If it's getting harder to reach your target market with TV and online ad campaigns, it's likely because your audience has left the building. Or it could be they've entered another world - a virtual world. But not to worry: you can still connect with them. Two emerging media platforms are addressing the major shifts in consumer behavior: mobile advertising and in-game … [Read more...]
Mapping Your Company’s ‘Value DNA’
Ever since 1896, when John Patterson, founder and CEO of NCR, held the first training class on how to sell cash registers, the best salespeople have always focused on selling solutions and communicating value from the customer's perspective. So why is it - more than a century later and after billions have been spent on solution-centric sales training, solution messaging … [Read more...]
The Changing Influence of the CMO
The marketing function has evolved in recent years, becoming more important to the success of the business and becoming higher profile. To test our hypothesis about the ways the chief marketing officer has changed and the new requirements for the role, we embarked on a study that involved interviewing more than 30 CMOs from major U.K. businesses, most of them FTSE 50 … [Read more...]
Is It Time for a New Marketing Organization?
Psst, want to know the secret to better marketing ROI? Just hire a statistician, add some complex analytical models to measure the marketing mix and voilà! That is overly simplistic and wrong, isn't it? If it were that easy, we'd all know exactly what we were getting for our marketing dollars. The truth is that it isn't even close to being that easy. Many ascribe the difficulty … [Read more...]
Personalized Marketing
INTRODUCTION: THE DREAM The relationship marketing arena stands on the cusp of its golden age, at an inflection point parallel to that of the golfing world. Just as golfers with the best technology at their disposal should be shooting under par like never before, marketers equipped with cutting-edge technology tools and awash in a sea of consumer data should find that … [Read more...]
Pencils and Towels
Nothing from my marketing past could have prepared me for this meeting. Fresh from having run a large, publicly traded interactive agency, I was in my second month as president/CEO of a mid-size, independent experiential/promotional agency. Earlier in my career, I had been embedded in the fact-based, data-driven world of direct marketing. Sitting around the table were some very … [Read more...]
Where Are Your Customers? Try the Intersection Of Multiple Online Channels
Your intuition tells you that reaching customers more often across more channels will inevitably improve your brand recognition. But with very little research to support this, and given the industry standard of giving the "last ad clicked" 100 percent of the credit for a conversion, it's been difficult to prove this theory. And to further obscure your marketing vision, the … [Read more...]
Addressing Online Social Networks
Social networking has always been about people who trust one another coming together for support, reassurance and insight to provide and defend a common coveted space. Recently, new tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and local city sites have moved the speed, reach and enhanced trust of social networking to unparalleled levels. Social networking sites are emerging as … [Read more...]
The Art of Creating A Community
I admit it: I'm a user-group junkie. I got my first taste of user groups when I worked for Apple - speaking at their meetings was one of my great pleasures. Their members were unpaid, raging, inexorable thunder lizard evangelists for Macintosh and Apple II. These folks sustained Apple by supporting its customers when Apple couldn't - or didn't want to - support them itself. … [Read more...]
Business Process Improvement
In the past, the utility industry could consider itself exempt from market drivers like those listed above. However, today's utilities are immersed in a sea of change. Customers demand reliable power in unlimited supply, generated in environmentally friendly ways without increased cost. All the while regulators are telling consumers to "change the way they are using energy or … [Read more...]
Future of Learning
The nuclear power industry is facing significant employee turnover, which may be exacerbated by the need to staff new nuclear units. To maintain a highly skilled workforce to safely operate U.S. nuclear plants, the industry must find ways to expedite training and qualification, enhance knowledge transfer to the next generation of workers, and develop leadership talent to … [Read more...]
Modeling Distribution Demand Reduction
In the past, distribution demand reduction was a technique used only in emergency situations a few times a year - if that. It was an all-or-nothing capability that you turned on, and hoped for the best until the emergency was over. Few utilities could measure the effectiveness, let alone the potential of any solutions that were devised. Now, demand reduction is evolving to … [Read more...]
Measuring Smart Metering’s Progress
Smart or advanced electricity metering, using a fixed network communications path, has been with us since pioneering installations in the US Midwest in the mid-1980s. That's 25 years ago, during which time we have seen incredible advancements in information and communication technologies. Remember the technologies of 1985? The very first mobile phones were just being … [Read more...]
Managing Communications Change
Change is being forced upon the utilities industry. Business drivers range from stakeholder pressure for greater efficiency to the changing technologies involved in operational energy networks. New technologies such as intelligent networks or smart grids, distribution automation or smart metering are being considered. The communications network is becoming the key enabler for … [Read more...]
Online Transient Stability Controls
For the last few decades the growth of the world's population and its corresponding increased demand for electrical energy has created a huge increase in the supply of electrical power. However, for logistical, environmental, political and social reasons, this power generation is rarely near its consumers, necessitating the growth of very large and complex transmission … [Read more...]