Alberta Business Marketing

When Stanley Pollitt and Stephen King created the notion of "planning" back in the 1960's, they began the journey to what is now a very discombobulated discipline.

Let's have a look at the first description of account planning - "The account planner is that member of the agency's team who is the expert, through background, training, experience, and attitudes, at working with information and getting it used - not just marketing research but all the information available to help solve a client's advertising problems." - Stanley Pollitt

In the 1990's, Jay Chiat evolved the definition of planning to add a splash of creativity and flare, yet still remaining true to the discipline.

Fast forward to 2010. This is where I face a split opinion.

Many agencies are not familiar with the discipline of planning and try to create a role to fill an unfulfilled need. This role usually includes a planning title; created with little or no knowledge of what planning actually is. This direction dilutes the discipline of planning and builds confusion both internally and with the client. We now have client planning, creative planning, research planning, just plain planning, strategist, account planning strategist and most recently, digital planning or digital strategist. I'm sure I've left out a plethora of others.

On the other hand, It's my personal belief that a good account planner can be all of the above as long as the consumer is at the core root. It's all a matter of managing expectations with the employer/employee and client. Good planners have the ability to bridge together their understanding of the consumer and how they relate to the client's brand and visa versa. Because communication channels continuously multiply, it is crucial for planners to stay ahead of how consumers are engaging with brands.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Jennifer Morozowich

Tags: Get it off your chest, Strategy
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

Group think is the nemesis of qualitative research. The more senior you go in any organization, the more dismissive of focus groups managers become because of "group think." And, indeed, watching focus groups, as I have done innumerable times, it could appear that group think is impacting the dynamic.

Of course, one manager's group think is another manager's consensus. I mention this as an aside, but it is true that when 6 people in a group like the concept, this is a sign of a great concept. When six people in a group dislike the concept, it's clearly group think. Of course, if you hate the concept, then this works the other way around. Which leads to:

Bernstein's First Law of Group Think: The intensity of group think in any focus group is indirectly proportionate to the degree that the group reflects the observers innate bias.

But, I digress.

Group think is the inevitable result of recruiting homogenous groups of people. Why are we surprised that people who are in the same targeted age group, same target education level and use the same products with the same frequency, share the same opinions about the brand, product, category, and so on. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if there is no group think, then the recruiters have done a lousy job. And, perhaps even more controversially, the reason why professional respondents (i.e. those who attend many focus groups and don't absolutely fit the criteria) are generally more interesting than actual respondents (those who do fit the criteria and have little or no experience withfocus groups) -- they are, in fact, not the same as everybody else in the room and are therefor are more likely to have different opinions!

Think of it like this:

In her brilliant (must read for all marketers) book, The Art of Choosing, Sheena Iyengar points out three aspects of personhood that help clarify this issue:
1. People are more alike than they think
2. What people believe about themselves (or what people would want other people to believe about them) does not vary much from person to person
3. Each person is convinced that he or she is unique

So, if this applies to all people, imagine how much these lack of differences are magnified in a homogenous group. Group think is not group think in the sense of people following a leader in spite of their own personal opinions. Group think is simply group agreement.

So what?

Couple of things.
1. The next time a client complains of group think, stick your finger in your ears and hum loudly
2. Don't recruit homogenous groups to focus groups. Try recruiting different people, try mixing the cohorts -- mix frequent users with terminal rejecters; mix 35 to 49 with 18 to 29; mix males with females; mix high income with low income. In any case you are better off doing two groups of mixed A and B than one group of A and one group of B
3. Read "The Art of Choosing" and get back to me .

And, for your added enjoyment, check out our new web site.

Laurence Bernstein

Tags: Customer Experience, Get it off your chest, Research, Strategy, This and That
Posted in Advertising | | Comments Off

Oh how the world has changed and not necessarily for the best.

Labatt's has awarded its Quebec Bud Light account to Publicis just after completing an agency review last summer according to the May 17 issue of Marketing. Good for Publicis. Lousy for the agencies that pitched and won and shameful for Labatt's.

Once viewed as one of Canada's most desirable accounts to work on Labatt's has truly adopted the view that agencies are commodities to be traded like all other commodities. Its culture was more civil when it was Canadian owned. Asking agencies for spec creative during a pitch, reimbursing them a paltry $5000 and then firing them in a year is shameful. Marketing Magazine says "Complaints are understandable, given the tens of thousands agencies invest in reviews. Ont he other hand, perhaps that's the price of entry if you want to access a beer account-the most Canadian of products that can define careers with "Bud Light Institute" moments, whatever they're worth".

To clarify the Bud Light Institute was created before the Brazilians bought Labatt's. No great campaign has been created since. The advertising/marketing communications business is changing at warp speed but not all changes are for the good as demonstrated how Labatt's continues to treat it's agencies.

Tony Altilia

Tags: Get it off your chest
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

As social media continues its assault onto the mainstream audience, one of the side-effects has been the emergence of the view that marketing isn't allowed in the space. Conversations on blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and elsewhere are vocal in the opinion that marketing is dead; we choose who we buy from and whose reputation we ruin; what gets our eyeballs and what doesn't. Simply put, old school is dead; long live the King (of new media school). And, to a degree, it's correct - old school is dead. But let's not get too carried away by our new best friend social media, either.

Any time a new marketing platform comes out means that the "old school" is dead as it was; but now you use it in conjunction with the new. The view that we (as consumers) have all the power and that brands now need to listen to us is nothing new. Sure, we have a soapbox on which we can stand now that allows us to share our likes, dislikes and outright hatred of a brand, product or service, and to a worldwide audience looking for the next fix of brand assassination on YouTube. But at the same time, is this really new? Haven't we always had the power over brands? It doesn't matter how great advertising, marketing or PR messages are -if we don't like something, we vote with our wallets. This has been happening since the dawn of the first trade agreement. Just because Coca-Cola runs a great Christmas advertising campaign doesn't mean I'm going to suddenly buy Coca-Cola. I don't like the stuff, so their marketing and advertising is lost on me.

The view that social media has allowed us to force marketers to think differently isn't completely true either. Good marketers have always planned with their audience in mind - it's one of the key tenets to marketing in the first place. We don't just come up with an idea and hope it works - like a duck on water, there's a lot more going on that you can't see, while the pretty stuff on public view looks effortless.

Additionally, good marketers have always known when a message is right, if the timing is there, and reacted as a campaign has progressed, using analytics and feedback. Kind of like Twitter does now, or blog posts - the main difference is now you have instantaneous feedback to work from, as opposed to waiting on figures coming in from print or TV/radio media.

There's no doubt that social media is one of the biggest changes in the marketing (and business in general) landscape when it comes to tracking, measurement and engagement prior to, and after, the launch of a product or service. But to say that it means marketing is no longer needed is missing the boat slightly. Like any sound business, the good marketing tactics will work and the lesser ones won't. But isn't that how it's always been?

Danny Brown

Tags: Get it off your chest, social media
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off

My wife recently had an interesting customer experience that, although she categorized as positive, I am sure the service provider would categorize as negative. My wife was trying to redeem points from a loyalty program toward an airfare. Her first stop was online where her options would have required eight times the number of points she had anticipated. Dissuaded by what she saw, she called the loyalty contact centre. By talking to an agent she was able to obtain an upgraded ticket at one-fifth the number of points as was required by the sel-serve option presented on the internet.

My wife was delighted with the service and results that she received from the contact centre, but as a contact centre guy myself, I was haunted by the unnecessary call that was driven into the contact centre. At the core of the issue for me was the inability for two customer-touching channels to harmonize their servicing strategy. The internet, a channel used to improve customer experiences and reduce costly calls to the contact centre, had in fact driven an additional call into the contact centre.

This experience is not unique to loyalty programs or an online contact centre strategy. We see this type of unintended end result frequently caused by organizations with multiple customer touch points. When you consider all the potential ways in which you touch a customer (inbound calls, outbound calls, marketing solicitations, statements and invoices, applications, letters and so on), its easy to understand how difficult it becomes to maintain consistency within a customer touch point communication strategy.

I have seen organizations where customers question that company’s price competitiveness not because of the outside competitive market, but rather because different channels are offering different rates for the same product suite. I have seen organizations where statement inserts have not been communicated to the contact centre and thus resulted in frustrating customer experiences and lower than anticipated take-up rates. All of theses types of issues, and many more similar ones, drive both customer dissatisfaction and increased cost.

The overriding issue seems to be that the larger an organization grows, the more touch points and channels it has to communicate with customers. As the number of customer touch points grow, the control over the consistency and sharing of information internally seems to weaken.

What is missing is a customer contact guru: an individual or a team who does not own a specific customer contact channel, but rather is empowered to ensure that all information sent or accessible to a customer is appropriately disseminated within the corporate organization. A group that is tasked for identifying and eliminating conflicting information between channels. Effectively, a group that makes sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. Until such time that we recognize that all of our touch points with our customers need to be zealously guarded, we will continue to be our own worst enemies.

Richard Litvack, Vice President, Operations, Citi Cards Canada Inc.
& member of CMA’s Contact Centre Council

Tags: Contact Centre, Customer Experience, Get it off your chest
Posted in Alberta Business | | Comments Off