CALL CENTER EXPOSURE: LIMITING LEAKS & PEEKS

Continuing the Secure the Trust of Your Brand initiative, the CMO Council, along with Envision Telephony, Inc. will host an audio web conference dedicated to safeguarding customer contact center data. The webcast will evaluate the risks and repercussions that marketers face within call centers and provide best practices on how to protect and secure brand identity in the face of potential breeches and threats. We will bring together leading brand strategists and customer relationship officers for discussions on ways to mitigate the risks of brand compromise, identity theft and privacy breaches in contact center operations worldwide. Panelists representing retail, health care, financial services and travel will explore best practices and solutions for safeguarding confidential data and recovering from security failures, compromises and internal leakage. To register, visit: http://www.cmocouncil.org/programs/current/secure_trust_webcast.asp

GET TO KNOW A CMO:

Marketing Magnified: CMO of Nortel is a big job. Do your responsibilities encompass both marketing and sales?

No, the global selling organization is the responsibility of four regional sales presidents who report to our CEO. I also report to the CEO and am responsible for worldwide marketing, which includes sales effectiveness, market intelligence, strategy and planning, brand development, and the broad range of marketing communications activities including analyst relations. I am working very closely with my sales peers on several new sales force effectiveness initiatives. The first is a global sales management system, another is the design and implementation of a global CRM tool to pull sales on to one global platform and, a sales enablement project that provides an online portal for all sellers to access the information they need to get the job done. I stay quite busy with 13 direct reports and 550 other marketing people, who are located at corporate, in our regions, and our LOBs.

Marketing Magnified: Lauren, you’ve been at Nortel for about a year now. What challenges have you faced since you arrived at the company?

The number one challenge has been quantifying the impact of the work we do in marketing, our contribution to driving the business. The second challenge has been creating the organizational capabilities to be a world-class marketing function. I want the organization to move from a traditional selling mode to an engagement model, which has required analyzing the skill sets required and making changes within the organization to ensure optimization. I’ve done a lot of movement of people to match skills to needs this past year as well as lots of “vitality hiring,” bringing in people with the critical skill sets we need. Finally, I’ve been working to create the marketing execution engine across both marketing and sales that drives the sales process. This will enable a 360-degree view of the customer and integrate our activities. We also are working with a UK-based company to further define segmentation to place focus on the most profitable growth opportunities, which will improve the effectiveness and yield of our sales force. Our sales effectiveness council – comprised of sales operations and our marketing team - helps drive all of our initiatives.

Marketing Magnified: Since your number one challenge is quantifying marketing’s impact, you must be spending a lot of time improving your MPM system. Do you have a formal system in place now?

When I arrived at Nortel the measurement of marketing performance was uneven. I’ve been working to achieve a more consistent approach from corporate marketing to regional marketing to line of business marketing. Now, CMO objectives reflect the CEO’s business objectives. I ensure that there is linkage between what the business says is important and what marketing does to support the business imperatives. We now have a dashboard approach that shows a direct line from business to marketing, both strategy and operational execution. We have had a major focus on how operationally effective the team is. We asked ourselves the question: Is the capability of the marketing team where it needs to be? You asked if we have a formal MPM system in place. Yes, I can say we now have one in place. Much of the work has been done by our global marketing board, which includes our top marketing leaders and representatives from IT, HR, procurement, business strategy, and other operational leaders. We meet face-to-face monthly or by videoconference. This provides us with a 360-degree view of our customers so we can optimize what we do. Now, we have a complete line-of-sight into every expenditure that impacts the customer. We had been fractured both in terms of execution and how we spent our money, so the marketing board did a complete analysis of our marketing spend and then offered a recommendation for 2007 as a group. We benchmark everything and have been very operationally focused this past year. We track our macro indicators on our dashboard, which include overall business indicators and within those we can look at granular marketing trends and results as well.

Marketing Magnified: You must have encountered a few barriers along the way. What were the largest?

As is the case of so many companies the availability of consistent data from region to region has been our biggest barrier. I would also say that breaking down internal silos and making the matrix work well has been a barrier, but with the initiatives I mentioned earlier, we are making great progress in this area.

Marketing Magnified: Are you planning on investing in any new MPM improvements this year?

Our main goal is to develop tight correlations between the intelligence we gather to the productivity of our sellers. It's part of the global sales management initiative we are working on to ensure that we invest in initiatives that drive a bigger business payoff and provide differentiation, like better optimization of sales.

POINT OF VIEW: OVERCOMING MARKETING'S RELEVANCY CRISIS

The recent CMO Council “Select & Connect” study (http://www.cmocouncil.org) shows that the marketing function within companies has little ownership of market segmentation and marketing is disconnected with the realities that drive effective:

• Customer segmentation & targeting
• Customer acquisition
• Customer retention

The study goes on to tell us that the marketing function does not have significant contact with customers and that customer advisory boards and links with online communities are rare. It also informs us that there is no consistent monitoring of customer churn and retention!

Much has been written and discussed regarding marketing's position within organizations. So why then do marketers spend such a large percentage of their time justifying their position and their budgets? It is because the marketing function is not relevant enough to its three primary constituencies:

• The customer
• The channel
• The business

So, is it any surprise that marketing has a “relevancy crisis” largely brought on by marketers themselves? To illustrate this lack of relevancy further, results from research conducted by executive recruiter Spencer Stuart tells us that the tenure of a CMO is now less than 2 years, which is half the average tenure of a CEO.

If marketing is to become an important and respected part of an organization it needs to demonstrate greater relevance to the customer, to the channel and to the business. It must also be underpinned with fact, data and metrics to measure its performance and relevancy to these constituencies.

Customer relevancy

It would appear that many marketing functions have lost sight of the late Peter Drucker's simple definition of the purpose of business, which is to "create and keep customers.” The customer and the market should drive everything a marketer does. As the CMO Council research points out this is not necessarily the case.

Overcoming the customer relevancy crisis starts with knowing who and where customers are and understanding their needs. Then you can tailor messages and propositions to meet those needs. Moreover, it is also imperative that marketing has an understanding of how people buy and how to empower as well as convince its customers, as the diagram below illustrates:

As an example, you know engineers are hard to schmooze with marketing messages of any kind, because, like other technical people, they're almost "anti- marketing" in attitude. So, how then did Tektronix get a 46% click-through rate in a recent RF marketing program? First of all we started with needs-based segmentation and incremental profiling. An email was sent to a database of RF test engineers offering a fulfillment piece with a broad appeal. Everybody who responded to this offer was asked which area of RF design they worked in before they could receive their primer. Nine categories plus 'other' were given as the choices. The click through rate was approximately 7%. Those who identified themselves as working within one of the nine categories were kept in lists by category. Each individual list was sent a message relevant to the chosen area of work offering them a literature download on that particular topic. Furthermore, the copy was tailored for each of the nine constituencies to make the message itself more relevant. Each constituency’s message was also given a tailored subject line and heading, increasing the likelihood of the message being opened. The results proved that by listening to what the customers had told us about the area of work they were involved in and then responding in a timely manner with an offer directly relating to that topic we increased message relevancy to the point where almost half of the recipients wanted to read the email and download the guide. The average click-through rate across the nine messages sent was 46%, compared with the average click-through rate of 6%.

Channel Relevancy

As we know channels are multi-faceted, be they direct or indirect. All require the marketing function to be relevant. Each channel warrants an article by itself, but in the interest of brevity, let me illustrate channel relevancy with the following direct channel example.

For our top global customers we use lagging versus leading indicators. This allows us to assess the business transacted in prior quarters or years, but provides us with little insight into future account growth potential. There is little systematic insight to indicate whether we are maximizing our presence within these accounts or understanding Share of Wallet (SOW). Additionally, we currently have little insight into whether or not a correlation exists between customer satisfaction and customer advocacy as a future growth indicator.

Working with sales and finance teams, marketing led a global SOW and advocacy project to:

• Understand current and potential SOW within selected regional customers
• Attain a “net promoter score”
• Develop an action plan to address the findings

The result of this project enabled us to gain valuable SOW insight by account across all of our geographical regions. Through multiple touch points we now have a systematic approach to capture, track and report our “net promoter” scoring.

By involving sales and finance the project has facilitated fact and data based dialogue. We are now developing joint action plans with our sales peers to address the findings uncovered by this project. Ultimately, it points our sales teams towards growth opportunities and has made us more relevant with our sales channel. Equally, we could describe a number of other indirect channel examples of channel relevancy.

Business Relevancy

Finally, this is the area where marketers constantly under-perform much to the chagrin of the CFO and CEO: the ability to measure and track metrics that drive top and bottom line growth and therefore become more relevant to the business.

Why the resistance to accountability? In my experience I have heard hundreds of excuses and very few reasons why marketing is unable to measure itself.

At Tektronix we took an incremental change management approach five years ago to how we measure our contribution to the business. We used defined metrics, developed marketing dashboards and most importantly outlined a performance culture based on accountability for our results in addition to holding forums where we discussed our performance based on fact and data. What do we measure in order to be more relevant to the business?

We decided to look at 3 primary measurement types:

• Macro Level Measures. Assessment of our overall organizational health, efficiency and productivity through our monthly operations and dashboard review.
• Program Level Measures. Examination of our program execution against stated goals/outcomes and organizational best practices, which are reported at our Quarterly Business Reviews.
• Predictive Measures. These are forward looking indicators that predict future performance and/or drive changes in planned programs as indicated by monthly sales funnel analysis, quarterly SOW and our new promoter scores.

Through rigorous focus on metrics and accountability we can now track our outcomes to strategic objectives and to our business contribution. We have quality and business effectiveness metrics and above all we hold ourselves accountable for year-on-year productivity goals.

There is no doubt in my mind when talking with my peers and CMO Council members that a large percentage of marketing functions are in crisis. I know many organizations - including my own - are working hard to increase marketing relevancy and are well underway in developing programs to measure marketing performance. With so many articles recently published on this topic in BusinessWeek, the WallStreet Journal, and similar publications, CEOs are expecting more accountability and relevance from marketing. Pointing back to the Spencer Stuart research we all must ask ourselves the ultimate question: are we relevant in what we do? If not, your replacement will be.

POV is a regular monthly column that features points of view on a wide range of marketing topics from CMO Council members. Martyn Etherington is Vice President, Marketing for Beaverton, Oregon-based Tektronix, Inc.

MEASURING THE IMPACT OF MULTI-TOUCH MARKETING

Good marketers know that successful marketing is dependent upon the effective use of multiple communications and touch points to your best prospects. Success is driven from the value of repetition and timing, as well as using the strengths of different tactics to create perceptions and actions that move customers through the buying cycle. Yet quite often when measuring, companies assign credit for a sale back to the last contact that generated the lead or sale, neglecting the benefit and contribution of the multiple touch points that were part of that contact.

Ideally, you want your measurements to provide actionable information, which means knowing if the investment required to run a specific marketing initiative contributes enough incremental profits to meet financial goals. Do you keep these initiatives, replace them, or work to improve them? How can you make them more effective? The answers can only be found if you put the right measurements in place.

Let’s compare a number of measurement approaches ranging from simple, directionally valid measures to more advanced, statistically valid measures. The progression from basic to advanced can be summarized as:

1. Full credit to the lead/sale source
2. Credit to all touch points
3. Credit allocated across touch points
4. Correlation analysis
5. Incremental impact analysis

Full credit to lead/sale source

The typical approach mentioned above takes the value of a closed sale, traces the sale back to the most recent marketing contact or source of the lead, and credits the sale amount to that marketing initiative. This is obviously not a complete picture of the marketing impact necessary to create the lead or sale, but it certainly is an acceptable approach that can be done with some basic tracking mechanisms in place.

Keep these facts in mind as we consider other measurement approaches:

• In most cases, the marketing initiative defined as the single lead source was the one that put the prospect into an active buying mode. Other touch points helped build awareness, consideration, and interest, but this touch point created action, which is worthy of more credit than other touch points.
• With many marketing and sales touch points reaching your prospects, each benefits from previous touch points and each provides benefits to future touch points. Where the majority of marketing initiatives are response-oriented, this may net out to even in terms of the credit captured and lost. However, where some marketing tactics are better at conditioning prospects than generating response you run the risk that your measurements can potentially suggest eliminating low-response initiatives that actually are making a contribution.

• The one additional debate that tends to occur with this analysis (as well as the next two that follow) is whether the marketing initiative generated a new opportunity or simply reached an existing contact that sales would have closed anyway. The question here is not about crediting other touch points, but whether marketing deserves any credit at all.

In the following example, the e-mail campaign would be credited with a $10,000 contribution to sales while the trial download on the Web site would be credited with $21,000 in sales. Direct mail and the Webinar show no impact for these specific two sales.

The big question that comes up is how to account for other touch points. The two approaches that follow are ones I’ve seen used by numerous companies to help account for this. Both take the analysis further than the single source approach but run into similar limitations.

Credit all touch points

In this approach, a touch point that is associated with a sale receives the full amount of the sale in its total contribution. For the $10,000 sale that was touched by a Webinar and an e-mail campaign, each of those tactics will be credited $10,000 in sales contribution. For a $21,000 sale touched by direct mail, an e-mail campaign, and a trial download, each would get a $21,000 sales contribution credit. The sales contribution by marketing tactic would be as follows:

E-mail Campaign $31,000

Direct Mail $21,000

Trial Download $21,000

Webinar $10,000

Clearly this approach overstates the total sales contribution. The idea behind the approach is to look at relative value across the tactics. Those tactics that influence more sales, such as the e-mail campaign, show higher value. And those that influence more valuable sales, such as the direct mail campaign compared to the Webinar, show higher value.

An ROI analysis that compares the profit from these sales to the cost would be meaningless here based on over-counting total sales. The benefit of this approach is giving more credit to those touch points that may have an impact leading into the response tactic and sale. The risk is that there is no cause-and-effect relationship and those tactics reaching many prospects (such as direct mail and e-mail above) may not be having any incremental influence.

Allocating credit across touch points

The next step that marketers will take in pursuit of their goal to reflect the impact of multiple touch points is to take the total value of a sale and divide it evenly across all of the touch points made during the marketing and sales cycle. Now the $10,000 sale touched by a Webinar and e-mail campaign will result in a credit to each of those tactics of just $5,000. The $21,000 sale touched by direct mail, e-mail, and a trial download, would add $7,000 of sales contribution credit to each. The relative value remains consistent as the sales contribution by marketing tactic drops to:

E-mail Campaign $12,000

Direct Mail $7,000

Trial Download $7,000

Webinar $5,000

This is certainly a step better than full credit to all touch points since the financial values are more in line with reality, making an ROI analysis possible. However, the same flaw exists where a marketing tactic that can reach high potential buyers but has absolutely no impact will show up as making a sales contribution. It is possible that the e-mail campaign is redundant and adds no value when following a direct mail initiative, yet it gets just as much credit for influencing that sale.

Correlation analysis

Moving out of the tracking approach and into analytics, one methodology that can be useful in this process is a correlation analysis. In effect, the allocation of sales revenue to all touch points works like a manual version of the correlation analysis to show higher value for touch points associated with high value sales. By looking across many prospects and the touch point patterns leading to sales, the statistical technique of a correlation analysis provides more conclusive results as to which touch points correlate with sales contribution. This still does not show a cause and effect relationship, but is a great first analysis to concentrate your efforts on those marketing initiatives that are most likely to be effective.

Incremental impact analysis

When dealing with an environment that has many touch points, your measurements should be set up consistent with the decisions you are trying to assess. If you want to measure the contribution of a specific tactic or determine if a change or additional investment drives additional impact, then the ideal approach is to run a market test. Testing your marketing initiative in the form desired against “business-as-usual” marketing as your control group will give you a measure of the incremental impact.

The addition of your marketing initiative may be generating more response as a follow-up to other touch points, improving the conversion rates in the sales pipeline, attracting higher value prospects, or having an overall lift across all other marketing and sales activities. A well-designed market test will capture the net impact on leads and sales conversions, eliminating all other external influences and eliminating the question of incremental contribution.

Market testing is not limited to isolating a single marketing tactic. Integrate campaigns with multiple touch points that are designed to effectively motivate each stage of the buying cycle can be tested against current practices or alternative integrated campaigns. In addition, this approach to testing tactical decisions can also be applied at a strategic level. And where market tests are challenging, there are forms of pre-post trend analyses that can be used as the measurement methodology.

The improved measurement methodologies make marketing decisions more effective. This can also be part of the cultural shift as you work to move from the mindset of “competing for credit” to “collaborating for credit” both within marketing and between marketing and sales.

MEASURING BRAND SUCCESS: CONVERTING AWARENESS TO LOYALTY

For many years brand marketing practitioners have struggled with the task of proving the worth of their efforts. While almost everyone agrees that a "strong brand" is a good thing to have, it has been very difficult to calculate the return on the investment of building that brand to begin with. Over time, many academic and commercial researchers have attempted to link specific brand and marketing activities, such as advertising, public relations, management prowess, and so on with direct measures of financial performance such as stock price, increase in sales volume, increase in the win-loss ratio of opportunities, etc. Usually, these efforts involve some type of "black box" process—wherein many variables and market statistics are input and some unseen complex algorithm produces a final determination as to the value of the brand.

Anyone who has used these valuation methods will attest that it is a long, arduous process that requires a great deal of market data—much of which must be estimated rather than measured directly—and relies heavily on expert opinion to calibrate the final results. While the ability of the these models to tie branding activity to the measurable outcomes are purported to have a high degree of success, the expense of the endeavor puts such valuation techniques out of the reach of most companies.

Since the mid-1990s an alternative model that has shown a great deal of promise, both in terms of simplicity and cost-effectiveness, is the "sales funnel" concept.

The sales funnel model utilizes the Awareness-Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA) framework and other planning concepts. In essence, this framework measures the power of a firm's brand—through its marketing activities—to directly influence the proportion of people who, once aware of the brand's presence in a market, are eventually converted to loyal, repeat customers. At each stage of the sales process, brands tend to lose share. Precisely at what point the losses take place in the process are elements of the model that provide great diagnostic power for managerial action [See Figure 1].

Figure 1: The Historical AIDA Framework

The Socratic Brand Power Rating™ (BPR) System

Since 1999, Socratic has studied many versions of the sales funnel form of measurement and has synthesized an improved version of brand power modeling. The model not only has very strong correlations with current market share, but also has shown to track successfully against directional changes in future share. The Socratic BPR system modifies the AIDA framework to measure four strong components common to most market conditions: Awareness-Consideration-Preference-Purchase Intent - and creates a single index number that indicates the overall efficacy of a brand to move customers down the sales funnel.

A representation of the Socratic BPR is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: The Socratic Brand Power Rating™ (BPR) System

Similar to the AIDA framework, the BPR measures the “drop-out” of potential customers at each purchase decision node within the funnel. The degree of “drop-out” from start-to-finish indicates the efficiency with which the brand maintains control of the purchase process. The strongest brands are well known and convert the majority of the customers aware of the brand's presence into repeat buyers. Conceptually, the purchase decision conversion process can be described as follows:

• If a customer is not aware of a brand (in the relevant market segment), he or she cannot consider it for purchase.
• If the brand is not considered, it cannot be preferred as one of the short-list of acceptable competitive substitutes.
• If the brand is not one of the preferred brands (a set of brands that are close substitutes for one another), it is highly unlikely to be purchased on a loyal basis.

The BPR calculation itself is based on two market-proven realities:

• The higher a brand's initial awareness, the stronger its general position vis-à-vis lesser known brands that must struggle (with both time and money) to make the market aware of their entry; and
• The more people that are converted from simply "being aware of a brand" into being loyal customers, the stronger the brand's long term prospects for holding onto a share leadership position.

The BPR, therefore, is a weighted average of the initial total percent of awareness and the conversion rate, the percent of those aware who are converted into customers.

The Brand Power Rating for any brand always falls on a 0 to 100 scale, where 100 means that 100% of the people in the market - based on a scientific sample - are aware of the brand's products and/or services and 100% of them have a strong purchase intent for those products and/or services. This would represent a virtual monopoly and rarely, if ever, exists in the real world. However, scores for some very strong brands frequently do reach 85 to 90.

A BPR of zero on the other hand represents a brand for which there is no awareness, nor any purchase intent. We frequently see weak brand BPRs in the 10-to-20 range, but very rarely below 10.

In order to quickly communicate the meaning of a particular BPR score within a specific market, the following qualitative scale has been created to describe the competitive power associated with various levels of BPR.

Table 1: BPR Point Interpretation

Calibrating the model's predictive capacity

The Socratic BPR index has been calibrated using more than 250 brand ratings collected through interviews with more than 30,000 individuals. The results have shown that a strong positive correlation exists between the BPR and the current market share for brands in their respective market categories.

The general model includes thousands of brand ratings from technology markets within both B2B and B2C applications. The mathematical model providing best fit to the data is not linear, but rather curvilinear, showing that the greater the starting levels of BPR, the faster the gain in market share for further increasing BPR ratings. While the general model has a normatively high correlation between the BPR and estimated current share, individual markets tested have shown an average correlation of more than 0.900. This means that while BRP is generally applicable to the strength of brands across categories, it is even more helpful for understanding the competitive value of the sales funnel conversion rates within specific competitive environments.

USING CUSTOMER FRANCHISE VALUE TO BRIDGE SHORT- AND LONG-TERM INVESTMENTS IN A FINANCIAL CONTEXT

Most marketing plans have elements that are not intended to fully pay back in the near term – think brand positioning, development of research platforms, etc… In marketing, it’s generally understood that you can make some outcomes happen immediately, but others take some time to produce results.

Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom doesn’t work in the world of finance and accounting where they must follow “generally accepted accounting principles” (aka GAAP). And GAAP clearly dictates that any marketing investments made now be booked as an expense now, regardless of the expected payback period. With only few exceptions, marketing expenses cannot be “capitalized” and deferred over some useful lifespan.

So it should come as no surprise that investments in long-term brand-building or customer loyalty development create conflicts when it comes to forecasting the financial payback. If traditional ROI methods are used, the “slow-build” tactics will rarely (if ever) be approved over shorter-term, volume-generating activities.

The responsibility for bridging this GAAP gap falls mostly on us marketers to start developing a more disciplined way of helping others understand the tangible, financial value being created over time. To do this we need to move beyond talking about the “strategic value” being created and translate it into economic impact. We need to help finance figure out whether, from a cost-accounting perspective, the proposed investment offers a better payback on a net present value basis than the other investments that the rest of the organization is seeking to make.

One way to reframe the discussion is on the basis of Customer Franchise Value (CFV).

CFV is a snapshot of the net present value of your current customer base, looking at how many customers you have, what they are buying today, how long they are likely to continue to buy into the future, and how profitable those purchases are. Determining the CFV is a relatively straightforward exercise you can do with your finance department, subject to making some assumptions about lifetime value amongst segments of the customer base.

While this may seem fraught with difficulty, consider that absolute accuracy isn’t nearly as important as arriving at consensus on a conservative calculation methodology. It doesn’t matter nearly as much how customer lifetime value is calculated as it does to set a benchmark and see how much it changes over time.

If you have a CFV process in place, you can consider how any given investment will impact CFV in terms of acquisition, retention, up/cross-sell, or reduced price elasticity. For each of the next, say, eight quarters, you can forecast how much incremental CFV you will create, and then discount that incremental value back to get the NPV of the proposed expenditure. Then you can compare longer-term investments against shorter ones on an apples-to-apples basis, financially speaking.

Monitoring CFV is not only an effective way to bridge the short- and long-term payback horizons, but also a means of continuously assessing the health of the business and the continuous improvement of the marketing department. Marketing effectiveness can be measured by assessing the actual change in CFV versus the expected change. Efficiency can be defined in terms of the dollar change in CFV for each dollar in marketing spend. Over time, these measures will reveal some clear performance trends.

The bottom line is that if you properly engage the finance stakeholders in developing a CFV process, you’ll begin to build cultural and political bridges that will open all kinds of other productive horizons for your marketing team.

Copyright © 2009 MarketingNPV LLC

MEASURING MARKETING EFFECTIVENESS THROUGH FRACTIONAL PANEL OWNERSHIP™

You may have heard of or been a fractional vacation homeowner, fractional boat owner, or even a fractional jet owner. In general, the fractional ownership concept works well for big-ticket items that require significant maintenance, but would not be fully utilized by only one owner. Have you, as a marketer, ever thought of being a “Fractional Panel Owner”? You may ask What does this mean and how could it help my organization?

In a white paper published in 2004 by the CMO Council, Measures and Metrics: The Marketing Performance Measurement Audit, over 90% of surveyed companies rated Marketing Performance Measurement (MPM) a high or moderate priority. Furthermore, the report mentioned that the activities companies felt least capable of measuring included: branding, channel marketing, sales and marketing collateral, and advertising. To help better understand and measure these marketing activities – as well as all ranges of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) initiatives – it is important for marketers to remember one important thing: Gather frequent feedback and opinions from the people who matter most – customers and prospects. And, for companies seeking to do just that Fractional Panel Ownership™ may be the answer.

Essentially, Fractional Panel Ownership provides marketers of leading brands a fully tailored market research panel without the costs or time normally associated with building, utilizing, and maintaining such a panel. This customized panel affords marketers the opportunity to conduct objective market research via regular and direct communication with tight segments of their customers (and competitors’ customers) to evaluate campaign, advertising, and marketing collateral effectiveness – all activities that marketers agree are both important and difficult to measure.

Which leading brands participate? So far, over 30 brands have benefited by participating in the e-Rewards market research program including: American Airlines ®, Blockbuster ®, Borders ®, Continental Airlines ®, FTD, Hilton HHonors ®, Northwest Airlines ®, Pizza Hut ®, Pier 1 ®, and Zales ®. Because there are collectively multiple owners of the panel (all leading brands) everyone benefits through increased panel membership and shared costs. As an added benefit, because the customized panel can be hosted online, the research insights are obtained faster, more efficiently, and from multiple media formats.

This is how it works:  

• Leading brands invite select segments of their customer base to join a custom panel, which is part of the overall e-Rewards market research program.

• There is no upfront cost or investment for the leading brand.

• The custom panel is developed with customized profiling and segmentation.

• Leading brands use their custom panel to conduct research studies at no cost using their earned “research credits".

• Customers of leading brands receive rich rewards for their time spent participating in research studies.

• Leading brands are protected from direct competitors specifically targeting their customers.

• The custom panel may be enhanced by linking customer transaction data to survey results.

• Custom panel member privacy is fully protected at all times.

• Custom panel members control frequency of e-mail communication.

In addition to the above-mentioned benefits, there are many other benefits that are afforded by having a custom research panel:

• Fractional Panel Ownership supports customized, in-depth profiling specific to the leading brands’ needs, including behavioral data.

• Research projects can be quickly turned due to the proven panel management expertise.

• Custom panels are built at no cost – research credits are provided based on the number of panel members recruited, which can be exchanged for sample services.

• e-Rewards market research achieves leading survey response and retention rates, which means you can continue to get the answers you need.

• The custom panel offers an objective, unbiased research channel whereby the potential “halo” or “pitchfork” effects of a branded study do not bias survey results.

• Fractional Panel Ownership allows for competitive benchmarking, as the customized market research panel is comprised of both the leading brands’ customers and competitors’ customers.

So, while marketing decision-makers have understood the importance of regular communication with their customers and prospects, until now, many have not encountered a cost-effective, convenient, and non-biased way by which to do so. By utilizing the e-Rewards Fractional Panel Ownership approach, companies can achieve a better measurement of marketing effectiveness while avoiding up front investment or shouldering prohibitively high panel maintenance costs.

THE DOWNLOAD

A recent study shows luxury marketers need a better economic understanding of their affluent consumer targets and more effective means of reaching them.

Don Neal, president of of McClean, Virginia-based Echelon Research, says "Most marketers rely primarily on four categories of data: demographic, geographic, behavioral, and attitudinal. However, luxury marketers need to understand who can afford expensive products and the impact of money on their attitudes and behaviors. They need to consider a fifth category based on economic insights." He calls the fifth category "econographic" data.

The study also reveals that 85 percent of luxury goods marketers want to engage in more one-on-one marketing, but only half of them actually do so.

According to the study consumers assume luxury brands have large marketing departments, which Neal says is not true. "Most are good at brand imagery, but not so good at data-driven marketing or focused consumer messaging," he says.

Finally, the study notes e-mail is the least able vehicle for presenting a luxury brand image. More effective methods include direct mail, catalogs, telephone calls, and special events that involve consumers.

Web Analytics Now Mainstream

CMS Watch – a Silver Spring, Maryland-based vendor-neutral analyst firm - has released the Web Analytics Report, which evaluates 13 major Web Analytics suppliers based on extensive vendor research, interviews with customers across a wide range of industry sectors, and "hands-on" testing of solutions.

"Web Analytics vendors are moving quickly to try to become the 'brains' behind their customers' e-marketing efforts more broadly," says Phil Kemelor, lead analyst for the report. "This makes a lot of sense, but Web executives and marketing managers are finding they often lack the human and infrastructural resources required to take analytics to the next level. We think 2007 will see enterprises addressing this more directly as Web Analytics appear more frequently on corporate radars."

The report also found:

• New data mining and customer segmentation solutions are being introduced by vendors such as WebTrends and Coremetrics. These solutions can help enterprise customers focus online marketing efforts more effectively. However, many customers underestimate the analytics experience required to maximize the potential of these tools.

• Partnering with other e-marketing suppliers enables vendors such as Omniture and Fireclick to offer best-of-breed tool choices to their customer base. However, this does not always solve tricky integration challenges amid debates over where the master e-marketing data warehouse should reside.

• Increasingly sophisticated data and process integration requirements are driving a renewed reliance on IT resources to support e-marketing. In the past Web marketers predominantly procured and managed analytics tools on their own.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Marketing Thought, Silicon Valley AMA
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Santa Clara, CA. Santa Clara Convention Center
Website: www.svama.org
This event will include presentations from two nationally-recognized marketing thought leaders: Guy Kawasaki (The Art of Innovation) and Andy Sernovitz (Word of Mouth Marketing)

Mobile Marketing Forum Presented by the Mobile Marketing Association
Wednesday & Thursday, June 6 & 7, 2007
New York, NY. New York Marriott Marquis
Website: www.mobilemarketingforum.com/

A Secure the Trust of Your Brand Online Event:
Safeguarding Customer Contact Center Data
Thursday, June 7, 2007
2:00 PM EDT/11:00 AM PDT
Join the CMO Council for an interactive online discussion about brand integrity risks from customer record exposure and information leakage in the estimated 100,000 call centers worldwide. 

Business Marketing Association 2007 Annual Conference
“On Their Terms: Winning with Today’s ‘Give Me’ Customer”
Wednesday - Friday, June 13-15, 2007
The Venetian Resort Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas
Website: www.bmaconference.com

The 2007 Mashup Presented by Ypulse
"Researching Today's Totally Wired Generation With Technology"
Monday & Tuesday, July 16 & 17, 2007
Hotel Nikko, San Francisco
Ypulse, the independent blog for youth and teen media and marketing professionals, presents The 2007 Mashup, a national conference focused on how marketing and media professionals use technology to reach a “totally wired” generation – Generation Y, tweens and teens. Youth marketers and media producers will learn how to harness social media and technology in ways that are authentic, add value – and are not disruptive. Beyond discussing teens as consumers, the conference will delve into how technology is transforming their lives – at home, at school and with their friends. Members of the CMO Council are extended a special invitation to attend The Mashup 2007, and are offered a 25% discount on conference registration. To receive this discount, please use special priority code YCMO when you register at www.mashup.ypulse.com.

ClickZ Specifics Online Video
Thursday, July 19, 2007
New York, NY. New York Hilton
Website: www.clickzevents.com/video/sf/index.html

4th Annual Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit
Thursday & Friday, July 19 & 20, 2007
Governor Hotel, Portland, OR
Join CMO Council member Cammie Dunaway and other senior marketing & IT executives from FedEx, IBM, Intel, WebTrends, Adobe and One Economy Corp. as they share their insights and ideas on how marketing & IT can work together better, and the real-world benefits of integrating the Internet into overall business strategies.
For more info visit: www.internetstrategyforum.org/ES2007

Transpromo Summit
Transforming Transaction Documents into Marketing Opportunity
Wednesday & Thursday, August 22 & 23, 2007
Hilton New York New York, NY
Essential forum for senior marketers to learn more about transpromo—and how collaboration between marketing, service providers and IT professionals can deliver a new channel for more effective marketing messages.
Website: www.transpromosummit.com
Special CMO Council member registration, click here.
(CMO Council members receive a 10% discount on the show)

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