Jet Blue Tweets Discount Air Fares - New Promotion Approach

Jet Blue and United have starting using Twitter for discount air fare promotions. This is an interesting test of an approach to generate marketing ROI from Twitter. As reported in this USA Today article, Jet Blue is sending out Tweets, typically on Mondays, announcing reduced airfares on unsold seats. The trick is that followers must react quickly to capture these discounted rates. (By the way, love the name "Cheeps" even though it may be too downscale and may cheapen the brand equity.) A recent tweet offered a $9 fare from JFK to Nantucket. It's a hihgly targeted approach to fill underutilized and expiring capacity by offering these discounts to a limited audience without widespread exposure to the rest of the market. There's always a new wrinkle for brand marketers... If you are small business, how might you use this approach to promote your brand in your local market?

Marketing Dashboard

A Google search on "Marketing Dashboard" generates 285,000 responses. That's a phenomenal number given the relatively few businesses that actually use a marketing dashboard.

After speaking with several marketers recently about the use of dashboards, I came to a seemingly obvious but critical conclusion. A dashboard is only as good as the data feeding it. A marketing dashboard is only useful if it ties to the marketing objectives and performance goals of the organization. Without this connection between marketing data, marketing objectives and business performance metrics, the dashboard is only a sexy gadget. Generally, marketers love gadgets. But this one won't gain you any support without the proper alignment.

A short but nice overview of marketing dashboards can be found on Chief Marketer. Of course, you could also read the 285,000 links on Google.

Are You First In Line? Marketing during Recession

How often have you heard the question “should we increase or decrease our marketing and selling expenditures when the economy softens?” We’re in recession. The politicians may not use the word, but it’s clear that the market has slowed and growth has stalled. Today, with business orders soft for many companies, there is concern about how long the economy may be in the doldrums. The value of the dollar remains weak (and I have a trip to Paris in a month!), Bear Stearns is getting a bailout, and 8% of mortgage holders can’t make their monthly payments. Many project a protracted slowdown before a recovery. So what do you do with your marketing budget as you try to protect your profits?

You may be looking in the wrong place for the answer. The answer may well lie in the state of your balance sheet rather than your income statement. We’ve all seen it: sales are soft and in order to achieve our net profit for the fiscal year we reduce expenses. When sales soften, marketing and advertising budgets are among the first to go. It’s the easiest, least painful expense reduction in the income statement. It typically means the fewest reductions in labor costs as well. At the same time (how often have you heard this?) business leaders will say “I know I am mortgaging future sales and wish we could have kept our marketing spending at current levels. I wish we could spend even more.”

Take a look at your balance sheet. The answer to your approach to marketing and sales spending during this soft economy may be answered, in part, by the health of your overall business as indicated by your assets and liabilities, not your revenue and annual profit lines. If the economic slowdown has strained your existing capital resources and you’ve taken on additional debt burdens to fund your operations or growth plans it may make sense to hold back on marketing and sales expenses. But if you’ve been taking care of business and your balance sheet remains relatively healthy despite a near-term slowdown, and if you believe the economy will eventual begin to heal, accelerated (or at least maintaining) marketing spending may be an advisable strategy.

Why? As the market turns and returns from negative growth businesses will experience increases in orders and production requirements, inventories will build, labor requirements will begin to increase and the flow of dollars through the economy will increase. Whether your business delivers goods and/or services to consumers or businesses, those customers will begin to increase demand for your needed product. You need to be first in line when that demand occurs. You need to be positioned so that the customer reaches out to you to meet that need at the very moment that they are ready to return to the market. Be prudent, but stick with your customers through the tough times and they will stick with you through the good times.

Marketers talk of being first in “mind share”. You want to be in position to be the first among your competitors to be contacted. Better yet, you want to be in contact with your customers when they recognize their need to place an order. If you’ve taken care of your balance sheet, now may be the time to use efficient, effective marketing strategies to tighten relationships with your customers.

Are you first in line?

If this was interesting, take a look at Seth Gdin's comments about how to craft your story during a recession.

Outlive the 23-Month CMO Hurdle.

In an earlier post MarketingWitz notes a report that CMOs are short-lived, lasting 23 months on average. Marketing Witz: Marketing Executives are Short-term. How can Markerting survive? Are CMOs performing that poorly across the board or are they just performing the wrong role? Return on the marketing investment is as much a function of defining the return as measuring the investment. If the CMO is measuring return on the role differently than the CEO then the inevitable turnover will continue.

As CMO, do you view your role to be the prinicpal driver of profitable new growth via new customers and increased sales among current customers? Do you define your role as steward of the brand, enforcing brand positioning and brand communication consistency? Do you view your role as advisor to various constituencies across the organization? Are you the face of the company with the media? If you answered "yes" to most or all of the these questions you are in good company with other CMO's. But CEOs are likely to view the first question as the only truly meaningful measure of marketing return. The other functions are simply marketing approaches to help deliver on the objective of increasing sales and profits. Measuring marketing results based on increased brand awareness or level of internal brand consulting activity is merely an internal marketing process metric while delivering increased sales and profits is the focus of the CEO. Be sure your CMO objectives are clearly defined and in line with the goals of the CEO, and outlive the 23 month hurdle.

Brand Paradigms Harming CMOs?

There is a very thought provoking article recently published on Brand Channel, titled "The End of the Master Brand" which challenges the core paradigms that brand marketers have used to organize thinking about brand portfolios for the past 20+ years. Going beyond a critique of brand architecture as we know it and a suggested alternative way to view portfolios, the article suggests that the forced structure of brand architectures alienates marketers and may inhibit marketers from gaining a seat at the C-Level strategic table. Do you agree? I think that may be going a bit far, but it certainly raises an interesting question about whether force-fitting paradigms is harming strategic marketers, and we know that average tenure of CMOs is remarkably short. Linking those two thoughts - perhaps there is more here than meets the eye.

How to Maximize Competitive Intelligence

There is a simple thing you can do as a marketer to generate greater return on investment from your market research and competitive intellegence efforts. Marketers spend countless hours optimizing research methodologies, survey questions and analytics (rightfully so, too.) Competitive intelligence can come from many sources, extending beyond formal research to include press tracking, and even simple hearsay from the sales force. So what's the single most powerful thing you can do to improve return? Create an organized central clearinghouse to capture the information. Great insight results from crossing data points from multiple sources. Market analysis indicates Competitor X may be boosting short term sales, HR hears that a key executive from Competitor X may interviewing in the market, and your Regional Sales Manager say the CFO of Competitor X golfing with the President of Competitor Y. Acquisition or merger? You'll need to learn more, but clearly there is a situation to be explored, and only by crossing these points of information are you able to gain the insight. So...create a central repository of competitive information (paper or digital) and review it often.

Good competitive intelligence reads: Society for Competitive Intelligence, Primary Intelligence

Tale of 2 Books - Marketing Metrics

I read two books this month, both focused on metric marketing issues. The first was "Return on Marketing Investment" by Guy Powell. The second book was "Measure What Matters" by Laura Patterson of Vision Edge Marketing. While both authors share a common goal of guiding CEOs and CMOs to measure marketing more effectively to achieve desired outcomes, the two authors approach the topic in decidedly different manners. Powell argues that marketing investment should be evaluated like any other business investment - calculate the expected return on various marketing investments and compare the returns against defined hurdle rates. Apply high hurdle rates for more risky investments such as advertising versus more known marketing tactics such as direct marketing. While Powell's approach is logical and the quantitative model mathematically correct, he fails to fully address an effective way to set hurdle rates or how to effectivey define expected returns on new marketing efforts, other than to say that the hurdle should be higher for higher risk or less known programs.

In comparison, Patterson breaks the role of marketing into three core performance areas that link to business objectives: acquisition, retention, and monetization. She then proceeds to offer specific marketing metrics for each area that can be measured to determine how marketing programs contribute to these fundamental objectives. I particularly like her reference to those metrics that measure business output versus those that measure marketing activity. See my earlier comments about process v. results marketing metrics.

Both share the goal of linking marketing to business results. Patterson's book is an easier read and will be more palatable to most marketers. Powell's book is more academic and by it's very nature feels more like your Finance 101 text, yet offers relevant thinking. Read both and see what you think. Both believe in my favorite line, "Facts Find Funding"(sm).