GET TO KNOW A CMO:

Marketing Magnified: Companies are placing increased emphasis on marketing’s strategic role in supporting the delivery of business objectives. How is Visa marketing structured to ensure that marketing strategy is in sync with business strategy?

We have primarily a functional structure for the most part including advertising, marketing communications, product marketing, and metrics/analytics, but I also have a marketing strategy and planning group that ties everything together and has improved the efficiency and effectiveness of our integrated message and market approach. It’s kind of like an agency structure with marketing strategy and planning performing an account group role by pulling everything together to ensure we are supporting the overall thrust of the company. A key part of their role is coordinating and communicating cross-functionally within the organization and with clients. We have 150 people in the Visa USA marketing group. About 100 are deployed to do behind the scenes marketing support work for our clients, the banks. The other third are focused on building the Visa brand. As I mentioned I am responsible for Visa USA and have a peer running the international side of the business, which is primarily global brand standards and coordination of the brand.

Marketing Magnified: What do you see as VISA marketing's major challenges this year?

Well, one is to evolve our brand from a credit card company to a payments company. Our “Life Takes VISA” campaign replaced our long-running “Everywhere You Want To Be” campaign in February of 2006. We are trying to communicate that Visa provides better money for better living, a better form of payment than either cash or checks. We are giving the brand permission to enter in to new ways to pay, new reasons to pay, and new places to pay. Within 14 months we have achieved almost the same metrics as our previous campaign, which took 20 years to build. I think our other big one is taking Visa public, which we plan on doing next year. We are now global, but driving the business regionally. Our challenge is to be more of a broad global company offering clients seamless global services. Another top priority is to get consumers to adopt new technologies like making payments using their cell phones.

Marketing Magnified: What are you focusing on this year as your #1 priority?

My job is to enable people to do their best work to drive both B2C and B2B business with our eyes always on the bottom line. Short-term, we will focus on driving volume and usage, but long-term we need to educate consumers about our new technologies and ways to pay.

Marketing Magnified: What changes have you made within the last year to improve marketing's organizational efficiency and effectiveness?

Our reorganization with the new emphasis on the integration role of strategy and planning happened about three years ago and is now being fully implemented. Since then we have beefed up our analytics group and updated our analytics models. We use several outside companies like MMA, who have very good predictive models. I have also put in place a new vice president in charge of marketing accountability who inventories all the metrics we have and then provides a gap analysis for us to delineate where we need to improve. We are spending 4% of our marketing budget on research and analytics primarily for measuring performance in the areas of brand, marketing programs, media mix, product messaging, etc…

Marketing Magnified: What changes are you planning on making in the future?

We will continue to fine-tune our organizational structure. This is the first year we have had it fully in place. We will also look at how we plan and budget, focusing more on segments. We now have 20 different marketing plans targeting both horizontal and vertical markets and we have someone accountable for each. We need to analyze the success of each and help coordinate and drive the execution.

Marketing Magnified: How does Visa marketing measure marketing effectiveness?

We measure marketing effectiveness in several different ways. First, we use qualitative research, such as focus groups for a variety of programs. We also do quantitative research through firms like Ipsos, which evaluates our marketing message strategy. As I mentioned before MMA researches our media mix strategy and Future Brand is our vendor for brand valuations. Commitment studies are also done to determine the drivers for payment brands and we use payment panels to study buyer behavior. Interestingly, we don’t have a lot of information on the back-end results from clients when we do programs for them. There isn’t a lot of end-of-program data.

Marketing Magnified: What is your system for communicating marketing results to the organization?

We use several dashboards. One is aligned with the informational needs of the Board, CEO, and finance and the other provides information to the organization as a whole. Additionally I spend a lot of face-to-face time with the Board, the CEO, and the CFO getting buy-in on our analytics models. The broader community also receives quarterly staff meetings either face-to-face or by video. We share best practices and learning with these groups. We also have a marketing dashboard that is used mainly within marketing as an action tool.

POINT OF VIEW:

Marketing Magnified Editor Bob Nelson interviews noted marketing expert and CMOC Academic Liaison Committee member Dr. David Stewart.

Marketing Magnified: What’s driving the trend toward improving efficiency and effectiveness within marketing departments?

There is a general sense of urgency for making marketing more effective and efficient that can be traced, I think, to three key reasons: First, CEOs have squeezed everything out of operations and now are looking at other areas within the organization. They are looking at marketing because they can’t get it anywhere else. If you are going to cut, metrics and measurements help target where those cuts should be. Second, fall out from Sarbanes-Oxley requires companies to be more transparent and operate more efficiently. Marketing has historically been a loose function with an emphasis more on creativity and not control. This accountability is causing much more marketing scrutiny. Finally, there is a desire by firms to better manage their earnings. Lots of the tools they had before can’t be used because of Sarbanes-Oxley. They need to smooth sales and demonstrate growth and marketing activities need to be identified to help them do that.

Marketing Magnified: What key areas are marketing organizations focusing on for improvement?

The first is attention to the real need for standard metrics and measurements. Marketing generates lots of different metrics and measurements, but not necessarily tied to financial measurement. They need to develop metrics that link to financial returns, the future of the business, and are useful in business decision-making. The second need is for process. If you have measures but no process you can’t learn what works and what doesn’t and you don’t get any better. Focus on processes that inform decision making through evaluation of programs and spending. And, there is a need for developing personnel that understand the analytic requirements of marketing. They need a balance between creative and analytic.

Marketing Magnified: Are they getting results?

It’s not happening across the board. Some firms are further along in developing metrics and processes and those that have done it are seeing results. There is an enormous amount of resistance, however, from marketing organizations for accountability. The real concern – I think a misplaced concern – is when you begin to apply analytics and measurements you squelch creativity. Many think effectiveness and efficiency will drive out creative marketing. The pharmaceutical industry has such good data that they can tie marketing activity to sales very well; they are an industry that has the potential to create processes that can improve effectiveness and efficiency over time. The financial services industry is also generally doing a good job because of longer-term customer relationships and the depth of their data. Assembling data is problematic in some industries and that restricts their ability to construct effective metrics and measurements…linkages are more difficult to construct.

Marketing Magnified: What organizational structures seem to be the most effective?

A variety of structures may serve the same purpose. Marketing and finance are increasingly talking to one another instead of being siloed. There are now more efforts to have finance and marketing working together. In the product development arena, a more close relationship with R&D has developed. In services industries, customer service and marketing are forging closer ties.

Marketing Magnified: How does this all tie in to the development of an all-encompassing MPM system?

Well, there needs to be recognition by marketing and the organization that there is value in information and learning. If you don’t set up standardized processes you can’t learn and you can’t get better. In quality and customer service, companies have been successful in setting standards. Marketing is at the threshold in developing standards for specific industries. There will be firms that take advantage of standards and will capitalize on the advantages they bring. You have to spend money to create standards that will provide great future ROI. Some standards will be cross industry and some will be specific to an industry, for example, Six Sigma is a successful cross-industry quality standard.

POV is a regular monthly column that features points of view on a wide range of marketing topics from CMO Council members.

BUILDING A MARKETING PERFORMANCE CULTURE

Combining people, processes, and technology is the key to realizing full benefits from marketing performance measurement solutions.

Becoming a more efficient and effective marketing organization, which we sometimes describe as adopting a “marketing performance measurement” or MPM culture, requires a combination of people, processes, and technology. Early adopters of MPM are seeing the benefits, including visibility into which investments are most profitable; a marketing mix analysis across channels, segments, and product lines; and, ensuring all marketers can tangibly measure how their programs contribute to the bottom line. MPM is helping organizations better navigate, manage, and analyze the growing complexity of marketing.

Business trends are driving the need for an MPM culture within marketing

As complexity grows, measuring and tracking performance are even more important than in the past to ensure only the most effective, profitable, and loyalty-building marketing activities are executed. Many external forces have contributed to this increase in marketing complexity, including:

1. Ensure sponsorship. Key stakeholders and sponsors should be identified to drive the creation and ongoing development of an MPM culture. A task team including executive staff, marketing staff, and sales should be formed to drive the processes, reviews, approvals, and output needed.


2. Clearly articulate goals and objectives. To make sure everyone in the marketing organization understands the value and purpose of the MPM practice, goals and objectives must be defined. This will ensure alignment across roles, ultimately providing each team member, as well as the marketing organization, with the ability to measure progress against key objectives.


3. Identify important external and internal metrics. Using the experience of your task team, identify the most important external and internal performance indicators to measure. Be sure to include appropriate metrics for every major element of your marketing mix.


4. Gain agreement on what and how to measure. Since the output of the MPM solution will be regularly shared, analyzed, and reviewed by individuals internal and external to marketing, obtain buy-in from key stakeholders once metrics are identified. Sales, finance, and your CEO should all be involved.


5. Review information needed and available to measure each metric. Be sure to review how the information will be gathered to populate your final output. Do you have access to all the data needed? Or do additional processes or access levels need to be put in place?

The first five steps above describe how to create an internal process for marketing performance measurement. The next five steps describe ways to make the execution of that process more efficient:

6. Implement EMM technology to speed MPM. Using EMM technology, organizations can streamline and automate marketing activities so that performance measurement is just one step in the marketing process. Automation also frees up marketers to analyze the effectiveness of each customer communication and activity. The timelier this analysis, the more flexibility marketers have to refine and adjust communication strategies to ensure that goals are met.


7. Develop a prototype with sample reports. Using the information gathered from the task team regarding what metrics to track and calculations to apply, create an MPM prototype - including sample reports. This will allow you to flush out the processes and gain key approvals.


8. Review and refine prototype. Execute an iterative design approach. As with all organizational changes, creating an MPM culture is a mix of business process and supporting technology.


9. Rollout. Once the prototype is reviewed and necessary changes are made, the MPM solution is ready for organizational rollout. Planning the rollout of the resulting processes, supporting systems, and technology as well as reports is an important step.


10. Assess and review. The iterative nature of MPM doesn't stop after the initial rollout. Over time all aspects of this culture change must be monitored, assessed, and reviewed. As with any business process, marketing performance measurement improves with time, new information, and experience.

Implementing a successful MPM culture requires a combination of people, processes, and technology. Early adopters of MPM are seeing the benefits, including visibility into which investments are most profitable; a marketing mix analysis across channels, segments and product lines; and, ensuring all marketers can tangibly measure how their programs contribute to the bottom line. MPM is helping organizations better navigate, manage, and analyze the growing complexity of marketing.

HOW TO GET THE CFO TRAFFIC COP OFF YOUR BACK: GREATER MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS AND EFFICIENCY THROUGH MARKETING PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

The marketing department is an easy target for cost reduction when there are revenue shortfalls. Ask any CMO and they will likely have a story of the battle with the CFO when the numbers are down and cuts need to be made. All the hype about the marketing and CRM systems that are going to put your organization on the road to “ROMI” hasn’t helped the situation. Marketing automation technology spending is up to “an approximate 16% compound annual growth rate.” Yet the promise of all that new technology isn’t being realized and marketing budgets are still being cut because the processes are not in place to prove to the CFO that marketing is working and the expenditures are not only justified, but necessary.

The focus for marketing executives has been forced to shift to marketing performance management (MPM) to accomplish their desire for greater marketing effectiveness and efficiency. The search for talent, answers, the right tools, and especially positive customer responses has moved into high gear. Unfortunately, the marketing “vehicle” still isn’t moving anywhere. Why? Because someone still has his foot on the brake, blocks around your wheels, the hood up telling you to replace your engine, no steering wheel to direct the vehicle, and by the way, foggy windows with no mirrors to see what’s happening around you. But other than that, the hype is in high gear, and the engine is making a lot of noise.

To put it another way, the CFO traffic cop is forced to keep directing you into the lane of short-term thinking and cost reductions.

Managing marketing performance is all about creating a customer- and data-driven discipline in your organization, enabled with the right tools and information when needed and measured in such a way that every one in the marketing organization who makes decisions gets immediate feedback as to whether their decisions created or destroyed customer value, and generated or reduced return on marketing investment.

There is a simple model for taking the new focus on marketing performance management into action and not just wasting words or a playing a guessing game. It has three basic components:

1. Customer insight derived from individual customers' needs and experiences.


2. Six dimensions of marketing capabilities: actionable strategies, appropriate measures, organization alignment, effective processes, information assets, and enabling technologies.


3. Measurement of both return on marketing investment (ROMI) and Return on CustomerSM (ROC)2.

There has been enough learning in pursuing CRM, campaign management, and marketing automation during the past 10 years that now there is an equally simple formula for making a dramatic shift in the performance of your marketing organization over a period of about 18-36 months. This is the CMO's ultimate toolkit. Not hollow promises. Not overset expectations. Just the reality of how the best marketing organizations are transforming all the rhetoric into action and results for their customers and companies.

GROWING? TEACH YOUR BRAND VISION, FIRST

By now most of us have heard about the missive from Starbucks' founder and chairman Howard Schultz delineating his take on the coffee chain's current woes. In his nearly 800-word memo to company execs (which found its way on to the Web earlier this spring), Schultz lamented how a push for efficiencies resulted in the "watering down of the Starbucks experience." For that ill, Schultz specifically faulted a series of decisions - obviously, in his view, mistaken ones - such as eliminating in-store grinding of coffee beans and the switch to automatic espresso machines.

Whether or not we agree that Starbucks has lost, as Schultz put it, its "soul," we should all acknowledge that Starbucks is not alone in the kind of struggle it's in right now. Balancing business expansion and brand preservation is one of Corporate America's highest tightrope acts. In fact, there comes a time in the life cycle of almost every brand when the line between an extension that makes sense and one that is "off-brand" becomes vague. After that, it's all too easy for a company to unknowingly cross it.

Indeed, the pursuit of growth - whether it be through new products and services, a new way of communicating with consumers, or even increasing operational capacity (as was the case with Starbucks) - often leads corporations into dangerous brand territory. So what's a brand-conscious-yet-growth-oriented company to do?

Schultz suggested that his company "get back to the core." To me, that's only part of it. Revisiting a brand's core values is unquestionably an important exercise to engage in at regular intervals, but I've found that it's equally critical to apply a forward-thinking approach. A brand's success today relies less on simply reiterating core values and far more on applying and activating those values within the context of new opportunities - as, for instance, when a brand expands into new product lines, or enters new regions, or taps new customer segments. At these critical times, a company's leaders must assure that employees know how to execute a brand's strategy with integrity and a singular vision.

Easier said than done? Not really. From my work with brands ranging from Sony to Jack-in-the-Box to Nautica, I've learned that it's quite possible (indeed, it's quite critical) to develop instructive tools and standardized processes that effectively inspire, equip and empower people to envision the desired future of the brand, and then to make the right decisions to get it there.

Tools for your trade

To start with, all stakeholders should share one common understanding of the brand. They must be engaged with it; their daily decision-making must be aligned with it. Nice as all that may sound, you can't simply assume employees will "do the right thing." Nor should you assume that all of your department heads "get it."

My experience bears out that employees require a clear articulation of the brand values and attributes. Consider using a literal framework such as the "Brand Pathway" (see chart) that connects the core company mission to the desired customer experience. You should consider publishing a "Brand User's Manual" to set up the brand framework in a form and style that's accessible to everyone.

How else can you equip people to bring about the desired brand future? Give them tools and behavioral scenarios specific to a particular team. That means, for instance, a list of "must-make" points you can hand out to your sales staff. Or a "Partner Program Toolbox" that'll help your managers decide which companies to partner with. This sort of creative tutelage ensures that your people are equipped to interpret the brand vision accurately.

'Where do I fit in?'

Unfortunately, too many employees think that branding is the sole responsibility of the marketing department. Perhaps they believe in the importance of the brand, but that doesn't mean they see the brand's relevance to them and what they do. Enter the "Brand Integration Work Session." These should be held at every level and for every function in the company.

Hands-on exercises and immersive experiences are far better than mere lecturing if you want to fuse brand understanding together with appropriate decision-making in your staff. Start off with a simple "Brand Value Quiz" that relates key facts about the financial value of brands in general—and your brand specifically—and you will get your people's attention. You'll secure their commitment, too.

Better still, consider producing a "Customer Immersion Experience" in which teams spend a day in the life of one of your target customers. You might also engage people in writing "Brand/Customer Narratives" that describe what they consider the optimal experience a customer can have with your brand.

By sharing these creative pictures of the brand at its very best, your stakeholders will start to see the importance of their own role within your brand's structure.

It seems like everybody has an agenda these days. Well, so should you. If you want to harness the efforts of others to achieve the brand's vision, teams must develop strategic agendas for their business unit or function within your brand.

For example, "Brand Operational Agendas" link opportunities with the groups responsible for implementing them. Say that your desired brand positioning requires a change in your distribution plans. Your sales, development, and logistics teams must develop and follow agendas to get you there.

These agendas shouldn't be lofty, conceptual talk; they should be concrete plans that lay out specific actions, target dates, and delivery goals. Nor should your agendas be mere adjuncts to annual plans already in place; they must be woven into the ongoing business planning of your organization.

What the future holds

Starbucks isn't the only company to struggle with balancing business expansion and brand preservation. A quick glance at business history of recent years reveals that automakers, packaged goods manufacturers, and retailers alike are retreating from overly ambitious growth plans because the brand itself suffered along the way.

Business ambitions don't have to be stifled just to maintain or strengthen the brand; you can have it both ways. With instructive tools and standardized processes, you can align your stakeholders behind one common understanding of the brand, its future, and how to express both to the consumer. Strengthening your brand isn't just about getting "back to the core;" it's calibrating your core to the standards of the future. Starbucks may end up learning this lesson the hard way. You shouldn't have to.

UNLOCK THE VALUE OF CONTENT TO TRANSFORM ONLINE BUSINESS

A cohesive strategy for content and brand management in all customer interactions is mission-critical to conveying a compelling and persuasive online sales message, and ultimately, positive customer experiences.

Businesses today face a radically complex mar­ket landscape that presents many challenges: rapidly changing consumer preferences and expectations, an explosion in social computing, and a dramatic shift in sales and marketing investments to the mobile and online worlds. To succeed, organi­zations must transform their online strategies by capitalizing on new ways of attracting and engaging customers. Businesses must also be able to provide a consistent experience across all customer touch points – including the Web, print, and mobile chan­nels – to optimize the use of content to drive busi­ness and aggressively compete for customer loyalty in today’s increasingly fragmented marketplace.

Content drives your business

Successful Global 2000 companies have to deliver consistent brands, messages, and services to customers in their customers’ own language and across numer­ous channels such as mobile devices, contact centers, email, websites, and printed collateral. While many enterprise processes have been automated – such as ERP, supply chain, HR and CRM – most companies cannot completely automate the processes that drive the customer experience. These processes usually oc­cur across multiple departments, divisions and geogra­phies, providing complex challenges for organizations managing the customer experience.

For most companies, ensuring consistent content quality and effectively implementing branding standards are rare. Information is shared between locations and departments on an ad hoc basis, leading to isolated, redundant efforts that confuse customers. Since more and more customers now interact with businesses across multiple touch points, the likelihood of providing an inconsistent and poor customer experience has only increased.

Ultimately every customer interaction has an objective and delivers a message. The primary goal of any customer experience initiative should be to ensure that these messages are consistently relevant and positive, and that they help meet the customer’s objective. That is why it is important for companies seeking to improve the customer experience to develop a strategy for managing content that can drive business growth.

Manage all of your customer interactions

Content management solutions ensure that customer messages are targeted, relevant, and positive, so you know what your customers are hearing or seeing – no matter where they are. Strive to implement solutions for managing content from creation to publishing, including brand management, content management, segmentation and analytics, and multi-channel delivery capabilities.

Content management solutions help companies optimize customer experience by delivering the most accurate, current, persuasive, and appropriate content. Getting the right content to the right person, at the right time – across all channels including the Web, call centers, print, storefront, and wireless – means enterprises can:

• Strengthen customer loyalty. By providing higher-quality and contextually relevant information to customers through a personalized interaction, positive customer experiences keep customers satisfied, decrease defections, increase sales growth, and increase lifetime customer value.
• Achieve unified brands, messages, and corporate image. Deliver consistent customer-facing branding and messaging across all touch points and all geographies, so that a company’s message and ultimately its brand value are consistently reinforced and enriched.
• Accelerate worldwide product launches and promotions. By streamlining all processes from collaborative creation through global publishing, your content management solution should enable your enterprise to create or edit customer-facing content and deploy it immediately and consistently around the world.
• Optimize customer process efficiencies. Effective content management solutions automate manual processes, prevent redundant work, and optimize efficiency, often reducing the costs of providing customer content by 70 percent or more.
• Provide regulatory compliance and security. Be sure your solution enables compliance with SEC and other governmental regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, corporate standards and privacy directives for customer data and transaction records, thereby protecting companies against legal exposure and security breaches.

Content management solutions help companies employ persuasive content to optimize the cus­tomer experience – delivering the most accurate, up-to-date and appropriate content.

Whether a customer is surfing the Web, talking to the call center, or looking at a retail package, companies know the right message is being communicated. Robust content management solutions handle all the content challenges companies face: brand management, Web content management, segmentation and analytics and multi-channel publishing. Enable your team members to deliver outstanding customer experiences – no matter what channel customers use to interact with your company.

Multi-channel brand management

Delivering a consistent and accurate representa­tion of an organization’s brand across all customer touch points is a key requirement to developing positive and profitable customer relationships. Content management solutions should enable organizations to manage, extend, and increase the value of their brands.

A strong brand management solution helps companies to control their brand and messages wherever they appear. Teams can easily catalog, manage, transform and distribute brand assets, including photographs, logos, audio, video, datasheets, advertisements, presentations, and documents. Business users can effectively manage these brand assets as discrete elements for later assembly into customer-facing communications.

An effective multi-channel solution ensures that the bullet points on the back of the package match the website, datasheets, and call center scripts. Once content has been approved for publication, it is provisioned to locations such as Internet, intranet, call centers, IVR, email, kiosks, and wireless devices. This process ensures that current and approved content – and only approved content – gets to the appropriate delivery channels. No matter how customers interact with you, your message and branding should come through consistently and with impact.

Segmentation and analytics

For many businesses, the creation of online offers, content, and experiences is time-consum­ing, expensive, and often follows a one-size-fits-all approach, resulting in a suboptimal cus­tomer experience. Segmentation and analytics solutions address this challenge by assisting business users in deliver­ing both a richer and more targeted online experience. The solution helps businesses create, deliver, analyze as well as apply content to transform their online presence, giving marketers a flexible and agile solution for converting pros­pects into customers.

Segmentation and analytics solutions also make it easier to categorize, target and deliver relevant, personalized content to the right person at the right time. Systematically adding context and metadata to content, adding tags to all links on all pages, and then delivering and tracking user interactions automatically are achieved by the use of analytics. Business users can then see and adjust which content elements exist for specific segments, and which elements are used globally across all segments.

Final thoughts

Competition across industries will only get fiercer. By creating compelling online experi­ences with persuasive content that both educates and informs customers, businesses can achieve competitive advantage, increase revenue, and build loyalty. Companies can begin building and executing improved customer experiences by learning from their customers, creating a solid strategy with skilled and experienced profes­sionals, aligning their organization, developing a brand management strategy and carefully setting measurable goals.

COUNCIL'S CUSTOMER AFFINITY INITIATIVE ON TRACK

The CMO Council - with support from CMP Technology, Interwoven and e-Rewards - is working closely with leading marketing academics to develop an evaluation framework and auditing tool that will determine The Tech 100 Customer Affinity and Advocacy Index (CAI). The framework and auditing tool will determine the level of customer affinity, loyalty, advocacy, and attachment enterprise IT specifiiers and buyers have to top technology and telecommunications brands. The first Tech 100 CAI Index will be announced in conjunction with the release of the “Profitability from Customer Affinity” report in September.

The CAI initiative is similar to The Global Information Technology Report (GITR), which has become the world’s most respected assessment of the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on the development process and competitiveness of nations.

The qualitative research phase of the initiative is nearly finished with the completion of over 70 in-depth interviews with experts (academics, authors, and consultants); CIOs and other senior buyers-specifiers of technology solutions at large enterprises; senior level marketers at B2B technology companies; and, senior customer care and customer service executives at B2B technology companies.

In addition to the qualitative work, large scale quantitative research with key customer affinity stakeholders is now in the field and will capture responses from over 1,200 channel solution providers; CIOs and other senior buyers-specifiers; senior-level marketers at B2B technology companies; and, senior customer care and customer service executives at B2B technology companies

Upon completion of the qualitative and quantitative research phases of the initiative in early July, invention sessions with our academic partners and CAI Advisory Board members will be conducted to finalize the Audit tool and ensure its credibility, validity, and effectiveness.

The Tech 100 CAI Index will be launched in September through a number of key events, including a media briefing at Columbia University, a Webcast, and the release of the “Profitability from Customer Affinity” final report, which will be accompanied by a major national publicity campaign.

THE DOWNLOAD

New research from The Diffusion Group shows 11% of adult broadband users (some 12 million U.S. consumers) listen to podcasts at least once per month. TDG's latest report on new media usage, Podcast Usage Profiles and Demand Forecasts thru 2012, predicts that by 2012 this number will grow to 24% of broadband users (nearly 39 million Americans).

While the audience for podcasting continues to expand, TDG identifies two specific factors that are holding down usage:

• Podcasting continues to be perceived as too complex for average consumers to use.
• Consumers remain unaware of the quantity and quality of content available for podcast consumption.

“Most consumers have a very poor understanding of the medium or the variety of content available for consumption by podcast," says Dale Gilliam III, director of primary research and author of the report. “This lack of understanding is due primarily to the multiplicity of ways in which pundits and marketers have used the term.”

Other key findings of the report:

• Among those that listen to podcasts at least once per month, 68% use a portable device while 49% listen to them on a PC
• On average, users listen to 5.4 podcasts per month on a portable device and 4.7 on a PC
• On average, those who subscribe to podcast services are signed up for 4.1 different feeds
• 70% of users rely on iTunes to access podcasts.

Survey of C-Level Executives Reveals High Use of Switching Tools

Nearly 60% of sales executives and 43% of marketing executives report using switching tools to reduce the hassles customers encounter when moving to another company. In the Griffin Group CustomerSat study of 500 senior executives with selling, marketing, and corporate buying responsibilities, a wide range of high-use switching services were reported. Among marketing and sales executives 51% say they use incentives like fee waivers or welcome gifts. Forty-four percent report helping customers fill out paperwork required for switching accounts and 30% indicate the use of “switch kits” that clarify steps customers can follow to move the account.
Both B2B and B2C marketing and sales execs say they use switching tools to woo customers away from competitors. Executives surveyed were from a cross-section of industries including insurance, banking and other financial services, food manufacturing, electronics, technology, professional services, healthcare, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals.

U.S. Advertising Spending Weakens in 2007

Research firm Global Insight expects total U.S. advertising expenditures to weaken in 2007, posting a nominal growth rate of 3.6%, compared with 5.7% in 2006. Sluggish housing markets, a sharp slowdown in corporate profits, and a poor showing by the au