Archive for the ‘Required Reading’ Category

Really enjoyed Claudia’s framing of what life is really like for most of us… A squiggly line…

From George Saunders..

Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up.  Speed it along.  Start right now.  There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really:selfishness.  But there’s also a cure.  So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf – seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things – travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.  Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial.  That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality – your soul, if you will – is as bright and shining as any that has ever been.  Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s.  Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place.  Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

You can read the full speech here…

Nice little video on the creation of the Dumbo Feather app. And you can read more over at Chris Ronan’s blog.

More Google Wallet disruptions of the less positive kind. I wonder if major developers are starting to prioritize Apple on the roadmap for the stability of the roadmap alone. Its a case of “the worse but stable roadmap is better than the sexy unstable roadmap”.

It never ceases to amaze me the PR-spin wrapped into these kinds of announcements… while cancelling the functionality, they are quick to say that we shouldn’t worry, because we are doing something like it that will come later. The issue with this approach is that while it might be ok for consumer communications, it isn’t a cred builder with serious enterprises who look to stable roadmaps and long-term commitments as a precursor to supporting platforms.

This is what they said: We’re working with retailers on other options for gift and loyalty card redemption within Google Wallet, and are excited to share them with you soon.” Yeah, right.

The Australian Marketing Institute’s newly published “Marketing’s Role in The Boardroom” is a great little guide that should serve to get the C-suite and their boards asking a crucial question – Why isn’t marketing here?

The report nicely states “for many organizations marketing is the fuel that powers business strategy”. Peter Drucker said it this way “Business has only two functions — marketing and innovation”.

So, if its that important, why doesn’t it have a seat at the table?

A brief call-down to fifteen CMO’s here in Australia revealed an interesting fact, albeit off a small sample. The majority do not work for a CEO directly and none have an formalized role in engaging with their board. Marketing is one of, if not the only, major business function sitting on the periphery of the senior leadership teams of some of Australia’s largest brands.

There are two potential causes. First, does the board and leadership value the brand – and fully comprehend the role of marketing leaders in protecting and growing that value?

Second, is there an appreciation for the role of marketing as a direct and indirect element of the P&L?

In short, how do they understand the value of marketing? AMI’s report put it this way, “It is time to revisit the potential for marketing activities to prove their value… and to understand the means by which potential might be realized”.

We as marketers need to take a fair amount of the responsibility for the lack of answers.

Today marketers seek to earn that seat at the table through a raft of return on investment metrics. Most painfully analyze every campaign using ROI to demonstrate their, and the program’s worth.

There is no question correlating financial performance to marketing activity is crucial. But ROI in most cases will be the wrong metric. Its roots are in measuring one-time capital investments – not the continuous and tightly interwoven web of activities that constitute marketing.

Dominique Hanssens, professor of marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management also argues that marketing is an expense rather than an investment and that marketing costs appear on a company’s profit and loss account rather than the balance sheet. Expense to most of us is a dirty word though – investment sounds so much more grand. But if we want a seat at a table we need to be less concerned with the light in which marketing might be seen, and instead concern ourselves with how the business actually sees it. It’s an expense in the P&L.

More than often, when we say ROI, that isn’t what we mean. We are in fact talking about a ratio and not a metric that has anything to do with crucial performance indicators like cash-flow. It’s a necessarily narrow metric and fails to demonstrate the contribution of marketing to the overall business. If we want to drive marketing effectiveness we need to build measures that provide a more holistic view of marketing’s contribution. And, ROI is a particularly bad indicator of what future spending should look like.

For CMO’s and their teams to earn a seat at the table a more rigorous conversation needs to be had around the role of marketing in driving the performance of the business. Throwing about abstract brand valuation metrics and point-in-time ROI data will do little to get us there.

One good metric that more marketers need to embrace is ROMI. And that doesn’t stand for Return on Marketing Investment as so many think.

Return on Marginal Investment simply put measures the marginal return vs. the average return and it this that makes all the difference in comprehending results and determining the right level of future spend.

Companies like MarketShare are bringing true science to understanding how much investment is required and where the next dollar should go. Smart brands are investing substantial amounts in systems for understanding marketing performance – and these systems are replacing the ROI dashboards hacked-together by marketers over the years with real science.

My money is on those with the science getting the seats at the table first.