Recently in B2B Branding Category
Gaurav Bhalla has just published an article in the January-February Harvard Business Review titled - Rethinking Marketing.Along with his co-authors - Roland Rust and Christine Moormon - Bhalla insists that companies must shift their mindsets from a product-centered focus to building long-term relationships with customers.
Says Bhalla:
"The traditional marketing department must be reconfigured as a customer department that puts building customer relationships ahead of pushing specific products. To this end, product managers and customer-focused departments report to a Chief Customer Officer instead of a CMO, and support the strategies of customer or segment managers."
You can sign up for Bhalla's Customer-Driven Innovation Newsletter and download "Rethinking Marketing" here >>
You can read the interview we did with Bhalla here >>
Co-sponsored by Emory Marketing Institute and AIGA, author, consultant, and marketing guru Dev Patnaik will be our guest speaker on Thursday May 14, 2009 from 7:00 to 8:15 PM.
His topic: Wired to Care: Driving Growth Though Customer Empathy
What it’s about: Recent history has seen the rise of innovation as a key mandate for driving top-line growth in business across multiple sectors. But as organizations have devoted increasing resources and attention to innovation, a critical issue has been ignored in the process. How can you create new value if your company doesn’t have a gut sense for what people outside its walls actually value? The challenge facing business today isn’t a lack of innovation, it’s lack of empathy.
Dev Patnaik takes audiences inside leading companies like IBM, Target and Intel to see how empathy can drive change and growth. He dives deep into the human brain to find the biological sources of empathy and their critical role in decision-making, learning, and judgment. And he spends time on both sides of the political aisle, to show how empathy can give politicians the acuity to cut through a morass of contradictory information.Patnaik is a founder and principal of Jump Associates, a consulting firm that helps companies innovate. Together with his teammates, he works with visionary business leaders to identify new markets, reinvent existing categories, and define new products and services. Dev is a trusted advisor to senior executives at some of America’s most admired companies, including General Electric, Nike, Procter & Gamble, Target and Hewlett-Packard. When he’s not working at Jump, Dev moonlights down the road at Stanford University as an adjunct professor, where he teaches design-research methods to undergraduate and graduate students. Since 1999, he has taught a course called Needfinding. In the class, students draw upon methods from anthropology, design and business planning to discover insights about ordinary people and create new products. While the class is required for all Design majors, it’s become a favorite of students from the Business School, School of Education and even Computer Science.
Learn more and register here >>
The event will be held in two sessions:
Session 1: Customer Experience Management
An attractive
customer experience is critical for differentiating brands.
In his presentation, Dr. Bernd Schmitt will cover tools and
methodologies for managing the brand experience. He introduces
the five-step Customer Experience Management (CEM) framework,
a comprehensive tool for managing the customer experience and
connecting with customers at every touch-point. The framework
demonstrates how CEM enables managers to:
" Gain original insight into the customer's world
" Develop an experiential strategy platform
" Create a unique and vivid brand experience
" Provide dynamic interactions at the customer interface
" Innovate continuously to improve customers' lives.
As part of the CEM framework, Mr. Schmitt will present cases of successful CEM implementations in a wide variety of industries. Join us to see how he links customer experience to customer equity - the financial value of customers.
Session 2: Experience Engineering
Through illustrations from Fortune 100 clients, Dr. Lou Carbone will share how the systematic design and delivery of experience clues can have immense impact on customer value, loyalty and the bottom line. Experiencing thought leader and author Lou Carbone will change the way you think about customer experience forever. His message to business leaders and professionals is simple: Create customers that come back and customers that tell others, by connecting emotionally with them through the experiences you deliver.
Carbone urges business to focus on managing experience "clues", conscious and unconscious, because experiences are what customers value most. He stresses that the world has moved from making and selling to sensing and responding-a dynamic change that requires new competencies.
Complete info here >>
Logically, strategy must precede metrics.
However, in many companies, metrics develop a life of their own and begin to dictate strategy.
Because of reward and incentive systems based on key performance metrics, managers all too often manage metrics such as ROMI rather than managing the business. For example, when profits or returns are limited under adverse economic conditions, companies often cut back on marketing investments in order to produce acceptable performance (ROMI’s). Ironically, for strong companies, this may be the best time to go on an offensive because less robust competitors may be weaker still.
Using the same metrics to both measure past performance and to resource the future can have disastrous results:
- The best way to kill new product innovations that have long-run payoffs is to use short-term, backward-looking metrics such as margins, turnover and return on assets that favor incumbent products thus starving innovations of badly need growth funds.
- Blurred insights can lead to questionable decisions. For example, higher short-run sales response elasticity for price-promotions has led to a systematic decrease in the share of marketing mix budgets allocated to advertising in the long run.
- Because marketing activities are listed as expenses rather than investments, they must typically “pay” for themselves within a year. Ironically, market-based assets such as customers and brands are the only assets that appreciate, and not depreciate.
Welcome to the Emory Marketing Institute's blog - where we focus on the intersection of branding practices and business performance.
Our goal is to start meaningful conversations around a few topics of interest to us:
- Branding History
- Benefits of Branding
- Brand Strategy
- Resource Allocation
- Brand Lifecycle Management
- Marketing Programs
- Operations Management and Branding
- Brand Strength Assessment
- Brand Performance
- Brand Valuation
- Business to Consumer Branding
- Business to Business Branding
- Technology Branding
- Services Branding
- Branding Case Studies
- Branding Best/Worst Practices
- Private Label Competition
- Branding Commodities
- Branding in Emerging Markets
- Branding Retail Organizations
We invite you to participate, to contribute - ideas, suggestion, comments and insights. Join us in our learning journey...
