My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Erin Nelson, the CMO at Dell, came with a bonus in that Manish Mehta, the VP of Social Media and Community for Dell joined us as well. I hope you will enjoy this CMO 2.0 Conversation as much as I did.

Erin is responsible for Dell’s Global brand strategy, social media, global communication, as well as for the talent development of the Dell marketing teams - where she focuses on reinvigorating the way Dell marketing works. She has been with Dell for 11 years, while Manish has been with them for 15 years. Manish is in charge of social media and communities, including dell.com, their intranet and their extranet.

One of the first things we discussed was the role of social media and communities within Dell’s business strategy - and how they got to become one of the leaders in social media adoption. On the one hand, dealing with customers directly through social media is a natural extension of what the Dell brand has been all about for the past 25 years - having a direct relationship with the customer. On the other hand it was also precipitated by what has come to be known as “Dell Hell”, when prominent blogger Jeff Jarvis and others had some not too flattering things to say about Dell in public forums. The latter incident gave them no choice but to jump full force into embracing the social on a large scale. As Erin said, it wasn’t a question of test, learn, and measure, it was actually a question of survival - with their brand under severe pressure. In hindsight, Erin believes that this has been a huge benefit for Dell, saying that you cannot get into social media by just putting a toe in the water - you are either all in and it becomes part of your culture, or you’re not.

As we argue in our upcoming book, the Hyper-Social organization, we could not agree more. Companies that successfully embrace the social are those, like Dell, that make it part of the fabric or DNA of everything they do - it cannot just be managed as bolt-on programs to existing strategies. It is also interesting to note how companies like Dell and IBM, which have managed to totally transform themselves, were able to do so only after “near death” experiences (and those are my words/observations, not Dell’s). Dell truly rebuilt itself with the customer at the core of everything they do - how they sell, how they market, how they service and support, how they communicate, and how they design new products.

The scale at which Dell interacts with customers online is staggering - with billions of connections every year through the purchase path, the support path, and through the community path of learning how to use technology and achieve more with it. All that cross-functional customer interaction required them to set up a cross functional governance council, with member representatives from across the entire company - business units, marketing teams, service organizations, and product organizations. They meet on a regular basis to share the learnings, and to make sure that the learnings become embedded within all company processes.

Next we talked about the lessons learned from listening to what is being said about the company in the marketplace and from deciding how and when to engage in those conversations. As many other successful Hyper-Social organization CMO’s told us, they do not always engage. Listening is incredibly important, but often times hearing, learning, and acting upon what is being said are the real keys to success - not direct engagement. It is also important to realize that in this new world, notwithstanding that you can have a common brand spirit, you cannot really have a singular voice of the company anymore. At Dell they have 100,000 team members who are experts in what they do and who will speak out in their own voice.

We also spent a fair amount of time talking about how best to measure the impact of social media and community initiatives - especially in view of the recent announcement that Dell sold $6.5M worth of products through their Twitter channel last year. Obvioulsy being engaged in social channels such as Twitter is not all about generating revenue (although that is a nice side effect). At Dell they try to gauge many other things, including level of engagement/connectedness, sentiment, the value that they are adding in the customers’ buying decisions, and whether they add value in how customers utilize their technology better.

Lastly we talked about some of the recent changes that Dell made to their IdeaStorm environment, and how they felt the need to expand their successful online suggestion box concept with directed and time-bound innovation jams called Storm Sessions through which they ask the community questions in real time, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, and sometimes for hours. They have found this real time learning capability, which they use both inside and outside, to be extremely powerful.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The importance of assigning roles to employees who engage in social media - making sure, for example, that technically unqualified employees do not attempt to respond to tech issues
• The challenges associated with integrating acquisitions within your corporate culture (specifically the acquisition of Pro Systems, which increased the number of employees at Dell by 40%).
• How making the social part of the fabric of the way they do business changed the way they think about market segments - thinking more about customer clusters or tribes rather than classic demographically based segments
• The importance of ratings and reviews in leveraging the social as part of your business
• The two types of customer interactions that happen online - disgruntled ones where you need to turn their sentiment from a negative to a positive, and fans, who are brand amabassadors and who you want to engage to influence the influencers
• The importance and risks of status in communities
• How talent acquisition shifted from looking for people with existing expertise to people who can develop new capabilities

As usual, you can listen to the full podcast below.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Erin Nelson [48:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (288)

I had a very insightful CMO 2.0 conversation with Christa Carone, the CMO at Xerox. As with many other CMO’s I interviewed on this site, Christa has had a pretty long tenure at Xerox - 14 years to be exact, with the last 1 1/2 years as CMO.

Being the CMO at Xerox is a unique position in that the company is in the business of helping its customers market themselves better. So not only do you need to market your company, you also need to serve as a best practice for your customers - you need to walk the talk.

Early on in the conversation we talked about the dramatic changes that social media brought to customer communications and go-to-market strategies. Christa described how Xerox is very active in social media and how they have a real cross-functional approach to social marketing. They found that the cross-functional team that they put in place, which consists of existing social media enthusiasts, is keeping a much higher level of energy than typical cross-functional teams. Part of the reason for this is that they enlisted people who had a personal passion that they could now put to work on behalf of their company.

They obviously listen to what is being said about themselves, and they pay a lot of attention to what conversations  to participate in, and perhaps more importantly which ones to stay away from - realizing that sometimes participating in conversations can hinder more than help. An interesting problem that they face in listening to what is being said about them is that the term Xerox is often being used as a verb and returns a lot of content that isn’t relevant to them.  They also get the fact that sometimes you can start a conversation on your own platform, but that often times conversations already exist somewhere else and that in these cases it is better to engage people where they are rather than try to attract them to your own environment. As Christa said, you can build it, but if nobody shows up, you are not getting any return on your investment. Unfortunatelly, and according to the results of our yearly Tribalization of Business Study, most companies do not realize that - resulting in many dead company-sponsored forums and communities littering the web.

At Xerox, they encourage every employee to become part of the voice of the company. They developed friendly guidelines that empower employees and encourage them to use social media on behalf of the company. By tapping into employees’ passion they are achieving a level of virality with new product launches that they never saw before. In order to do this they had to give up some control, but the benefits are tremendous.

Next we switched the discussion to some more traditional marketing issues - including how to deliver a consistent brand experience through a complex distribution channel, and the impact of the economic downturn on the marketing mix.

Xerox has over 10,000 resellers and more than 6,500 authorized sales agents - making for a lot of customer touch-points. While they are incredibly disciplined on branding, they, like everyone else, are losing some control of how the brand is being perceived by the customer. What perhaps keeps  the brand perception across all those touch points the most consistent is a shared passion for the brand by both employees and channel partners.

The economic downturn and the associated reductions in marketing spent has had three major effects on Xerox’ marketing mix. First they doubled down on cross-media customized content (one-to-one) as part of their direct marketing campaigns - dramatically improving their rates of return from their target markets. Second, they redefined marketing programs for which they had long standing contractual obligations like sports sponsorships - turning them into business functions where the customer hospitality actually has a business purpose. Not only did they get business value from it, the hospitality piece allowed them to strengthen the relationship with their customers. Third, and they are still working on that, they developed an integrated communications/messaging platform that has tentacles across all lines of business and that is more than just a tag line or ad campaign  for the company.

Another interesting part of the conversation was when we talked about how Xerox transitioned from being a research lab-driven bastion for innovation to a customer-driven innovator. They still have their research centers, but even the researchers get out of the labs and participate in the periodic “dreaming with the customer” sessions that are now at the core of the Xerox innovation process.

We closed the conversation by talking about the need for new marketing metrics in this new socially-enabled business world. As some other CMOs said in previous CMO 2.0 Conversations, Christa reminded us that there is a certain level of subjectivity that goes into what we do in marketing. There is this gut check that says that something’s working, especially when you are looking at brand based marketing that is not intended to have a direct and short term revenue-generating objective to it.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The role of one to one communications in marketing
• The challenges associated with shifting marketing resources to social media marketing (discretionary budgets vs. headcount)
• How to use Facebook as an extension of your employee communications strategy
• How to strike the right balance between being taken hostage and spending the right amount of energy with those people who have the largest social media megaphones
• The importance of surrounding yourself with people who can make good judgment calls on behalf of the company
• The changing role of market research in defining the marketing mix
• The importance of employee passion in getting things done

As usual you can listen to the full podcast of the CMO 2.0 conversation below.

 

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My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Larry Flanagan, the CMO at MasterCard was a good one.

As is usually the case with these interviews, Larry started off by giving us some context to the career that led him to become CMO at MasterCard - in his case a background that includes a stint in the advertising business, as well as client side experiences with Proctor & Gamble and L’Oreal, where he was involved with major acquisitions. He joined MasterCard 13 years ago when the brand was in dire straits, and became CMO 5 years later. Not surprisingly, one of his main yardsticks in managing global marketing campaigns for MasterCard is Marketing ROI.

MasterCard has an interesting and fairly complex business model. On the one hand, they deal with partners, for the most part banks, but also merchant partners and non-financial institutions, who are basically franchisees. On the other hand they deal with consumers, who are the carriers of the cards. That makes for a business that is not just into B2B or B2C, but also into B2C2B and B2B2C - resulting in interesting and unique challenges as it relates to balancing the marketing mix and branding.

We then talked about the challenges associated with delivering a consistent brand experience when you have as many customer touch-points as MasterCard has - most of which are not in the company’s control. Brand is especially important for MasterCard as it is fully intertwined with the value propositions to their partners. At MasterCard, just as is the case with many other companies, branding has undergone dramatic shifts over the last decades. Larry described how branding went from being a process that consisted of a one way dialog in which companies told the consumers how they should think about the brand, how it’s differentiated from competitors, what the key benefits and value proposition are, to a many-to-many process in which the brand exists in the consumer’s daily experience, and is influenced not only by what the company says, but also by what is being said in consumers’ social networks, and what friends are telling them. Larry calls this a consumer inside-out view of the brand - one in which the brand truth lies with the consumer.

What that means for marketers is that they have to think differently about the channels through which they try to influence consumers. Sometimes the best way to have a dialogue with the consumer is through third party influencers and stake-holders who enjoy a high level of trust within their communities and networks.

In Larry’s view, social media and digital technologies have ignited a revolution that has leveled the playing field between individuals and corporations. In a way, it has enabled word of mouth, which has always been one of the most successful means of influence and decision-making, to become word of mouth on steroids, with everything being amplified and traveling much faster than before. That is true in all aspects of business, not just in marketing, but also in the way we recruit and manage talent, and how job applicants select the companies they want to work for. And while we may not fully understand the long term impact of social media on our business - one thing we know for sure is that as companies we have to be part of those conversations.

One of the challenges facing marketers who are investing in these new channels and leveraging these new-found opportunities to engage with consumers, partners, and competitors, is how to measure the impact of those programs, and how to attribute value to all those new behaviors so that we can influence the ones we want. Clearly there are no good models out there to do that and Larry believes that many companies will develop proprietary models.

We then talked about an issue that is very specific to the financial sector, yet applicable to all industries - that of trust. It’s no secret that the last economic downturn have severely damaged the trust that consumers have in their financial institutions. When you are hit with a trust confidence crisis like this - how do you overcome it and how do you regain that trust? According to Larry, the key to overcome this is by first listening to the marketplace and truly understand what is going on. Next is to engage with the marketplace in a manner that is transparent and value driven. Specifically for financial services companies that means convincing consumers that they want to make their lives easier while not hiding the fact that they are for-profit commercial institutions and not charitable organizations.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The changing role of reputation management in a social media world
• The importance of listening to what is being said about your company and how to select the conversations in which you want to engage
• The skill set of people needed to successfully lead you through the current changes
• The importance of mobile applications in the marketing mix
• The role and valuation of impressions and engagement in paid media, earned media, and owned media
• The balance between global/local needs in the marketing mix

As usual, you can listen to the full podcast below.

 

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My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Gail Galuppo, the CMO at Western Union was both fun and refreshing. Talk about the challenge of being in charge of a legacy brand that totally had to transform itself, with the added complexity of serving 15,000 distinct customer communities. Not an easy task, for sure, but one that Gail and her team seem to enjoy thoroughly.

As usual we started off with Gail giving us some context by describing her background. In her case, she learned to put the customer at the center of all decision making while being trained on Six Sigma at GE Capital. She then had a career that took her from financial services to retail and back into financial services and which allowed her to experience various places worldwide. At Western Union,  she deals with offices in 202 countries and 400,000 retail locations - six times as many retail locations as McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Citibank combined. Talk about a challenging footprint to deliver a consistent brand experience worldwide. As mentioned earlier, they serve 15,000 distinct customer communities, who behave very differently from one another - from Ghanaians in France, to Kenyans in the UK, Filipinos in Dubai and Guatemalans in the US - just to name a few. Their customers are work emigrants who send money back home.

The first marketing challenge we talked about was that of international marketing - how to operate as a global brand, while being relevant to your local communities. The job gets further complicated by the fact that even within their distinct customer communities, there are fundamental differences in needs, expectations, and lifestyles. A migrant from Puerto Rico who immigrated to the US 30 years ago has a very different lifestyle and other needs than one who’s in the country for 3 months or 3 years. And if you thought that was it - think again. They also need to appeal to both senders and receivers of money. With this many permutations and message requirements, nobody could blame you for having a marketing conniption. The way they resolve this seemingly insurmountable and massively expensive problem is in two ways - through a hyper-national brand campaign based on common consumer tribe attributes for all immigrants worldwide combined with a hyper-local set of programs focused on the separate customer communities within each country. Worldwide, their research found that the common attributes that binds all immigrant customer tribes together are pride, sacrifice, adventurism, dreams for their family members, positivity and can-do spirit. Based on that they created the Yes! campaign, the first global brand campaign for Western Union. At the same time they also continue to celebrate the differences between their consumer tribes by having hyper-local programs (like concerts with bands from their native country) that are led by people from those consumer communities - so for example, they have Chinese, Kenyan, and Togolese employees leading the local marketing efforts for those groups in France.

It would be interesting to see if you could harness this consumer tribal behavior  into a true global online community. Members would be attracted to the community by what unites them worldwide and would remain in the community by what makes their own tribes unique. They could hang out in sub-communities with their own people and help one another get adjusted. Western Union could strengthen the relationship with their customers by recommending community-specific products, and services, and by providing advice. From a technology enablement perspective it certainly would work as 90% of their customers have cell phones and are over-indexed on the Internet - the community would have to have a strong SMS component to it.

Another interesting aspect of the Yes! campaign is that the primary audience for the campaign was not the actual customers, but the employees and the Western Union partners who operate the storefronts.The effort, called “Project Galvanize,” was actually meant to change the culture from one where people were thinking of customers in terms of transactions into a much more customer-centric culture. When you have 400,000 customer touch-points worldwide, it’s hard to deliver a consistent brand experience if you focus on the transactions rather than the humans and their motivations.

We also talked about the role of social media in the marketing mix. While Western Union is in the early stages of leveraging social media and communities as part of their marketing - they do have a initiative on FaceBook called World In Motion - they definitely intend on expanding that. They are monitoring what is being said about them in social media, but here too they want to take this to the next level.

Lastly we talked about growth - and whether they focus on expanding the array of services for existing customers, or look for new markets first. The answer for Western Union is both. They are coming out with a series of new mobile applications for existing customers and are also getting into the small business market - not just the generic small business market, but that part of the small business market operated by immigrants. A new consumer tribe that probably would thrive online as well.

I can totally see how Gail thinks she has the best job in the world.

Other things that we talked about include:

• The details of the Yes! campaign and how they measured progress and success
• The importance of a values-based system in managing all the possible agent scenarios worldwide
• The role of customer analytics in marketing
• The importance of integrating marketing with customer service
• The challenges related to recruiting a true diverse workforce worldwide

As usual, you can listen to the podcast below.

 

 CMO Conversation with Gail Galuppo, CMO at Western Union [55:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3549)

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Ted Gilvar, who is the global CMO at Monster (and also a customer of ours), was a really interesting one as I have a fairly high level of familiarity with their business. It is also fascinating to see how some themes, even though they are sometimes called by different names, are recurring among CMO’s - even when they are operating in very different lines of business.

As is customary with CMO 2.0 Conversations, Ted started off by talking about his background and the business challenges he is facing. In his case he had a life-long career on the agency side before taking on the role of CMO at Monster 2 years ago.

Having come into existence by being a classic business model disruptor, we quickly started talking about where the next disruption might come from and how to leverage innovation to get prepared for it. Not surprisingly, the biggest shift on the horizon is the advent of social media and how this allows “the social”  to become part of the talent acquisition and development process again.

When they think of innovation at Monster, they think about it both from a product point of view as well as from a marketing point of view, says Ted. The biggest recent innovation on the product side was to add semantic search to refine searches - and that innovation came to Monster through an acquisition. On the marketing side, one of the more recent innovations was getting people to trial the service - even though Ted did not really call it that. That happened when they organized the “Keep America Working” tour, which offered a a free career fair to any employer who had jobs. In marketing, Ted believes that success cannot be predicted based on what happened in the past - and so you need to be willing to innovate all the time, even when looking at traditional marketing programs.

After this we spent a fair amount of time talking about the impact of social media on the talent acquisition and development process - a process that is inherently social to start with. One of the cornerstones of their social media strategy, community-based talent acquisition and development,  happened through the acquisition of Affinity Labs. They host affinity-based communities centered around professions - where members can network with like-minded professionals and get inspiration to help one another further their careers. With this community-based approach, they are transforming the relationship that they have with professionals from an episodic transactional-based relationship, where you interact with them only when you are looking for a job,  to an ongoing peer-to-peer community-based relationship. With the most recent recession, and people being forced through painful job/career transitions, the reciprocity that powers those communities - people wanting to help others and be helped - has been very strong. Other benefits of this community-based approach include:

• The fact that people’s profiles will not just have static career/job information but will now also contain some social context - which is very powerful.
• The fact that besides search based-matching, the process of matching people to opportunities now has an added social filter.

Another important lesson that we can take from Monster is that while they have a destination site, they also realized that they need to supplement that by being other placdes job seekers are, and so they syndicate their content to other sites. A federated approach like that allows them to get a larger share of attention from job seekers - and especially from the coveted passive seekers.

Next we talked about the impact of Monster audiences becoming increasingly digital on market segmentation and marketing programs in general. Not surprisingly, most marketing budgets at Monster are focused on digital marketing - giving you a quick and accurate sense of what works and doesn’t. Moving forward, community based marketing is expected to play an increasing role in the marketing mix.

Ted also spoke about the importance of social media monitoring and engagement as part of their marketing strategy. Seeing the fusion of marketing and customer service in social media was one of the most interesting learnings from engaging in those conversations, he said. If done properly they see social media based customer service as an opportunity to diffuse an issue before it becomes one.

We also talked about the importance of content in all aspects of marketing. When peer-to-peer communication is becoming the most important form of communication, companies like Monster need to think differently about content - developing it so that it travels in the networks that matter.

Ted also pointed to the fact that marketers should spend more time monitoring the quality of the content that they put out, not just the strategic fit. People vote on the quality of your content with their time and attention, and that is why you need to produce content worthy of consumption. It will be interesting to see the increasing role of user generated content as they go further into community-based marketing.

Other things that we discussed include:

• How they connect their traditional marketing programs with social media
• The halo effect of social endorsements in the recruiting process
• The potential benefits of adding hyperlocal community activities to their affinity-based communities
• The challenges of segmentation when you have a mass appeal and limited budgets
• The think locally act globally strategy for international markets
• The changing profile of people who staff successful marketing departments
• The dynamics of the emerging Gen Y workforce

As usually you can listen to the podcast below and soon we will be publishing a transcript as well.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Ted Gilvar, CMO at Monster [59:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1824)

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Marty St. George, CMO at JetBlue was truly enjoyable – especially since I am intimately familiar with the service they provide and biased in that I am a big fan of the company. JetBlue managed to turn what has essentially been a commoditized service by other airlines into a brand that is far from a commodity.

JetBlue’s original mission was to bring humanity back to the airline industry. So the first topic we tackled was how you can humanize a brand when there are so many employee touch points that can make or break that brand promise. It turns out that for JetBlue, the most important ingredient for success is having a values-based culture - one in which every single employee bases his or her actions on those values. Not surprisingly, the values that drive the JetBlue culture are fairly straightforward and easy to live by:

• Safety (the most important of course)
• Caring
• Integrity
• Fun
• Passion

All employees get screened against those values during the hiring process, go through extensive training on it after they get hired, and get constantly reminded of those values throughout their career. The end result is that everyone at JetBlue feels part of a big team, single-mindedly focused on improving the customer experience and by proxy the JetBlue business. Front line crew members are empowered to make independent decisions based on those values, and because of that values-based approach they end up with a self-enforcing culture that has built-in organizational learning. Off course, and in order to make true empowerment work for a company, you also have to have a tolerance for failure.

Marty further talked about the importance of transparency in forming a cohesive workforce - one that focuses on them (the customers) and not us (the employees). Briefing employees on how the business is doing and addressing their concerns in a timely manner is at least as important to JetBlue executives as it is to deal with investors.

Surprisingly (or maybe not because it is an effective marketing strategy in just about any other industry), one of most effective marketing techniques at JetBlue is getting customers to try the service. I say surprisingly because I would have never expected an airline marketing executive to talk about trials. But if you look at the All You Can Jet program (#aycj on twitter), where people can fly as much as they want during a 30 day period for $599, or their “JetBlue Cheeps” program (@JetBlueCheeps on Twitter), where they announce cheap fares between selected locations every Monday, that is exactly what they are doing - getting people to try the product. The results are very good because they are confident that once they get someone to fly with them, they’ll get them back again.

As usual we touched on the marketing mix impact of the fact that most of their audiences have gone digital. And since 80% of all JetBlue tickets are sold on JetBlue.com, it is not surprising that most of their marketing spend is online - with very strong marketing metrics as a result. Even though I would consider JetBlue a strong adopter of social media-based  marketing and customer service, Marty believes that there is still a ton to learn and plenty of unearthed opportunities for them (and others). Twitter is an especially successful channel for them - providing both a window into the brand and as said before a tremendous source for trials and customer service-based interactions. As they engage with disgruntled twitterers they constantly have to make sure that they don’t undermine the decisions made by empowered front line employees - they do not want twitter to become a court of last appeal. Fortunately that is where a values-based culture comes back into play - they can predict 99% of all decisions made by front line employees and reinforce those decisions where needed on twitter without having to check with those decision makers.

Lastly we spend some time talking about the importance of innovation as part of JetBlue’s success. While the innovation process is informal and organic, it is part of everyone’s job to think about innovation. They also have a few avenues for customers to get involved in innovation. According to Marty, one of the key ingredients to make innovation with customers and employees work, is to be a good listener and to always provide a response - positive or negative - to every suggestion. As with many other CMOs we interviewed Marty does not believe that you need a reward system to incentivize innovation - it should all be based on a social contract.

On a closing note, Marty mentioned the simple mission statement that he has for his marketing team, the 3 B’s - “Brand, Buzz, and Butts.” You got to love simplicity when it works like this.

Other things we talked about include:

• The pros and cons of adding social media information as part of your CRM profiles
• The importance of internal review teams to allow for lateral communications and sharing of best and worst practices
• Their social media monitoring and engagement process
• How you have to stay small as you become a big company
• The importance of customer privacy and the impact of social media profiles on that privacy
• How their JD Power award, which they have won for multiple years now, is going on tour to all their local centers, much like you would have a hockey trophy going around
• Other ways through which to create passion for your brand

As usual you can listen to podcast below and soon we will publish a transcript.

 

 CMO 2.0 with Marty St.George, CMO JetBlue [58:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1554)

As usual I had a great deal of fun conducting this CMO 2.0 Conversation with Rob Spencer from Pfizer - this one focused on innovation.

Rob started out by providing some context around his job and the innovation processes he manages at Pfizer - although he does not call them that, preferring instead “collaborative problem solving.” He helps people from all over the company tackle challenges through electronically facilitated problem solving techniques - and he does that for all sorts of problems, not just drug discovery related challenges.

The underlying process used for problem solving is actually an old one - one that he calls diverge/converge. First you define the problem, you lay out some clear goals, and you broadcast it widely . You then set up a  review teams that includes technical reviewers as well as business people and you make sure that you have a good balance between people who will benefit from the solution and those who are willing to pay for any future solution. This latter concept is a very important one if you want to ensure that your solutions will get funded. Rob will typically assemble problem solving teams ranging from 200-4000 people, and occasionally will run problem solving challenges with tens of thousands of people.

Next we talked about the difference between collaborative problem solving and a social innovation process. You collaborate with people you know and they do it because it is part of their job. A social innovation process is one where people help you solve a problem without knowing one another and without it being a part of their job. Rob uses different language, based on Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept, to mean the same thing. He talks about the head of business problem solving - which involves those people whose job it is to solve a problem in a very directed way - and the tail of problem solving - which involves electronic media to greatly expand the scope of people who may participate to groups whose job it is not to solve those problems. At Pfizer they use both the head and the tail, although there is a dominant use of directed innovation with the head of problem solving.

When we talked about breakthrough innovations at the edges Rob reminded us that innovation in health care is heavily constrained by the human genome - which is actually very small. Being bound like that by nature limits the innovations at the edges - most innovations in the health care space come from within the genome. This  is why directed innovations work so well in the pharma space.

An interesting concept that Rob brought up is the importance of individual thinking in problem solving. While there are great benefits to be had from collaborative problem solving, collective individual problem solving is an important component of innovation as well. At Pfizer they try to have people first come up with individual ideas and only after that do they ask others and groups to build on and review these individual ideas.

As we have in other conversations, we also touched on the role of rewards in innovation. Rob uses recognition instead of reward. Of course there is an inevitable dichotomy when you deal with employee teams, especially with those at the head of business innovation. For them it is their job and therefore they get both rewards (in the form of salary and bonus) and recognition for solving problems. That being said, Rob reminds us that it is important not to monetize what are essentially social contracts. Monetary rewards can also be very distracting from the core business challenges at hand and add unnecessary bureaucracy to the business environment.

We also spoke about the role of constraints imposed by government regulations and patent law. Without constraints you have runaway innovation with people falling in love with every single idea that is being proposed.

Other things we talked about:

• The importance of technology to scale innovation to the far corners of your organization
• The need for proper framing of the challenge that is being considered - and the need to constraint the problem as well as expand the scope of the problem
• The benefits of scale in innovation
• How altruism may be a level above the highest level in the Maslow pyramid
• The importance of details and hard work in innovation
• How you could leverage fear to trigger altruism, but only occasionally - as opposed to good behavior which can be done chronically
• The importance of flexibility to change in promoting and recruiting people

As usual you can listen to the podcast below and soon we will publish a transcript.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Rob Spencer, Pfizer [56:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1275)

I just had another great CMO 2.0 Conversation - this time with Mark Gambill, the CMO at CDW. As usual we started by having Mark provide some context about his company and his focus there. In this case the company is an $8B provider of software, hardware and services to a variety of industries that has more than 400,000 customers.

The conversation then moved to how some of fundamental changes in the industry – e.g., the fact that people are making their buying decisions based on information they gain online and in social networks, that they increasingly bring their own tools to work, and that mobile devices are more and more looking like full fledged computers – is affecting marketing. Mark talked about the blurring lines between consumer and business applications and about the need to not flail as a marketer when it comes to integrating social media as part of your marketing mix.

He also talked about the need to segment customers differently and how deep consumer research allowed them to uncover six customer profiles that help them better answer the questions: “what do we stand for?”, “who do we serve?”, and “how do we win?” Interestingly enough (and we see more and more marketers follow this trend), much of the segmentation was based on behavioral characteristics of potential buyers and not traditional market segment data. Other information that came with the profiles include data on where those people like to hang out, how they prefer to receive and consume their information, who else they are listening to, and more. All of this allows them to create and distribute content - both online and offline - in a much more effective way than what they were able to do before.

We then talked about the challenges of developing a recognizable brand when you do not manufacture your own products but instead distribute those of companies that may have pretty strong brands themselves. The way CDW tackles this complex problem is by being “technostic” (meaning technology agnostic) and by positioning themselves as a trusted solution partner. They also realize that buyers establish trusted relations with people more so than with companies or organizations, and so every customer gets a dedicated account manager. With a maniacal focus on customized personal service for every customer they hope that this is what will allow them to deliver against that “trusted partner” brand promise.

We also talked fairly extensively about CDW’s commitment to and use of social media. They had started a small business community but then decided that they would be better served by engaging, as participants as well as sponsors, in places where people were already hanging out. (It is always good to speak with a marketer who resists “the not invented here syndrome” that we have witnessed so many times when companies deploy communities as part of their business processes. They feel like the only way to be successful is by hosting the community on their own platform, even if a strong community already exists on some other platform.) Mark sees social media as a meaningful way to engage people in the context of customer support, but he thinks there is a scaling issue when it comes to leveraging it for lead generation. This is something we have heard from other marketers who need hundreds of thousands, if not millions of customers to be successful. The key here may be to develop a comprehensive leader/ambassador strategy and to understand how those people will help amplify everything you do across the various platforms where your customers, prospects, and detractors hang out.

Although, as usual, we ran out of time, we did get to talk about the types of people that Mark is looking for in staffing his marketing department. Besides finding people who are a good fit from a corporate culture point of view, Mark is looking for well rounded people who, while they may not yet have the full battery of skills one might desire, can be trusted to learn them as well as embrace future skills that we don’t yet know will be valuable. Another important hiring criteria in Mark’s business is diversity. Mark is also convinced that a CMO has to increasingly become a well rounded generalist, with knowledge that goes well beyond marketing.

Other things that we discussed include:

• The importance of face-to-face meetings in customer relations
• The importance of good customer service in brand building
• How they are monitoring what is being said about them in the social media space and how they are engaging
• The importance of understanding “human 1.0″ in explaining what is happening in a web 2.0 world
• The importance of appealing to the altruistic part of the brain instead of the pleasure side of the brain when running communities
• The impact of the “green wave” on technology sales
• The importance of ROI, customer loyalty and other marketing metrics

As usual you can listen to the interview below and soon we will put up a transcript of the call.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Mark Gambill, CMO CDW [59:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1843)

My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Ram Menon was an enlightening one, and definitely another conversation with some real teachable moments. Ram is a no-nonsense marketer with a great deal of common sense.

Ram has an interesting take on the changes in technology marketing. He believes that the 90’s spoiled technology marketers. There was an unprecedented technology boom with plenty of IT  budgets to go around, so as a technology marketer the only thing you had to do was set up a pretty web site, put out some collateral and declare victory. In the last few years however, budgets disappeared, technology buyers became disillusioned with technology solutions, and new technologies turned traditional marketing on its head. Consequently, the marketers who did not keep pace are finding themselves in tough times.

One of Ram’s interesting points of view is that bonding is the new branding. You have to bond with 1000’s of people, and at any time…you can no longer plan for a launch, come up with nice messaging, launch and then forget about things until the next launch. In todays world we are facing launches that are on 24/7 and that require ongoing bonding to all of our constituencies.

Marketers need a good understanding of the technologies that are at their disposal to allow them to become better marketers. While he does not see much of a change in the type of people they hire in marketing, that is probably due to their culture of focusing on hiring people who are smarter than you - not necessarily people who have a lot of past experience. For Ram, past experience is no indication of future success.

We also talked about the fact that even though the number of different value propositions for different buyers keeps increasing and that the channels through which you can reach those buyers keeps multiplying, his job as a marketer has in fact become easier and cheaper. The main reason for that is that the most important conversations are no longer the ones you have with your customers and prospects, but instead those that happen among them.

That led to an interesting follow up conversation on their use of communities. They run both a customer community as well as a sales community. Early on they realized that by providing a platform for customers to talk with one another and to help one another, they could in fact make their own job easier. Plus it allowed them to reduce their cost of customer support in the process. They also understood that for the community to work, they needed to be ready to engage - so they encouraged all their engineers to engage with their customers through the community. On the sales side things, they found the same forces at work. By giving sales people a platform in which to help one another, they found that sales professionals started to actually do that across geographic boundaries. Not only that, they started modifying marketing materials and mashing up content to make it work for micro-segments that marketing could not have served in a cost effective way. In effect, they turned their sales process into a social process.

Of course we could not have had a conversation with the CMO of a technology provider who markets a sales and marketing analytics solution without talking about marketing measurements. As we have seen in previous CMO 2.0 Conversations, one of the most important metrics for Ram is customer loyalty. And while they are very metrics-driven, which could in some cases stifle innovation, they support marketing innovation through a dedicated marketing R&D budget.

Other things that we discussed include:

• Offshoring marketing
• How they use social media as part of marketing
• Integration between marketing and customer service
• The issues related to letting go of control
• The need for marketing to formalize sales enablement
• The shift from physical events to virtual events in the marketing mix

As usual, you can listen to the podcast below and we will be posting the transcript soon.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Ram Menon, CMO Tibco [51:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2281)

I was looking forward to interviewing a marketing executive from the airline industry, and speaking with Virgin America’s CMO Porter Gale was no disappointment.

As usual, we started the conversation by setting some context – in this case we are talking about a new airline which started flying just one and a half years ago, has 28 airplanes, and 1,400 employees.

The motivation for Virgin to start a new airline in the US was driven primarily by the opportunity that presented itself to redefine the category in the face of rapidly deteriorating customer expectations. I think that is putting it rather mildly – and would have categorized the state of the industry as one in which the service providers seem determined to make their customers lives’ miserable while they are with them. At any rate, it was a perfect fit for Richard Branson’s philosophy for Virgin companies to be customer champions.

We spent a fair amount of time discussing the essence of the Virgin America brand, and how they are making deliberate efforts to humanize the brand and the service. In order to ensure consistency of this experience throughout all the customer touch-points, and to get buy-in from all the employees, they have a very rigorous hiring and training process. Showing respect and a human face to the customer may seem like common sense, but it is a tough thing to scale – it requires the right culture and zero tolerance for mediocrity. Another important aspect of Virgin America’s success in humanizing their brand is not to brainwash people into telling the corporate story, but rather to empower them to tell their own stories. To support that personal passion they also continuously focus on making sure that they have a product that employees can be proud of – so it is a big closed loop system.

Porter spoke at length about the importance of social media in customer support, branding, innovation, and marketing. From how they monitor everything that is being said about them and deploy customer recovery actions when someone twitters or blogs about a bad experience during flight, to how they empower people to act as they see fit when they see some negative comment online. For some reason they attract a very tech-savvy crowd, which makes it a natural choice for them to social-media-fy their marketing, or to use Porter’s words “to explore the digital space, look at all of the trends that are happening, the social media changes, and find more ways to engage and have deeper relationships with people who love the brand through digital.”

Another interesting aspect of Virgin America’s marketing strategy is that they find themselves to be not just be an airline or travel company, but also a media company (which I think will be increasingly true for companies who are successful in harnessing consumer movements, communities and tribes). In the case of Virgin America, they were basically able to fund the launch of a new city through a paid media partnership with HBO.

Other topics we covered include:

• How there are totally new career paths in marketing
• How they are continuously trying to reinvent the category
• The importance of fairness in how you deal with customer problems
• How they focus hard on ensuring brand consistency throughout the travel “ribbon” – including the flight experience, the website, check-in, and where they can, even the terminal experience.
• How Wifi in the airline industry is a true game changer
• The role of advertising in awareness building when launching new markets and new offerings and  the shift to social media after awareness is created.
• How they were able to create a movement before they even flew – rallying people around the cause to let Virgin America fly

When you have an airline and passengers write to you to tell you that they wished the flight was longer, or that they rescheduled their honeymoon so they could fly with you – you know you are doing something right. I wish I could interview some other CMO’s from the industry to get their perspective.

As usual, you can listen to the podcast below and we will start posting transcripts next week.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Porter Gale, CMO Virgin America [58:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2275)

It was fun to have a CMO 2.0 Conversation with Pete Blackshaw for a variety of reasons. First, it was reminiscent of a great SkypeCast conversation he and I had a few years back (right after Skype launched Skypecasts - we felt like pioneers), but also because he brings three distinct angles to the CMO conversation - that of a CMO, that of a person who markets to marketers, and that of a thought leader and author. Pete is the author of Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000, and also blogs at ConsumerGeneratedMedia.com.

We delved straight into one of Pete’s favorite topics, which is what he calls the great “Conversational Divide” that exists between marketing and customer service. Pete believes, and I agree, that is unfortunate that customer service is so frequently considered a non-strategic part of the business, with little integration between what companies know about their customers from their CRM systems, their social media strategies, the promises they make through marketing , and what actually happens in their customer service departments when they talk with customers. Pete’s take is that it is time for CMO’s to step up to the plate and define a unified conversational ecosystem. It makes no sense, he says, to have different rules in the different parts of the organization.

Companies should also start capturing information about their customers’ influence in their CRM system, i.e., do they have a popular blog, do they have a lot of twitter followers, etc. - especially since the people who typically use the customer service back channels are the same people who tend to use megaphones to express their dissatisfaction. If you do it right you could develop a so-called user contribution system, where consumers help one another and become advocates for the brand, reducing not only your customer support cost but also other costs like consumer research.

Pete talked a lot about the importance of credibility in the age of consumer generated media, and described in detail the six drivers of credibility: trust, authenticity, transparency, listening, responsiveness, and affirmation. He is convinced that trust is perhaps one of the most important competitive differentiators that companies can develop.

We also spent a fair amount of time talking about the benefits of building brand communities, and whether companies should all have their own or affiliate with one another to deliver better value to their members. And we discussed the community efforts at Intuit as we both have familiarity with Scott Wilder’s work - and especially highlighted the importance of setting up a cross-functional center for excellence to capture all the potential benefits of communities, as well as the power of a credentialing model to ensure quality control when customers help one another.

Other things that we discussed include:

• How Dell Hell could have been prevented
• The importance of emotion and fairness in word of mouth
• How the new customer service motto might be “this company is being monitored for quality improvements”
• How there is a real risk that bad marketers will spoil it for the rest of us
• The symbiotic relation between traditional marketing tools and social media based tools

We wrapped up the conversation by talking about the challenges that Pete is facing as a marketer, and how he measures progress and success. Not surprisingly, his primary way to measure success is by monitoring his client advocacy. Are customer willing to get on a stage with him? Are they willing to recommend his company?

We also talked about the challenges associated with competing in a world with many free offerings - and with Nielsen actually having their own free offerings. Interestingly enough, the way Pete looks at it is the same way you would look at it from a consumer packaged goods manufacturer’s perspective like P&G - which is that “sampling” does lead to purchases.

As usual you can listen to the recorded podcast below, and we will put up a transcript as soon as we can.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Pete Blackshaw, EVP Nielsen Online [60:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2258)

I had the pleasure of conducting another CMO 2.0 Conversation with many teachable moments - this one with Mark Colombo, the Senior Vice President of Digital Access Marketing at FedEx. For the sake of full disclosure, I should say that Mark is a client of Beeline Labs, the company I co-founded and where I am a partner.

Mark set the stage by giving an overview of the FedEx business, a $36B company.  Mark described his business as a “network business,” with very similar characteristics as telecom carriers, railroads, and airlines - facing unique challenges in that they can not easily reconfigure their network based on specific market segment requirements.

We talked a fair amount about the changes in marketing caused by shifts in audience expectations. In this case the audience expectation shift has to do with how customers interact with FedEx and with one another. People increasingly want to interact on their own terms. In Asia that may mean through a text based interface on a cell phone, while in the US people expect a richer Web experience. Meeting expectations gets further complicated by generational differences - with some people using technology only when they interact with FedEx, and others expecting the same rich interfaces that they have grown accustomed to in using other online environments and applications. FedEx now handles 13 million digital experiences with their customers every day, making them not just a business services company, but also a software application development company - and one that has to deliver on its brand promise of trust and reliability through all those software applications. Managing the shift from having most of your customer touch-points happening through digital interfaces instead of through humans (the FedEx drivers) is not a trivial challenge.

From a brand perspective marketing has gone through some interesting transitions. In the 50’s and 60’s, brands used to be built on a set of attributes. Now brands are built by customers, one experience at a time, and those experiences are, obviously, more and more online experiences. Fedex has seen additional changes in branding as their offering is increasingly becoming a critical part of their customers’ offerings - thus becoming an “ingredient brand.”

Mark also talked about changes in market research and in measuring marketing effectiveness - with the most important measure of marketing effectiveness at FedEx now being customer loyalty instead of customer satisfaction. It’s not hard to understand when you realize that a 1% increase in loyalty comes with an extra $100M straight into the bottom line. Interestingly enough, loyalty is strongest among people who had a problem that was resolved to their satisfaction, not among those that never had a problem. When discussing market research we also talked about the power of the 2.0 world and how it makes it so much easier to get instant feedback.

Other interesting topics that we touched on include:

• How Fedex uncovered affinity-based group behavior in their community, and the role of cognitive surplus in brand champions and customer (self-)support
• How the new “word of mouth” is increasingly coupled with customer support
• How they set up a listening infrastructure to monitor what is being said about the company and to be able to quickly turn negative word of mouth into positive word of mouth to increase customer loyalty
• The importance of co-marketing with customers
• The role of listening in innovation, and how listening is the most important thing you can do as a marketer
• How fairness plays an important role in customer loyalty. You can fail to solve a person’s problem but still instill loyalty if what you did appeared to be fair in the eyes of the customer.

Mark also touched on the type of marketing people he is looking for - well rounded people with strong technical skills who are good listeners.

You can listen to the recorded call below and soon we will be posting a transcript of the conversation as well.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Mark Colombo, SVP Marketing at FedEx [60:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2252)

Another great CMO 2.0 Conversation - this time with Susan Lavington, the SVP of Marketing at USA Today. It’s always fun to talk with someone who is passionate about her job. In this case, being the head of marketing at USA Today was a dream come through for Susan so there was plenty of passion in this conversation.

We set some context by talking about Susan’s personal journey on her way to become head of marketing at USA Today, the changes she had seen the industry and her profession undergo over the years, and by looking at her current responsibilities as head of marketing.

USA Today seems to be weathering the storm that is currently hitting the newspaper industry better than others (they are actually growing circulation) in part by having been designed from the ground up to be internet compatible - small bite sized articles, quick reads, and color pictures. They also benefited from never relying on classified ad revenue.

They went “digital” early on and after a false start they developed a very rich online experience for their readers. Unlike many other publishers, they seem to try to put the user at the center of the online experience and not the content - although as with any community both content and members/readers form a virtuous circle. One thing that I had not thought about is how hard it is for a publishing company to develop a product development mindset. In traditional publishing there is no such thing as a beta product – you work really hard to deliver the best product, every day. But when you start having online offerings, you need to think like a traditional product development company – which features will you prioritize over others, how will you test the product, how long will you be in beta, etc.

By going digital and social, they were able to do two things differently from a market segmentation point of view. First they were able to address market niches that they knew they had but could not effectively serve through their print product, e.g., cruising families with kids. Second, they were able to uncover tribes that traditional market segmentation had not exposed, e.g., the mixed martial arts community or the gaming community.

It was interesting to hear Susan talk about consumers all the time. On the one hand you would expect nothing less from a head of marketing, but on the other hand, and for a newspaper whose slogan is “capture the conversation of the nation,” you know that the content side of the house does not think of them as consumers. Susan talked about how those creative tensions always get resolved by going back to their original mission.

Other interesting topics that we covered include:

• How the half-life of news poses interesting challenges in how to recommend popular content to community members - some content becomes stale overnight while other content is very much evergreen.
• The changing expectations of their advertisers and the increasing need for USA Today to do research as part of their offering so they can come back with additional metrics.
• The shift from “we bring the audience and you bring the creative and if it does not work it’s your fault”  attitude that newspapers had for years to that of a true partnership - “if it doesn’t work it’s our collective problem”
• How the marketing culture changed over the years and how the skillset that she is looking for in marketing hires has changed - flexibility over specialization, i.e., you do not know what tomorrow will bring.

You can listen to the podcast below, and in the near future we will actually start posting transcripts from the interview.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Susan Lavington, SVP Marketing USA Today [59:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2340)

Today’s CMO 2.0 Conversation with GE’s CMO Beth Comstock was packed with interesting insights. On a personal note it was certainly neat to get a one hour personal marketing tutorial from the CMO of one the largest companies in the world. By working in a real marketer’s laboratory, Beth must be one of the luckiest marketers around.

We touched on three main topics: the role of a corporate marketing group in a large diversified company with strong operating companies, how to foster innovation at GE, and general changes in marketing.

As a central corporate marketing group, Beth’s team is responsible for sales growth, innovation, and the GE brand platform. Even though the company has very diverse operating companies, her team has also been able to find opportunities for developing a customer platform (i.e., cross-sell accross business units), as well as product platforms (i.e., ecoimagination, the GE green platform, and a cross-operating-business battery project).

On the innovation side of things we touched on the importance of having a robust pipeline of innovations and on the need to have the right resources deployed across the right portfolio of innovations. We also discussed the need to kill ideas faster and the opportunity to create an innovation marketplace for ideas that may not be a good fit for the company. Beth described GE’s robust innovation process, and how they have both a formal process that very much resembles an in-house venture process as well as an online imagination network that relies much more on the wisdom of the crowd - in this case their employees. Other innovation related topics we covered include:

• how they use outside coaches and customer discovery sessions to bring outside insights into their innovation process
• the importance of including detractors in the innovation process
• how innovation is not just about technology innovation, but also about commercial innovations - and how they are constantly looking for new ideas around product, space, and business model
• the cultural changes required for fast-paced innovations and the creative tensions between being a process-driven organization and the inherent messiness and chaotic nature of innovation
• how in some cases you need to step away from traditional metrics to measure progress and success of ideas that are being incubated

We also talked about the changes afoot in marketing and how the new marketing challenge is in fact a knowledge management challenge - knowing enough about your customers so you can feed them data that will make them smarter.

On the need for new marketing skills Beth listed what she is looking for in marketers - people with new world skills, people who can simplify things and engage in customer communities, and people who can curate an experience for the customer. She also described how they set up a team of “rogue marketers” within the company, whose job it is to come up with rogue marketing techniques. It would be really interesting if at some point they would publish their findings in rogue marketing innovations.

You can listen to the podcast below, in the near future we will also post the transcript from the interview.

 

 CMO 2.0 Conversation with Beth Comstock, CMO at GE [57:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (5293)