Musings of a Marketing Maven

Today I was struck with how many peo­ple are writ­ing and debat­ing about the secrets to suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing. Seth Godin has a new book out; the CMO Coun­cil has released a major report on B2B mar­ket­ing; and I stum­bled across a blog that chal­lenges the valid­ity of the clas­sic mar­ket­ing fun­nel. Pure brain candy.

Thanks to a short break between client engage­ments, I was able to indulge in some of the lat­est think­ing, span­ning the gamut from consumer-centric mar­ket­ing pun­dits to B2B gurus. Here’s a quick tour of today’s nuggets.

Get­ting Mar­ket­ing Back In Synch

Today I attended a webi­nar fea­tur­ing Seth Godin who was launch­ing his lat­est mar­ket­ing provo­ca­tion, Meat­ball Sun­dae.

Godin’s new book out­lines the 14 key themes that are reshap­ing the mar­ket­ing land­scape. Whether you spe­cial­ize in B2B or B2C mar­ket­ing, there’s some­thing here for every­one to con­sider. As a case in point, Godin opines that scarcity and abun­dance cre­ate won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ties — but between them lies the curse of medi­oc­rity and obscurity.

What I liked most is his rec­om­men­da­tion that mar­keters take respon­si­bil­ity for craft­ing the customer’s entire expe­ri­ence, from prod­uct incep­tion through to deliv­ery and the product’s inte­gra­tion into the customer’s life. This means rethink­ing the value chain, from the fac­tory to the point of con­sump­tion. It’s another take on his theme of mean­ing­ful differentiation.

To explain what he means, his webi­nar (and prob­a­bly the book) cite a stream of busi­ness inno­va­tions from Josiah Wedge­wood (whom Godin calls the great­est mar­keter of all time).

Wedge­wood inno­vated in many ways, such as:

• brand­ing things made of clay (pot­tery in all forms) — even 200 years later, we can still rec­og­nize the tra­di­tional Wedge­wood pot­tery, thanks to brand char­ac­ter­is­tics that are intrin­sic to those products
• intro­duc­ing the first prod­uct show­rooms in Lon­don (think Nike Town, circa 1700’s)
• per­suad­ing the British powers-that-be to build canals to his fac­tory so Wedge­wood could reli­ably trans­port their frag­ile prod­ucts via their dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels to their end-customers
• lever­ag­ing the power of “light­house cus­tomers” and word-of-mouth mar­ket­ing — by send­ing a full set of prod­uct sam­ples to the crowned heads of Europe (at great per­sonal expense to Josiah Wedgewood)

After all these sto­ries, I’ll look dif­fer­ently at the Wedge­wood china we inher­ited from our in-laws…

Aspir­ing to Cus­tomer Affinity

I was equally impressed today with a recent report spon­sored by the CMO Coun­cil on Cus­tomer Affin­ity: The New Mea­sure of Mar­ket­ing. Although the writ­ing lacks the light­hearted fun of Meat­ball Sun­dae, there’s great food for thought in this report on how to drive supe­rior rela­tion­ships with customers.

Here’s a nugget (their def­i­n­i­tion of cus­tomer affinity):

…Cus­tomer affin­ity is more mean­ing­ful than cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, loy­alty or advo­cacy. Cus­tomer affin­ity goes beyond cur­rent, top of mind per­cep­tions; it looks into the depth, breadth, and impor­tance of the customer-vendor rela­tion­ship in order to deter­mine its capac­ity for sus­tain­abil­ity, strate­gic value and trusted, long-term engage­ment. Indeed, we have found dis­tinct dif­fer­ences in this study between cus­tomer advo­cacy, which is basi­cally a will­ing­ness to refer a ven­dor, and cus­tomer affin­ity. We believe that cus­tomer affin­ity is the more pow­er­ful and sub­stan­tive issue for ven­dors, chan­nel part­ners and cus­tomers alike. In today’s fast-changing and dis­rup­tive mar­kets, supe­rior cus­tomer inter­ac­tion may be the most essen­tial com­pet­i­tive advantage.

For peo­ple engaged in B2B mar­ket­ing, this report is def­i­nitely worth reading.

Is the Mar­ket­ing Fun­nel Still Valid?

Last sum­mer David Armano raised the ques­tion of whether a spi­ral might be a bet­ter alter­na­tive to the clas­sic mar­ket­ing fun­nel as a metaphor for the core mar­ket­ing func­tion. His blog sparked a lot of debate.

Check out his blog to see his think­ing and how he illus­trates his ideas, as he reflects on some 2007 thought pieces from For­rester regard­ing mar­ket­ing best practices.

Armano’s key point is that if cus­tomer engage­ment mat­ters — if there’s some form of inter­ac­tion among cus­tomers, or between the cus­tomer and the ven­dor — then a spi­ral might be a more use­ful men­tal construct.

Here’s Armano’s illus­tra­tion. The inter­est­ing ques­tion is, how valid is this con­cept for B2B enter­prise prod­ucts, par­tic­u­larly those that fall into infra­struc­ture cat­e­gories? It’s easy to imag­ine its rel­e­vance for con­sumer prod­uct cat­e­gories, in which the end user cares enough about the prod­uct to engage in a con­ver­sa­tion with others.

To me the ques­tion isn’t either/or — it’s both/and.