Early bird agenda: Marketing innovation

Next Cranfield Customer Management Forum workshop is on Marketing Innovation – 27 Sept 2012

We have super case studies from Orange, Jewson and Ahlstrom, plus Cranfield expert Chris van der Hoven. And an innovative ring-a-friend session to get you some peer support on our own company’s innovation challenges.

CEOs are clear. They want more accountability and more innovation out of marketers. You can’t get radically better metrics without both incremental and step-change innovation, actually. This workshop deals with both.

We start with an expert view on what distinguishes high-innovation firms, industries and countries from low-innovation ones, from Cranfield’s Chris van der Hoven. He will draw on his recent research in India as well as his personal impressive track record.

We then have three case studies tackling different aspects of the challenge, starting with innovation in the brand. Orange Business Services report on a successful three-year project to refresh both the brand and, of course, the customer experience through which the brand is largely perceived. Billion dollar paper and materials group Ahlstrom also have an experience led approach, looking at how the whole value chain contributes to a customer getting their job done – such as us decorating our house – and where the unmet needs are. This systematic approach helps to embed innovation as a habit. Jewson are crowdsourcing their innovation, and will discuss the challenges this poses in opening out the organisational boundary.

Last but not least, we have a syndicate ‘ring-a-friend’ session that will allow delegates to team up with others facing similar issues and provide some peer support.

Further dates for the diary

Finally, further dates for the diary. If you have thoughts about what you most want us to cover, or speaker ideas, or what research we should be doing and feeding back to members on these topics, do let us know.

22 November on customer experience.
Speakers include RBS, Orange, SAS and Cranfield.

28 February 2013 on CRM.

16 May 2013 on multichannel.

For more information about any of these events or joining the forum: CCMF@cranfield.ac.uk

 

Hugh Wilson
Forum Director

Enhancing the effectiveness of low resourced campaigns

One syndicate session at the May 2012 meeting of Cranfield Customer Management Forum identified this as a key challenge:

This discussion was inspired by a great presentation on RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution), a UK charity which reached over one million young people off the back of a direct mail campaign to 12 influential bloggers.   (Thanks to Doug Dunn from TunedIn and Debi Bester from Proximity for a truly inspiring session).

Frequently senior management are setting their marketing teams the objective of developing campaigns with minimal resources (time or finances), compelling them to think differently.   These are a few of the principles that the syndicate discussed:

• Start each marketing campaign meeting from the premise that you have no money to spend and brainstorm ideas based around your campaign objective
• Leverage your existing assets:  Search for under-utilised assets that already exist within the business but are not being used to their full potential
• Turn the business inside out:  Look beyond the nuts and bolts of the business and seek resources that can be used in a different way or repurposed.
• Start lots of small campfires rather than one big bonfire:  Start small and build on what is working.
• Think thin and deep:  Look for ways to develop deep relationships with a small number of customers who will then become strong advocates on your behalf.
• Make your customers the heroes: Go beyond testimonials and use your customers to tell your story.
• Gain senior management buy-in by taking the time to show them: Often people just assume CEOs/senior management don’t value their work or are resistant to new technologies.  But perhaps no one has taken the time to show them.  However, pick your moments.  For instance, one organisation gives printouts of customer feedback to their CEO so that she has something to read on long flights.  This helps to demonstrate the value of the marketing team through the voice of the customer.

Do any of the workshop participants want to add further comments?  Other thoughts welcome!

Challenges of measuring and improving marketing effectiveness

 At the 10 May 2012 meeting of the Cranfield Customer Management Forum, participants were asked the following question:

“List one challenge you are having with measuring and improving marketing effectiveness in your organisation”

We identified five broad themes which we then discussed:

1. Defining and measuring social media KPIs.
2. Enhancing the effectiveness of low resourced campaigns.
3. Allocating an inferred sale when you’re using online/offline, multiplatform campaigns.
4. Measuring and managing the ‘big orchestration’ approach – efficacy, scale, etc.
5. How to measure engagement in an actionable way? How do you know what portion of your customer base are disengaged?

We then delved into some of these issues in our syndicate discussions.  Any comments?

Emma.

Dr Emma Macdonald CCMF Research Director
Follow me: @DrEmmaMacdonald, #CranfieldCMF, ccmf@cranfield.ac.uk

Improving marketing effectiveness

We’re looking forward to the forthcoming Cranfield Customer Management Forum meeting on 10^th May.  The theme of the event is “Improving Marketing Effectiveness”.

It’s all very well not knowing which half of your marketing spend is wasted, but at times like this, the CEO is likely to call your bluff, halve your budget and make it your problem! Today’s CEOs don’t stop there: they also demand innovation from marketers. The May workshop will begin with lessons from the leaders in marketing campaigns: distillations from 250 submissions to the IPA Effectiveness Awards, from major report co-author Claire Spencer.

We then look at a radical innovation in marketing which is already proving its ability to drive step-change improvements in effectiveness. It builds on the next-best action concept which is driving CRM performance up sharply. The Forum heard all about this from, amongst others, Aly Richards when she was then CRM director at O2. She’s coming back to present on the next step: next-best content. By listening to social media conversation, the company can join in seamlessly, picking up on current themes in an individualised way. Aly will report on some early success at Guinness, with click-through rates up 190%, email open rates up 332% and a 7.5x increase in engagement in six months.

Which raises the issue of what we mean by engagement anyway. Sky, along with my Cranfield researcher Anne Mollen, will report on progress with measuring & improving online engagement and its outcomes.

Our final case reports on RNLI’s crowdsourcing of a campaign which achieved extraordinary results for the cost of just twelve personalised, subversive mailings to opinion leaders in the target segment. (By the way, driving hard marketing improvements from social media is just as relevant to you if you’re B2B, as we heard from RS Components in February – we’ll have more on crowdsourcing in B2B in September.)

Finally, our social media session in February had a very successful peer support session where delegates who wished to floated issues they were struggling with and got some expert brainstorming on how to solve them. We’ll repeat the process this time, so bring along your key marketing effectiveness challenge.

Contact us at: CCMF@Cranfield.ac.uk for more information about joining the forum.

Theme was ‘brotherhood’ at Cranfield last week

Great workshop at Cranfield last week on the topic of Embedding Social Media in Marketing Practice – despite threats of snow and freezing rain!   Fantastic talks from our guest speakers including:

• IBM on demystifying social to make it part of everyday business;
• Chivas on their campaign for Chivas Regal whiskey and how to evaluate an effective social campaign;
• RS Components, creator of the DesignSpark community for design engineers, on what it means to be social in a B2B context;
• Rank Interactive talking about the impact, and potential, of online gaming.

We also brainstormed issues we are grappling with:

• How far should we shift from our category to generate social interest (particularly when we operate in a ‘low involvement’ category)?
• How to embed social in marketing strategy and how to deal with the ‘ownership’ challenge?
• What to do about the combined challenges of limited budget and limited time for social?

What are your thoughts on these issues? Leave a comment….

Emma.

Dr Emma Macdonald
CCMF Research Director
Follow me: @DrEmmaMacdonald
Cranfield Customer Management Forum: #CranfieldCMF

For information about club membership: www.cranfield.ac.uk/som/ccmf
Or email: CCMF@cranfield.ac.uk

Embedding social media in marketing practice

Our next workshop for CCMF members is coming up on 9th February 2012.  This is the year in which we need to work out the place of social media within our integrated marketing practice. It’s the same shift we made nine or ten years ago with dot-com. This workshop explores some of the ways in which social media are here to stay, and provides a space for evaluating your social media strategy with some peer support.

Embedding social media in marketing practice

IBM has the scale of client engagements to be in a good position to reflect on the place of social media within the multichannel customer journey, and equally the place of social media within the firm, so we’ve asked an IBM expert to begin the day with some thoughts from recent projects. We then have four case studies exploring different applications of social media.

A first step for many firms is market research. Jamesons are a super example of a brand which is analysing what’s said about them online and feeding this insight rapidly into its communications strategy.

The multiple prize-winning RNLI case shows that the traditional barrier between customer insight and communications is being rapidly eroded. Crowdsourced content was distributed to some influential bloggers by tailored mail packs – just twelve of them. The result was a campaign which reached 11% of 15-20 year olds, all from 12 envelopes. Now that’s direct mail!

Social media can be embedded not just in the communications process but in the value delivery itself. This is illustrated well by RS Components, an early innovator in B2B online sales a decade ago and still ahead of the curve in enhancing customer experience through its online hub.

At leisure sites like Mecca Bingo, peer-to-peer engagement is inherent to the proposition and has been for some time, so we can all learn from what its parent Rank has learned about supporting social encounters online and integrating them with the offline proposition.

Finally we will have a working session in which four groups will brainstorm approaches to challenges posted by delegates about their own businesses. Members suggested this format to us, and it’s been enthuastically received in the last two workshops, so we’ll do it again!

Contact us at: CCMF@Cranfield.ac.uk for more information about joining the forum.

24th Nov: Channel hopping

The agenda is set for our next CCMF member’s meeting at Cranfield.   The theme for the Nov 24 meeting is “hopping” – or channel hopping to be precise!  The actual title is MAXIMISING THE RETURN ON MULTICHANNEL MARKETING and once again we have an exciting line up of speakers.

We’re very pleased to have Michael Lynch from National Savings & Investments (NS&I) back to talk with us.   Michael is the Head of Demand Planning and Chair of the Marketing & Sales Committee at NSI.  Michael is going to talk about how to achieve channel shift at scale, including how NS&I have grown internet to a multi-billion pound channel.  He will share some of his insights about the structure and metrics needed when customers hop between channels.

Then Brendan Dineen is going to share some insights from the 2011 IBM Global CMO Survey.  Brendan is the Director of Marketing – Demand Programmes at IBM UK.  He is going to talk about how markers are addressing the challenges of skilling up to maximize return on multichannel marketing.   He will discuss how we can make multichannel journeys work for both the organisation and the customer.

After some morning coffee, we’ll be joined by Prof Don Schultz who we’ve flown out from Chicago to speak with us.  Don is a Visiting Professor at Cranfield and Emeritus Professor at NorthWestern University.  He is also President of the consulting firm, Agora, regular columnist in the US-publication, Marketing Management, and author of thirteen books on marketing.  Don consults across several sectors and is going to share his observations on what we need to do about multichannel marketing as the marketing system we grew up with is breaking down irrevocably.

After a fine lunch from the Cranfield buffet, we’ll have some discussions on the multichannel challenge.  And then our final guest speaker for the day, Aadil Qureshi from IBM will talk about how being agile is vital.  Aadil is Senior Consultant at IBM Interactive.  He is going to suggest ways that organizations can develop the ‘structural agility’ necessary to govern multichannel, the ‘experience agility’ required to embed the voice of the customer, and the ‘technological agility’ to make us flexible and responsive to rapid changes in customer behaviour. 

As usual, Prof Hugh Wilson will round up the day with observations from the day’s sessions.  And then we’ll invite our members for their feedback and topics for discussion at the next meeting. 

Posted by: Dr Emma Macdonald, CCMF