Marketers, This is Your Time to Innovate and Lead, Not Hunker Down

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This past holiday season was brutal for almost all retailers. Still, Amazon.com was one company that rose above the carnage and stood out with its positive performance, growing fourth quarter sales by 18 percent and profits by nine percent. Amazon.com’s share of traffic compared to the top 10 discount retailers and department stores hit 39 percent in December, up 18 percent from a year ago. In contrast, Overstock.com and CircuitCity.com (since liquidated) saw their share of visits plummet 35 percent and 44 percent, respectively.

What is the secret of Amazon.com’s success? As always, there is no single silver bullet. Amazon.com certainly provides a great customer experience. The success of Amazon Prime, its free shipping program, is cited as a factor. However, Amazon.com has long distinguished itself among online retailers by the power of its recommendation engine, which tracks the behavior of shoppers, reminds them of what they have looked at and makes also makes recommendations based on past behavior of a shopper as well as the behavior of other shoppers who have displayed similar behavior.

It is no accident that Amazon.com and Netflix—another company that focuses on customer behavior, preferences and taste and provides a wonderful customer experience—consistently score the highest on the annual Top 40 Online Retail Satisfaction Index.

The popular saying that “necessity is the mother of innovation” led me to hope that current hard times might actually spur innovation, or at least lead marketers to emulate these success stories. Particularly since these methods that optimize the customer experience and maximize cross sell when the customer is already engaged, are cost effective. Alas, I have not found that to be the case among many of the large companies whom we serve.

Marketing Paralysis

What I have found, instead, are senior managers who seem paralyzed by fear. They are reducing their staff—often mandated by top management—and are unwilling to risk trying anything that is new, even if it holds the promise of delivering better ROI.

Senior managers were unwilling to re-allocate people and resources to programs that potentially had a much higher ROI and also offered a more relevant and rewarding customer experience.

For companies that spend a lot on outbound direct marketing, it makes sense to shift some of this money to smarter inbound marketing or trigger based programs, where a specific customer action triggers an offer or a communication. However, any such shift requires some learning and experimentation, to see what works within each customer segment. It may also require some investments, to make your systems more nimble and responsive.

In the case of two of our major financial services clients, both of whom have been hit hard by the current turmoil, the investments in these programs are tiny compared to their current spending on direct mail or outbound email. These direct marketing programs have become much less effective than they traditionally were. However, there are large groups of people whose jobs, literally, depend on these programs. Senior managers were unwilling to re-allocate people and resources to programs that potentially had a much higher ROI and also offered a more relevant and rewarding customer experience. In effect, they were saying, “If we don’t use our budget the way it is supposed to be used, we will lose it.”

The pervasive fear within marketing departments seems to be dampening, rather than spurring, change and innovation. This is confirmed by a recent Forrester Research survey of senior direct marketing executives, which found that marketers continue to shift marketing dollars from offline to online media, but the focus is mostly on outbound marketing efforts such as email, not when the customer comes in and is engaged in a call center, IVR system or website.

One of our clients, a regional bank, has had great success shifting focus to in-bound marketing. As a small bank, they have been prudent in their lending and do not share the problems that big banks have had with their portfolios. However, they have had trouble raising deposits in this market. A few months ago they started actively participating in a program with Money Aisle, where depositors can have banks bid for their deposits. These are customers who have a very definite purpose and are actively searching for a bank. Our client found this to be a very efficient channel to raise deposits and acquire new customers, albeit at a premium. By keeping their rates competitive and through a well designed rewards program, they have been able to retain these customers and get them to roll over their deposits when they mature.

How did they fund this shift? By reducing their outbound direct marketing expenditures.

Break Out of the Doom Loop

My initial optimism about the potential positive side of the downturn is being tempered by the realization that for most managers, conserving their jobs is priority No. 1. Fear seems to be holding them back rather than motivating them to try something new. To these managers, my message is this: Wake up!

Will you be that marketer who leads your company to greater customer loyalty and revenue growth by being nimble and responsive when your competitors are trying to do more of the same?

Hunkering down may delay the reckoning, but does not necessarily save you in the long run. If the economy continues to slide or even stabilize at these low levels, the pressure to cut will continue and be relentless. The best way to get ahead of this train and avoid it running over you is to:

  • Proactively suggest cuts in expensive programs that may have outlived their usefulness, even if they had good ROI historically.
  • Go ahead and shift money into inbound marketing programs tailored to what you know about each customer.
  • Be disciplined about measuring lift and ROI.
  • Make sure you set the programs up to learn what works and what does not.
  • Be ruthless about eliminating programs that do not payoff and be aggressive about doubling up on programs that do.

Soon, you’ll have success stories to tell in this age of doom and gloom. Success breeds confidence. You might be pleasantly surprised at the reaction of your management to this.

Times like this create new heroes, even within risk averse corporations. Are you going to be the one manager to buck the trend? Will you be that marketer who leads your company to greater customer loyalty and revenue growth by being nimble and responsive when your competitors are trying to do more of the same?

If you’re already innovating, please share your experience. It is time for us all to share success stories that help lift our collective spirits up!

Naras Eechambadi, Ph.D
Dr. Naras Eechambadi is the founder and CEO of Quaero, a world-class data management and analytics platform empowering enterprises to integrate, discover and democratize their customer data. He is a life-long technologist and entrepreneur with over three decades in the software products and services industry. He has been awarded numerous distinctions as both a marketing executive and entrepreneur. Naras is also the author of a critically acclaimed book, High Performance Marketing: Bringing Method to the Madness of Marketing.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Hi Naras

    How right you are about the marketing myopia that has crept into a lot of marketng decisions. It is almost as though CMOs are thinking that if they just push their marketing a bit harder, they will be OK. They won’t of course. Custsomers are on strike! Althogh their needs probably haven’t changed, the solutions they buy to fulfill them have. And they are putting off fulfilling some needs, e.g. a new car or an expensive foreign holiday, till later.

    In this down-market, marketers have to be a lot smarter and to innovate around fulfilling customers’ needs in new ways. Triggers is a great choice. My own experience at a retail bank suggests that response rates can go from 5% to 35% just by moving on from predictive outbound marketing to trigger-based outbound marketing. And trigger-based sales through service may move responsiveness above 50% in some cases. That’s a whole lot better than 5%.

    Graham Hill
    Customer-driven Innovator
    Follow me on Twitter

  2. Naras,

    Your comment about paralyzed by fear and hunkering down resonate with me. Now is the time to reconsider how you are responding to a changing and changed marketplace.

    While the economic turndown in 2000 looks lightweigh now it did impact budget and made many cash conservative. At the time I had a client that provided digital printing services. Among it’s virtues is the ability to highly customize printed material. One of the problems was to stimulate the marketing and design community to take full advantage. Designers love coupling design with interesting paper. The problem for my client was storing a wide assortment of paper, it just took to much cash.

    Fortunately for all involved, the one paper supplier realized that if the printer didn’t attract customers to digitial printing, they would be sitting on paper in their warehouse. The solution, put small supply of diverse paper stocks with the printer on consignment. The printer was smart enough to take it from there.

    Don’t hunker down, find ways to add value.

    John

    John I. Todor, Ph.D.

  3. Marketers, This is Your Time to Innovate and Lead, Not Hunker Down
    Naras V. Eechambadi
    I think I agree to your words and I also endorse the extra cash you may have is best rested on the nest of the innovation. The reason is simple. We have seen so mush of the imagery and a lot on the plasma that we need to have a slight change from the racket. Your comment on Amazon is right. Amazon is always evolving as the new books and new gifs keep on coming in the net, market etc. We need to give the impression of being at the innovative items that are not only cheap but agreeable as we are truly fed up with little cash and exclusive gifts etc.
    The current years are for youth and we need to aim masses to the youths but also the parents who pay for these. Therefore, the goods are for the two sects. Then we will sell. But the innovation, we must have. We cannot stay in the dilemma of the oldies any more. We desire, too, to look more decent in the wake of the fake politics and farced wars etc.
    I thank you
    Firozali A Mulla MBA PhD
    P.O.Box 6044
    Dar-Es-Salaam
    Tanzania
    East Africa

  4. Thanks, Graham. We have seen that magnitude of performance increases as well. It is too bad that marketers are unwilling to try new things when their backs are to the wall.

    Naras V. Eechambadi, Ph.D.
    email: [email protected]

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