I was moderating a conference session a few weeks ago and asked marketing executives from Gillette, Dunkin’ Donuts and Circle Lendng what they thought was the most important competency for marketing professionals today.

Their unanimous response: math.

With so much customer data available today analytics is becoming one of the most strategic aspects of marketing, yet there’s a huge talent shortage in this area.

"One of the new marketer’s key skills is the ability to marry fluency in higer mathematics and computer modeling to marketing flair and creativity," wrote Richard Rawlinson in last summer’s issue of Strategy & Business. "Just as mathematics has revolutionized finance, it will now invigorate the marketing field, as new models and algorithms are developed to extract value from consumer and business databases, and to allow more precise targeting of ‘hot’ topics to each consumer."

I know a lot of students read this blog, so if you’re interested in a marketing career think about analytics. And for the rest of us, maybe it’s time to learn more about the scientific and mathematical aspects of marketing to be able to be creative in measurable new ways, and to elevate the value of our profession.

marketing and math

Speaking to marketers recently, two ideas seem to be really resonating with people.

Digital listening

The first is that listening is as big a part of digital marketing as creating things like blogs or social networks. And there are two ways to listen: passively, reading blog posts, listening in to social networks, subscribing to consumer generated media analysis services; and actively, where you make it easy for customers to talk with you and your company, which might take the form of communities, or a more inviting way to find and contact the right person in an organization instead of just being directed to info@acme.com or customerservice@acme.com. If a company doesn’t make it easy for me to talk to a person who’s interested in what I have to say, does the company really care about listening? Probably not. The good news is that’s easy for companies to fix.

How to involve people

The second concept is that the purpose of marketing is to involve people with your organization so they can get to know you, trust you, and do business with you. What is most likely to involve people are fresh ideas, conversations, stories and entertainment that are relevant, framed in new context, and elicit emotions. Successful union organizers and educators have used this approach to involve people and children for years.

So where do social media and digital marketing techniques fit into this picture? This chart suggests which techniques are best suited to deliver on involvement. (Blogs only get half a check because some have a lot of conversation via talk backs, but most don’t.)

 If you've ever sat through annual sales  meetings, don't miss IBM's hilarious sales training parody videos at YouTube.  IBM made the videos as a spoof to use at its mainframe sales meeting and then put them up on YouTube.  These three short videos probably due more to change the image of stodgy old IBM than anything else IBM has done. By the way, the guy in the video is the real director of sales for IBM's mainframe busness.

Maybe traditional Madison Ave. businesses need to retire or get out of the office and spend the rest of the summer  on listening tours, learning first hand how deeply people have changed and what that means to marketing and advertising.

 In today's Advertising Age Matt Creamer reports on the "new and improved" Advertising Week focus , to be held Sept. 25 - 29 in New York.  "The schedule, released today,  is a response to criticism from industry observers, Advertising Age chief among them, that the week's first two incarnations featured agency folks speaking to themselves," writes Creamer.

 A look at the schedule makes you wonder whether the adverising industry is in touch with shifts in marketing. It also begs the question whether the industry sees itself  as the people who make ads or as  strategic marketers.  Just as the public relations industry has hurt itself by focusing too much on publicity rather than communications, it appears that the ad industry identifies with ads.

Here are a  few of the agenda highlights that struck me as out of touch.   If you have others, please share them with us.

•  "About 100 are expected to pile into Jeep Wranglers in the procession from DDB's Madison Avenue headquarters to Times Square," reports Advertising Age.   That's right, a gas-guzzling, smog-hogging testosterone-laden kick off.   A great spectacle and a three-hour buzz for the Wrangler brand. 

• "In Search of the Big Idea: Top CMOs share insights on getting the job done."  Pssst. It's not about the big idea any more; it's about listening to the customer, providing lots of useful and sometimes entertaining information through channels customers prefer,  and delivering product/service  experiences that consistently knock their socks off.  They don't really care about the big creative idea. 

• "Blurring: A Truly Intgegrated Approach to Multichannel Marketing. A stellar panel discussing a revolutionary marketing model. This executive panel will decipher the challenges of today's marketers in collaborating efforts bewteen advertising and direct marketing."  Yikes.  Aside from the decidely old hypey language style, the fact is that Web 1.0 blured the lines of advertising and direct back in the 90's.  (And some say we're in the Web 1.0 or 3.0 phase.) Marketers get that digital marketing does double duty and have been doing consistenly innovative "blurring" work for over a decade. 

• And my favorite.  "The 3rd Annual Stars of Madison Avenue:  The Business of Celebrities will honor popular celebrity and athlete endorsers and the big name marketers they represent."  Honor them for what? Being really smart about cutting $10 million endorsement deals and never having to be held accountable for whether the endorsement moves the sales needle?  How relevant is this to marketers?

I hope advertising is evolving, but this conference signals that the industry is stuck. The good news is that there are huge opporutnities for the new breed of marketing services agencies — and they've already eating the ad industry's party appetizers. Lunch is next.

Interested in getting some fresh perspectives and practical know-how
about innovation? Two upcoming conferences promise to be out of the box
while also providing ideas to use when we have to get back in the box.

The 2006 Marketing Innovation Conference: Building a New Marketing To Meet a Changing Market will be held June 8-9 at Columbia Business School in New York City. Corante and The Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia are sponsoring the event.

BIF2, sponsored by the Business Innovation Factory, will be held on October 4-5 in Providence, RI. The 30 speakers are
really eclectic, from big company executives, successful entrepreneurs
and university presidents and professors to scientists, entertainment
executives, writers and journalists (each speaker gets just 15 minutes
to tell a personal story).

What I like about these conferences
is that there won’t be any talking heads going through PowerPoint decks
promoting their companies. Both are about provoking thinking and
providing a forum for talking with interesting people we don’t meet in
our usual business circles.

Hope to see you in NY or Providence…

Should the United States Post Office be in the business of promoting direct mail?

Yesterday I received a copy of “Deliver,” the USPS’ expensively produced, 32 page magazine. USPS sends the free bi-monthly magazine to 350,000 marketers.

The
business world is moving to a paper-less, digital world, but the Postal
Service is trying to promote the value of direct mail and other
“innovative marketing tools.”

“Finding innovative marketing
tools is a must for any company that needs to promote its brand and
products to the consumer,” according to USPS press release announcing the magazine last winter. “Today the U.S. Postal Service is
Deliver-ing a magazine for marketers about strategies and trends that
are shaping the world of marketing and advertising.”

My view is
that the USPS has no business trying to be in the marketing advice
business, especially as their advice is grounded in the old print
world, which is hardly innovative. That's just a bad use of our tax
dollars. Not as bad as the USPS' huge sports sponsorship spends a few
years ago, but still rather irresponsible.

USPS should take the
hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on the magazine and
address its real issue: how to create a new USPS business model for a
world with less and less mail.

Now, back to getting my tax returns completed…

I got excited this morning when I heard that President Bush had invited
about a dozen former secretaries of state and defense — from both
parties — to the White House today to talk about Iraq.

Imagine
the potential value of putting such talented people to work to figure
out how to best navigate the complexities of this situation?

But
was the intention to really listen to new voices or simply to put a
more positive public spin on the Bush Administration? Here's how to
tell the difference.

My communications scholar friends, like Walter Carl at Northeastern University,
say that there are three general categories of listening, a sort of
Maslow's hierarchy of listening, if you will. People tend to feel
listened to when they reach the third level.

1. Recognition: just recognizing the other person's existence
2. Acknowledgement: acknowledging what another person feels or thinks or says
3. Endorsement: accepting another person's thoughts or worldview as valid and legitimate

Were these former global public policy leaders really listened to today?

PS: This listening hierarchy is also helpful to assess whether we're really listening to customers.

This time of year we all receive many
Holiday Cards. But the best card for marketing people EVER, has to be
from advertising agency Phil Johnson & Associates, written like a marketing plan. Here’s what it says:

Objectives

• Evaluate existing holiday greetings
• Determine which greetings work best to:
• Change perceptions of the holidays
• Convey sense of community and love
• Reduce cynicism
• Help you be the best holiday greeter you can be

Holiday trends

• People are busier than ever
• Fewer “Happy” or “Merry” people out there
• William Hung has just released a Holiday CD

Current holiday greetings

Season’s Greetings

• Generic
• Universally accepted for its ambiguity and utter vagueness
• Leaves the door wide open for the Greetee to assume the Greeter is denomination-sensitive

Warm Wishes

• Soft and sappy
• A great opener and closer for holiday toasts
• Brings out the “hugger” in people

Peace

• Efficient, to the point
• Perfect in situations where you’d like to keep the conversation to a minimum

Happy Holidays

• Has legs
• Most
  commonly used between November and New Year’s but could potentially be
  used for Groundhog Day, Arbor Day, and an other “holiday”
• Great in a pinch

Focus group quotes

• Feedback from holiday greeting focus group participants (not a representative sample)
• “These cookies are free, right?”
• “I bought my wife an iron. Is that bad?”
• “What’s wrong with ‘Hey you?’”

Conclusions

Each holiday greeting is relevant and unique and the market could benefit from you using it.

Agency recommendations

• Use them all
• Try not to forget what’s really important this holiday
• Grab as much health and happiness as you can
• Drinking too much “eggnog” and trying to sing Auld Lang Syne spells trouble.

Dov Gordon of The Gordon Group, a management consultancy in Israel, was surprised to learn from one of
my posts that BK’s Subservient Chicken campaign hadn’t increased sales.
From reading about the campaign in marketing publications, his
perception was that it was hugely successful.

"When
you get a chance, please tell me why you think it is that advertising
and marketing people continue with these viral campaigns if sales have
not gone up. What’s their rationalization?"

First I sent Dov a link to Adrants about the new Maxtor campaign, yet another Subservient Chicken copycat.

Then tried to answer his question.

1. Marketing and advertising people are getting rather desperate.
   Traditional advertising isn’t working so there’s a rush to create
   something new that will.
2. Many don’t know how – or may not
   want to – or aren’t responsible for – doing the heavy lifting needed to
   increase sales. Making less “stuff” and listening more to customers in
   new ways to get ideas on how to deliver more value. Developing more
   thoughtful insights and new ideas to help customers and create loyalty.
   While new roles are emerging in marketing, the silos and old rules
   still remain. Advertising is still very promotional and creative driven.
3. Wacky “innovative” ideas, spun right, look good on a resume Most
   marketers aren’t responsible for creating new customer value models,
   which is a real career builder. That’s usually the CEO’s domain. So
   they often feel stuck in the realm of tactics.
4. Now this one is likely to get me in trouble, but I have data from a study by Dr. Kevin Clancy, CEO of Copernicus
   to prove it. There’s a whole lot of testosterone in marketing and
   advertising. The boys posture, brag, taunt, copy — and are afraid to
   say the emperor has no clothes. They make more decisions based on their
   gut than women do. They create campaigns and promote them so well that
   people like Dov think they were successful, when they were not.
5. And then there’s the copycat mentality…

I’m
a little down after meeting yesterday with a respected chief marketing
officer of a large fast food company. But what I learned was a valuable
reminder about what it takes for change.

“I don’t care about the concepts of community and conversations and consumer relationships,” the marketing exec told me.

“What
matters to me is transactions. Does a marketing tactic connect directly
to sales? If it does, it has value. If it doesn’t, we shouldn’t be
doing it.

“The concept of a having a community for our customers
is nice. So are more viral, entertaining ads. But I’m not sure the
investment is worth it. For one, it would appeal to a limited number of
customers. Secondly, I can’t measure its value in terms of sales.”

The exec pointed to some of Burger King's promotions, like the Subservient Chicken, which got a lot of people talking. But, he added, Burger King's chicken
sales didn't budge. So the money was really, to him, a waste.

While
so many of us see the value of a shift in marketing from “talk at”
promotions to "talk with" conversations, we probably need to remember
that decision makers are reluctant to change without measurement
metrics.We need more proof.