Here are the trends:

1. Demo-shifts: people are getting older, moving into the cities, becoming more diverse
2. DIY MEdia: I will select my own media sources and advertising, based on my preferences and how much I want my media to be ad-supported.  I will be my own media planner.
3. Friendtelligence:  before I consume anything, I’ll have instant access to my friends’ preferences (think of it as the Zagat-ization of everything)
4. Consumption metering: soon I will know what my consumption rates are – money spent and on what, energy consumed, calories consumed, carbon footprint etc – - I’ll have my own personal consumption scorecard
5. Shoptimizing: my product preferences and consumption rates will automatically generate a weekly shopping list (or shopping order), along with offers and ideas
6. Prolifetition: competition will continue to proliferate – - much harder to predict who your competition is or where they’ll come from next
7. Closed-loop marketing: dispersion-based marketing and the sales funnel is giving way to full connectivity of all phases in purchase decision-making
8. Marketing arms race: as long as new tools and techniques keep coming out, marketers will race to adopt them, regardless of their true effectiveness
9. Zappos-ification: regardless of the product you are marketing, the ‘support’ service you offer will take center stage
10. App-licate: marketing will turn into a series of apps – - there’s an app for that
11. Inmarketing: marketing efforts will begin with employees (and distributors, licensees etc) and work its way into the marketplace
12. Ethonomics: increasingly, consumers will care about the ethics of the companies they buy from
13. Investment-graded marketing: the CFO is becoming friends with the CMO, s marketing gets to be more measurable
14. Contextualimits: contextual ads will be seen as less than effective (people make purchase decisions at strange times)
15. Open/exclusive: every product/service will have a try-me-free component, with upcharges based on value received
16. Search = Find: Google search will give way to Google find… Google will know what we’re looking for before we do
17. BRIC by BRIC: growth will come from outside of the US, and we’ll have to go get it

OK, seventeen trends happening out there.  Which ones are most relevant to your business, your brand, your career?

For the group I worked with recently, we ended up with the following:

Most Top Votes: DIY MEdia, friendtelligence, closed-loop marketing

Middle Vote Getters: demo-shifts, shoptimizing, prolifetition, marketing arms race, zappos-ification, inmarketing, investment-graded marketing, search = find

Fewest Votes: consumption metering, app-licate, ethonomics, contextualimits, open/exclusive, BRIC by BRIC

What we concluded is that marketing is becoming more digital, more communications-oriented, more measurable and personal, more behavioral, more insightful, and more emotional.

On top of this, marketing is becoming much more confusing and complex, with greater and greater need to be able to navigate, and a greater demand for a cross-functional approach.

Which trends are you watching?  Which ones will have the greatest impact on what you’re doing?  What are you doing about it?

He offered the following advice, as he called it the secret to his success, which he said took a long time to really crystallize.

He said in this business there are four kinds of people.

The first group is comprised of good people doing a great job.  These people you reward and recognize.

The second group is folks who are good, but not doing so well.  They have it in them, but are struggling.  You help these people get back on track.

The third group is made up of assholes who are doing bad.  This one is easy- fire them.

And the fourth group is the hardest.  These are assholes who are performing well.  His advice is to fire them, too.  Life is too short to fix an asshole, they’ll always try to screw you at some point, and they’ll poison good people around them.

This is very good advice.

Komisar says to, ‘assemble everyone’s insights rather than their conclusions.’  And the decision often makes itself.  Now really, this sounds so simple as to be unhelpful.

Wait a minute, though.  I just got off the phone with my HR director, who has been around the block more than once.  Duane has seen it all, in black and white and in color.  He commented that he was just finishing a book on the neuroscience of management, and the conclusion is that the more senior you go up in management, the more biased your view becomes.  In short, you replace insights with judgements.

Maybe Mr. Komisar is onto something powerful here.

Maybe it’s the simple things that help us be most effective!

1.Three-way arms race: marketers, retailers, shoppers

2.Shoptimizing: money & time

3.Metering: visibility into and active mgmt of spending

4.Palm power: tech-enabled shoppers

5.More competition: brands, imports, formats, services, private label

6.Transparency: price = value (Progressive)

7.Ethonomics: people know how ‘good’ you are

8.Zappos-ization: service = product

9.The new ‘search’ is ‘find’: savvy marketers know where I am

10.Rising expectations: authenticity, availability, transparency

More here: http://www.slideshare.net/jimholbrook/shopper-marketing-3324132

Make sense?  what are you seeing?

- true understanding of the target audience, and deep insights about their wants and needs

- a clear, objective, ROI-type structure for the definition of success

- an attractive look & feel (platform, positioning) for the brand

- a message/story that’s appealing

- an offer or call to action that causes your audience to behave the way you want them to

- executional feasibility for the marketing idea

- overall organizational support and alignment

- the right resources to get it done

- enough budget to get it done right

- some strong ‘assets’ to leverage

- a quality product/service to put your marketing behind

- timing – enough lead time to get it all done right, and executing the marketing at the right time

I doubt this is even close to a comprehensive list.  And sometimes, the items on this list have different weights.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to have some sort of equation of these (and other) inputs, with relative weightings, to guarantee a successful output?  Can marketing be turned into a formula, or a recipe?

- consumers have moved from passive to active (from ignorant to inquisitive)

- retailers have moved from passive to active (from real estate to community service center)

The Current Situation:

- marketing is still mainly about messaging and bribing, not about engaging

The Disconnect:

- consumers (and retailers) don’t want messages or bribes, they want more

The Result:

- ‘marketing’ has devolved to ‘marketing services’ (from business-building to budget-allocating)

Further Result:

- the CEO looks outside Marketing for growth ideas

The Solutions:

- define and execute a consumer engagement model (closed loop?  open loop? etc)

- define and execute a retailer engagement model (segmented?  portfolio’d?)

- define and implement a broad-based and sustained innovation effort

“I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

I am flummoxed at how businesses large and small do planning.  I have seen everything from fire, fire, fire to the most rigorous matrixed multi-faceted linked excel workbooks with circles and arrows.
So, what constitutes a good planning process and what constitutes a good plan?  Could someone please tell me?
We all know that credenza-ware isn’t what planning is all about – you know, those nice notebooks with the stenciling and the custom tabs that contain a wealth of information and that sit proudly on your bookshelf… probably done by an outside consulting firm hired by the CEO and paid incredibly huge sums of money to take your hard work and reformat it into their proprietary templates and then take credit for the content.  But I digress.
Or there’s whack-a-mole planning – - you know, chase all kinds of priorities around as fast as you can and hope to catch one or two.  And everything’s a priority in whack-a-plan.  You just have to whack whatever pops up.  Don’t argue.  Whack it!  Fast!  This is incredibly unsatisfying, because what it says is there isn’t a plan at all.  Just a bunch of activities.  Activity-based planning.  Where activities substitute for objectives or strategies or results.  Or whatever.
There are a few relevant lessons that I have picked up along the way… maybe these will make sense.
First, clearly answer the question, ‘what problem are we trying to solve?’  I read somewhere that the average doctor takes 17 seconds to diagnose a patient’s problem.  The average marketer takes far less time.  The best plan arises almost naturally and effortlessly from the proper diagnosis.  Framing the problem is the most valuable step, and it’s the one most often glossed over.  That’s because it’s human nature to want to problem-solve, not problem-frame.  You don’t hear, “Bob got to be CEO because he could sure state the problem really succinctly” now do you?  No, it’s more like, “Susan got to be CEO because she flat out got things done, drove solutions, waded in and rolled up her sleeves and fixed it.”
But you have to know what to fix.  Sir Frank Lowe of the famous Lowe Advertising Agency used to say, ‘big answers deserve big problems’ and he was right.  Frame it big.  Another great Eisenhower quote goes like this – “if a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.”
Second, and as importantly in the diagnosis, define the boundaries.  What things are fixed and what are variable?  What can and cannot be changed?  Oh, you say, everything is on the table and we shouldn’t constrain ourselves with limited scope.  Look under every rock.  Really?  This is never the case and we all know it – there are always a few sacred cows, a few pet beliefs, a few cherished facts that cannot be changed.  So, ok, just get them out and work with them or around them.  I would much prefer to think inside a well-defined box than think outside an amorphous box.  The clearer the picture of reality, the more creatively realistic the solution can be.  No constraints means unrealistic output.
Said another way, what’s the business’ appetite?  Massive change or incremental?  Top down or bottom up?  Lots of little stuff first?  Pay as you go?  Inclusive or exclusive?  Urgent or studied?  Every company has a ‘way’ that things get done.  Know the boundaries and the shortcuts.
Third, what needs to change to solve the problem?  Not what activities to do or what org chart to design or what budget to allocate.  What needs to change!  (You know the famous Sam Walton quote, “if you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten”)  The problem is “x” and the answers are “y” and “z”.
So, there now – - you have the problem clearly stated, the boundaries defined, and the answers objectively crafted.
Now you can do your plan.  How to implement the answers within the boundaries to solve the problem!
Make sense?  What does the plan look like?  How do you really get down to stating the problem most powerfully?  Can outsiders figure out the business boundaries or is that the work of insiders?  Who do you get to help figure out the solutions?  how do you pick the right solutions?  Buehler?

1.  Good ideas come from anywhere.  Having good people and supporting
resources, along with the right environment, fosters innovation.

And last year’s good ideas may not be so good this year, which is what’s so darned much fun about this business.  There’s a ’shortage’ of good ideas, and filling the pipeline is critical.

2.  Companies are perfectly organized to get the results they get (ok, I
borrowed this from John Galbraith), and that goes for marketing departments,
too.  Centralized vs. decentralized.  Generalist vs. specialist.  Control
vs. influence. Strategic vs. operational. Plan vs. opportunistic.
Hierarchical vs. matrixed.  The smart folks at Booz completed an in-depth survey of marketing operations and found many different structures in use.  I lump them into four groups – 1) Kinko’s, for the fast-turn, activity-based marketing style; 2) the fire department, for the always-on, fast-response marketing style; 3) the architect, for the big thinker grand strategizer; and 4) the NASCAR team, for the high-performing, well-trained, very focused marketing.  #’s 1 and 2 account for over 70% of all marketing organizations.  #4 is in less than 10%….

Not enough truly good ideas, in organizations sub-optimally organized….
3.  Invest enough in order to be meaningful.  While this is generally a
budget issue, it can also translate to management time and attention as
well.  An appropriate budget allows for full marketing mix optimization
(versus the ‘or’ mentality we’ve all confronted).  Especially if you want to
grow.  For every Virgin (and Richard Branson), who gets by on bravado vs.
budget, there are many brands starving for better support.  We always ask the toughest budget question first- ‘how LITTLE do we have to spend to get the results we’re aiming for?’  And we follow that up with, ‘what resources do we need in total?’

4.  Go big or go home.  Throwing a brick in the pond is far more impactful
than throwing handfuls of sand.  Make a splash. And using more marketing
levers is more impactful than using fewer- because consumers are harder to
reach and harder to motivate.  Advertising is necessary but often not
sufficient when moving beyond the low hanging fruit.

It all comes back to the idea, the organization, and the resources!

5.  Measure the total effort; learn from the diagnostics. Success should be
measured cumulatively, with aggregate measures (the cumulative GPA).  Then,
the involved parties can learn from the tactics in order to optimize them
next time.  Grading overall success on a line-by-line basis is frustrating
and counter-productive.  Do your specific SAT scores (yes, I remember mine) tell everything about your academic prowess, or your career success?

So, how about an idea machine, organized to nurture and execute the ideas, with the right resources properly deployed, and the right methods for executing, all measured so as to learn and improve?  Now that would be a killer app marketing eco-system!

Do you know of any companies that are pulling this off?

In fact, my pursuit often seems Quixote-esque, as different companies do marketing so differently that it’s hard to draw any meaningful and portable conclusions.

What’s Wrong?
What is clear to me is that there is a huge opportunity to do marketing better, and to do better marketing.  It sure looks like what’s out there that people call marketing is not very good.  I offer as anecdotal evidence this year’s Super Bowl commercials, roundly criticized en masse, not for being particularly bad, but for being consistently uninspired.

(It is important to me to distinguish between marketing and advertising – - advertising is a tactic used by marketers to achieve a certain objective, namely awareness.  It has an indirect impact on the P&L, sometimes that indirect impact is negligible, and sometimes it’s fantastic.  This impact is based on how well the tactic is developed and deployed.  To belabor the point, let me offer up eBay as an example – their ad campaign for a long time has been very ‘celebratory’ and anthemic – see “Shop Victoriously” – but to what end?  eBay has 90% awareness.  What eBay lacks is a connection between their brand, which people know and like, and actual usage.  The brand is much better known than it is used. Is advertising the right tactic to solve this problem?)

I can also point to recent tours through shopping malls – again uninspired marketing and merchandising.  The Sunday coupons, the radio on my commute, the latest People magazine ads….  Where is the inspiration?

My friends at IMI Research have relentlessly studied marketing programs and have also concluded that most are ineffective or sub-optimized.
I could go on here.  But arguing against marketing these days is like arguing for gravity – my point is proven inductively and deductively.

How Does It Look/Feel?
If your R&D department continued to design products that people didn’t want, or your Operations group turned out products out of spec, or your Product Supply group opened warehouses far away from traffic, or your Finance group miscalculated project IRRs or cash flows, or your Sales department called on clients that weren’t buying… well, you’d likely call them into the “how come room” for a little powerpoint and chat.

Here Is The Diagnosis:
There are five main operational problems with today’s marketing.  They are:
1.    marketing is out of touch with what people want/need
2.    marketing is out of sync with the companies they work for
3.    marketing is not integrated with the business plan
4.    the building blocks of marketing are scattered around and don’t build to anything
5.    too much marketing is based on spreading the message too thinly, and not enough on focusing… cast your bread upon the waters… hope…’broadcast’… shout…

An Aside
Just a quick story to illustrate- I love Triumphs and have had a few.  My last, a 1976 TR6 (with overdrive), needed some work.  So I took it to my favorite mechanic, who suggested that he start with the exhaust system.  He’s a genius, really.  We agreed.  I came back three weeks later, and he had rebuilt the car’s suspension.  What happened?  He didn’t do what I wanted; he didn’t do what I needed; he didn’t do what was on the priority/punch list.  He did what he wanted, and he did a really good job.  He spent my money in a way that was satisfying to him, but not to me.  He had changed strategies without telling me.  He threw away the plan and went ad hoc.  How many marketers do this?  What he did was good work, but not what I wanted or expected or needed.  He didn’t follow the plan.  He was out of touch with his customer.  I found a new mechanic.

So, Let’s Get A Grip
First, thing, get in touch.  This is work.  It isn’t reading research reports or trade mags or sitting behind one-way mirrors.  Getting in touch is personal, visceral, emotional, up close, physical, messy, time consuming, inefficient, frustrating, confusing, and, in the end immensely rewarding.
You have heard this all before – go out and visit with your customers in their homes, offices, parks, airline terminals….  Go with a mission to learn, discover, be non-judgmental.

There’s a great urban myth that circulated around the beer industry recently about how August Busch III, the patriarch of Anheuser-Busch and ex-CEO and Chairman, went out to talk to legally-aged 20-somethings about their drinking habits.  He was worried about the emergence of the ‘cocktail culture’ and ‘beverage cycling’ (beer, then red bull and vodka, then shots, then beer, then… you get it, no brand or even segment stick-to-it-ness).  So he did his own focus groups – brilliant!  But, so the story goes, he didn’t like what he was hearing, so he began lecturing the focus group participants on why they ought to just stick to beer.  Nice try.  If the story is true, he probably didn’t learn much.  When you know all the answers, your questions tend to not be so good.

How do you figure out what people want/need?  You can read research, delegate to R&D, find a patent to license, do what you did last year, redesign your package, add a line extension with a new flavor, hire a new CMO or agency or consultant, do focus groups….  Do any of these really help?
Are you your company’s expert on your customers?  Do you have deep, meaningful, intimate relationships with your consumers?  Are you your company’s go-to person for all things consumer-oriented?
Are you insatiably curious?

Now, Let’s Get Engaged
Second, marketing has drifted away from the real line management at most companies.  All too often, it’s cosmetic.  Sales support.  Kinko’s-like.  Subservient.  The folks who produce the stuff that no one pays attention to.  I’ve seen a startling trend where the marketing departments are moved to an out-building on the corporate campus.  Physically moved out.  Yikes.  If the marketing department isn’t core to driving business results (top and bottom line on the P&L, shareholder equity on the balance sheet), then there are more budget cuts and layoffs in your future.  Got to get your groove back.

I love the simplest definition of business – ‘to make customers’.  If your marketing isn’t doing that, you might want to put in for a transfer to the tax department.
Think about this- 75% of marketing departments have reorganized in the past two years.  Why?

And think about this – less than 15% of CMOs have control over all four P’s (product, place, price, promotion)

And, Get Plugged In
Here’s a simple chart for your examination.  Print it out and fill it in.  There are four pretty obvious questions to answer: 1) what are your company’s business goals and are they clear? 2) what are your key marketing initiatives and how well do they connect to the business goals? 3) do those initiatives translate into a plan? And 4) what are you executing, improving, and innovating in your plan?

Stack Up The Blocks
Do you know where your marketing is?  Scattered around?  Hanging out in seedy places, out past curfew?  One idea to get started is to gather up ALL of your marketing materials and put them up in one place.  Sales materials.  Customer service scripts.  Photos of your lobby.  Photos of your stores.  Your business cards.  Radio ads.  Direct mail pieces.  Yellow pages listings.  The list goes on and on, and you need to gather them all up and look at them.

Fish Where The Fish Are
Do you know where your customers are?  Or are you a broadcaster?  Great fishing advice is to fish where the fish are, but that’s much easier said than done, of course.  You have to think like a fish – - we use a little tool like the one here.  It helps focus.

Conclusion
So, there are lots of reasons why marketing is disconnected from the business, why it doesn’t get respect, why it is superficial and cosmetic and expendable.  Some are real, some are self-inflicted, but all can be overcome.  Marketing must be operationalized.  It’s the only way to be effective, productive and irreplaceable.

Much much more to come on this.

But before I get there, I really want to talk about what I think is the absolute fundamental key to business success, and that’s ‘alignment’. If everyone knows the corporate goals, and is aimed at helping to achieve them in a meaningful and tangible way with all that they do, that’s being in alignment. And it’s a good and powerful thing. You’ve seen the lovely and inspiring Successories posters- the picture of the crew boat and all the crew rowing in the same direction, to the same beat. Or the one that says something like, ‘There Is No “I” In “team”’.

Alignment is powerful because it creates more light than heat. It keeps people focused and productive. And it becomes very easy to give people good feedback- did you help achieve the clearly stated goals based on your defined role? If you did contribute in a meaningful way, that’s a good thing, and you’re in alignment. If you haven’t, then we have a problem.

Most companies do not have strong alignment. Most sports teams do not. Why is this? I have thought about it and looked at many high-performing teams and company departments, and have come up with the following diagnosis, in five parts:
1. The wrong players: Some people don’t know how to play well together, or resist working together toward common goals.
2. The wrong intentions: Some people think they’re contributing, adding value, doing it better, outside of the goals for some reason… they genuinely think they’re helping when they’re not… Sometimes this is ‘local optimization’, where employees don’t know how they fit in. Sometimes it’s the ‘whip effect’, where management asks a seemingly simple question that gets whipped across the organization, confusing everyone.
3. Weak management/leadership: We’ve all worked for people who shouldn’t be in leadership positions, for a variety of reasons.
4. Flawed goals: I have even worked for leaders who have made the wrong choices. And for sure, I have made some huge mistakes about company direction before myself.

These four problem areas above are tough ones, but relatively easy to spot. Tough to correct, but easier to diagnose.

And think of the positive side of these: 1. strong players with 2. good intentions, 3. directed by a strong leader, 4. all aimed at the same thing. What could be better than that? Or more obvious?

There’s a fifth area that fosters alignment when done well, and cripples alignment when done poorly- 5. Communications.

Communications is THE high-octane fuel that feeds every organization.

So, hopefully you are asking two questions now: 1) why is communications so hard? and 2) what’s the right way to communicate in order to insure alignment?

I think communications is so hard and so rare because it’s free. And since it’s free, it gets ignored (you get what you pay for).

Communications is also a tactic, a ‘how’ activity. As a manager/leader, I want to spend my time and the ‘what’s’ and ‘why’s’… and delegate the ‘how’s’.

And too often it’s a function with no owner. I’ll let the PR department, HR department, marketing department etc etc handle how the word gets out.

Finally, since it’s free, it’s easily ignored. Why should I have to spend my time communicating? I’ll send the message out and everyone will read it and ‘get it’. How hard is that?

Communications is so hard for me personally because it needs to be repetitive. One message said over and over. I get bored easily, and say many things. (I just gave an hour’s talk to a large group and used at least 10 metaphors, 12 analogies, and at least 5 non-sequitars.) It is hard for me to stick to one message, one theme, and communicate it over and over and over. Bo-ring.

(But think of the coach who says this week we’re going to work on a list of 47 things, all different than last weeks’ list of 56 things- and the players anticipate that next weeks’ list of things will be different once again.)

Good communications requires the utmost discipline. Discipline to stick to the message, to say it over and over, to say it with enthusiasm.

And the best news? It’s free!