There’s no pressure to follow in anyone’s footsteps for Diana O’Brien. . It’s a different job than O’Brien expected, as the majority of her focus for nearly two years has been on breaking down disparate silos within Deloitte.

It seemed natural to her to bring the silos under one umbrella, O’Brien says, but, “what I didn’t appreciate when we first started was how powerful an engine we would be in championing our clients by capitalizing on the powers we have now that we’ve brought some of these groups together.”

O’Brien became CMO in March 2015 after working for Deloitte in various roles since 1985. She has pushed out new campaigns, adopted new data technologies and served as the voice of the customer in Deloitte’s C-suite. Marketing News spoke with O’Brien about her time as CMO thus far and her plans for the future.��

Q: How has your role at Deloitte evolved?

A: I’ve had a long career at Deloitte. I joined our consulting practice in 1985. For most of my career, I’ve served clients, so I’m a very client-oriented CMO. Five years ago, I took the responsibility to build Deloitte University. That’s our leadership center in West Lake, Texas, for all of our professionals to invest in their development and create an environment where they not only will be given the opportunity to grow their leadership skills, but to concentrate and spark ideas with clients and their colleagues. That’s a touchstone of our culture today. That was an incredible experience that was unexpected in my career, as was becoming the CMO.

Q: It seems like each company has its own definition of what a CMO is. What’s your vision for CMO at Deloitte?

A: We define my role as a champion for clients and a driver of growth. We have a responsibility to build Deloitte’s reputation, and we do that by creating powerful experiences, unique insights and, ultimately, building lasting relationships with our clients. In my organization, I have a number of leaders that have market eminence and industry sector eminence who are bringing the insights to our clients to help them solve issues that they face.

When you couple what they do—which is build solutions—with the brand, [Deloitte’s] creativity and innovative mindset, our policy understanding, corporate citizenship and investment, all of those things really create a differentiated experience. That’s what enables us to help the business grow.

Q: Are you able to work easily with other executives in the C-suite? That has been a challenge for many marketers.

A: I wouldn’t say that’s been my experience at all. There are some CMOs who are unfamiliar with sitting in the C-suite, but at Deloitte we view marketing as a growth driver, not a cost center. I’m solving problems with my colleagues. I connect the dots across what our customers need the most, what our brand needs in the market place and what our chief talent officer and risk officer might say our conduct would be. I’m connected to every part of the C-suite. The advantage the CMO has, if they embrace it, is that they are closest to the customer. They have the deepest insights and they have the people and relationships to be in touch with the marketplace and understand what’s needed. If they can translate that into the language of their C-suite peers, they become an invaluable resource for problem solving and ensuring the experiences defined in the brand are what they create. 

Q: You’re able to be an advocate for the Deloitte customer?

A: That’s what any good CMO really is: the advocate for the customer. That’s relatively new. It started to change in the last couple of years. CMOs have been embraced and [companies see] them as someone who can solve problems and unite the C-suite, rather than being tactical.

Q: Tell me about your new “Look Again” ad campaign and your acquisition of creative ad agency Heat?

A: we made at the end of [2015]. It’s a tremendous asset that allowed us to become closer to a full-digital agency. We always had a strong practice in supporting [marketing], but we didn’t have the advertising component. Being a chief storyteller is a big part of what you need to have in order to serve as CMO. Our acquisition of Heat was critical for this.

We have a long history based on trust and integrity, but we also have a very large practice that helps transform businesses to be more innovative and insightful. We weren’t as well-known for that, and we wanted to establish a creative platform that helps us communicate that to our clients as well as to our professionals. We formed an agency model within our own organization to take full advantage of Heat. We wanted to eat our own dog food. What we’re advising our clients to do and what we want to do ourselves [is use] 

Heat, our digital agency, to help us craft a creative platform for our future. It’s a creative platform to emotionally connect to how we behave in the marketplace and arrive at some of the best solutions that our clients need. . It’s the essence of what Deloitte is looking at. We will look further to find the solutions you need. We will look within, we’ll look behind, we’ll look forward, we’ll look around to give our people the tools to ensure our clients are moving forward with things that are important to them. TV wasn’t the only thing we did; it was a piece of the story.

Q: TV advertising has dropped off a bit in recent years, but advancements are still being made in the use of customer data and segmentation. As CMO, how do you make use of data?

A: Every company is a data company. Every company is a technology company. We’re all rich with data, and we all have many different kinds of technology. The key is to use the data and the technology to create meaning and understanding, so you can make choices and decisions and be more proactive in satisfying your clients’ expectations. You can be overwhelmed by data, and it can overtake you, but the key is to stay focused on the problems you’re trying to solve and your goals. Then, you can organize and synthesize data in ways that give insight around your customer’s behavior and preferences. You understand performance more deeply and you get real-time feedback on your brand KPIs. That’s what allows you to exceed your customers’ expectations.

Q: When searching for customer insights, marketers have different philosophies. Some start with a problem, some go fishing for insights. What route do you take?

A: You have to be scientific about it​. You have to know the problems you’re solving and organize data to answer those questions. You have to look at data in a holistic way and look at surface trends. Both are important. Those trends can tell you things that you might not be thinking about when you’re just focused on solving a problem, such as “What are the preferences of this client segment over that segment?” When you look at trend data, you can see that people who buy “this” tend to buy “that.” Those are things you might not have asked a question about. We use data scientists, research and analytics to look at the data, so you can find different answers depending on where you’re looking.

Q: How do you navigate omni-channel marketing at Deloitte?

A: Omni-channel is a non-negotiable. You have to be where your clients are, and you have to deliver consistently to them. We understand that you no longer create a relationship with your clients by just having in-person relationships. That’s still important, and we don’t diminish that, but there are digital and social aspects we have to embrace. You have to use digital, social and physical in combination. It’s not to say you invest in all of them equally. You have to start with where your clients are, what’s needed to bring solutions to that segment and how to optimize that channel for that particular client segment. That’s how you meet expectations in ways that are value-creating. You’re giving it to them in ways they can digest and they most want to experience.

Q: Are there other ways to get in touch and stay in touch with customers?

A: We have a number of programs that focus on the customer experience. We bring together the physical and the virtual, engaging the customers throughout. We might use virtual reality to help them experience something. Customers will be in the physical setting and we may be able to have a facilitated dialog right there. We have robots we’re testing now that we put into individual sessions. If I’m in an immersive session with someone, the robot can be present and it could bring people, say a certain executive from one market or an executive from Asia or Europe, into that setting in that moment, and allow you to engage with them. That’s the real-time feedback that executives have received when we create these personalized experiences our clients are interested in.

Q: What’s the most important thing you’d like to see accomplished as CMO?

A: The legacy I’d like to leave is for all 80,000 professionals at Deloitte to be unleashed as ambassadors of who we are, what we are and be able to express that in the marketplace every time they’re interacting with our clients. My No. 1 job is to make sure they’re all ambassadors of our brand.

Q: Is that tough to do? Everyone has a different personality, so I imagine it takes a certain level of trust.

A: It definitely takes trust, but in the 24/7, unscripted world you have to trust people to make the most of every moment and make extraordinary experiences. Our purpose is to make an impact that matters; we want you to make an impact that matters with our clients, our people and within the communities where you live.

We’ve conducted enough research to know there are behaviors that we respond to and bring out when we’re at our best. Things like walking in someone else’s shoes and showing empathy. You understand through the client’s eyes. You ask questions that demonstrate that you understand and you’re willing to listen and lean into their issues. Another is to show up and be fully present—physically, emotionally and intellectually. Show undivided attention. Get into the trenches with them. Get on a plane if need be. Be there for them if they need you. These are things that I think stem from personality. They stem from behaviors of the kind of culture you want to have and the kind of people you want to be around.

The post Deloitte’s First CMO Walks in No One’s Footsteps appeared first on ���������.

On a warm Ohio morning in August, a Ukrainian hacker threw a middle market health care group into complete disarray. It was random and it was swift. 

The hacker, known as @PravSector, posted 156 GB of patient data from The Central Ohio Urology Group. COUG claimed the breach impacted 300,000 patients. The leak included full names, diagnoses, telephone numbers, insurance account numbers and postal addresses, . 

In claiming responsibility for the breach, @PravSector told DataBreaches.net the leak was politically motivated, a warning so that “no one thought to poison our people with the virus from secret laboratories.” COUG was not involved with any poisonings or secret laboratories, but the hacker wanted to bring attention to supposed “secret trials of virus in Ukraine” by the U.S. The hacker planned similar leaks, adding, “We are people, and we want to live.”

What happened to COUG follows no real-world logic. While this leak may seem purely random, COUG isn’t alone and will soon be joined by more victims in this seemingly random act of hacking. According to NetDiligence/McGladrey’s 2015 Annual Cyber Claims study, middle market companies—those with revenues between $50 million and $1 billion—account for nearly half of all cyber claims.

Cybersecurity is still a relatively new issue for middle market companies, but the impact is dire. A 2016 report from . Of those health care companies breached, 79% have been hit twice or more and 45% five times or more.

“You can get really paranoid when you think about that stuff,” says Thomas Stewart, executive director of the National Center for the Middle Market. “But if you don’t get paranoid, you can make careless mistakes.”

Companies worrying about cybersecurity extend beyond health care and into the rest of the middle market. Manufacturers, car dealerships, law firms, banks and others now store more data online than ever, making these businesses susceptible to a series of hard-hitting breaches. Reliance on data will only grow, and with it the threat of breaches, , according to technology provider CSC.

The Middle Market Under Attack 

, says middle market companies must stop thinking they are “too small to be targeted.”

“We primarily protect middle market companies and there are plenty of bad things targeting the middle market,” he says. 

As ransomware, phishing and other simplistic hacks have become prevalent, Stewart says larger companies have become better at cybersecurity; they’ve invested more and protected themselves. Meanwhile, middle market businesses have found themselves “under attack,” especially those with large amounts of data.

The National Center for the Middle Market recently to collect cybersecurity best practices. Stewart wants to create a “one-stop shop” for getting started in better protection online for the middle market. 

More centralized information for the middle market may be a good start toward improvement, says and co-founder of the firm’s cybersecurity and data privacy practice. Koering says the most common problem he finds in middle market companies is a dearth of concise, reliable information on cybersecurity best practices. Most firms are aware of potential issues but aren’t sure how to prioritize legal and technical problems. 

“Navigating those issues requires knowledge of the technical capabilities of the company and its marketing and data retention needs, as well as the legal obligations and potential legal exposure related to the retention and storage of that data,” Koering says. 

To start the improvement, NCMM released a survey of middle market cybersecurity that found:

• 86% of middle market firms say cybersecurity is important for their business, but only 22% have cyber insurance to protect assets from a breach.
• 45% of firms have an up-to-date strategy, while 30% of firms say they have no strategy.
• 75% say they haven’t been a victim of a hack, while 16% say they have, and 9% “don’t know.” 

Source: National Center for the Middle Market

However, Stewart says there’s one thing they know about this third set of statistics: they’re incorrect. Companies, on average, don’t realize that they’ve been breached until about a half-year later, he says, so the number of those breached is likely higher. 

There’s also some good news in the NCMM numbers. Sixty-one percent of middle market financial services companies say they have a current and annually renewed cybersecurity plan. The same is true for 54% of health care companies. Additionally, 49% say they talk about cybersecurity as part of the overall strategy at the board level with cybersecurity experts at the table, while 37% say they talk about it at the board level without cybersecurity experts. 

“They may still not have a policy in place as you saw, but I think that’s a decent number,” Stewart says. “These numbers are probably getting better all the time.”

While spending on cybersecurity may seem like throwing money down a black hole, NCMM’s report tells a different story. Companies that rated cybersecurity as “extremely important” saw revenue growth of 7.8%, while those that deemed it “very important” saw revenue growth of 4.7% and those who rated it “not important” saw growth of 3.9%. The average breach costs approximately $4 million, per the Ponemon Institute, so it isn’t surprising to see companies saving money even when spending on cybersecurity. 

Here are four tips for middle market organizations to improve cybersecurity:

1. Have a Plan

Koering says middle market companies must first have a plan to improve cybersecurity, including knowing what data they collect, why they collect it, where the data is stored and how the data is used. “Then, set up policies and procedures to protect the data consistent with best practices and legal obligations,” he says. 

Stewart says finding a plan can come from assessing risk, followed by assessing the people, process and technology. This may mean bringing in outside help, hiring more employees or improving training, among other options. With any plan midmarket companies make, Stewart says assessing risk and planning for protection is a good way to start. 

Beyer says visibility across the company and having the ability to interpret everything that is collected is an essential step in planning for cybersecurity.

“You don’t know what you don’t know about, so how can you prioritize which steps to take to improve your security?” he says. “Get a base-level understanding of what is happening in your environment and what threats you are facing so you can improve your security accordingly.”

2. Employees Must Be Secure

Ironically, Stewart says, technology is likely the most fretted-over cybersecurity threat, but also the easiest to secure. It’s the phishing attacks, carelessness about passwords, laptops left in taxis and other human-based errors that lead to the worst leaks. 

Just consider the attacks that built one of the biggest storylines of the 2016 U.S presidential election. , gave his account information away via a phishing attack. Phishing attacks—or messages made to look legitimate but sent maliciously to obtain secret information—aren’t easy for everyone to spot, so training employees on what to look for may need to become the new normal at middle market companies. 

Who gets access to what data can also be an issue, Stewart says, as can the company’s familiarity with the FBI or other agencies that need to be notified once an attack occurs. “You should already have these contacts,” Stewart says. 

Source: Ponemon Institute

Additionally, Beyer says allowing users to have local administrative rights is a “surefire way to get your company breached, regardless of all the shiny new security solutions you buy.” 

Negligent or malicious employees are the reason for more than half of cybersecurity events, Koering says. The best way to avoid this kind of breach is to educate and train employees on cybersecurity practices. And training employees doesn’t mean executives or ownership can skip out, he says. 

“Since executives and ownership often have access to more critical data and are more visible, and therefore more likely to be the target or subject of a phishing attack, compliance with cybersecurity best practices is even more critical for those individuals,” Koering says. 

3. Cover Legal Risks

Businesses now hold more sensitive data online, which means more potential legal risks. Koering says there are different liability levels for breaches—including civil, regulatory and criminal—depending on the size of risk. For example, civil liability states that risk of loss increases on a per-record basis because of plaintiffs’ attorneys using class-action lawsuits as an enforcement mechanism, Koering says. Since these lawsuits are expensive, there must be a significant number of breached records to bring about litigation.

“For middle-market companies, therefore, the risk of civil liability is generally small until the number of compromised records is sufficient for a contingent-fee attorney to take notice,” Koering says. “Once they do, the cost of mitigation of damages has averaged over $185 per record. … Thus, in general, the more records, the more risk, in terms of costs of mitigation and potential civil liability.”

Regulatory and criminal risk depends on regulatory and legislative environments, Koering says. President Donald Trump’s choice of Dr. Joshua Wright to lead the transition of the Federal Trade Commission may signal a weakening of enforcement capabilities of the FTC, the body that has thus far led cybersecurity regulation. Less enforcement from the FTC is likely good news for small and middle market companies, he says. 

“At the same time, we’re seeing increased legislative activity from the states regarding data privacy, especially in Delaware and California,” Koering says. “That activity, in turn, raises the possibility that state-based data privacy enforcement and litigation may grow to compensate for any decrease in federal enforcement. Unless that legislation includes more incentive to litigate, it is unlikely to increase the risk of cybersecurity breaches for small and midsize firms with limited numbers of data records.”

4. Protect the Crown Jewels

Some security can be one-size-fits-all, but Stewart argues that companies must protect their “crown jewels,” or data so valuable that any leak would be critical. 

“You can’t be 100% safe. We know that,” Stewart says. “But the question is: What do you want to protect to a 99% degree of certainty? How do you interact with total risk management? Have you also talked through with your lawyers all the things that you need to do beforehand? Obviously you want to protect customer data, your personal data and yourself from litigation risk.”

This is an area that will make executives paranoid and keep them up at night, Stewart says, but there must be a measure of vigilance in protecting the crown jewels. “You can’t be causal about it,” Stewart says. 

Breaches, like the one that happened to COUG, happen all the time. The problem is that not many get publicity, Beyer says, especially not as much coverage as the Target, Home Depot and Anthem breaches that affected millions. Middle market breaches tend to be in the vein of a pharmaceutical company that loses its prized formula or a financial institution that loses customer trust, Beyer says. 

“In the middle market, these types of breaches can be devastating, even crippling,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t take a galvanizing event before executives start making changes. But I think most executives think it couldn’t happen to them.”

The post Four Things Middle Market Companies Must Do to Improve Cybersecurity appeared first on ���������.

, a staffing agency that is a subsidiary of human resource consulting firm , recently released its 2016 Salary Guide for marketing and other creative professionals in North America. Now in its 16th year, the guide lists projected ranges of starting salaries for 40 marketing-related positions, broken down into agency or corporate organizations.

The data is culled from the thousands of open positions the Creative Group works to fill, as well as surveys of advertising and marketing executives, analysis of the hiring environment, and insights from internal staffing and recruiting communications. 

For 2016, the numbers reflect a 3.8% increase across the board from 2015, according to , executive director of The Creative Group.

“I think that what we’re seeing is typical behavior of economic recovery, as well as typical behavior as it relates to the diminishing available pool of talent,” Domeyer says. “In our most recent survey, 58% of the executives that we polled said that they’re finding it challenging to find the creative professionals that they’re looking for. That’s the highest that it’s been since 2010.”

Highest Paid Positions

The highest compensated agency position is president, which comes with an average salary between $149,500 and $230,000. Chief marketing officer is the most lucrative corporate position, which a salary ranging from $154,750 to $245,000.  The lowest paid position listed is event/trade show coordinator, with an average salary range of $42,000 to $59,250. 

While these numbers reflect national averages, the survey also adds a “local variance number” that can be used to adjust the overall salary range to specific regions of the country.  The regions with the highest local variance are New York City, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif., all of which have local averages at least 1.35 times greater than the national range. El Paso, Texas, Youngstown, Ohio and Duluth, Minn., comprised the lowest local variances, clocking in at less than .8 times of the national average. 

There’s also the question of whether the prices are inflated by the inclusion of temp jobs, which generally pay more by excluding some benefits and to attract people who are otherwise hesitant to accept short-term employment. While Domeyer says that The Creative Group doesn’t release numbers on how many temp jobs they fill compared to full-time jobs, she says that data shows full-time hiring is up in marketing and creative fields.

“What I can tell you is definitely we’ve seen that as marketing budgets have increased … it’s led to a steady rise in full-time hiring with contract-to-hire positions. So we definitely see increased demand for full time placement,” Domeyer says.

Most Challenging Positions to Fill

Brand/product management and marketing research both were included in the most challenging areas for companies to staff. Additionally, marketing automation manager is named as “rising star” position within the creative world, and a separate Robert Half survey names content strategist as one of its top 10 roles to watch throughout all industries, predicting a growth rate of 8.1%.  

“The unemployment rate for marketing managers is 3%, designers 3.5%, and Web developers [are] at 4.4%. So anytime you have low unemployment there’s definitely a situation where to attract and retain top talent, whether for freelance or full-time roles, organizations are paying more,” Domeyer says.

The 2016 Salary Guide also identifies several trends that influence creative staffing this year, including:

• Marketing budgets are increasing, creating new opportunities for industry professionals
  
• A better job seekers market, particularly for highly skilled candidates such as marketing managers with three or more years of experience, due to lower unemployment creating talent scarcity.  
  
• Companies have revamped the employee handbook to offer more robust and appealing benefit packages and workplace policies, such as flextime (51% of respondents), work from home policies (43%) and generous PTO (37%).
  
• Companies are also looking into assisting employees with career planning and professional development in order to keep their future professional outlook tied to their current organization.
  
• Employees show more willingness to job hop, while employers are cautiously warming up to counter offers.
  

For people looking at these numbers and considering switching employers, Domeyer has a word of advice.

“Compensation is a key factor,” she says. “Organizations need to pay competitively to attract and retain, but individuals also need to consider the work experience, the industry that they’re in, the growth opportunities and look at the situation holistically to determine where the best place for their long-term career growth is.”​

2016 Salary Guide: Advertising & Marketing

Adjusting Salaries for U.S. Cities

Source: The Creative Group 2016 Salary Guide

The post How Much Do Marketers Make in 2016? appeared first on ���������.

The problem is that most companies face big stumbling blocks that keep them from doing just that. Namely, established business models, classical organizational charts, entrenched operations and business processes. Traditional brands have more customers and a longer history with consumers than today’s startups. But startups have a better shot at connecting with folks more personally—and disrupting existing business models—because they’re free to innovate. They aren’t weighed down by the status quo. They can do a lot more trial and error in their search to coming up with new ways of getting closer to customers. 

One of the most of popular buzzwords trending right now in marketing speak is the “experience economy.” The notion gets at a basic reality. Information empowered, creative and connected consumers experience brands like no other group before them but—just as powerfully—they craft that interaction with brands, they’re in charge of it, and they dictate its terms. 

How do you compete in this experience economy? How does a company go about revamping its traditional top-down marketing message, its product-centric organizational structure in order to get to the promised land of a customer-centric focus? 

To kick off this change, here are four steps that companies should take to organize your operations more closely around what customers want in order to develop operating models more in tune with the realities of today’s marketplace:

1. Assume someone else is doing it better than you. The notion here is basic but powerful. Customers have so many choices and so much information at their fingertips that they quickly switch between brands, which means that one of your most important tasks is creating an internal culture that’s good with change, that’s constantly assessing customers’ expectations and is willing to adapt to them. This means not simply monitoring your customers and your competitors, but also the customer-focused leaders outside of your industry. 

2. Align your processes with your customers’ values. The amount of information available today lets you understand crucial subtleties that distinguish your customers from everyone else’s. 

This is the major distinction from the mass market, demographic-driven brand-building models of the past. Use it. Take this very practical example: Don’t obsess about having the fastest pizza delivery times if your customers care more about taste.

3. Double down on the biggest pain points. The friction points customers run into when dealing with your brand are bigger problems than ever. For one thing, social media gadflies have enormous power. But just as crucial is the fact that, given all of the choices they have, customers can simply disappear without warning when they have a disappointing experience. Be proactive in seeking out customer pain points. There are plenty of ways to do this, including self-assessments of the customer journey or appointing a chief customer officer with a real budget. Your goal is not to make every customer happy, of course—you should identify the best customer experiences that deliver the best returns for you. The key, though, is to weave proactive vigilance into your processes.

4. Actively listen to—and involve—employees and partners. If customers are better informed than ever before, so, too, are your employees and partners. Make them your collaborators in monitoring and coming up with ways to improve the customer experience. Think about how to incentivize and inspire these folks. We’ve seen it time and again with some of the most vibrant startups today: Great customer experience begins with engaged customers and partners. 

These are just starting points when it comes to getting closer to customers and creating a foundation for crafting new operating and business models. Fundamentally, the issue is that current models are built by function, business unit or geography to maximize revenue and profits, often at the expense of customer relationships. Companies have to come to grips with the fact that customer relationships are now the foundation of success.​

The post Structuring for Success appeared first on ���������.

1. Track your accomplishments. It can be challenging to remember achievements from a few years ago. You probably know what you did in general terms, but the measured results may be tough to r​ecall. Keep a folder where you can store e-mails, reports and performance evaluations that document your achievements and the statistics. It only takes a few seconds to tuck this data into a safe place for review at a later date. When it is time to update your résumé, you will be glad you saved those documents.​

​2. Keep your LinkedIn profile current. Your LinkedIn profile is much easier to update and maintain than your résumé. You don’t have to be concerned about the appearance or spacing. You can quickly drop in a few lines about a recent project or new certification. Also, you are probably on your LinkedIn profile page at least once every week or two. Each time you are on LinkedIn, it is a reminder to add important new accomplishments. 

3. Refresh your résumé twice annually. Waiting one or two—or more—years to update your résumé can be a large endeavor. The thought of such an effort can cause you to delay until you absolutely need a résumé. Rather than wait that long, update your résumé at least twice annually. Follow this checklist when performing your refresh:

    &�Բ�����;• Have your career goals changed?

    &�Բ�����;• Do you have a new position, new employer, new award or new degree to add?

    &�Բ�����;• What are your top accomplishments since your last update? Can you add a measured result for the              accomplishment?

    &�Բ�����;•Is your résumé style and format current?

On a rainy day, things will be more pleasant if you have an umbrella. You will have a better chance of career success if you are prepared for all scenarios, including layoffs. Be prepared by having your rainy day résumé plan, which will ensure that you have your critical information in place and an updated résumé ready to use. 

Photo via .

The post Three Tips on Keeping Your Résumé Up To Date appeared first on ���������.

Watson, owned by Armonk, N.Y.-based International Business Machines Corp.—better known as IBM—is perhaps the most famous computer program in the world. In January 2011, Watson competed against two contestants on one episode of the TV game show Jeopardy!—and won. It may seem like a computer could easily beat two mere humans in a trivia game, but to win Jeopardy!, Watson had to do more than look up answers to questions: It had to understand and use English to win the game. After much reengineering, the team at IBM had honed the program’s language skills enough to allow it to understand what Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek was saying, and to answer his questions in understandable speech.

Since then, the team at IBM has been working to put Watson’s data- and language-processing skills to broader use. Enter Watson Analytics, a  designed specifically for marketing analytics. Cognitive, or predictive, programs are gaining momentum in the business world as marketers struggle to keep up with an ever-increasing amount of data, and they need programs to help analyze that information and enable them to act on the resulting insights.  

Marketing News sat down with Watson Analytics’ worldwide director of marketing, Marcus Hearne, to find out how marketing and analytics dovetail today, and how cognitive technology programs like Watson are helping shape marketing going forward.

Q: Talk about your analytics experience and your career in marketing. How did they come together?

A: I started my career on the implementation and support side of analytics software. I got a business degree but very quickly learned that what was getting me out of bed in the morning was working directly with technology. I joined SPSS [a predictive analytics software company] in 1999, and at that point, rather than being a practitioner, I moved into the product management side and then quickly moved to the marketing side. The ability to communicate the value of this type of technology to people who had only clicking data [but didn’t have actionable insights] was something that I found challenging and rewarding. 

SPSS got acquired by IBM, and I moved to eventually lead the marketing for predictive analytics. Meanwhile, IBM was developing Watson technology; it was the ingestion of a huge corpus of information to then give very straightforward answers to people’s questions in, eventually, a natural interface, in anyone’s native language. It became my job to communicate to people the value of this, how it works, and how it had really advanced analytics capabilities in addition to natural language processing and Big Data capabilities. It allows people without advanced degrees or 20 years’ experience in analytics to access this type of resource. A lot of people are feeling a need because there’s a huge gap in the marketplace for applied analytics knowledge. 

Q: Watson made its way into pop culture with its appearance on Jeopardy!. Does that help or hinder your goal of communicating how Watson works? 

A: It gives us great leverage and much more media recognition in the marketplace than we would have if we had to do it from the ground up. Watson really is the underpinning of cognitive [analytics], and IBM is about cognitive business now. We want to take our clients to that space where technology is able to see data in context, understand and learn from it, and interact with people in their natural language. … Now we have a multitude of capabilities—modules, if you will—in the Watson DNA. There are new solutions being spun off all the time. 

There are points of hindrance because there will always be something that’s anomalous to the norm, but the norm is [that Watson] drives great conversations with clients. Clients are a mix, from, ‘Explain cognitive to me,’ to ‘We have an idea of how we think this could actually help.’ …  They [might] have a ton of data, but they find themselves repeating the same solutions over and over. A cognitive technology will learn and start to bring that learning forward so you’re not solving the same problems in a different format every time. The Watson brand is opening up people’s imaginations, so it’s giving us a great entryway to have conversations with clients. 

Q: How has the design of predictive analytics changed to accommodate the ubiquity of data and marketers using it?

A: It’s bringing it to the level where it’s accessible to more than just the data scientists, to more than just the person who has the Ph.D. It allows people to access advanced analytics very readily. That’s one big thing that’s important: take [the data] down to an individual level to give very ready access to it as is possible. 

Have marketers always been the primary customers of predictive analytics programs? 

It varies by role as to who is most ready to adopt predictive analytics. Marketers in retail absolutely understand customers and are able to scale interactions. Here, the Holy Grail for marketers is this ability to do a one-on-one, personalized interaction with you to maximize your interactions with a customer. From the point of discovery to becoming a prospect to becoming a customer to having an ongoing relationship, how is that done most effectively and efficiently? What’s the best ROI on the dollar that maintains that high level of customer satisfaction? Predictive analytics is extremely powerful in this area because if you can start determining what factors are predictive of an outcome, then you can start toying with those factors to optimize that outcome and avoid negative outcomes. 

It’s something very simple that we inherently know as marketers: If someone has to try multiple times to get a resolution to an issue, their satisfaction is going to go down. They’re less likely to do repeat business with you or recommend you to friends and colleagues. We know that inherently, but now … there’s a lot of data that precedes you being able to control that relationship, so you have to gather that, and Big Data makes that possible now. …

Big Data flipped the scenario for marketers. We used to get those insights from samples: We would take surveys or we would do a sample or focus group or something like that, then try to understand our entire population, either our target market or our existing customers, whatever the case may be. After Big Data, and especially with the digitization that’s available through the Web and the mobile platforms through Android and iOS, all of a sudden you can get the data on the entire population. You’re getting the data on the population to understand and predict what the next entrant is going to do. What’s your next prospect going to look like? How should you handle them based on everything you’ve seen across all of the customers and prospects you’ve dealt with so far? That’s where predictive analytics becomes really powerful. It can come through that existing population. Look for all the predictors and help you understand how best to deal with clients as they come to you in the future.

Q: What does it mean to interact with data in a ‘natural’ way? 

A: As marketers, we understand that it’s more than just a transactional demographic when it comes to a person. It’s more than just how much they spend and what they spend it on, or what’s their gender and postal code and how many children they have. There are the attitudes of opinions, there are things that change, how the weather affects how people behave. This is the Big Data part of it. There’s the volume side, which is, for example, how you track millions of transactions. Then there’s a variety of others: How do I gather and connect the pieces that I have, such as the demographic? There’s social media data, which is incredibly unstructured. How do I bring all of these things together to get a holistic view of a customer? 

Marketers know that they need all of those pieces to better understand and interact with customers to find new ones. That technology is now available. With cognitive [programs], there’s the ability to pick up the structured and unstructured [data], bring in social information, connect it to weather. … If two customers have the same transactions and they’re the same demographically, they’re probably quite different based on a number of other things: things they say, the weather where they live, whatever the case may be. The flip side is then for technology to understand the context of the data it’s dealing with. 

For marketers querying some information, technology like Watson can look at a date and can put it in context and understand if the date is the date of the latest transaction, or if it’s someone’s birthday or the day the warranty expires. Even simple things like that, being able to prepare the data and understand exactly what this data means is really important. Marketers are not trained to be able to analyze this kind of information, though now it’s an imperative. That’s where predictive analytics comes in. Watson will learn new things, and it will never forget. As trends change and people’s behaviors change, it will learn that over time. 

The marketer now gets the entire 360-degree view of the customer that they want, with all of the data—whether it’s structured or unstructured, internal or external—made available to them through the advent of Big Data technology, and then the Watson technology itself is able to put it together, put it in context, understand it, learn from it, and then deal with the marketer and the language that they understand.

Q: What will data analysis, and specifically predictive analytics, look like in the next year, and in the next 10 years? Will marketers even need to touch data?

A: There are two answers to this. The first one is that it becomes embedded and invisible in the systems. Today, when people are looking at dashboards of information, no one sits there and thinks, I’m looking at a report that’s built on prescriptive infrequency statistics. They just say, ‘There’s my report. What’s my average deal?’ That was one of the great evolutions of business intelligence: It made generalized analytics available to everyone through the use of dashboards. That’s where predictive is going to go. It will become so inherent to the system that no one would think twice that they have something like predictive analytics under the covers helping them. 

Then there’s the issue of how people will be interacting with predictive analytics in 10 years. Today, everyone can be very diagnostic. I can tell you through a predictor what size coffee I’m going to buy in the morning is pretty much solely [based on] what time I had to get up. If I’m up at 5 a.m., it’s almost 99% guaranteed I’ll buy a large coffee. If I’m up after 5, probably a medium. We’re already very diagnostic, but where it will go is very prescriptive—prescriptive towards optimization. 

Today, a marketer would sit down and simply interact with a system to diagnose a situation and then think about potential next steps or things to avoid, or how can I go out with a better marketing campaign. Prescriptive optimization would let a marketer know that given their parameters, their desired outcomes are XYZ, and they have a budget of D. Then, prescriptively speaking, they should be doing ABC. Marketers will always have room for creativity and that’s absolutely required, but it will become invisible. It basically will run models of future scenarios and say, ‘With your budget, given the segment you’re after, your geography and all the other predictive [information] available to me, here’s a recommended campaign or action or command. … And here’s what it is and what you should be doing.’

Q: What advice would you give marketers when they’re looking for an analytics tool?

A: The key for anyone shopping for an analytics solution is to look for one that doesn’t make the mistake of letting their bias drive the outcome. If you see revenue going down in certain territories and you gave the marketing and sales data to a marketer and to a sales person and asked them to find out why revenue is going down, they’ll both come with bias. A sales person will look at head count, covering closure, [length of] a deal, where the leads are coming from, how old they are, etc. Those are all the right things to ask. But a marketer comes in completely differently: How many campaigns are being run? How many leads? Which sellers are picking them up? Are they letting them age? There’s always an inherent bias. When looking for a tool, remember that bias is such a big part of our daily lives, so you need to find a tool that is unbiased in its analysis and presents the cold, hard reality for you. … Of course, there’s always the human element of judgment against what is done, but at least the information that’s being presented, the analysis, and the results therein are unbiased. That’s the first step, and the second step is looking for tools that other customers are making use of and succeeding with. Who’s got a good story, not just of adoption but of results? 

The appeal of this cognitive thing is that it removes that requirement for expertise in areas beyond the one that you should have expertise in. 

A marketer should have expertise in marketing: their offering and customers. They certainly, by and large, shouldn’t be required to be experts in analytics. What we’ll see in the very near future—and we’re seeing it already—is that more and more of this technology is becoming automated, intelligent and directed very specifically at what that role’s problems or issues or challenges are, and solving for them very quickly. Cognitive data analytics provides everything from the data preparation to the analysis to the output in the most appropriate format so that ideas, insights, decisions and everything else can be communicated amongst marketers very quickly. 

The post Why Cognitive Analytics Is the New Game Changer for Marketers appeared first on ���������.

Some of the most effective marketing campaigns not only tout product benefits or have an emotional hook, but also help customers solve a problem. Marketers at the Oakland, Calif.-based were trying to do just that when they set out to help people ward off the aches and pains of the cold and flu virus. Over the past few years, Clorox has tracked the spread of the flu internally via social media mentions and CDC data, providing that data to retailers to help them determine levels of product stock for Clorox’s disinfecting wipes and cleaning products. For the 2015-2016 flu season, the company wanted to use that data for a customer-facing marketing campaign.

“We’ve done a lot of work around trying to educate people on health and wellness during the cold and flu season, on things like washing your hands and getting rest. This year, we wanted to do something different. We wanted to provide more value and utility,” says , associate marketing director at Clorox. 

Action

Clorox worked with social media expert , author of , and found that online conversations about the flu spike a week earlier than the number of confirmed cases by the CDC, and therefore, social media could be used to track the liklihood of flu spreading. The study overlaid weekly data on flu prevalence from the CDC and analyzed more than 1 million tweeks for flu-related terms or hashtags, including “flu,” “sickness” and “chicken noodle soup.” 

Clorox then worked with Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based business intelligence and data analytics firm  and Critical Mass to launch , a system that analyzes social media conversations about the cold and flu and tracks what’s happening with the virus, including topics being discussed and cities where it’s trending. It analyzes millions of tweets in real time.

“Behind those keywords, we see location in terms of where people are talking about the flu and how they’re talking about it. From that, we try to come up with interesting stories for Clorox,” says , vice president of . “We can isolate that conversation based on certain markets and geographies, and certain audiences. If we just want to look at how females in Texas are talking about the flu, we can.”

People can visit to see the likelihood of flu coming to their area and the top “flu hot spots” around the country, as well as the number of people tweeting about symptoms, and tips for keeping their households clean and stopping the spread of flu. The website also encourages people to use Clorox cleaning products and disinfecting wipes to fight the virus. “We want to educate people about surface disinfection so it’s part of their routine, along with getting the flu shot and staying hydrated and getting rest,” Steinkrauss says. Clorox promoted FluPulse.com on its social media channels, through digital advertising and on a bus wrap in New York. 

By analyzing the tweets, Clorox found that people often tweet about binge-watching when they have the flu; that flu cases spike around the holidays; that exercise correlates to higher flu rates; and that when people tweet about staying late at work, they’re more likely to tweet about having the flu the next week. Clorox uses that data to create content for its social media platforms and articles for its website, including “” and “.” “We narrowed it down to the top 100 hashtags and pulled out major themes. We’re creating different content to match the progression of the cold and flu season: when people are in the prevention stage into when somebody in their family gets sick,” Steinkrauss says. “We see the same consistent themes, and a lot of the old wives’ tales about cold and flu are still out there.”

Related Content

• Uber Boosts Brand Perception With On-Demand Health Care
• Pedialyte Leverages Off-Label Use as Hangover Cure
• The Best Health Care Content Marketing in 2014

Results

The Clorox Cold & Flu Pulse campaign, which launched in October 2015 and will end in March, generated 3 million social media mentions and 7,500 monthly visits to FluPulse.com through December. “We’ve seen positive feedback from people who are using it,” Steinkrauss says. “As a brand, we want to have value for consumers beyond the products. This is more of a service and a tool versus just talking about our product, and it’s in the wheelhouse of what Clorox stands for, which is health and wellness, and stopping the spread of infection.”

, digital marketing supervisor at Rockville, Md.-based branding agency , says that the effort is a creative way to let consumers use flu-tracking data while helping Clorox build brand affinity. “It’s about the consumer taking control of the data. It provides all the information that somebody needs to take an action, beyond Clorox telling you it’s flu season. It gives you an actionable insight … and it’s personalized to where you are and where you’re logging in.” 

Adds Berger: “It’s a perfect fit with the brand. This initiative does a nice job of deepening that link between Clorox and flu prevention. It’s a great example of content marketing, building things that aren’t direct advertisements but build equity for the brand. When people think about preventing the flu, they think about Clorox.”​

The post How Clorox Used Social Media to Curb Flu Season appeared first on ���������.

Three years ago, Friedman decided to become a social entrepreneur, launching , a firm that gives meaningful work to individuals with disabilities with the aim of doing social good and delivering profits. “I spent 25 years in large, complex business organizations,” Friedman says. “I focused all of my energy on business outcomes and growing those organizations. I spent very little time giving something back.” 

He adds, “When I left Sears, I spent a period reflecting on what I was going to do next. I interviewed for an agency CEO job and for CMO jobs. I decided I was going to build something very personal to me. I have a 20-year-old son who has autism. ���������t five years ago, my wife and I started looking at what our son was going to do after high school. He’s not a young man that’s going to go to a traditional college. We realized that professional job opportunities for adults with autism are almost non-existent. Unemployment rates for that population are 80% or 90%. Of those who are working, most are in low-skill jobs—clearing tables, stacking shelves—not doing things that take advantage of what they are great at.” 

Autism is a complex condition, but many—including Friedman’s son—with the condition have an excellent eye for detail and excel with processes and repetitive acts, Friedman says. “I realized in the digital agency space that there’s a huge amount of process: Intensive, repetitive, detail-oriented work that gets in the way of agency people spending time on strategy development and business growth,” Friedman says. “At a digital agency, we give those tasks to new hires and they get bored after six months. The idea of AutonomyWorks is to combine the power and ability of people with autism to reduce the repetitive work within agencies. AutonomyWorks was born on that idea.”

Related Content

According to Friedman, AutonomyWorks supports agencies in three key areas: advertising operations, content management and performance reporting, which includes ad trafficking, quality assurance of ad campaigns, routine performance reporting, campaign optimization, post-campaign financial reconciliation, content management and accuracy, and weekly, monthly and daily performance reporting.

“Reporting is a great example [of AutonomyWorks jobs]. For one client we produce 25 reports a week so their analyst team can spend time doing analytics. Our client gets to focus on creating conclusions and recommendations, not loading data or building tables,” Friedman adds. “In the digital agency world, we’d hire smart people out of college to do that kind of work. Within nine to 12 months, they get bored. They start itching for their next opportunity. We’d promise to promote them, but it was difficult to motivate them to do this rote, process-oriented, detailed work over extended periods. … We’re solving that problem for agencies.” 

Like any successful entrepreneur, Friedman has adopted a measured growth strategy for AutonomyWorks: Start small and scale. Prove out the model and then grow. 

“Initially, in 2013, we treated it like a research project. We asked, ‘Can people with autism do this work?’ We had three clients that first year. We realized at the end of that year that the answer was, ‘Absolutely.’ Not only can people with autism do this work, they’re exceptionally good at it.” 

Having proven the concept, Friedman focused on scaling operations from three to 12 clients in 2014. “We added new capabilities, new staff and new markets that year,” says Friedman. “We began in Chicago and added clients in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco.”

In 2015, AutonomyWorks doubled its business, Friedman says. Today, AutonomyWorks supports digital divisions of Publicis and WPP, as well as a number of independent agencies. The fundamental business model is working. Now Friedman is determined to grow. 

“Our ultimate goal is to create a business that employs thousands of people with autism. We’re focused on building a single service center in Chicago that could have between 100 and 300 people with autism working in a single location doing meaningful work in a positive environment.” 

“We believe that will be a replicable model. If we can prove it works, we can build similar facilities in markets around the country and around the world.”

I asked Friedman if the social entrepreneurship approach is ultimately viable. Is it possible to do social good and make a profit?

“Like any entrepreneurial venture, we are investing all of our profits in growing the business. We are definitely profitable. We make money on every project,” Friedman says.

What really excites him, though, is the social aspect of social entrepreneurship. “Today, the school systems do a good job for people with autism. When these people graduate from high school, there is really nothing for them. Those young adults end up looking backward to high school and what they used to have in their lives,” Friedman says.

“AutonomyWorks gives people, like my son, the opportunity to look forward in life to what they could do—what their futures could be.” 

Friedman’s son is going to community college and taking classes to help develop skills to be a more successful employee.

In addition to AutonomyWorks, Friedman teaches social entrepreneurship at the , where he is the social entrepreneur in residence. “I tell the MBAs that you have choices,” Friedman says. “You’re going to work for 50 years or more. Don’t feel like the choice you make coming out of school locks you in for the rest of your life. You have the opportunity to make change. Sure, go to places like ,  or . Learn how to think. Learn how to solve problems. Learn how to apply technology to business problems. Once you have that level of expertise and knowledge, then you can apply it to social problems.”

He adds, “But even if you do go to a purely commercial enterprise, mix it up a little. I was 100% commercial for a long time. It might have been better to be 90% commercial and 10% social. Find something you are passionate about. Different social organizations have junior boards. They’re looking for volunteers. Are you passionate about the environment? Social issues? Voting? People with disabilities?”

Friedman believes that if you want to be a social entrepreneur, you have to work on a problem that matters deeply to you. “You have to be passionate about things outside of yourself if you want to be a good social entrepreneur,” he says. “I’ve worked in startup companies. I’ve grown companies from small to large. It takes a lot of work to do that in a purely commercial setting. It’s harder to do that in a social entrepreneurship setting because the organizations are trying to serve multiple objectives. It has to be something that you feel deeply passionate about.” 

The post A Career in Compassion appeared first on ���������.

The cronut, a croissant-doughnut hybrid pastry filled with cream and topped with glaze, is the brainchild of chef  Dominique Ansel , and is sold at his flagship bakery in New York every morning until the limited supply runs out. Since its launch in May 2013, the cronut has been one of the most talked-about pastry items in history, covered in national and international media and widely posted about on social media. Time named it one of the 25 best innovations of 2013, and during that summer, people sold cronuts for up to $40 (five times their $5 retail price) on the “black market” of Craigslist. Three years later, customers still line up around the block for the cronut, and it has inspired knockoff versions by Dunkin’ Donuts and bakeries around the country, such as the “doughssant,” in Chicago, Atlanta and Columbus, Ohio, and the “cro-not” in San Francisco. 

Ansel’s version, however, is the trademarked original, and it’s helped him make his mark on the culinary scene, but he’s definitely not a one-hit bakery wonder. The pastry category is a competitive one, and trends such as designer cupcakes come and go. Thus, like any savvy product marketer, Ansel stays at the top of his game through innovation, creating more Instagram-able new bakery and food items and hosting one-of-a-kind culinary events. Although the chef is world renowned and recently opened a Tokyo outpost, 80% of his customers are local Manhattanites, so he has expanded his business by coupling product innovation with small business marketing acumen and concentrating on customer service and experience.

“The experience is crucial to what we do,” Ansel says. “I always put myself into my customers’ shoes and think, what would make me happy?”

Whipping Up a Business

In his early career, Ansel, who grew up in Beauvais, France, trained as a chef in Paris and spent seven years at French bakery Fauchon, training its global chefs and helping set up locations in Russia, Egypt and Kuwait. He moved to New York in 2006. “It happened really fast. I had a try-out in New York at Daniel [Daniel Boulud’s flagship French restaurant] as a pastry chef for a week, and I didn’t know where I would end up,” he says. “Eight weeks later, I moved to New York with two suitcases.” 

After spending six years as executive pastry chef at Daniel, Ansel set out to start his own business, opening Dominique Ansel Bakery in November 2011. “I always wanted to have my own business and do pastries the way I wanted. When I said I was opening a bakery, everyone was trying to give me advice. Everyone said not to open a French bakery, and to focus on cupcakes and cheesecake or prepackaged sandwiches because that’s all people ate here,” Ansel says. “But I had my own way of running things, and my own visions of what a good pastry chef could be, so I did my own thing.”

The bakery earned several accolades in its first year, including Time Out New York’s “Best New Bakery of 2012” and Metromix’s “Best Bakery of 2012,” but starting the business wasn’t without growing pains, Ansel says. “The transition between being a pastry chef and being a business owner is huge. It’s two different jobs, with two different sets of skills. I only had four employees. I didn’t hire a dishwasher because I thought I could wash dishes myself. I was sweeping the floor, taking out the trash. I started out humble and small, and we built little by little.”

The bakery’s offerings include cakes, tarts, croissants, soups and quiches, and the DKA— “Dominique’s Kouign Amann”—pastry, a croissant with caramelized layers. When the cronut, a croissant-donut hybrid, launched in May 2013, it helped put Ansel on the map, and its success took him by surprise. “I don’t think anyone expected something like this,” he says. 

He credits the cronut’s continued success, in part, to his team’s focus on customer experience. That means taking care of customers who are waiting in line. The small bakery opens at 8 a.m., produces a limited amount of cronuts daily, and enforces a two-cronut limit per customer, thus resulting in those early morning lines for the treat. Ansel and his staff take care of the customers waiting in line by handing out fresh-baked madeleine cookies and hot chocolate, umbrellas in rainy weather, and hand warmers in cold weather. “I thought, if I were in line, what would make me smile? We have things to make the experience more comfortable and enjoyable,” he says.

Second, his focus on product quality keeps fans coming back, Ansel says. “It’s about respecting the quality of the food. [Getting] a factory and mass producing it, or selling it in a supermarket [is] something I’m really against.” 

The “limited time” feel of the cronut is beneficial in restaurant marketing, says Bonnie Riggs, restaurant industry analyst for The NPD Group, a consumer research firm based in Port Washington, N.Y. “He has a limited-time offer every day. It’s new, it’s different, it’s unique, and consumers want to get it before it’s gone. It creates a sense of urgency.”

But Ansel insists that making so few cronuts on a daily basis isn’t a strategy to increase demand. “It’s just a matter of space. We have a tiny kitchen, so that’s the best we can do. I want to be mindful of the quality of the food, so I’d rather do less. I want a chance for people to enjoy all the other pastries, too. Even my friends and family wait in line. They’re not happy about it, but they wait in line. It’s about giving people something true and authentic.”

Sweet Innovations

For Ansel, it’s also about making sure his customers aren’t bored, and that means focusing on product development, a key tenet for all food marketers, particularly restaurants and bakeries. Not only does he change the filling flavor of the cronut each month (flavors have included apple crème fraiche, milk and honey with lavender, sweet clementine ricotta and horchata caramel), but he’s regularly crafting new desserts. Post-cronut, the bakery launched frozen s’mores: honey marshmallows wrapped around vanilla ice cream with chocolate wafer crisps, which are torched to order. In March 2014, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, Ansel debuted milk-and-cookie shots: hardened chocolate chip cookies in the shape of shot glasses that are filled with milk. Cookie shots are, in a sense, the bakery’s afternoon answer to the cronut. They’re sold every day at 3 p.m., although lines for them aren’t as long, he says. “The cronut is great, but we keep moving forward. Innovation, and always pushing myself, is important for me.”

In April 2015, he expanded the business, opening Dominique Ansel Kitchen, a new concept restaurant in New York’s West Village. Dominique Ansel Kitchen features pastries and chocolate mousse made to order, and lunch offerings like croque monsieur and edamame avocado toast. In the summer, he serves homemade soft serve ice cream in funky flavors such as burrata, a soft Italian cheese. “We play with flavors and temperatures of all of the pastries and it’s very unique. It’s all part of pushing new things,” Ansel says.

Dominique Ansel Kitchen also hosts special culinary events, including U.P. (Unlimited Possibilities), an after-hours, dessert-only tasting experience for eight people where guests sit at a table that descends from the ceiling at the tiny kitchen loft overlooking the West Village. Relying heavily on storytelling, a technique marketers know well, the current U.P. menu is called “Firsts,” with desserts designed to remind diners of the flavors of their first experiences in life (the “first word” course, for instance, contains sweet pea, rice milk, gin and carrot cake, and the “first kiss” course contains raspberry, cream soda pearls and fresh mint). The company promotes these events on social media weeks in advance, and tickets typically sell out within a few hours. “They’re emotional dishes that connect with people,” Ansel says. “It’s a unique event where we can serve people and tell them the stories behind each of our dishes.”

In October 2015, Dominique Ansel Kitchen hosted Pie Night, an after-hours event where guests could purchase tickets for unlimited tastings of nine varieties of pie, a glass of champagne and homemade ice cream. “Pie Night happened very randomly. We wanted to do a team-building activity, so we decided to go apple picking in New Jersey. I told the team, ‘Since we’re going apple picking, let’s do some pies for our customers.’ The day after [we put the tickets up for sale], people crashed our website. The traffic was over capacity. It was a huge success. The pies were really delicious, and people really loved it.”

Media outreach also is a part of Ansel’s marketing strategy. His restaurants often are featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, Vanity Fair, People, GQ, New York magazine, The Village Voice, Huffington Post, ABC News, Fox News and other outlets. “It’s important for any business to reach out and tell people about who you are, where you’re from and what you do. We never take anything for granted.”

The company is very active on social media, as well, tweeting about new bakery offerings and events. But Ansel, himself, prefers a human connection, chatting with customers at his bakeries about their favorite dishes. “I’m often at the shop on Spring Street, and besides social media and our website, it’s more important for me to interact with people in person and communicate with them myself. We take every opportunity to meet new people.”

Foodie Fandom

Ansel’s empire continues to grow: He now employs 40 staff members at Dominique Ansel Kitchen, and 30 at Dominique Ansel Bakery, and in 2015, he published a book, Dominique Ansel: The Secret Recipes, and opened a Tokyo bakery. “Japan, especially Tokyo, has a huge market for bakeries. People love sweets, and they love French food and New York brands. It was a natural next step for us,” Ansel says. “We opened on a Saturday morning, and the first person came and stood in line on Friday night at 9 p.m. When we opened the door, we had 400 people waiting in line.”

In 2014, Ansel won the James Beard Award for “Outstanding Pastry Chef” in the nation and was one of Crain’s “40 Under 40.” Dominique Ansel Kitchen was named one of the best new restaurants in New York in 2015 by Time Out New York, and Dominique Ansel Bakery was one of the 10 most tagged restaurants on Instagram in 2015, according to Instagram.

It’s that kind of buzz that helps Ansel stand out on the crowded New York bakery scene, but he doesn’t focus on his competitors, he says. “It’s not about the competition. It’s about reaching out to people and touching their emotions, helping them understand what you do and why you do it. It’s about constantly creating new menus, changing with the seasons and adding new elements that will connect with people.”

Ansel’s focus on new food items will keep customers coming back, NPD Group’s Riggs says. “It’s a challenging market, and you have to have a strong, competitive point of difference. There’s a lot of nostalgia associated with some of those things he’s putting together. It’s like comfort food, something you’d remember from your childhood, and his products aren’t available everywhere. 

It’s such a ‘me too’ industry that there will be people who try to imitate him, but he has his niche and his market. Creating buzz is really what it’s all about because word of mouth goes a long way.”

Innovation like Ansel’s draws attention—and customers—to restaurants and bakeries, says Christopher Koetke, vice president of Chicago-based Kendall College School of Culinary Arts. “In many ways, food is like fashion. There is always a need for the traditional, but traditional doesn’t get headlines. Also like fashion, food changes and people are always curious to try something new, something innovative.”

Ansel’s authenticity also should help him grow his fan base, says Jenna Liberman, marketing and public relations manager at Chicago-based One Off Hospitality Group, owner of restaurants and bars including avec, Big Star, The Publican and The Violet Hour. “People can sniff out when things lack soul. [He’s] staying true to his roots. He took influence from classic pastries, and did his own thing to them. You have to constantly strive not to copy what everyone else is doing, but do something unique.”

Being unique, and having no fear, is at the crux of Ansel’s advice to small business marketers. “Don’t be afraid of trying: trying new things, or trying to understand the customer base and what they like. Emotions are very important. It’s about connecting with people and knowing what they like and why they like it. Understanding your customer is the most important part of your business.” ​

The post The Business of Baked Goods appeared first on ���������.

The “train question” has become synonymous with the difficulty of mathematics. However, when people bring up the train question as an example of why they found math so difficult, the implied caveat is that this difficulty is associated with the general belief that finding the correct answer is an impossible mystery, solvable only by the gilded few who were born with a certain level of math genius. Yet the question’s ubiquity underscores an important counterpoint to this belief. That is, the very fact that it is a hallmark of high school standardized tests is meant to suggest that average math students who have completed algebra should be able to solve it. Students are equipped to answer the question but have the mistaken belief that it is outside the bounds of their mathematical abilities.

One issue that many marketing professors face are students who have a fear of classes and assignments that are quantitative in nature. It is no secret to professors that marketing research, which generally relies on “number crunching” more than any other marketing course, is often the least popular in the curriculum among marketing students. Decades of research have shown that millions of adults suffer from math anxiety and avoidance, which blocks them from important career advancement opportunities. Yet while there is a correlation between math ability and math anxiety, the two can be entirely separate. Thus, it is possible to be capable in math but still fear it. Oftentimes, this is the realm where many of our marketing students reside. Researchers at Central Michigan University revealed that marketing students—and sales students, specifically—enjoy quantitative work less than other business students and feel that it is less important to their career development. Marketing students typically have the ability to do the math required of a business major (which often requires nothing more advanced than basic algebra) but don’t like it, and seemingly want to avoid it if they can. It’s up to marketing professors to help assuage these fears, but also train students for the level of data analysis required of marketing managers.

A recent survey of students at a large, national university revealed some interesting differences in regards to how accounting/finance and marketing majors view math, and how important they believe math will be in their business careers. The results showed that accounting/finance majors are more likely than their marketing counterparts to believe that they will use math heavily during their professional careers. While this is not surprising, it does highlight the fact that marketing majors are generally unaware of the ubiquity of data within the profession. From salespeople quantifying the ROI on their offerings to market researchers making increasingly heavy use of analytics, numbers—and the math required to analyze them—are unavoidable within the marketing discipline. Despite the increasing quantitative requirements in the marketing profession, might students be gravitating toward marketing, as opposed to other business disciplines, under the mistaken belief that they can avoid math?  

Another interesting, and disturbing, finding pertains to the reasons why the students chose their respective majors. Sixty-three percent of accounting/finance students chose their majors because of the intellectual challenge of the courses, whereas only 21% of marketing majors surveyed chose their major for the same reason. Could it be that marketing is the “fail safe” option for business students who want a less strenuous major—perhaps one less quantitative? To avoid attracting students to the marketing major under false pretenses, the data-driven nature of marketing should be highlighted in college catalogs and advising materials as well as entry-level business courses. Setting expectations early may improve the fit between students pursuing the marketing major and career opportunities.

Additionally, the survey revealed that accounting/finance majors were significantly more likely than marketing majors to do math in their major courses and were more comfortable doing math in general. Given the heavily quantitative nature of accounting/finance courses, this also comes as no surprise. However; given the importance of quantitative skills in the marketing profession, these results should require us to re-think how we integrate math and statistics into our curriculum to better prepare our students for marketing careers.

Marketing professors can better integrate math and statistics into the curriculum by treating the use of numbers as a way to solve holistic business problems rather than as answers needed on a test. One way to achieve this is by using computer simulations. In the introductory marketing course of one of the authors, students team up to form hypothetical companies in the personal computer industry. While the focus of the simulation is on how marketing and sales drive top-line revenue, students are also required to minimize their costs of goods sold, evaluate the financial trade-offs of hiring additional salespeople, and analyze financial forecasts of different global market segments. All of these decisions require students to utilize math and analyze data, but in a way that seems relevant to marketing. Additionally, as millennial students have grown up using computers and have witnessed the “gamification” of certain aspects of digital marketing, a simulation is a natural extension of an environment in which they are already comfortable. 

Despite what may be perceptions to the contrary, marketing is most certainly not a major for those students who want to avoid using numbers. Yet given the fears that many marketing students have toward analyzing data, it is incumbent that educators provide a realistic preview to students prior to choosing a marketing major, and integrate the use of math and statistics into the curriculum in a way that seems relevant to students. The future of our discipline may depend on it. 

The post Math Anxiety and the Millennial Marketing Student appeared first on ���������.