Talent Spotlight
 You launch a new product and it doesn't perform as you hoped. What do you do? Well, you could turn to someone like Irma Salinas for answers.
Irma is represented by Aquent's Connecticut office and is currently working on the "Marketing Insights" Team at a large non-alcoholic beverages company (as it turns out, she actually started her career at an international spirits company importing beer from Latin America). She got involved in doing product reviews when working for a research company where she was very involved in reviewing and reporting on the performance of non-carbonated beverages (water, teas, juices, etc.). "I started working in this area when it was really getting competitive. It was a very exciting time. The market for beverages was changing and I learned a lot."
Irma was frequently involved in reviewing the performance of new products. I asked her both why new products don't perform well, but also how companies go about setting sales goals for new products in the first place. "Of course, there is a very extensive process that large companies go through to develop and launch new products," Irma assures me, "and since they have tested it with consumers, etc., you soon discover that the reasons for poor performance are not usually to be found in the product itself."
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 "If you're not thinking segmentation, then you're not thinking," Ted Levitt of the Harvard Business School supposedly quipped. While every marketer would readily agree with him, getting segmentation right can be as challenging as it is necessary - and getting it wrong can be downright disastrous: Working with segmentation schema that are irrelevant to your business is a waste of time and money; working with too few or too broadly defined segments means missed opportunities; and working with too many or too narrowly defined segments means stretching your marketing resources to their breaking point.
Since there are so many options and variables involved in segmenting your audience, it is best to rely on analysts, either external or internal, who understand your business and who understand how to match your needs with the myriad segmenting approaches. To sketch out a useable framework for getting the most valuable results from your segmentation provider, I consulted Ben Ben-Baruch, a Senior Business Intelligence Consultant represented by Aquent who got his first contract assignment with General Motors in 1997 and has been there ever since.
"Whatever segmentation provider you use and whatever methodologies and data they employ," Ben says, "the key is ensuring that you can use the segmentation to meet your business goals. Finding a provider that thinks in terms of your business, presents the data with an emphasis on its proper use, and makes it easy to keep the data fresh, is critical not only to the success of your segmentation process, but to the success of your marketing efforts in general."
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 Jim Sterne, the producer of the eMetrics Summit and the president of the Web Analytics Association, has been talking about the internet and marketing since 1993. Indeed, he was kind enough to talk to me about it just the other day as part of the Talent Blog Podcast. We discussed highlights from the various eMetrics Summits in 2007, how the conference is evolving, and what folks can expect from the summits in 2008. We also talked about changes in the field of web analytics since he and Matt Cutler issued their landmark 2000 white paper, "E-Metrics - Business Metrics for the New Economy."
You may listen to our conversation by clicking on the device below:
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You can also download the mp3 by "right-clicking" ("control-clicking," Mac-wise) this link here, or check out all the Talent Blog Podcasts on iTunes.
Highlights of the podcast can be found at the following time coordinates:
00:45 - 2007 eMetrics Summit Overview
02:50 - Summit Content for 2008: More Mainstream Marketing
04:29 - The Buzz around "Engagement"
06:40 - The Slow Growth of "Standards"
09:29 - Website "Slipperiness"
12:20 - Measuring the Success of the Website Overall
16:39 - The People Component of eMetrics
20:18 - Your Website is Your End of the Conversation: Are You Listening?
23:20 - "Website" Is a Verb
Image courtesy of ohaiyoo.
 On November 29th, Aquent will be sponsoring an American Marketing Association webcast entitled, "Global vs. Local: Seven Key Insights for Global Marketing and Brand Management." The featured speaker will be Donald A. DePalma, who is a business globalization analyst with Common Sense Advisory, and author of Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.
Mr. DePalma has written extensively about the challenges associated with taking a brand or a business global, including this article on global toe dippers and toe stubbers, and characterizes the web-based, global marketplace as an "eighth continent," with all the peril and promise that that image implies.
If your company has already gone global, and your toes hurt, or if you're thinking of wading into the global waters and want to know how cold they are, you should tune in on November 29th.
Image courtesy of Charles Haynes.
 Jeffrey Emenecker is the president of the Analytics Group at Aspen Marketing Service, a Chicago-based firm with offices around the country and an impressive client list. [Disclosure: Aspen Marketing Services also happens to be a client of Aquent's.] Jeffrey has twelve years of experience in creating, managing and measuring marketing solutions within various industries. His particular focus at Aspen Analytics is on leveraging analytical solutions within customer relationship programs and knowledge-based marketing campaigns.
I was introduced to Jeffrey by Beth Martin, an account manager in Aquent's Atlanta office. As a veteran in booming field of marketing analytics, I was curious what he could tell us about the state of the discipline as well as providing tips for people pursuing careers in analytics. Here's what I asked and how he responded.
What are common misconceptions that people have concerning the power of analytics to influence the success or failure of marketing programs?
The most pervasive misconception is the belief that analytics plays only a small role in marketing programs, and that creative is what is most responsible for driving success. We've seen just the opposite: It's all about the powerful combination of creative, analytics and the offer.
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  Our creative director has a coffee maker at his desk and when I walked by it yesterday I thought it smelled really good. "You know," I said, "Americans associate coffee with 'home.' That's why realtor's put on a pot of coffee when they're having an open house. When people walk in, they feel like they're home." He asked me to leave his cubicle.
I learned about the association between "coffee" and "home" from a New York Times article I read seven years ago entitled, "Does the Smell of Coffee Brewing Remind You of Your Mother?." The article discusses the work of Clotaire Rapaille, a medical anthropologist who uses Jungian-style "archetype research" to uncover the unconscious associations that people have with various products and cultural phenomena (he has written several books about it, including The Cultural Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do).
There are at least two lessons for marketers and designers to learn here. One has to do with smell and, in fact, the folks at Adverlab just yesterday wrote about Motorola's patent for a Smell-o-phone. That post has a list of other smell-related advertising news that is definitely worth checking out. The folks at a related site, Futurelab, also recently published a post on ads that target customer noses, which says that one chain of gas stations in California is spreading "the aroma of coffee near the pumps to encourage consumers to fill up their travel mug in addition to their gas tank." (Thanks to Erik Hauser of the Experiential Marketing Forum for that last tip.)
The other lesson is that the associations people have with products and brands are not necessarily conscious and that traditional surveys and focus groups may not be the most effective way to figure out exactly what those associations are. Who knew, as Dr. Rapaille discovered, that the key association that Americans have with the presidency is not "fatherhood" or "leadership" or even "nationalism," but, "cheap entertainment."
Joseph Jaffe, of Life After the 30-Second Spot fame, is asking on his blog for people to recommend those blogs which are best at providing "smart, original thought leadership and guidance for people trying to understand and navigate through the new marketing world."
If you have an opinion, you should head over to his blog and join the conversation. If you are hoping to find out which blogs marketing bloggers find most valuable, Jaffe's post is also a good place to start.
Aquent (the company this blogger works for) is sponsoring an AMA Webinar on March 6, 2007 at 10:00am PST/1:00pm EST entitled, "Web Analytics Demystified: Ten Simple Strategies for Using Web Analytics to Improve Your Online Marketing Efforts." The presenter will be none other than web analytics luminary, Eric T. Peterson. To quote from Eric's recent interview with Robbin Steif of LunaMetrics, this webinar is appropriate for " Anyone spending money on the Internet. Anyone spending money on website design, website analysis, anyone spending money on AdWords."
Not too long ago I had the opportunity to ask Eric a few questions of my own. Here's what I asked and what he answered:
Matt Grant: If someone were to move into "web analytics" from another discipline, which discipline would offer the best preparation? In other words, what skills are most readily transferable to a career in web analytics?
Eric Peterson: Wow, great question given that MBA programs around the country are just now starting to talk about web analytics. (I say this based on the increasing requests for Web Analytics Demystified from universities and MBA programs.) In my experience, successful web analytics professionals have the following traits and characteristics:
- They have a serious interest in the business, either from a marketing or operational focus, and are interested being an active participant in understanding how the business can be improved.
- They are either experienced with or unafraid of the technical aspects of the Internet. JavaScript skills are a MUST, especially as new technologies like AJAX become more popular.
- They need to be comfortable working with diverse groups and teams (IT in one meeting, marketing in the next, management after that, etc.) and confident presenters and speakers. Analysis is a tool for building consensus, not delivering ultimatums.
- They must be passionately curious about "why" things happen, online or off. It is the difference between reporting that something happened and reporting why something happened. One is a reporter, the other a scientist.
Given all this, companies do well to look for folks with a background in science, mathematics, analysis, and the like. A premium should be given to people who present well and exude confidence.
Matt: Having made such a move, what does a career path in web analytics look like? Is there an identifiable progression of job titles, responsibilities, etc.?
Eric: Someone just getting into web analytics can probably expect to be given a reasonable amount of "gruntwork" (i.e., generating and distributing reports, as opposed to conducting analysis) for 18 to 24 months as they learn the details of web analytics technology, the business, etc. After 24 months or so, the superstars should be promoted to a more senior role and tasked with conducting and presenting analysis at least 50 percent of the time. The real superstar analysts, depending on company growth, often are faced with management responsibilities within the first five years.
Matt: Is it a good idea to pursue a career in web analytics? Is this a discipline with a promising future or is that still to be determined?
Eric: Absolutely, but keep my personal bias in mind here. Since I first outlined the true value of hiring dedicated web analytics professionals in several reports published by JupiterResearch [both require login] an increasing number of companies have started aggressively hiring web analytics professionals. My research was more recently corroborated by Megan Burns at Forrester Research in this paper [again, login required] and today a very strong case can be made for hiring web analytics talent. Given the relatively small number of qualified applicants searching for new jobs at any given time, juxtaposed against demand, experienced folks are rightly getting good six-figure salaries to conduct the exact kind of research they find most interesting. Slam dunk.
Matt: What can web designers and other creative types learn from the web analytics crowd?
Eric In a nutshell, the difference between "attractive" and "effective". One of my favorite examples of this is a well known car site that is constantly criticized by creative types and brand managers as being "so 1995" and "flat out ugly!" Unfortunately for these folks, the CTO of this company knows web analytics very well and has clear measurements of success for any new design, regardless of how pretty the design is. You either meet the revenue per visit requirement or you get thrown out. Now, this strategy doesn't make my friend popular with the creative people on his staff, but his shareholders love him.
Matt Last question: In this post, Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown asks, "Is your brand a party animal?" What web metrics could we use to determine if our brand is a party animal?
EricEngagement, an emerging "Web 2.0" metric that many people are talking about but few are actually measuring. If you'd like to know more, you can read my posts on the subject in my weblog.
Matt: Thanks, Eric!
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Intrigued? Then by all means, tune in to the webinar!
Marketing and creative careers are increasingly "impacted," as some like to say, by the social networking phenomenon. On the one hand, marketers are called on to figure out strategies that take advantage of the potential offered by social networking sites from LinkedIn to YouTube to MySpace. On the other hand, marketers and creatives are called on to design, develop and market new social networking sites for companies as diverse as Nike, Wal-Mart and Air France-KLM. In fact, the proliferation of social networking sites led Ellen Sheng to lament in this WSJ article [registration required], "The social-networking bandwagon is getting awfully crowded."
I was wondering about the reasons behind this and I think I came up with something [Alert the media!], thanks in part to Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown. Last October he wrote a post on his blog entitled, "Is your brand a party animal?" and his main argument, rather loosely paraphrased, was that most brands were too boring, conservative, or self-centered to succeed in the social media space. He used the analogy of a party to drive his point home. The popular people at a party are those who are engaging and entertaining, and the same goes for the popular "people" (i.e., those with a million friends) on MySpace, for example.
Could it be that companies start their own social networking sites because they know their brands would be unpopular on the sites that already exist? Probably not. I would guess that the motives are actually more selfish than that: Companies start their own social networking sites because they want to aggregate their customers, gather information from them, and present them with more targeted promotions and products.
Two questions present themselves: "Who will develop the simple, plug-and-play, out-of-the-box social networking site development kit?" and, "Who will launch the social networking site for people who want to or have already launched social networking sites?"
In my last post of 2006, I called for a reality check vis-a-vis the interactive talent shortage. Sure there's a shortage, but, I asked, how significant is the shortage given the actually work being done by marketing departments and ad agencies?
Well, here is your reailty check in all its info-graphical glory: Estimated US On-Line and Off-Line Ad Expenditure 2005/2006. Courtesy of MarketingSherpa
Gathered from a number of different sources, these charts make it clear that there is still a ton of money, upwards of $50 BILLION, spent on direct mail and the total amount spent on promotional items, $18 billion, roughly equals the amount spent on ALL on-line marketing put together.
Which is another way of saying that, while the demand for marketing and creative professionals with on-line experience will continue to grow (and, I'll admit, $18 billion isn't nothing), businesses still rely heavily on folks with strong print design abilities. And lets face it, many interactive designers are still called on to do print work. As one Flash developer put it to me, "People may or may not go to your website, but everyone has to get their mail."
First in a series on the twists and turns of marketing career paths.
How does a career in marketing happen? Since my own path to marketing, while not entirely accidental, was certainly unplanned (I started out as a college professor), I was wondering if others had had similar experiences. Did everyone in marketing today set out to be a marketer, or did some become marketers in the course of doing something else? Is there a "typical" marketing career path or are there many paths that vary by industry and area of specialization? More importantly, if you start out in marketing and then develop your own product and bring it to market, are you still "in marketing"?
I figured the best way to get answers to my questions was to talk to actual marketers and ask them how they got to be what they are. I kicked off my search for the truth about careers in marketing by calling someone who knows a lot about marketing: Anne Holland, President of MarketingSherpa. (If you are not familiar with MarketingSherpa, I suggest that you join the quarter of a million folks who turn to them every day for fact-filled, practical, and thought-provoking newsletters, case studies, and reports on a broad range of marketing-related topics.)
So how did Ms. Holland come to found and lead a widely respected marketing research company? Well, you may be surprised to learn that, although her professional work revolves around marketing and she herself has, among other things, actually run marketing departments, she originally "wanted to be in publishing," so that's where her career began. A self-confessed "poor speller," she eschewed the editorial track, choosing instead "the business side" of publishing and worked her way up from the circulation department to eventually launch a successful subscription site and several trade publications on marketing and the new media.
As she recounts it, the idea for MarketingSherpa grew out of her experiences as a manager. She found that people were more readily motivated and inspired by hearing "what the other guy did," then by "what the manager thinks," and so she built a whole culture around sharing the actual experiences and effective practices of individuals throughout the marketing organization. MarketingSherpa took this practice to the outside world operating under the assumption that marketing practitioners want to know, and may even pay to find out, what other practitioners are actually doing.
She launched MarketingSherpa relying on a model in which her audience serves both as a source of income and as her best source of content. Starting with a broad network of contacts in the marketing world, she called people she knew and asked them about the specific results of campaigns they had run and tactics they had tried. (As she puts it, "We're the opposite of Advertising Age. Their model is, 'So-and-so is launching this campaign.' Our model is, 'So-and-so launched this campaign. Here's what happened.'") She then sent her findings to her network. Gradually, she built a publishing business around and out of these stories of success and failure, and she soon began to leverage her audience to generate new stories by conducting surveys, interviewing paid customers, partnering with other organizations, and monitoring responses to her e-newsletters ("what headlines are getting the most clicks"). 237,000 subscribers later, her business is thriving.
Returning to the question of career paths, I think it is fair to ask: Is this a story about marketing or publishing? I find it fascinating because it's about both. Anne Holland has pursued a career in publishing, even becoming a publisher herself, but she has consistently functioned as a marketer and focused on marketing. It is also illuminating because it reminds us that marketing doesn't take place in a vacuum; we are always marketing something. In other words, a "career in marketing" will inevitably always also be a "career in something else." (Just imagine someone saying, "I don't market anything at all. I just market.")
That being said, it also makes sense that at least one sort of career "in marketing" begins with an interest in a certain industry, entails developing and marketing products for an established business in that industry, and then culminates in developing and marketing products of your own. The question is, if you are hawking your own wares, are you still a "marketer"? And if you are, who ISN'T "in marketing"?
Bringing an innovative product to market is the best way to increase revenue growth for consumer packaged goods companies, but it's not always possible to load your product pipeline with breakthrough offerings. Fear not, for a recent study [registration required] of 480 product launches discovered there's another way to grow revenue and, guess what? It's all about marketing.
The folks at McKinsey & Co. who conducted the study found that "novel products" could bring about a "2.7 percent improvement on the average revenue growth in their particular categories" but that such novelties were fairly rare, comprising a mere 15 of the 480 launches considered. By contrast, they found that a combination of "incremental innovation" - changing an existing product slightly - and repositioning the product towards new consumer segments or uses could effect a 2.8 percent improvement. If you don't have a passel of brand spanking new products coming down the pike, this is your ray of hope.
Two Yoplait products were cited as exemplary of this approach (which was employed in 26 of the studied launches). The first was Yoplait Whips, where the innovation resided in "whipping air" into their existing yogurt and then positioning it as a dessert. The second was Yoplait's Nouriche line, which is a vitamin enriched (the incremental innovation) yogurt drink aimed at health-consious consumers. The bottom line? "Sales of these two products grew four times faster than the yogurt category as a whole and accounted for nearly 20 percent of Yoplait's total sales in 2005."
Of course, repositioning a product associated with breakfast or snack-time as a dessert brings with it its own set of challenges. First you have to figure out how to make it seem like a dessert (by whipping, for example). Then you have to address the fact that desserts are usually sold in a different part of the store than dairy products and breakfast items. Moreover, you have to take a whole set of new competitors (ice creams and puddings, etc.) into consideration. This all requires that you have a marketing organization capable of collecting the necessary data, distilling the practical insights, and disseminating the relevant information to sort out these challenges. To quote a related McKinsey report, "It's critical to involve a diverse array of people, including some with regional knowledge, others with trade or pricing skills, and still others with skills in branding or key-account management."
Here's the rub: Successful marketing innovation, as opposed to product innovation, depends on the people involved and the way they are organized. In addition to talented individuals who know how to think outside of their functional silos (account, channel, product, etc.), you need an organization that fosters communication and collaboration via common methodologies and shared data models. Your marketing department needs to be broad-minded, harnessing its collective intelligence to identify and act on opportunities revealed by the confluence of varied knowledge streams. Everyone needs to be talking to each other - the channel people, the consumer insight people, the sales people, et al - and the resulting revelations need to inform marketing plans that make things new - a new way of consuming, a new reason for buying, a new means of enjoyment, a new path to fulfillment.
And remember, "making things new," and not just "making new things," is what "innovation" is all about.
My research on Amaznode (see this post) reminded me that there are a lot of folks out there working on innovative and practical ways to display complex sets of data and networks of information.
While I thought I was so special for stumbling across Amaznode at Adobe Labs, I soon discovered that someone had actually referenced it back in September in a comment on this post from David Armano's (of Digitas) blog. In the aforementioned post, Armano praises the Visual Thesaurus, which depicts relationships between words in the same way Amaznode depicts relationships between products on Amazon (except the Visual Thesaurus actually allows for much deeper exploration of the related words it displays).
The Visual Thesaurus is just one example of information design that shows up on the site Visual Complexity, the stated intention of which is "to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks." This site is endlessly fascinating both due to the ingenious (and sometimes oddly beautiful) ways that people have devised to portray complex, densely interrelated systems, as well as due to the range of data, be it business-related (for example, what patterns might we discern by examining 10 million receipts from a large DIY store?) or just strange, that they have chosen to model.
As the serendipity of blogging and intellectual interest would have it, a colleague of mine brought The Baby Name Wizard's Name Voyager to my attention yesterday. The NameVoyager shows the waxing and waning fortunes of baby names from the 1880s to the present. It allows you to see, for example, that the name "Chester" peaked in popularity around 1910. The creator of the NameVoyager is one Martin Wattenberg who has come up with a number of methods for graphing complex processes such as the editing history of Wikipedia pages, among other things. In fact, he has been so inventive that several samples of his work show up on the Visual Complexity website, which I didn't even know existed two days ago!
Whoa.
When Money Magazine published their list of Best Jobs in America, it was interesting to note that there was one marketing role in the Top 10: Market Research Analyst, which came in at #6. (Of course, I was also interested to see that, at one time, I had the #2 best job: College Professor.)
Money based their calculations on several factors including average salary (it had to be above $50,000 to make the list), strong projected growth in the number of positions over the next 10 years, stress levels, flexibility in hours and work environment, and creativity.
What make the job of Market Research Analyst so great? Well, the $82,000 average annual salary sure helps, as do the 16,000 average annual job openings. The hours and work environment are also fairly flexible. Money gave this role a "C" for stress, however. Deadline pressures are the main source of stress they cite. I believe that a greater source of stress is knowing that your recommendations will influence critical business decisions affecting the success or failure of the entire enterprise and could mean the difference between outrageous profits and total financial ruin. (That's a little extreme, I know, but you get the picture.)
Money also gave Market Research Analysts a "C" for creativity, but I just don't think that's fair or accurate. Isn't the work they do often comparable to that being done by college professors (who get an "A" in this category)? What is the difference between designing a study to discover why business travelers choose a particular type of hotel and designing one to identify which genes determine wing shape in fruit flies? Don't both call for similar types of creative problem-solving within strict methodological parameters? Don't both require high levels of data integrity and actionable (or at least rigorously verifiable) conclusions? Don't the results of both studies have career and funding ramifications for those who conduct them?
Well, maybe the folks at Money weren't thinking about the work done by professors of statistics or genetics when they were handing out grades for "creativity." Maybe, instead, they had in mind the type of "research" that examines the pedagogical and aesthetic implications of vilified underground musical genres like gangsta rap.
(It should be noted that "gangsta rapper" didn't show up on the list of best jobs. That's probably due to the fact that, when compiling their list, Money states that they deliberately eliminated jobs featuring "dangerous work environments.")
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