How Mid-Market Companies Can Leverage Enterprise Grade Analytics Tools Cost Effectively
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While remaining strong believers in making sure Marketing professionals spend plenty of time out with customers, the reality in today's world is that mid-market companies must acquire and learn to use analytics tools to help make better decisions.
Fortunately, enterprise-grade tools are now available to mid-market companies at an investment that can return a positive ROI and short payback period. This paper discusses the current state of affairs.
Read the paper
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Customer Manufacturing Update
May 2016
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Dear Mitchell,
Here is your May Customer Manufacturing Update.
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Your Help Is Appreciated
 Many of you have a copy of one or more of our three books: It's Not Rocket Science; The Secret To Selling More; and Value Acceleration.
We would really appreciate you posting a review of any of these books on Amazon.com for us. To make it easy each title above is linked to the appropriate page on Amazon.com
Thank you in advance for your help.
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It's So Simple From The Outside In
Every process is perfectly constructed to produce the results it does. And we saw another example of this recently. 
The airline industry touts their customer focus, despite most people's experience to the contrary.
Many people who work in the industry might like to help, but the process they work in often prevents it. As Deming noted about business in general 50+ years ago.
One of our team was traveling from San Jose to Cincinnati, connecting through Los Angeles. We bought the ticket about two weeks in advance, and he was never assigned a seat, which is a red flag. When he went online to check in and see if he could get an assigned seat, still no luck. In fact he got a notice the flight was over-booked and they were looking for "possible" volunteers.
This prompted a call Delta to see if they would rather reroute him from San Francisco where there were many seats available, rather than have him fly to LA and then get stuck. The agent he talked to was sympathetic but she said that she was unable to reroute him even though the flight was possibly over-booked because their policy did not allow it.
When he got to LA, they were indeed WAY over-booked and were at $800 vouchers to try to get people to take a later flight. Unfortunately, while there had been seats from San Francisco to Cincinnati, there were none left from LA.
They got him to Cincinnati on that flight, but they paid at least $800 to someone else to let him. They could have had a happy customer, who was telling a different story, had they simply allowed him to help them help him. They would have also saved at least $800.
Every process is perfectly constructed to produce the results it does.
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Where's The Disruption Opportunity?
Philip Kotler recognized Marketing Guru and Professor, said, "...most of the impact of marketing is felt before the product is produced, not after." And yet almost everything we read about today is tactics for improving what Marketing does after the product is produced. Our friends at the ANA did a study with McKinsey on the need for disruption in Marketing. Their findings were interesting, and yet none of them had anything to do with what Kotler claims provides the most impact, "before the product is produced."
We wondered why that was. Could it be that Kotler knows less than McKinsey? We weren't ready to concede that point. A bit of investigation showed that the team from McKinsey that conducted the study consisted of their Digital Marketing consultants. That explains a lot.
If you bound the definition of Marketing disruption to those functions which occur after the product is produced and you only interview Marketers who have responsibility after the product is produced, which is what they seem to have done, then it should not be surprising that the focus for disruption will be after the product is produced.
No wonder Marketing continues to get less respect than it should. It seems to be self-focused (at least those who claim to represent it) on post-product release issues. No wonder some CMOs don't want to be associated with the Marketing Communications-focused CMO and therefore want a new title.
Shouldn't the CMO assure the company is leveraging Marketing on the front end? Sure, many CMOs do not have these people working for them, but that should not mitigate their purview to assure it is done well. The Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) has noted often that the majority of new products introduced fail (and in some categories it is the vast majority). They also note that an incremental investment in the front end of Marketing provides a better return than more money in R&D.
Apple spends relatively little as a percentage of revenue on the back-end of Marketing compared to other companies in its category. Yet its products sell very well. One might say, sure, they're Apple. But Apple has almost never spent a lot on the back-end side compared to others and their first decade products (after the Apple II) were busts (Apple III, Lisa I, Lisa II, Newton, etc.) Getting the product right is more important than promotion and promotion is easier when you get the product right.
Chrysler could sell out the PT Cruiser in its day, while needing to resort to pricing promotions such as "Friends and Family" type pricing to move its other cars. The Oakland A's baseball team, no matter the amount of promotion, could not regularly sell out its games ... until they got a good baseball team.
Want to know where the disruption in Marketing needs to be: Leveraging before the product is produced not discussing the latest content strategy. This requires insights that can be transformed into new products, services, or business models. Marketing's blind spot is in failing to recognize the insights need to come before the product is produced so it can result in profitable innovation.
It has been said that strategy and innovation have a cross-roads at insights. Given that effective strategies, executed well, driven by innovation, can create sustainable competitive advantage; then for Marketing to be more relevant simply suggests they must drive insights.
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Marketing Operations: Foundational or Supportive?
Our friend Gary Katz at the Marketing Operations Future Forum posed the question that is the title of this article. He then posited this answer:
Marketing's foundation comes from understanding your target market, how they buy and matching how they buy with your solutions, messaging and deliver  y. It is based on understanding the customer's needs and how one's company fulfills those needs effectively. Marketing operations is the facilitator that helps marketing and sales understand if you are accomplishing that mission, how you are doing it, how fast you are doing it and if everything you are doing is working: Providing the foundation of effective, efficient marketing.
We agree with much of what he said except one word: "the" facilitator rather than "a" facilitator. We appreciate that Marketing Operations is working hard to gain respect and value, both of which it deserves. But it is a tool used by Marketing to do a better job.
He also notes that Marketing must understand "your target market, how they buy and matching how they buy with your solutions, messaging and delivery." This is accurate and insufficient to describe Marketing. It is correct regarding current offerings, but as we wrote just above in the Disruption article, Kotler noted that the real leverage in Marketing is before the product is released.
Thus, as we say, Marketing's job is to align the capabilities of the company with the current and future needs of its customers. Marketing Operations may be helpful in the front-end as well, but it's the insights that should be developed by Marketing that are needed to truly understand where your customer is going that makes Marketing great.
So, in response to the question posed by the title, we say "supportive," and significantly so.
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Free Reading Guide
If you have a copy of our book Value Acceleration, you can download a free reading guide to help you and your team get the most from the book. (And btw, the book is also available in a Kindle edition.)
We appreciate your feedback to help improve these Updates. If there are others you feel would benefit from this issue, use the Forward email link just below on the left. Sincerely, |
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