April 10, 2008

On "Life After Katie"

I know this is a marketing blog, so excuse me if the following post seems every so slightly "off-center" but IMHO it is completely relevant...

I just finished reading a posting on the Time.com Tuned In blog by James Poniewozik titled "Life After Katie." The posting was about the rumored demise of Katie Couric's CBS Evening News show. His commentary should be read by every marketer, in every industry, in every role because it applies to all of us.

Here is a small excerpt from Jim's entry:

"Katie was brought in on the premise that she and her star power—plus a revamping of the newscast format—could bring in new viewers to the evening news, rather than just steal a few hundred thou from the competition. She cannot. God cannot. It is a losing proposition. As I have written before, Couric's newscast has been an expensive final refutation of the desperate belief that it is possible to reverse the slow, inexorable decline of network news. Network newscasts are a holding effort. They are a rearguard action. They are prisoners of demography and cultural shifts that are as irreversible as the physical laws of the universe."

Besides being cool writing, he is right. The article goes on to explain the various demographic reasons why Katie doesn't deserve $15 mil a year to safegaurd her chair while the broadcast's Nielsen ratings plummet. The point for me, however, was broader.

Across all facets of marketing, B2C and B2B, there are dramatic and continually evolving ways in the way the people consume information. Not that long ago, Wired magazine ran a cover story on "snack culture"...our growing predilection for information in small bites (bytes?). Media fragmentation continues to alter audience accessibility to marketers. Blogs and online video are redefining the term pundit. For marketers, the impact is a new landscape in which you must paint your marketing plan. And like network news broadcasts, any efforts to do things "the way you've always done them" would be rightfully characterized as another "rearguard action."

Katie Couric and CBS may have done a favor for more than just NBC and ABC. They may well have taught every advertiser and marketer just how important it is to change...or die.

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March 22, 2008

The Continually Changing Web Demographic

I missed this article in The Times (London) on the rising use of the Internet by teenage girls and young women. Based on work done by the Pew Internet and American Life Project it describes how girls and yound women have risen to become the most prolific users of the Internet.

For many brands, this trend is in itself important. But the long-term impact on business based on the shifting demographic of Internet "power users" is something that all marketers and managers will need to keep an eye on.

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March 2, 2008

Content Comes to Marketing

Perhaps no complaint is more universal in the B2B marketing arena than the need for well-writen, relevant content. Yet, companies routinely short-shrift investment in content creation. That leads to a woeful lack of good information and a continual disconnect between marketers and prospects/customers.

That gap is why I found Steve Rubel's latest posting on his MicroPersuasion blog so interesting. Writing about event from the recent IAB Annual Meeting, he pointed out how digitally-savvy media companies had become. His angle was the threat that media companies now pose to traditional agencies. Some interesting stats he presented:

• By 2010, 53% of media companies surveyed expect to do more business directly with marketers. The majority of marketers (52%) feel the same about publishers


• Only 27% of marketers expect to be doing more business with agencies two years from now


• Today nearly every media company (91%) offers some kind of "agency-like" services. This includes former untouchables like idea generation (88%) and creative development (79%)

The implications for B2B marketers hungry for content? The answer may be in closer relationships with media companies hungry to leverage their content libraries and substantial content creation resources in new ways.

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February 28, 2008

Customer Service As Recession Fighter

Taken from the HP website: "HP today announced the most substantial investment in consumer technical support in its history – the aim of which is to enable people to get faster, more effective help with the HP technology products in their homes."

At a time when the economy is wavering and many companies are retrenching, HP announces a major investment in customer service. They may not be perfect, but here is more evidence that some companies really understand what is happening in the marketplace while others flounder in the evolving, customer-centric world.

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February 27, 2008

On Marketers...And Dinosaurs

I was driving into work this AM listening to WCBS radio in NY (I know... how retro. ;-) There was a story about the number of e-mails that a typical businessperson receives in a day. The point of the story was that if you spent even a nominal amount of time processing each e-mail, it would take about 2 ½ hours a day just to process e-mail.

That got me thinking about the changes in marketing that are on the horizon. The boomer generation of marketers was raised on the philosophy that if you need more awareness, more orders, or more action, simply push out more marketing. We manage daily communications similarly — pushing information (e.g. "e-mail") to colleagues and blithely copying large blocks of people.

The Gen Y/Millennial cohort now entering the workforce has been raised differently. They eschew e-mail in favor of self-service, permission-driven social networks. They tune out irrelevant marketing. They tell manufacturers how to market instead of passively absorbing what the company chooses to spit out. They collaborate with peers. Welcome to new world of communications.

The implications of this psychology and behavioral change are immense. My company lives in the B2B world and we see the growing need for a whole new way for companies to interact. Dealers don't have time to read all the "noise" they receive from the manufacturers they represent. Salespeople can't spend 10 hours a week in training to learn increasingly arcane product features. In short, the philosophy of B2B communications must change in the same ways that B2C communications have already begun to change. But marketers have never been known as the most adaptive of species, and this change does not come easy for most companies.

My advice? The next time you prepare to send an e-mail, or approve that new mailer or ad, think hard about the changes happening around you. Do your actions account for new media, new strategies and new organizational behavior? Change happens by slowly modifying behavior on the thousands of small decisions you make daily, not just the big, high-profile ones.

Of course, you could just continue "business as usual" ... and reserve your place in the same hall as T-Rex.

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