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As marketing evolves, one of the key shifts is the ability to test everything, all the time. Compared to my earliest marketing jobs in the late 90s, the tools of experimentation have been democratized and the cycle time between experiments have disappeared. We can get instant learning on just about any attribute we care to test on just about any aspect of marketing.

This testing mindset has the potential of taking out some of the guesswork out of marketing and brands are increasingly adopting a mindset to continually test and learn.

Yet this explosion in what we can test can lead to its own kind of analysis paralysis. Google couldn�t decide between two blues in a design, so they famously tested 41 shades between each blue to see which one performed better.

This data-driven environment led Google�s visual design leader, Douglas Bowman, to quit, penning an eloquent goodbye letter on the way out the door. He wrote, �Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and... Read more (including related cartoons)

We are working in a golden age of metrics. But the explosion in available data and metrics can give us KPI tunnel vision. It can blind businesses to what’s really most important.

Sky found that it was tracking more that 2,000 KPIs across their business, leading to short-termism and disjointed marketing. They eventually found a way to narrow the KPIs they track to 30.

Nathan Linkon described how a similar problem played out at Pepsi:

“We were in a situation where we had as many KPIs and tracking metrics as there were combinations and brands and countries, which is a lot… What the business was left with was a flood of information. You could always...Read more (including related cartoons)

Customer engagement is often discussed purely as a technology challenge. If only brands had the right platform, the right tools and the right customer data, they would somehow build deep and meaningful relationships with their customers.

But I think what sometimes gets lost is why a customer should care about having a relationship with a brand in the first place. What’s in it for them? Why does a brand deserve to be more than transactional?

The technology is increasingly table stakes. Customers expect to be able to reach brands in whatever channels they choose. They expect brands to offer a seamless customer experience across those channels. They are frustrated when brands fail to deliver.

And, to be sure, most brands have a lot work to do to deliver on those basic expectations. Marketers talk a lot about delivering omni-channel experiences, but much of what happens in practice is still multi-channel or cross-channel at best. Brands may be present on multiple channels, but the experience is...Read more (including related cartoons)

“Customers are in the midst of a trust crisis,” Salesforce CMO Stephanie Buscemi recently observed. Citing a Salesforce study, she said “54% of customers don’t think companies operate with their best interests in mind.”

Richard Edelman made a similar observation after the Edelman 2019 Brand Trust Survey published earlier this year:

“Eighty-one percent say, ‘Trust in brands is an important part of my purchase behavior,’ but only one-third of people say they trust the brands that they buy. So that’s an incredible opportunity for brands...

“Trust really matters for brands now. I think it’s a completely new moment for brands where it’s not enough for brands to communicate. You actually have to make a difference.”  

The Edelman Survey found that 41% of consumers don’t...Read more (including related cartoons)

Black Friday has long shed its American Thanksgiving roots, spreading around the world, spanning more of the calendar, and pulling in more brands and retailers. Black Friday has morphed into Black November and Cyber Monday has expanded into Cyber Week.

As Marshall Cohen of the NPD Group put it:

�Black Friday used to be the greatest day in retail all year. Now it�s becoming background noise � It�s not actually Black Friday anymore, or even Black Friday weekend or Black Friday week. It some cases it started in October. Lowe�s and Home Depot even had Spring Black Friday sales�

�Christmas creep has turned into deal creep. You have to be one of the unluckiest people in America if you are paying full price for anything these days.�

The NPD Group predicted US holiday sales growth between 2.7% and 3.2%, driven mostly by more products and services on sale. Yet competing only on price can lead to a race to the bottom. Constant price promotions risk... Read more (including related cartoons)

As we transition to a new decade in marketing, it can seem like everything is up for grabs.  Long-established marketing concepts are continually challenged.  There’s a lot of pressure to throw out the old and jump on to the new.

In this cartoon, I cherry-picked just a few things we regularly read may be dead or dying: TV, retail, segmentation, the CMO, brand loyalty, positioning.  And yet many of these have been predicted to be dead for years, as Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman once mocked in a headline: “TV to Die Soon. Again.”  

Working in marketing means constant evolution and we have to avoid complacency.  But as much as marketers like to throw around the word “disruption”, the fundamentals of marketing are relatively stable.  Things evolve and adapt rather than disappear entirely.

As Mark Ritson observed in 2017: “Marketers love to predict the death of established ideas, but in reality... Read more (including related cartoons)

I always liked the inventiveness of the flops on the Island of Misfit Toys in the classic 1964 Rudolph animation � a cowboy riding an ostrich, a airplane that can�t fly, a spotted elephant, a train with square wheels.

Every business has their own island of misfits � innovations that failed to make it. Most companies treat these misfits the same way as the Rudolph special, by sequestering them on an island somewhere out of sight and not talking about them. When we don�t talk about our misfits and flops, we don�t learn from them, or we take the wrong lessons.

I admire the mission of the Fail Festival, an event series that is trying to get rid of the stigma of failure in organizations by having them talk about failures publicly. As they put it:

�We need to get beyond thinking that the word �failure� is somehow a black mark, and come to accept that failure is a natural byproduct of innovation and risk-taking ... Mistakes that get brushed under the rug do double harm: first when we do the mistake, and then ... Read more (including related cartoons)

Net Promoter Score is the mother of all customer satisfaction metrics. Created by Bain partner Fred Reichland 16 years ago, NPS is the two-digit number generated by the ubiquitous one-question survey that now seems to trail just about every customer interaction — “How likely are you to recommend this brand to your friends and family?”

Ironically, this most popular mechanism for gauging customer experience can itself lead to some pretty annoying customer experiences. I was struck by how Fred described the state of Net Promoter Score recently:

There are way too many companies who obsess on the aggregate score as if it were magic and link bonuses to it, make decisions based on it and they don’t even know how to measure it…

“By linking it to frontline bonuses they’re distorting the experience itself by all the pleading, gaming, manipulating and selective sampling that goes on. The more you tie it to frontline incentives, the less useful it... Read more (including related cartoons)

A French entrepreneur named Nicholas Baldeck pranked CES 2020 last week by debuting the “World’s First Smart Potato” at an actual CES booth.

It’s an antenna that you stick into a potato and connect to your smartphone over Bluetooth. You can then ask the potato questions like a Magic Eight Ball, tapping into the potato’s “artificial intelligence”. As he put it:

“I am skeptical of this idea of ‘connected everything.’ Now it looks like innovation is about putting a chip into any object. I’m not sure the word ‘smart’ makes more sense before the word toothbrush than the word potato.”

He also set up an Indiegogo campaign and said “if we get to $100,000, we will go to Potato Blockchain.”

With the imminent arrival of 5G, there’s a lot of euphoric talk about about the future of connected devices, which is leading to a fair amount of technology-for-technology-sake.  And there are...Read more (including related cartoons)

The Super Bowl is the world’s biggest marketing stage, so it’s always educational to see how brands place their bets.  

The stakes are high, with $5.6 million for the 30-second media buy alone in 2020.  In the most recent Super Bowl advertising study from Communicus (2017), they found that 80% of Super Bowl ads failed to significant impact for the brand.  And in a more telling statistic, 64% of Super Bowl viewers couldn’t connect a memorable ad to the brand it was advertising.  

To try to break through the clutter, Fast Company reported that more brands in 2020 are investing in elaborate teaser campaigns — essentially commercials for the commercials.

As Wieden+Kennedy Ad Director Christine Gignac put it last week: “If we want people to consume ads as entertainment, I think it makes sense to... Read more (including my past Super Bowl Advertising cartoons starting in 2003)

David Hieatt recently drafted a few internal principles he uses to create a culture of “Deep Work” at his company, Hiut Denim. Number one on David’s list is: “Protect you from meetings.”

As he framed it to his team:

“Most meetings are the result of lazy thinking. The problem is not even understood. So, no solution can be resolved. No clear action point is undertaken. So mostly it is an exercise of who has the nicest biscuits. If we call a meeting, it will be for a good reason.”

It’s easy to get stuck in the rut of meeting for meeting-sake, with a default Google calendar meeting length of 60 minutes.

If we’re not careful, our... Read more (including related cartoons)

I was struck by a recent editorial from Russell Parsons on �peak brand purpose�, which he linked to a crisis of confidence in marketing as a discipline. He wrote:

�We reached peak brand purpose in 2019 with Gillette�s �The Best a Man Can Be� and Cadbury�s �Unity Bar��

�Marketers have sought to become part of the solution to the world�s ills, that it was no longer enough to have a product that performed or a service that satisfied � you had to be worthy�

�This has slipped into an underlying disquiet among many about what they do for a living. That, somehow, being a marketer is...Read more (including related cartoons)

“It’s too bad most people only think about their network when they need something from it.”

I heard this years ago from branding adviser Denise Lee Yohn and it stuck with me.

In 2012, the default generic introduction message on LinkedIn was “Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.” Since that greeting was often sent to people they’d never met, let alone trusted, it inspired me to draw a cartoon about a guy saying this to someone on a random street corner.

A couple years later, in 2015, the designer Frank Chimera tweeted that “Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” would work as a caption on every New Yorker cartoon. The Internet then put Frank’s very funny (and accurate) theory to the test, using that caption on every non sequitur cartoon situation you can think of, from desert islands to actor Benedict Cumberbatch popping up in an ultrasound scan. Within days... Read more (including related cartoons)

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg famously said that privacy was no longer a “social norm.”

New research this month showed that 94% of consumers are uncomfortable with how their personal data is shared online. Drew MacRae at the Financial Rights Legal Centre, said consumers’ expectations had fundamentally shifted. As he put it:

“Privacy is making a comeback. People are slowly realizing what is happening out there in the market and discovering that, when they click on the button to agree to some service, some app, or some website, there seems to be all this stuff happening to that data, and people are starting to see the results of it.”

Drew credited the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” for turning privacy into a “barbecue conversation starter.”

The research also showed that 7 out of 10 people...Read more (including related cartoons)

Gapingvoid creator Hugh MacLeod once observed, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they’d punch you in the face.”

Hugh shared this insight years before the marketing automation revolution, but the same could be said for many forms of marketing, now more than ever.

Analysts at Demand Gen Report recently revealed that 60% of respondents would give their own Lead Nurturing campaigns a failing grade, a worse score than previous years.  

I wonder how much of this failing relates to...Read more (including related cartoons)

Someone named Microsoft Sam recently compiled a selection of current advertisements into one three-minute montage titled: “Every Covid-19 Commercial is Exactly the Same.” The video highlights eerily similar copy, music, and visuals across all the ads, spanning automotive to tech to retail.

As Microsoft Sam observed in the video liner notes:

“Since they can’t film a new ad because of social distancing, they compiled old stock b-roll footage and found the most inoffensive royalty-free piano track they could find.

“This, combined with a decade of marketing trends dictated by focus groups and design-by-committee, released a tsunami of derivative, cliche ads all within a week of one another. It’s not a conspiracy – but perhaps a sign that it’s time for something new.”

I think that’s true for all types of brand communication right now. The path of least resistance is to follow the same formulaic playbook. But when every brand is following that same playbook, maybe it’s time to question the playbook. For example, one piece of generic marketing advice ... Read more (including related cartoons)

In this time of change, I’ve been thinking about the gap between a desire to change and uncertainty on where or how to change. The pandemic has been a change accelerant, but the path isn’t always clear.

Jeff Bezos has some relevant insights in how he describes Day 1 versus Day 2 thinking. He first codified this idea in the early days of Amazon in 1997 (and even named his Amazon Building “Day 1” as a reminder always to act like it is Day 1). In a 2016 shareholder letter, he expanded on Day 1 thinking in a way that I think is particularly timely today.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

In Day 1 thinking, Bezos gives some useful perspective on how to think about staying on top of changing customer needs.

“There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

“Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and...Read more (including related cartoons)

A recent report found that 94% of businesses said that digital transformation was high on their list of priorities and 51% said they’re moving on these priorities in the next month.

Yet a separate YouGov study found that 54% of employees either don’t understand (20%) or misinterpret (34%) the meaning of digital transformation.

When more than half of employees are confused by the meaning of a top business priority, there’s not exactly a recipe for success. McKinsey determined that 70% of digital transformation attempts fail.

Digital transformation has become a catch-all term that can mean anything and therefore frequently means nothing. Too often, it’s... Read more (including related cartoons)

We are never finished with digital transformation.

In the late 90’s, I worked as a project manager helping build early web sites.  For many of the companies I worked with, this was their first-ever web site.  

One of my clients was a regional airline based in Milwaukee called Midwest Express. I remember big hoopla to celebrate when their web site went live. The launch was even timed for the morning of a board meeting to show how this signified a new era for the company.  Yet there was also a sense that a box had been ticked – that the airline had become officially digital – and it was otherwise back to business as usual. There was no plan for what came next. We briefly celebrated and then moved on to the next client’s web site.

Twenty-plus years later, I see a similar binary one-and-done mindset.  A Forester study a couple years ago reported that 21% of companies think they’ve already completed digital transformation.

A related McKinsey report assessed ... Read more (including related cartoons)

A Gartner study recently reported that more than half (57%) of CMOs expect to see a return to business as usual in the next 18-24 months.

It made me think about what “business as usual” even means right now.  Some aspects of how we work have changed so fundamentally, it’s hard to imagine that some of these changes aren’t permanent.  I read somewhere that COVID is not so much forcing a change in business as it is accelerating a future that was already underway.

For a few years, I’ve been hearing the managerial acronym VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity) to describe the turbulent business environment we work in.  What struck me recently was to learn that the VUCA concept actually originated more than 30 years ago.  The U.S. Army War College first coined the term in 1987 to describe ... Read more (including related cartoons)

This cartoon is dedicated to Comcast, the most recent company to show me how far we have to go before we reach conversational AI that can come close to a human voice.

The only thing worse than the Comcast customer service bot that greeted me when trying to resolve a technical issue was having to have identical conversations with the same bot each additional time I had to call back.  The human operators I finally reached (who were all incredibly helpful) eventually coached me on the quickest way to get past the bot the next time.

It struck me that all the lip service around Customer Experience often overlooks the human factor.  Customer service is every bit a part of marketing as any other tactic.  And yet it’s often measured more by operational efficiency than by creating customer value.

“By 2025, AI will power 95% of all customer interaction, including live telephone and online conversations that will leave customers unable to ‘spot the bot,’” a CX technology company named Servion said in a typical industry prediction recently.

McKinsey found that 57% of customer-care execs consider call reduction their “number-one priority” for the next five years, investing in technology to prevent the need to talk to a human through websites, chat bots, apps, and AI robots that can simulate human conversations.

And yet McKinsey cautioned businesses not to let customer service take a back seat to technology...Read more (including related cartoons)

Brands are judged less by how they operate when things go right, than by how they handle situations when things go wrong.

Mark Ritson recently recounted the story of Marks & Spencer during World War II, when the retailer made ration clothing for the British public. They had to figure out how to manufacture clothing in a different way to make the most of limited materials, even as more than 100 M&S stores were hit by bombing raids. Mark said that how M&S stepped up during the war was a widely admired fact during the 60s and 70s in the UK.  As he put it:

“They were with us when the shit hit the fan, and we were with them afterwards because of it.”

I think brands have to be careful to avoid shallow rhetoric in “we’re here for you” brand messaging.  Jeff Beer at Fast Company wrote about the avalanche of brand communication this week in ... Read more (including related cartoons)

A recent survey from Blind found that 83% of marketing and communications professionals are reporting burnout, the highest of any job function.

There are likely many factors at play, but I wonder how much of this burnout relates to productivity anxiety, the pressure to be busy, and the hustle culture in business.  

The pursuit of constant productivity can actually be unproductive. As Stanford researcher, Emma Seppala, put it, “our culture is obsessed with productivity. But research shows that attempting to triumph over an ever-expanding to-do list actually works against us.”

Since the pandemic started, our work days have increased by an average of 48 minutes, according to The National Bureau of Economic Research.  Bluescape found that 77% of employees say establishing boundaries between work and personal life is the most important work skill.

Intel recently tried to address burnout by ... Read more (including related cartoons)

From data plans to toothpaste to headache medicine, most categories operate as if more choice is better than less choice.

But if you’re actually a shopper with a headache in a headache medicine aisle, the only thing a complicated product assortment will do is make your headache worse.

As Scott Galloway put it recently (echoing Barry Schwartz’s 2004 classic, The Paradox of Choice):

“One of the biggest mistakes we make as marketers is that we assume choice is a good thing.  Choice isn’t a good thing. It’s a tax. We don’t want more choice.  What we want is fewer choices, but to be more confident in the choices presented.”

Companies ranging from Coca-cola to Mondelez to McDonalds to Mattel are starting to use the pandemic as a time to rationalize their product lines.  Some of these efforts began as...Read more (including related cartoons)

A Capgemini study found that 75% of organizations believed themselves to be customer-centric. Only 30% of customers agreed. The numbers were even more stark for consumer products companies — 80% believed they were were customer-centric and only 14% agreed.

There's a wide gap between what customers expect and what organizations deliver.

Deloitte identified one of the key CX challenges that contribute to this gap as a form of silo thinking they define as “Broken Customer Connectivity”:

“Although top management may clearly express a willingness to focus on the customer, we see many legacy organizations, often built on product lines, suppressing the kind of customer-centric initiatives that ...Read more (including related cartoons)

“If being purposeful means doing ads to you, then you’re probably doing it wrong.”

I was struck by this observation from the ever-insightful Tom Roach in his essay exploring whether brand purpose is “the biggest lie the ad industry ever told.”

The topic of brand purpose has always inspired some of the most absurd BS in marketing. Last week, Mondelez drew plenty of ridicule in the industry with their announcement that they were introducing a new purpose-led approach to marketing they called “humaning”, which they defined as “a unique, consumer-centric approach to marketing that creates real, human connections with purpose”.

Mondelez went on to proclaim “Humaning is when storytelling becomes storydoing” (leading PR Week to ask, “Did a robot come up with this?”).

There is a brand purpose bandwagon underway, and much of it takes a...Read more (including related cartoons)

“Universities are no longer nonprofits, but the highest-gross-margin luxury brands in the world,” NYU Professor Scott Galloway wrote recently.

Professor Galloway has been exploring the crisis of higher education in the U.S. lately, accelerated by the pandemic.  Of all the wrecking ball implications of Covid-19 on brands, the impact on higher education is one of the most dramatic.  And as with other industries, it’s less of a new problem, than an acceleration of problems already under way.

The value proposition for U.S. higher education has long been out of whack.  One telling statistic: study found that universities believed they were providing graduates with 80% of skills they would need in the work place, but employers felt graduates were only arriving with 40% of those skills.

Yet Covid-19 is putting the broken value proposition in high relief.  As many Universities start to shift to online-only (after accepting full tuition deposits), the vast majority are holding firm to the same tuition price they charge for an in-person experience, asserting that nothing has changed in the value proposition. Princeton approved a 10% tuition discount, but they are in the minority.

I think there are lessons here for any brand.  Covid-19 is forcing a re-evaluation of how brands across the board are valued.  It resets the playing field.  Ultimately the value of any brand is ... Read more (including related cartoons)

I've been thinking lately about Scott Brinker's observation back in 2013 that "technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarithmically."

Scott was referring specifically to marketing technology (and dubbed this conundrum as "Martec's Law") but I think this observation also rings true for the time that we're working now more generally. As Scott later said:

"In my opinion, Martec's Law encapsulates the greatest management challenge of the 21st century: how do we manage relatively slow-changing organizations in a rapidly changing technological environment?"

As Scott put it, we have to "recognize that we now live in a world of perpetual change, and so we're never going to be fully caught up ever again."

In this "world of perpetual change," not only do organizations change logarithmically, I find that my own instinct, as an individual, is to change logarithmically too. Organizations are composed of individuals after all, and this current situation has brought up ... Read more (including related cartoons)

Psychographics are back in the news as part of the US election cycle, four years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal made the term mainstream.

This week, CB Insights published a useful primer on psychographics, which they describe as one of the “dark arts” of social media and internet marketing.

Yet psychographics are nothing new; they were first developed in the 1970s. I remember learning about psychographics in 2002, working in consumer packaged goods.  At the time, psychographics were a blunt tool, mostly survey-based and relatively anonymous.  

They often seemed a bit silly to me, with cookie-cutter names like “Weekend Warriors” and “Rural Strugglers” applied to large groups of people. It was difficult to know exactly what to do with the information.  When you find out that 24% of your brand is considered an “Urban Aspirer”, how exactly do you change your marketing?  Just because you understand a certain personality type doesn’t mean you’ll know how to create marketing communication that will resonate.

What is new is how social media became a psychometric tool, fueling the sheer amount of personal data and sophisticated micro-targeting.  Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix famously bragged that their firm collected four to five thousand data points on every American citizen.

Here’s how Mark Ritson colorfully framed some of the implications of that shift:

“Marketers will face an inevitable backlash when consumers and activists discover...Read more (including related cartoons)

There's a funny image circulating right now of a survey that asks, "Who led the digital transformation of your company? A) CEO B) CTO C) COVID-19." COVID-19 is circled.

COVID-19 is accelerating digital transformation at many companies, knocking through long-standing resistance and silos. As ITWC CIO Jim Love noted, "Sometimes it takes a crisis to turn people's mindsets around."

The crisis is also setting the agenda and the priorities of where to focus digital transformation efforts, such as facilitating the needs of a mass, remote workforce.

But there's still not a shared understanding of what digital transformation actually ... Read more (including related cartoons)