Table of contents for April /May 2017 in Marketing

Marketing would like to recognise and thank the members of its Editorial Advisory Board for their invaluable guidance, including but not limited to Dr Michael Valos (chair), Caroline Ruddick, Erik Zimmerman, Mike Harley, Shannon Peachey, Trisca Scott-Branagan, Skev Ioannou, Cameron Woods and Peter Little. * CONTENT PARTNER: a Marketing Content Partner is an organisation with which we’ve entered into a partnership to collaborate on content for the magazine (see page numbers listed for each) and/or exclusive benefits for Members of Marketing Pro. See marketingmag.com.au/pro for more information.…

“We have ‘addictively easy to use’ right up there as a priority.” “I would like to see a much better understanding of what creative works and personalise that.” At MIT, Mark Torrance rubbed shoulders with Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web. With that early exposure, Torrance founded Stockmaster.com, the first consumer finance website and one of the first few hundred websites. Later, at web-development company Vinq, he worked on projects that involved artificial intelligence (AI) and human-centred design. One of the biggest projects there was Radar Mail, an email service with AI mixed in. It was a sister project to one that would spin off from SRI and become Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant. Working on projects like that when that kind of technology was nascent, says Torrance,…

It’s easy to forget just what a large industry marketing education is, spanning undergraduate coursework through to tailored professional development programs for those already deep in their careers. The ever-changing marketing discipline, due to disruptions in consumer-brand relations and never-ending advancements in technology, has led to a permanent state of flux in what constitutes the skills necessary to be a well-rounded marketing professional. In response to this, many also speak out in defence of marketing fundamental skills. To get an idea of education in marketing, here we interview a number of people in various stages of education, work and professional development. One individual, with formal training in marketing, has met the need to return to study finance. Another, satisfied in postgraduate certificates to date, now enjoys a successful career that…

The 2017 version of the annual ‘B2B Marketing Outlook’ gives a comprehensive view of the concerns, challenges and focuses B2B marketing professionals face. The most challenging activity? Customer experience (CX). 95% of respondents to the survey rated it as challenging or somewhat challenging. Refreshingly then, 68% said optimising CX will be significant to their efforts in 2017, and 27% say it will be ‘somewhat significant’. This makes it the third most significant objective for 2017, after generating leads, and nurturing and progressing leads. Other key findings surround issues with alignment of sales and marketing departments within organisations, and how best-in-class marketers are addressing this and working collaboratively with sales teams. The way B2B marketers use social media continues to evolve, as new platforms and methods come into play and the…

Amazon Echo and Dot devices are fast becoming some of the most popular smart home appliances available in the market – with their global footprint expanding. It’s important to note, however, that these represent more than just devices. They are Alexa-enabled and are helping Alexa to further integrate into consumers’ lives. And Alexa isn’t alone: from Google Now to Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri, we have a budding class of intelligent agents (IAs) on the rise. In 2015, 45% of US online adults used at least one IA. What are intelligent agents? You can identify them as: Personal digital concierges that know the user and her data and are discerning enough to interpret her needs and make decisions on her behalf. Intelligent agents are going to continue to grow in…

Smartphone usage now means that people are more likely than ever to create and share video via mobile devices. Project #secretlifeofmypet Client Universal Pictures International Australia Agencies Now We Collide (content), Mediacom (media), Channel 7 Sunrise (media partner) Background: Universal Pictures International (UPI) Australasia briefed Now We Collide on its newest animated movie release for The Secret Life of Pets. With a giant box office target and a release date outside of school holidays, UPI needed to go beyond the traditional kids animation audience and establish The Secret Life of Pets as a must-see film for Aussie pet lovers of all ages. Objectives: The objective was simple: make The Secret Life of Pets the most talked about movie among Aussie pet lovers and establish strong viewing…

Done right, purpose will challenge you to walk the line between longterm positive impact and short-term sales. Done well, building purpose into your brand is both the most difficult and rewarding thing you will do in your career. Yes, you can start small, but ultimately, like anything to do with brand, you can’t be half in – you either stand for something or you don’t. Purpose needs to be built-in, not bolted on. Bolt-ons are easy to spot. They talk a good game but, ultimately, their actions let them down. Like BP talking ‘beyond petroleum’ then engulfing the Gulf with oil. Or Volkswagen taking us all for mugs in a US$20 billion fail that has seen that brand lose trust, customers, employees and reputation in one big brand stink. Brands…

If you’re a B2B brand, are you doing enough to differentiate yourself in a market where success and customer loyalty is driven by how you sell, not what you sell? Informative, tailored and engaging content is the key. It’s at this point in the selling journey where content – and the world of integrated communications – comes into play. Here are the three 'T's of B2B content marketing, 1. TEACH FOR DIFFERENTIATION There needs to be agreement across the entire organisation of the company’s unique benefits. Using the findings from this to build a narrative that plays and leads to your core strengths provides reps with the same message to use when meeting with customers, and you pull these messages through each piece of your PR, marketing and advertising materials.…

“ It’s inevitable that marketing science will become the front player of business strategy.” Information and data have never been more abundant. For marketers, this is data about market performance, customer wishes and behaviour that can be mapped to enterprise resource planning, transaction systems and customer relationship management systems. We are already at the point where many marketers are overwhelmed by data. However, the volume of data will only increase. CMOs should not see this data as a burden. Instead, it presents opportunities. The granularity of data, advances in analytics science and the price of analysis have merged at a sweet spot that enables marketing to push forward the frontiers of the discipline. Knowledge can now be had at a lower price per byte than ever before. The challenge now…

“You really don’t have to be too clever to generate great marketer intelligence – just humble, able and ready to listen.” Intelligence is not, when you think about it, one of the most enduring traits of marketers. We’re famous for being slippery, conceited and manipulative, but rarely are we held up as the smartest people in the room. There are, with the exception of the small army of marketers who work for Elon Musk, very few rocket scientists working in our discipline. So rather than look at intelligence as a trait of successful marketers, let’s examine it as a noun instead. Because the ultimate resource for any successful marketer is the right intelligence upon which a successful strategy can be built. I’m going to argue that there are six superior…

That new digital technologies improve exponentially is not debatable, and in future I might eat my words on this, but… there are a few things I don’t see machines learning any time soon. Empathy, emotional intelligence and irrational decision making: the most important things about relationships. For the foreseeable future (if that’s a sensible term to ever use) I think I’m safe in that claim. Huge investments of time, money and energy continue to be made into natural language processing and synthesis, but until the next iPhone comes out later this year, Siri – as with the rest of her kind – can barely listen properly, doesn’t learn, and can only deal with single-step input-output requests. Those things are going to get much better very quickly. Listening, adapting and ‘thought’…

More than 90% of all sales scripts are static. In other words, the same scripts are being written over and over again to be applied to every kind of different person on the other end of the phone line or email inbox. That leaves a small proportion of scripts that could be described as dynamic, that take into account how the caller and recipient are feeling at the time. This fact alone explains why the vast majority of selling fails, says Daniele Lima, a marketer, sales person and corporate trainer turned author of A Practical Guide to Selling with Emotional Intelligence. After almost 30 years in sales and marketing roles, Lima was most recently a training manager for major pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb. It was during that role he turned…

When Cassandra Kelly answers the phone it’s hard to place her accent. Now based in New York, you can hear her many years of living and working overseas coming through. She’s articulate, genuine and easy-going, which may not be the first impression that you would get from the standard-issue executive portraits and the incredible list of resume titles, mostly containing the words ‘founder’, ‘chair’ or ‘director’. Cassandra Kelly is a cross-sector champion of financial services, technology, philanthropy and entrepreneurship. She co-founded Pottinger, Pottinger Analytics and Atomli. Pottinger is a highly respected financial services company with offices in Sydney, London and New York. It has been featured by the Australian Government’s Productivity Agency as one of the 10 national benchmarks for skill utilisation and productivity. She is also a digitalisation and…

Australian CEOs do not consider CMOs among the top C-suite leaders best placed to drive disruptive business growth. From established organisations to digital start-ups, organisations Australia-wide seem to be working to tackle the challenges of digital disruption and digital transformation. In the current disrupted market, the challenge of increasingly elusive revenue sources is posing a major risk to the success of an organisation. Traditionally, CEOs have played an instrumental role in chasing new revenue sources, revising their organisation’s growth strategy by leveraging ‘disruptive growth’ opportunities that push beyond today’s boundaries. Today, CEOs are looking to other C-suite level executives for expertise and guidance, such as CMOs, chief sales officers and chief strategy officers, to assist with driving the disruptive growth agenda in the digital era. According to Accenture’s annual ‘CMO…

Noun The ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. The collection of information of military or political value. Origin Late Middle English via Old French from Latin intelligentia, from intelligere ‘understand’. Source: Oxford English Dictionary “Emotional intelligence is the most important predictive factor for any employee in any business.” (52) “The traditional view of loyalty has faded – there is no such thing as a customer for life. You have to win the customer every time.” (62) It’s not impossible to test for System 1 thoughts. Gamified testing techniques, for example, can circumvent the tendency for survey respondents to switch to System 2 thinking . (58) “You really don’t have to be too clever to generate great marketer intelligence – just humble, able and ready to listen.” (96) “I…

Mailee Creacy, country manager, Rocket Fuel The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionised our everyday lives and this impact is just as apparent in the world of marketing. In the next 10 years we can expect this progression to be even more prominent. By 2027 AI will have changed everything about the way marketers work. The sheer volume of data available and the capabilities of AI technologies allow for such an in-depth knowledge of a potential customers’ behaviour that marketers will have the power to predict consumers’ needs and desires, and deliver a brand message that is personalised for each individual. It’s not just the technology that will drive change: consumers are starting to demand more from the brands with which they interact. Digital experiences have evolved to such…

No function other than marketing interacts with customers during their entire life cycle – from awareness, to engagement, to customer, to advocacy. Perfecting the ability to understand the customer through personalisation has long been a focus of marketers. By 2020, it is expected CMOs will match this understanding with direct action that drives engagement. That’s one of the findings from ‘The Path to 2020: Marketers seize the customer experience’ a report by Economist Intelligence Unit report commissioned by Marketo. It includes responses from 499 CMOs and senior marketing executives worldwide and explores which technologies and customer trends are likely to change marketing organisations the most over the next five years. The report’s results classify the elements that contribute to a personalised customer experience, and how it creates value for a…

“Thanks to responsive design and predictive marketing technology, consumer experiences are assembled in real time.” The use of artificial intelligence has already revolutionised our everyday lives – think customer service chatbots, personalised recommendations from Netflix and Amazon, auto-braking mechanisms in cars and smart home applications that adjust room temperatures automatically. The sheer volume of data available and the capabilities of artificial intelligence allows for such an in-depth knowledge of a consumer’s behaviour that our relationship with technology has fundamentally changed from static interactions to a connection that is dynamically evolving. This is evident in how we’re consuming media. Accessing the day’s news no longer requires sitting down and reading the newspaper in the morning or watching the evening news bulletin; instead, we live in a world where we can now…

There’s a reason young males disproportionately make up more than one-third of preventable drownings in New Zealand: stupidity. Campaign Swim Reaper Client Water Safety New Zealand Agency FCB Background: There’s a reason young males disproportionately make up more than one-third of preventable drownings in New Zealand: stupidity. Let’s be clear – it’s not that young men aren’t smart. They just have a tendency to make some dumb calls around water. Give them a ridiculously high cliff to jump off and they’re as happy as can be. So, if you’re tasked with trying to modify this behaviour, as Water Safety New Zealand has been, how do you go about talking to a group who is highly cynical and detest being told what to do? Objectives: Given that young males are so…

By social I am not suggesting social media, but social purpose, social impact, social enterprise, social ventures, social impact investing… Our spooks have great SEO! But that got me thinking: what if we actually had an Australian Social Intelligence Service? Searching the term ‘intelligence’ – as you do when bereft of a central idea after being invited to write an article likely to be read by your industry peers and that’s already past deadline – returns 390 million results in approximately 0.55 seconds, according the search engine. What caught my eye was one of the top results – Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Obviously our spooks have great SEO! But that got me thinking: what if we actually had an Australian Social Intelligence Service? The Service’s…

Today, users interact with a broad range of applications on a daily basis, both at work and at home. What this means for marketers is that there has been a growing demand for data-led skills to inform their creative campaigns – a demand that is not likely to be quelled in 2017. Data analytics, digital marketing and mobile development are all areas that we know are growing especially fast; demand for data science skills has tripled over the past five years, while demand for digital marketing and mobile skills has more than doubled. With access to more data than ever before, successful marketers today have increased pressure to leverage data from multiple sources to make – and defend – critical decisions. This is why we expect the rise of hybrid…

“While most voice-recognition software and natural language processing isn’t much better than a six year old kid today, it will be the equivalent of a PhD in every subject in less than five years.” Marketing has always been about intelligence, but it’s a nuanced kind, one that involves making sense of all the bits that make up an economy. We need to have a handle on macro trends, sociology, psychology, consumer sentiment, technology, demographics, finance, regulation and pop culture to name but a few. Such is the complexity and quantum of information we must grasp, utilise and leverage, it’s nigh on impossible to pretend what we do is scientific. Occasionally we get lucky enough to concoct a market formula that works for a period of time. We may even bask…

“ The annoyance that made advertising notorious might finally disappear...” Change is just as constant as our resistance to it. Thus, a relentless state of tension is what really defines human behaviour. This is verified by homoeostasis, a physiological property in which living organisms will self-regulate to remain constant. It explains why it is so hard to form new habits and even harder to break away from them. It’s also why I buy into Byron Sharp’s mental and physical availability need for brands to grow; just be there, create the context and the buyers will buy. The question is how to become more useful with a more holistic approach that focuses on contextual rather than behavioural change? In Brazil, Danone established a contextual link for the consumption of its Actimel…

The exam question ‘What is a marketing intelligence system?’ remains firmly embedded in my brain. I was never one for theoretical questions and I had, somehow, made it to the end of my class in marketing research unaware there was, or could be, a ‘system’ in place. I must have done OK enough with my guesstimate, clichéd answer, surmising that any such system must be about gathering and then analysing information that allowed a brand or company to make marketing planning decisions. That was almost 30 years ago and, while that answer may still scrape a pass today, the emphasis from an academic perspective, at least, is now far more about managing the vastness of information available than it is about simply gathering it. Even the concept of analysis has…