Category: Value

  • Customer focused telcos?

    Good article in Melbourne’s Age’s newspaper today about the tactics Australia’s telcos are employing in an attempt to lock their customers in to long-term bundles.

    Unfortunately, its not surprising that despite their customer first rhetoric, these deals are all about these companies’ economics, their margins and their internal business drivers. It may be what’s best in terms of the immediate monthly and quarterly revenue targets, but is this approach a sound, long-term strategy?

    You can read the full at The Age’s website, but here are two exerpts:

    “The chief executive of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, Teresa Corbin, said bundles may offer discounts but also force consumers to buy services they do not use.”

    “Telstra’s pricing encourages customers to either underestimate monthly calls, and get stung by higher actual costs, or pay higher monthly fees for something they may not use.”

    The article quotes several telco execs defending their practices, but what they should be really worried about is a recent Deakin University study found that inertia was a stronger driver than loyalty in determining how long a customer stayed with one company.

    There’s opportunity there for the first telco to break out from the pack and genuinely focus on customer centricity and the outside-in thinking that requires.

  • CMOs will drive technology spend not CIOs

    “CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs”

    When Gartner analyst Laura McLennan made this bold statement in a Gartner report late last year, it attracted plenty of skeptical comment.

    Increasingly, however, more and more people are lining up to endorse Laura’s view.

    Marketing is now a major technology driver, as it becomes clear that marketing needs a marketing technology backbone in order to get anything constructive done.

    CMOs and CIOs must accept the new reality that they need each other to deliver the cross-functional integration their customers and ultimately their shareholders demand today.

    Tech Republic’s Steve Ranger sums up the challenges in this good blog post.

    Steve quotes a recent Forrester Research report _ Business execs increase direct IT spend to support systems of engagement _ which claims that if IT doesn’t step up and engage, it will be relegated to “overseeing legacy systems”.

    According to the report only 39 per cent of execs thought IT consistently delivered projects on time and on budget, something Forrester described as “the basic building block of IT’s credibility”.

  • We’re all marketers now

    “In the era of engagement, marketing is the company”

    Excellent McKinsey Quarterly article makes the compelling case the organisations need to re-invent themselves around their customers.

    I’d go further than the authors recommend that two traditional C-level roles, the CMO and CIO, be abolished and replaced with a Chief Customer Officer.

    Here’s the article’s conclusion:

    “The major barrier to engagement is organizational rather than conceptual: given the growing number of touch points where customers now interact with companies, marketing often can’t do what’s needed all on its own. CMOs and their C-suite colleagues must collaborate intensively to adapt their organizations to the way customers now behave and, in the process, redefine the traditional marketing organization. If companies don’t make the transition, they run the risk of being overtaken by competitors that have mastered the new era of engagement.”

  • Will it matter in six months from now?

    We all get caught up in our day-to-day dramas, but do today’s issues truly matter?

    Will you even remember them in six months from now?

    What’s important?

    Are there more productive and enjoyable purposes for your time?

    Changing the game or maintaining the status quo?

  • Burberry’s click-to-buy online video experience

    Burberry continues to execute on its digital brand mission. Watch the company’s new season videos online from the brand’s website, and if you like an item, click on it and buy it. Very cool.

    Go direct to the website here:

    http://youtu.be/U6BLE3yNlic

  • Is fear holding you back?

    Spare 3 minutes and 41 seconds and watch this emotional and honest “we just got bought” video from Buddy Media CEO’s Michael Lazerow:

    As he explains in the video, Lazerow has just sold his company for $US 689m to Salesforce.com. Analysts estimate that the deal may have enhanced his personal net worth by around $US 200m.

    And for another perspective read this Forbes comment.

    And I also relate this assessment from the CEO of Radian6, Marcel LeBrun, another SFDC acquisition, especially this paragraph:

    “We believe that Marketing is undergoing the biggest transformation in 60 years. Marketing is evolving from traditional media campaigns focused on one-way messaging and brand impressions to social marketing, focused on building customer connections, two-way conversations and customer relationships. Advertising is expanding from traditional media to social media, with campaigns that engage customers and build connections. Social media has moved from a specialized team in marketing to the foundation of marketing.”

  • Excel is evil

    If you’re organisation is stuck together with Excel spreadsheets, it may be time to think about a better way.

    A reliance on Excel almost certainly means you’ve got a hetrogeneous legacy system environment where everyone spends far too much time forcing themselves on their processes in an attempt to stuff done (tracked, measured, analysed, forcasted, etc).

    You should be embracing 21st century, Internet native business technology and driving the business via your new-generation platform’s dashboards. Definitely not Excel.

  • Social enterprise collaboration makes business sense

    Social enterprise collaboration makes business sense

    Streamling enterprise communication: “the fewer places I have to go to access information, the better, for two reasons: fewer interfaces and critical mass. What we want is a critical mass of users and a critical mass of information in the fewest places possible. That’s what makes social networking so effective. That’s why we’re all on Facebook–because that’s where everybody is and that’s where all of the good information is. The same dynamic will hold true in the enterprise,” says Forrester Research analyst Rob Koplowitz.

    Rob claims that the kind of horizontal social network–or social layer–offered by Yammer, Jive, Chatter, Socialtext, and others is beneficial to enterprise users because it will allow them the greatest exposure and access to information and expertise with the least number of locations and interfaces to deal with.

    Makes sense?

    The Social Enterprise becomes a reality.

    Zero internal emails, fantastic!

    This is how your real-time, social business needs to be architected:

    And it its recent report, which is attached, Nucleus Research singles out as its No. 1 prediction how the social-network platforms will drive significant, company-changing productivity increases.

    According to Nucleus, most successful firms “will leverage social technology to build the productive enterprise”.

    Rebecca Wettemann, vice president, research, for Nucleus, says that the advance of social networking in the enterprise merits its No. 1 prediction because the trend is comparable to the rise of e-mail 10 to 15 years ago, with the enormous changes that it brought to operations.

    Here’s their report:

    l107 – Nucleus top ten predictions 2012

     

     

     

     

  • Excellent Sydney Data Miners event

    Good audience at the Sydney Data Miners meet up. Excellent questions from the floor. Thanks to Will and the Datarati team.

    Check out my presentation here

    And several audience reviews.

    The same presentation was also delivered at Tonkin’s Marketing ROI Forum on Monday afternoon (the 28th).

    The reviews averaged out at a pleasing 8.5 out of ten. Thanks to all those who voted.

     

     

  • Burberry executes on its vision and generates profitable growth

    Excellent execution, Burberry’s digitally-immersive Taipei store opening:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwJtY_r9rJw

    And great vision:

    Equals profitable growth