73% of CEOs think marketers lack credibility - Why?

A recent study by Fournaise found that almost 75% of all CEOs believe marketers lack credibility.  They think marketers place too much emphasis on brand values and brand equity without enough measurable data to prove how marketing drives revenue.

Will someone who feels this way please define success for me?  Define love.  Define the shade of gray.  If I got 100 definitions for each, they would all be different.  My point is that success, love and shades of gray are all subjective, yet the diversity of the definitions doesn't make them any less valid or accurate.

Marketing is a science that requires both creativity and access to data to accurately measure ROI.  Yes, sometimes measurement can be subjective, but often thats because the research needed to quantify its impact can take a significant amount of time or isn't given the proper infusion of resources (financial or otherwise). I can think of several companies (Amazon, Sony, Ford) that didn't make money coming out of the box.  It was continuous product development and marketing that ultimately led to their success. 

While I agree that every company should demand marketers understand and measure ROI and its impact on P & L, companies must also be willing to invest in the tools necessary to collect the required data.  If not, what analytics do CEOs want marketers to use?  The number of daily sales isn't a very accurate way to measure ROI if you don't know how many people are entering the store.

Additionally, the success of a marketing campaign can be directly impacted by internal or external variables that are often out of control of the marketing department. A campaign might increase store traffic by 100%, but if inventory management is poor, that campaign may have no impact on sales.

A good marketer will experiment with new communication channels like social media to determine their effectiveness, just as a medical researcher will experiment with a new drug to determine its effectiveness.  There are no guarantees that either will work.  So should a smart company just sit back and wait until the competition is effectively utilizing a new channel before making the decision to invest in it?  They could, but then they'd be fighting an uphill battle trying to win back the loyalty of the customers they lost to the competitor who was innovative enough to try something new.  We invest in research for new designs, new products and new systems every day without knowing what the outcomes will be.  Business requires calculated risk.  Marketing needs to be included in that equation.

Viewing marketers as lacking credibility is commonly the result of not understanding the science of marketing or not placing the proper emphasis on marketing.  Often companies will expect champagne results on beer budgets. But when goals aren't met, how often is the budget looked at as the problem?  I'm willing to bet not as often as the people. 

That is not to say that there aren't bad marketers out there who try to avoid quantifying their value.  I don't trust those guys anymore than the CEOs in the Fournaise study do.  Though I don't think the problem is any greater in marketing than in any other profession.  Can the value of HR or IT be quantified?  It's hard to do, but they are still valuable and necessary.  I've worked with many colleagues and business partners who weren't worth the paper their paychecks were written on, and I can think of several occasions when the marketing department bailed out other divisions without getting the credit it was due.

Marketing & ROI measurement should always go hand in hand, but expecting it without providing the proper tools and a willingness to take calculated risks is neither smart nor sustainable.

So before CEOs view marketers as lacking credibility, perhaps they should take the time to understand and invest in marketing first.  I'm willing to bet that those who do are probably not reflected in the 73% identified in the study.

Why do some researchers spend so much time on useless statistics?

A little levity for your day.

Every week I look forward to reading the articles that are emailed to me from the CMO.com News in Review. This week an article titled 5 Degrees of Twitter Separation, caught my attention. I thought that it had to be a teaser for something more important than the title indicated.

I clicked on the link to discover that I was wrong. It was just a ridiculous article about how all Twitter users are removed from one another by only five degrees of separation. My initial thought was, “Who in the world cares?” So I reread the article, hoping that I might have missed something of value. Nope, my first impression was right! The article WAS based on a useless statistic that I didn’t care about. Why would someone spend valuable time and resources writing an article about how far removed I might be from Ashton Kutcher on Twitter? Most people who are even vaguely familiar with Twitter know that users don’t read 99% of the tweets that are posted by the people they are following anyway. That’s why I try to keep the number of people I’m following to a reasonable minimum; because I don’t want to sift through all the junk tweets to get to the few with some meat. This ridiculous 5 degrees of separation statistic has so little value to me as a marketing professional, that I was actually amazed that CMO.com would waste valuable space promoting it.

However, it did prompt me to seek out other useless statistics that researchers have found important enough to study, yet have very little value to…well…anyone!

Here are a few:

• Most people have an above average number of legs.

• 3 out of 10 men, and 1 out of 10 women are left-handed or

ambidextrous

• Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada has the largest number of bars per

capita than anywhere else in the world

• On average, there are 178 sesame seeds on each McDonalds Big Mac bun

• Odds of being killed by falling out of bed - 1 in 2 million

• Termites eat through wood 2 times faster when listening to rock

music

• Driving at 75 miles (121 km) per hour, it would take 258 days to

drive around one of Saturn's rings

• 40 per cent of women have hurled footwear at a man

• The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime

waiting for the traffic lights to change (Although I bet that

Washington, DC drivers are above average!)

• Assuming Rudolph was in front, there are 40,320 ways to rearrange

the other eight reindeer

• You are more likely to get attacked by a cow than a shark

• Oh, and here’s one I got from Twitter: Based on various sources,

on average 54.1167% of all statistics are meaningless

Do you have a few other useless statistics you’d like to share? Post them here.

Hispanic Consumers: Why do we continue to ignore a growing customer base?

A recent study by independent Hispanic agency, Orci, as reported in DMNews.com ( http://tinyurl.com/yc456da ), showed, “80% of US marketers say that the Hispanic market will impact their products and services in the next five years”. However, the same study indicated that half of those companies are not even marketing to the Hispanic population, and 80% of them have no plans to increase their efforts in the next 12 months.

Additionally, a study conducted last year by AOL and Cheskin showed that internet usage by Hispanics living in the U.S. has outpaced the total U.S. online population, closing the gap from 16% in 2002 to 13% in 2009. Yet even fewer businesses target Hispanics online.

There is still a real fear among marketers to engage the Hispanic population. I think there are three reasons for this trend: First, marketers don’t believe they understand Hispanic culture or have the appropriate resources to market to them effectively; second, marketers are concerned about alienating their “core customer” who is not Hispanic; and finally, marketers fear that this will lead to demands from other ethnic groups that they be marketed to in their own language and according to their own cultural preferences, causing marketing chaos.

However, the bottom line here is that Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S., and the population is only going to rise. To ignore them is to ignore huge revenue opportunities for smart businesses.

Even companies that focus on B2B are missing the boat, as Hispanic run businesses are increasing along with the population.

From discussions I have had with the leadership team at the Greater Washington Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Latino business owners are itching to become more engaged with non-Hispanic consumers and businesses. They also recognize the opportunities, but share similar concerns; in particular, language and cultural barriers.

At Goodwill, when we decided to begin actively marketing to Hispanic consumers a few years ago, I shared concerns about how our core shoppers would react. As a result, we were very gradual and methodical in our marketing efforts, slowing increasing them over several years. Now we actively engage the Hispanic community through the use of bilingual signage and direct mail, bilingual sales associates, advertising through Hispanic media channels, and the development of Hispanic social media sites. We even conducted a market research study to learn more about the shopping habits of Hispanic consumers (thanks to a terrific graduate student named Lorena Jordan from Johns Hopkins University), and gained some valuable insight that has improved our Hispanic marketing strategies. None of our efforts have alienated our core customers. As a matter of fact, the education and household income level of Goodwill shoppers in the DC area have actually risen over the past four years.

The DC Chapter of the American Marketing Association (of which I am the president) is soon going to become a member of the Hispanic chamber, and leaders at the Hispanic chamber are going to become members of the American Marketing Association. It’s time we stop fearing the inevitable and begin sharing best practices across cultural divides for the benefit of all.

A Marketing Lesson Learned in High School

As the President of the Washington, DC chapter of the American Marketing Association, I recently had the privilege of speaking to a class of high school students about marketing. I won’t mention the high school, because some of you may have students there.

When I first arrived, I wanted to get a lay of the land. So I spoke to the teacher as I had several times before. She explained the students’ level of marketing knowledge in a bit more detail than she had in previous conversations, and outlined the course curriculum, so I was aware of what subjects may be a bit too advanced for them, and what might require just a little more explanation.

My plan was pretty simple. I wanted to give some information about my educational and professional background; explain the mission and goals of the AMA; discuss some recent marketing trends; and facilitate a dialogue about what they were learning in their marketing class, followed by a Q & A.

That was the plan…

What I quickly learned was that there was ONE question I should have asked before I ever agreed to the presentation: “How many of you are interested in pursuing marketing in college or as a profession?”

When I finally did ask that question at the start of my discussion, I was disappointed to see only a few hands go up out of a class of 30. I suddenly felt a surge of heat pulsate through my body as it became painfully clear that to most of the students in the room, this may very well be the ever-popular…”blow off class”! This was not a core class, it was an elective. Since few wanted to pursue marketing, they must have thought it would be easy. I should have known!

OK I thought…If they’re not interested, I’m going to win them over. I’ll engage them with some compelling information, humorous anecdotes and fascinating case studies. Wow! What a marketing geek I am!

My intro started out fine. But once I got into the discussion portion of the presentation, you would have thought that every student in that room believed they would spontaneously combust if they raised their hands. From there things just went downhill. The heads started to fall down on the desks, the cell phones came out, the yawns seemed to last for days, and the eyes began looking in every direction but mine (mostly inside their eyelids)! Now granted, it was 7:30 in the morning, which is pretty early for a group of adults, much less teenagers, so that may have played a role.

Regardless, I found myself starting to dig for additional subjects to touch on, going back to my days in the radio business hoping that discussions about music, DJs and concerts might pull them back from the point of no return. Unfortunately - I don’t think I the rope I threw was long enough. I had lost them.

It was a humbling feeling.

I have given successful presentations and interviews to professionals, graduate students, the media, and conferences of hundreds! But somehow, someway - I managed to lose a class of 30 teenagers. How could this happen?! Here I was, a seasoned marketer – yet I couldn’t adequately reach a group of “consumers” sitting right in front of me.

It certainly taught me something though. I’ll definitely know how to prepare for my next presentation to a group of high school students…if one is ever offered! I will engage them in a discussion about products that are important to them (which is at the core of my presentations on social media. Shame on me!). I made the mistake of believing that marketing was important to them, simply because they were in a marketing class. Why? Because I didn’t ask the right question until it was too late. I didn’t do my basic market research.

I guess it just goes to show you - know your audience, and don’t make assumptions. Chalk one up in the “lesson’s learned” column for me.

However, to the three students who seemed to find value and interest in my presentation…I humbly thank you.