we represent,” he says. “As long as you keep both of those things going, we’ll be golden.”

Modern and Mobile

Daniel Mori is trying to keep up with a lot. Not only is he Zoosk’s senior director of business analysis and monetization, he’s also currently heading up the online dating company’s marketing efforts. “I’m having a very busy quarter,” Mori says in his thick Italian accent with a laugh and slight sigh. 

Amid all of the spinning plates he has to keep track of , he’s also tasked with capitalizing on the large cadre of consumer data that comes in on a minute-by-minute basis through the company’s website, mobile app and 13.3 million fans on Facebook (the company began as a Facebook app in 2007).

Most of the company’s decisions are based entirely on data, he says, especially when it comes to figuring out how marketing dollars are allocated. “The main goal for [our] team is to tie price to value,” he explains. “We’re very diligent about making sure every marketing dollar we spend has a measurable value on business. Our job is to measure that impact.”

Mori says Zoosk is “a bit of a hybrid between direct response and a large consumer brand.” The company does a lot of digital direct response marketing to a smaller audience than most other large consumer products. 

“Think about it in these terms: Fifty percent of the adult population in the U.S. is single; that’s our target audience in general. Those are the only people who are even eligible for our service,” Mori says. “Within that 50%, we have to make sure approximately 25% have tried online dating or are willing to try online dating, so we have to figure out ways to determine intent within that pool of the adult population. 

“Most of what we do in marketing is try to polish and refine our marketing to identify single adults … and try to predict intent. That’s easy in search marketing [such as PPC and SEO] … but beyond search marketing, intent becomes a little bit more of a trick exercise,” Mori says. 

While Zoosk has attempted to break it big via TV and radio spots, like eHarmony, Mori and his team weren’t satisfied with the ROI. Perhaps the biggest player in Zoosk’s marketing strategy is the aforementioned 13.3 million Facebook fans and the heaps of data it receives on a daily basis. 

Mobile spend is outpacing desktop spend at Zoosk, as the . Mori says the conversion rate for Facebook mobile, from click to install, is between 5% and 10%. This is thanks in large part to the extremely specific data it receives.

“We have the ability with Facebook to target people who have self-identified as being single,” Mori says. “Even if we’re not always able to measure their intent, we know their eligibility for our service. That’s a very, very effective marketing tool for us.”

It’s no wonder mobile is so effective for Zoosk, as more people, specifically in the 18- to 24-year-old crowd, are now on mobile dating apps. Pew reports that 22% of people in this age group now use mobile online dating, up from the 5% who used mobile dating in 2013. Combine that with the reported 1.44 billion active Facebook mobile users and the potential is substantial. 

Where can Zoosk go from the mass amounts of users and Facebook followers? Keeping up quality of the site and app, as well as welcoming back previous users, has been helpful. Mori says security features, such as photo verification done by independent moderators, have helped the company build up a level of trust with its users. When relationships end, many end up returning because of the positive experience, according to Mori. 

“We live in a bit of a paradox,” Mori says of the online-dating marketing world. “On the one hand, we’d love to have a 100% retention rate. On the other hand, success means attrition. Unfortunately, the reality… well, fortunately for the business, unfortunately for humanity, I guess: Not all relationships last forever.”

Spiritual and Social

There’s one question that has been eating away at John Volturo, chief marketing officer at , since he started working in online dating in 2004. It’s been eating away at the rest of the industry, too: Can you create a dating brand that’s about more than just dating?

PerfectMatch​ before trying to start his own online dating service a year later. It fell flat; they had underestimated the expenses.

“People require so much more to effectively date,” he says. “Dating brands are a commodity in the space. Unless you have the [unique selling proposition] that resonates with someone, you’re going to get [people who] defect pretty easily.”

After years of experimenting, Volturo now works on the branding efforts for more than 20 brands at Spark Networks, including ChristianMingle and JDate. The selling proposition at Spark? Knowing there’s a religious connection before there’s a love connection—a shared value system from the start.

“One of the things we hear a lot on the Christian side of the business is that it’s really hard to go into a bar and figure out who’s Christian and what type of Christianity they follow,” he says. “It’s an awkward question. That’s why when you’re sitting at home or a coffee shop, we provide [a great] service. … You really do know with ChristianMingle and JDate that people’s faith is important to them.”

In addition to bringing people together online, both properties have seen success with in-person events. Volturo likes to think about each of the brands as a local business in each territory they’re in. This has paid off, he says, simply because of the connections they’ve created with users. People are “hungry” for these events, Volturo insists, as the events become social tools to make the brand exciting and relevant to its users. 

The No. 1 way Volturo says his team reaches out to users is through e-mail, which has meant testing, optimizing images, asking questions, and measuring time users are on the page, among other analytical testing. Keeping lines of communication open is essential, as they have looked to be trusted and create a bond with users. The most important marketing effort, Volturo says, is the combination of all of them; the halo effect of each channel increasing the relevance of the next. 

Has Spark Networks found its unique way of marketing? Volturo thinks so. Free apps don’t offer a focus and don’t bring the quality, he says, while other paid sites don’t offer religious filters.

“There’re riches in niches,” Volturo says. “Because it’s been around so long, it’s iconic, and there’s a huge amount of virility because the number of [Jewish] people who got married through JDate far exceeds all other dating sites. That longevity, that history, that success rate really translates into a lot of viral growth.”

Hip and Happening

Love at first sight is harder than ever to come by in 2016. Pew Research recently found that 62% of people believe online dating allows them to find a better match. Happn, a company which refers to itself as “the first real-life dating app,” wants to make stumbling onto love in real life the new hot trend.

The app uses geocoding to match people who have crossed paths, meaning users actually have to leave the house to have a chance of meeting someone new. Happn tells users just how many times they and another individual have crossed paths and will connect both if they both would like to chat.

Serge Gojkovich, who was hired as the company’s CMO earlier this year and was most recently vice president of marketing at dating app brands Grindr and Blendr, said the app’s hyperlocalization sets it apart from anything else on the dating market. 

“It’s more about the chance meeting,” he says. “Typically, [people] go to the same restaurants, they go to the same gym, the same grocery store, the same dry cleaners. How amazing is it that you can meet people who have similar activities as you do? That’s really the true algorithm: Meeting each other in real life and seeing the same things rather than filling out a 40-question questionnaire trying and meet up with someone.”

The Paris, France-based company has been rolling out slowly in the U.S., launching in bigger cities such as New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. This makes sense, as GlobalWebIndex has reported that 74% of location-based dating app users, as of the 4th quarter of 2014, were in urban areas. 

Thus far, the U.S. accounts for roughly 13%, or 1.75 million, of Happn’s user base. Happn says it is adding 1.5 million users each month across the world (150,000 to 175,000 in the U.S.), with an expectation of 30 million total users worldwide by the end of 2016. 

The reason for targeting larger cities is simple, Gojkovich says: There are more people around, creating a better chance of more people crossing paths. The objective now is to “insert ourselves where people are out and about having fun.” The company has events scheduled in big cities across the country, including pool parties in Miami and an event at , to show people how the app works and create a fun association with the name “Happn.”

While having a plan to reach critical mass in online dating is essential, Gojkovich knows that without a well-functioning, unique platform, the company would be left for dead. That’s why he says the Happn crew strives to introduce new features to the app, such as the ability to send a potential date a song from Spotify or showcase Instagram photos.

“What we’re trying to do is create an app and new features that people want to use,” Gojkovich says, “But we also have to tell people about it. That’s why we’re doing event marketing. That’s why we’re doing the public PR push.”

Reaching critical mass this year will be an important step for Happn. “We’re excited about dominating the U.S. market,” he says.

How Brands are Getting Involved

Recent research from The Cassandra Report found that 75% of people believe online dating makes it easier to meet people and 73% believe it’s possible to have a relationship with someone they met online. But how do they feel about brands marketing and advertising to them amid their online romantic quests? 

Cassandra’s Shreffler says she sees a lot of interesting opportunities for brands in the online dating world. Many are already using mobile platforms heavily in advertising campaigns, so reaching this audience wouldn’t make for a huge jump. But the big opportunity she sees is to give people that “meet-cute” story, or their own unique story of “how we met.”

“It makes their story a little bit different than other people’s,” she says, citing brands that hold events in concert with online dating apps, hold special promotions and interact with users in unique ways. One example she gives is from a woman she spoke with at a focus group who claims, after meeting her boyfriend at a Heineken-sponsored event, that “Heineken introduced us,” a story they tell time and again.

“When you create the right kind of content … whether it’s for a nonprofit or an advertiser, users get engaged,” he says.

What Does the Future Hold?

Years ago, Brooks says he predicted that “we’d go Star Trek” in online dating, meaning he foresaw the impending mobile boom. In his recent research, he found that 73% of all visitors to dating services are on mobile devices. 

But a unique selling proposition is needed for websites that want to break through. Brooks believes larger screens, five-to-six inches, will come into prominence in the near future. Users want larger pictures for their online dating needs and Brooks says larger phones and small tablets will serve that need. 

After that, he believes wearable technology will play a larger role in the industry. Runners, for instance, may want to date other runners, but how can you truly know if someone exercises the same way? People often tell white lies on their dating profiles, but Brooks says sites may be able to take advantage of a customer’s FitBit data​ by matching people who run seven miles per day. The activity becomes the more in-depth way of describing one’s self. 

One thing is for certain: Online dating is here to stay with little chance of evanescence. Brooks notes that the availability of people, within the click of a button, has created an addictive element.

“Once you’ve got a person in tow and you’re communicating with them, the economics of the entire experience requires you to remain in contact with them or lose them,” he says “That’s the way the world works. We’re getting closer to modeling it after the real world with this new shift.”

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