Filed under: Marketing Models, Marketing Theory | Tags: control groups, marketing
Today’s post comes from our Director of Analytics and Insight, Tim Altier
First, do no harm. This well-known aphorism is fairly easy to understand as it applies to medicine: Don’t make the patient any worse off than he or she already is. But in marketing this is a little harder to explain. To say that, “communications programs should produce results at least as good as if nothing was done at all” is a start. But most marketers would want to go beyond this to say that for the dollars that I invest in my marketing efforts, I expect a positive return on that investment, because otherwise I would be better off doing nothing at all. Because ROI is the definitive measure of success in business and the Holy Grail of marketing, all of us had best make sure we can measure it accurately.
A recent study conducted by IBM reports that almost two thirds of CMOs think ROI will be the primary measure of their marketing effectiveness by 2015. But how do we measure this? I’d add to that and say, “With a control group!” Every campaign or program should incorporate a control group into its design. The control group is a randomly selected measurable percentage of customers or prospects who met all of our selection criteria, but we did not market to them because we wanted to benchmark the rate of returns, in the form of purchase dollars, had we not done any communications to them at all. This allows us to determine the incremental revenue created by our communications and marketing efforts. Another way of saying this is we factor out sales and revenue that would have occurred anyway, enabling us to attribute the increase in sales to our marketing program. The colloquialism that is sometimes used here goes like this: “Even a blind squirrel will find a nut sometimes.” Translation: the number of nuts that a blind squirrel might find equals the number of sales that would have occurred without any marketing effort (i.e. sales that occurred in the control group). The control group is key here and we spend a great deal of effort convincing our clients to incorporate a control group into their programs.
If your organization has adopted a measurement philosophy, then you probably already design control groups into your campaigns or the campaigns you design for your clients. If you do not, then you will be faced with changing the culture of your organization toward one of analytics and measurement. Measuring your marketing programs is the only real way of knowing whether your efforts are improving ROI or harming it.
Today’s post comes from Bridgz engagement strategist Andrea Krohnberg.
When a business is in sync with its customers, it can be a thing of beauty. An organization that is operating completely in line with the wants and needs of the people it is serving is almost certain to succeed.
When there’s disconnect between company and customer, however, the results can be ugly. The recent blow-up of SOPA/PIPA legislation serves as an example of the power wielded by the C2C (customer-to-customer) community. Congress proposed a bill that would have compromised the freedom and privacy of online users, stirring up a storm of criticism that included major websites being shut down in protest.
The bills were quickly withdrawn as Congress yielded to the power of the people. Had the representatives that initially sponsored and supported the bill held a better understanding of their constituents to begin with, they likely could have avoided a whole lot of negative attention.
Companies can take a lesson from the entire fiasco. Here are a few ways you can better understand customers and ensure that your business programs and initiatives will jive with them:
- Embrace your customers. Invest in your social capital by listening to your customers in order to understand their relationship with your business, their wants and needs. Doing so helps create an open, trusting relationship with them.
- Weave insights into decisions. Give your customers a seat at the decision-making table through insights learned and acted upon.
- Get key influencer buy-in. It’s great to use customer insight to guide business decisions, but don’t forget to collect feedback along the way.
The best strategy is one built around your most important asset. Involving the customer in your planning process will help you avoid heading in the wrong direction.
Today’s post comes from Bridgz statistical analyst Paul Edwards.
Here’s a reminder for all of us in the marketing mob. Every time I hear one of those insurance TV commercials touting that individuals can save $411 a year on average if they switch to brand X car insurance, I want to rip my hair out. Equally annoying are those ads that state that a person can save, on average, $795 a month if they switch to a “new and improved” drug prescription plan. Now maybe I am just a stats nerd, but for an individual to make a decision based solely on the average (in any scenario), seems absurd to me. Here’s why.
Today’s post comes from Bridgz senior copywriter John Andreini.
One of the chief tenets of brand building is to make it easy for customers to engage with and experience your brand. No one would be at all surprised to hear a company CMO or CEO say, “Our brand has to be accessible, easy to relate to.” 
But what if it wasn’t? What if a brand was difficult to know? Inscrutable, yet intriguing?
This is the question that Grant McCracken, a research affiliate at MIT and the author of Chief Culture Officer, asks in his Harvard Business Review essay, Medieval Marketer.
In medieval times, it seems, people were accustomed to looking for meanings embedded in things, hidden messages. “The medieval world took for granted that the universe was filled with secret messages, placed there by God and correspondences on which the world was built,” writes McCracken. This changed dramatically in the twentieth century with the rise of modernism. The new rule was, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Everything was pared down to the essence of simplicity and practicality. Hidden meanings were seen as arcane and distracting.
Today’s post comes from Bridgz account managers Julie Bittner and Janell Lathauer.
It’s fair to say that this hasn’t been a dream year for Netflix. The online movie rental service reportedly lost 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter of 2011, and while this was undoubtedly attributable in large part to a significant price hike, the company didn’t help itself by implementing a confusing separation of services and name change around the same time.
There are a number of considerations to be taken into account when rebranding your company, and the customer should be top-of-mind throughout this process. Here are four important areas where Netflix went wrong:
Today’s post comes from Bridgz business analyst Allan Green.
My wife will tell you I am tough on eyeglasses. I scratch them, I break them, I lose them. Because of this, I was particularly interested when she told me that I had a chance to get a free pair through a company called Coastal Contacts. All I had to do was “like” them on Facebook.
I went ahead and gave it a shot, and was impressed by the selection and the ordering process. Then the other shoe dropped. My frames and lenses were free but there were plenty of other things that go along with glasses that were not. There was shipping, coatings, glare resistance, upgrading to the extra thin lightweight lenses – all this was extra. In the end, my glasses wound up totaling $48. Not exactly free, but better than the $100-plus I usually pay.
I had just run afoul of the latest gimmick in social media marketing: “like-gating.” Online companies have realized that large communities of engaged brand advocates can translate into big additions to the bottom line. But if you’re a sizable commercial company, how do you get people to “like” you on a social network?
This morning I went into my local Caribou Coffee shop for a caffeine fix. It was busy and there were quite a few people crowded around the counter waiting for their Cup of Joe.
I’m generally not the most patient individual, but as I stood there I noticed something. I wasn’t tapping my foot anxiously, repeatedly checking the clock or quietly grumbling about the slow service. In fact, I was rather enjoying my wait. I looked at the other customers and observed that they didn’t seem to mind either. I was fascinated by this and started to wonder why.
I looked at the employees behind the counter and found my answer. The baristas wore genuine smiles on their faces. They were chatting with each other and with the customers, and looked liked they were actually — dare I say it — enjoying themselves at work. I thought to myself, “What a fun job.”
This is employee engagement at its best. Happy employees are vitally important to a good customer experience. These workers are on the frontlines; they are the face of your company. Customers can tell if employees are happy and want to be there, and their bright moods create a positive atmosphere. An employee’s genuine engagement with the customer means the customer leaves satisfied and wants to return for future purchases.
Heck, they might even blog about it and give you a little free PR.
Today’s post comes from Bridgz Director of Creative Michelle Van Santen.
One aspect of customer engagement that we heavily emphasize is connecting on a deeper, more emotional level with the people who support your brand. In that respect, Major League Baseball whiffed on a big opportunity this past Sunday.
With a Mets game taking place in New York on the 10-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, many players expressed an interest in sporting NYPD or FDNY caps while playing to honor the heroes who lost their lives on that fateful day.
The league, unfortunately, put the kibosh on this plan with authority. According to a Deadspin report on the topic, not only did MLB send out memos forbidding players from donning the honorary caps, they actually had representatives go down to the dugout and physically collect them from dissenting players.
This past weekend I took my almost-12-year-old daughter school shopping.
Did I just hear a collective sigh from moms and dads everywhere? Yes, I’m the proud mother of a member of our nation’s most profitable segment. All marketers are focused on them. Or are they?
In a consumer-driven economy, competitive advantage goes to companies that can engage with customers in a meaningful way across all points of interaction. With the complexity of today’s multi-channel market environment, this is not something that can be accomplished within the confines of the corporate marketing department — it must become a responsibility of the entire organization. We are all marketers.
Such is the message being delivered by numerous business consultants, marketing gurus and thought-leaders, but how many are able to help companies accomplish this?
The need is clearly and concisely stated in an article released earlier this week by McKinsey associates Tom French, Laura LaBerge and Paul Magill.
