How do you create a data-driven culture in your marketing team?

Becoming a data-driven organisation doesn’t just rely on the right technology, structure and processes. The human element is essential, and without the right skills, qualities and roles, any effort to be successful at data-driven marketing is destined to struggle.

And the kinds of skills that support a data-driven philosophy are rich and varied.

This is very true.  The "art" and "science" that requires actionable data lean more to the art side in most marketing departments.  The biggest change is to respect what data can bring to the equation.  Many marketers don't respect data, they respect their gut and soft metrics like awareness.  While data doesn't solve all problems, it helps inform direction.  It helps decide what is happening with the customers you are trying to target, plus the ones that you aren't targeting and whether you should.  

“The data-driven marketing team is knowledgeable enough to converse freely with technical and statistical resources while staying laser-focused on getting the right message to the right person at the right time. But the most important quality needed in a modern marketing team is curiosity. Without that, I may as well outsource all of my data related work to a third party. Curiosity stimulates creativity and conversation, and aids decision-making.” 

I like the statement of staying laser-focused on getting the right message to the right customer at the right time.  Too many times teams lose their focus and start drifting on to answers that are either easy or different from the most relevant topics.  Understanding what data is saying is more valuable than having the person who can put the report together.  Money is made by providing the insight to the data, that is what I look for in my team.  But don't forget to have the guy that can put all the data together.

Quintero adds: “Building a data-driven culture is not an overnight process. It takes time. To me, a data-driven culture means building a safe environment where experimentation is encouraged and mistakes are tolerated. It’s less about having all the right tools in place – although that’s a critical part of the process – and definitely more about cultivating excitement around discovery and objectivity. Being data-driven is exciting and people should be encouraged to enjoy the process as much as making things happen.”

Changing a culture is a journey.  Teaching the team about why decisions are made from looking at the data and what the thought process for coming to the conclusions is critical in building the data culture.  No matter how smart a person is, if they don't understand the thought processes of decisions they will never be able to take leaps with the data.  If they understand what to look for in data, they beginning asking the right questions and delivering recommendations along with their questions.

9 ways to boost customer loyalty with Marketing Automation

I'm not a big fan of the lists, but it makes it convenient to talk about a few of the concepts.  Marketing automation is a very important tool for the digital marketer.  I will even go as far as saying it should be the center of the digital marketing universe.  Because digital marketing grew up as being web, this is not a popular view among digital marketers, but that doesn't mean it's not true.  

Gathering knowledge allows to build relationship: the more you know about customers, the more relevant offers you can address. Personalization is impossible without advanced behavioral and transactional analytics.

Marketing automation starts and ends with data.  Data is the basis for running any marketing automation tool.  Without a good data collection and architecture strategy, marketing automation will be hampered to a degree.  It also ends with data because the capturing of the behavior driven informs the next decision.  It is cyclical as far as data collection is concerned.

1:1 Marketing. Dynamic content and e-mails are the base of long-lasting bond with customer, because they show that you treat him individually and adjust offers to his/her particular needs. Also find opportunities to say thank you to them, ask for opinions and suggest complementary products

1-to-1 marketing is the dream.  To cost effectively do this is still farther out, but we are getting close.  The problem becomes content.  To effectively market to each person in the database is unrealistic, but start at the top.  What would it take to market to the top 10% of the database on a 1-to-1 basis.  Start from there and then try to go farther into the customer base.  

Use analytics to improve content quality: with content marketing you can not only educate your customers, but also discuss values you share, what is crucial for establishing loyalty. 30% of customers say that shared values are one of 3 top reasons for being loyal to a brand. Hence invest in content and optimize it. Read more about content marketing and marketing automation synergy.

Good content can be scary for marketers.  The time and effort to create such content is time consuming and costly, especially in the form of man hours.  It is also hard to quantify the results, which normally don't start to materialize for many months.  However, great content builds a relationship with the brand.  Storytelling and guides for customers help them relate to the brand better than most advertising.  Let the analytics guide the decision.  If customers are buying bathroom products from Home Depot, don't send them content about building a fence.  A great timed "how to" on bathroom design could go a long way to loyalty and upsell opportunities.

Measure: don’t just repeat common knowledge that making actual user buy is 7 times cheaper that bringing new one. Use advanced analytics offered by Marketing Automation Systems to measure ROI of your loyalty improving actions, and optimize them.

The crucial part to any marketing automation strategy, how are you going to measure the results?  This thought process usually comes at the end, but it should start at the beginning of your marketing automation journey.  The first thing your boss will ask after the marketing automation system goes live is "how are we doing"?  You need to not only be able to answer his questions, but you need to answer that question for yourself.  Marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities.  They are never finished and they need to continually evolve.  The only way to determine the evolution is by understanding the results.  

How To Win Customers Without Data-Driven Marketing

The human element – even for online businesses – always shapes the final judgment on customer retention and acquisition.

This is the exact reason why becoming a customer-driven organization is so important, even in the age of data-driven marketing.  In most cases a human interaction will determine whether customers remain loyal or churn.  This is part of the customer experience, just as much as delivering the right content to individuals to drive the desired behavior.  While data-driven marketing can handle most customer experience, for offline businesses and even online businesses, the human interaction is critical to handling the cases where things don't quite go as well as you hoped.  

The morale of this story is: make sure that your employees are your strongest, most amazing asset because the most sophisticated technology or data-driven marketing can’t replace what your employees can deliver – caring, thoughtful, on-the-spot customer happiness.

Period. Full stop.

here is so much talk about who owns the customer experience and why CMO's are reluctant to own the entire experience.  In this article the letter describes the interaction with Terry from the call-center.  Now this interaction is as much part of the brand as an advertisement driving a customer to a website or in-store.  This experience defines the brand, yet the overall person in charge of this is not the CMO, it is more than likely an callcenter manager that reports up through an operations division.  

This is where the customer-driven organization has to be a culture, not an individual.  It doesn't matter what the position title is, there is no one person that can be the customer advocate throughout large organizations.  The customer advocate has to be all employees, period.  There could be a person leading the charge, but until an organization has changed its culture to be truly customer-centric, data-driven marketing and great advertisement will never drive the most ROI possible because the organization is not focusing on the customer experience as a whole.  

For data-driven marketing to succeed doesn't need a customer-centric organization, there is a lot of value and areas to increase revenue.  My belief is all organizations should be customer-centric, this enhances all aspects of the business, not just the data-driven marketing side.

The Jony Ive Freakout

For those of you who haven't heard, yesterday Jony Ive was promoted to Chief Design Officer at Apple.  While that may seem like a good thing, the Applesphere and Techsphere are freaking out.  There is a pending doom in the air, Jony Ive is leaving the company.  Hmmmm.  It looks as though he is being promoted, not leaving.

One of the biggest cries come in the title.  The one that is bantering around the most is his lack of ego and no need for a title.  While this may be true of himself, there are people under him that deserve a jump in title.  I believe this allows his lieutenants to get the title recognition they have deserved for quite awhile.

Jony has the same aura as Steve did.  There is this belief that Steve had his hands in every minute decision and he was the mastermind behind all the tech that Apple had created since his return.  That could not be further from the truth.  Steve was brilliant at getting teams to focus, make things simpler, which is a form of design.  Jony falls under the same category.  He does not design everything that comes out of Apple, he leads the team that does it.  While I am not trying to minimizing his role with that statement, I am trying to emphasize that his team designs and comes up with the concepts as well.  Jony has the final say, which nothing changes under the new arrangement.

Apple is a very large company with many brilliant people who dedicate an inordinate amount of effort to produce the products we love.  It is more than just 1 or 2 people that make Apple what it is.  There is an entire ecosystem of brilliance which is lead by very smart people.  Apple has always been about focus, which is how they also operate with public figures.  This is the coming out for 2 strong individuals at Apple.  

Even though I don't know them personally, Richard Howarth and Alan Dye deserve these positions, which I'm sure they have already been doing for quite some time.  The one thing you don't want as an Apple follower is for Jony to burn out, which it seems he was on his way to doing.  This allows Jony the freedom to take a break, and dare I say, travel and decompress a little more than he has been allowed to since Steve's passing. The day-to-day will be just fine without Jony there.  He will be there plenty to guide the teams, which is what a leader should be doing.  Everyone needs to chilax.

The State and Drivers of Data Marketing

What matters most is the optimization of the customer experience, relevance and (perceived) customer value as a driver of business value. Data-driven marketing certainly is not (just) about advertising and programmatic ad buying as some believe. Nor is it just about campaigns. On the contrary: if done well, data-driven marketing is part of digital marketing transformations whereby connecting around the customer across the customer life cycle is key.

Very succinct vision of what data-driven marketing is, it's all about the customer experience.  The advent of "big data" was nothing more than gathering extra data about the customers.  Gathering data is only the first step of the process, albeit a time-consuming one.  The good news is after the hard work of gathering the data has been completed, the harder part starts.  Once you have data, making sense of the data and creating actionable outcomes to enhance the customer experience becomes the goal.  This is very hard work.  It takes plenty of analysis and insight to reach this goal.  But the companies who will do this the best will be the ones that succeed in the digital age.

Among the key takeaways of the data-driven marketing report by the GlobalDMA:

• 77% of marketers are confident in the data-driven approach and 74% expect to increase data marketing budgets this year.

• Data efforts by far focus on offers, messages and content (marketing) first (69% of respondents). Second ranks a data-driven strategy or data-driven product development. Customer experience optimization unfortunately only ranks third with 49% of respondents.

• Among the key drivers of increased data marketing: first of all a need to be more customer-centric (reported by 53% of respondents). Maximizing efficiency and return ranks second followed by gaining more knowledge of customers and prospects.

I believe the first step in the process is understanding where the puck is going to be and skate in that direction.  Marketers are understanding this data revolution is coming and they are saying the right things in surveys.  The real question will be how to get there.  It's easy to identify problems, it's hard to implement solutions.  The marketers who will show they are adept at change will thrive in this new paradigm.  

Customer analytics is something I have focused my entire career.  In the casino industry we have had the optimal opt-in mechanism for many years and have collected amazing amounts of data about our customers behavior.  We have used this to create targeted marketing campaigns to our customers, so I believe in the direction the entire industry is taking.  Always start with the customer.  It will lead to creating better experiences and more profitable results.

 

Sears Could Disrupt Throwaway Tech Culture

It's funny the timing of this article.  I was just talking with my wife about Sears and how it seems they have no future, it's only a matter of time before the Sears retail store as we know it will no longer exist.  Then to read a headline about Sears disrupting?  Heck ya I'm interested.

The company has launched a Seattle office, and recruited retail tech execs to help it get a handle on the data it has amassed from the 40,000+ daily service queries its Home Services group collects on washing machines, refrigerators, and other appliances. It turns out that the industry average is that about 1 out of every 4 customers don’t get their appliance woes fixed on the first visit. 

“Each truck carries about 400 parts, yet those annual service calls require something like 168,000 different parts,” explained Arun Arora, the group’s president. “We’d have to have our 7,000 certified technicians driving semis around to anticipate them.”

"Big data" has so many applications and to see Sears trying to disrupt in a way that doesn't make headlines is impressive.  This kind of disruption, even though on the surface looks like a cost-savings initiative, can revolutionize the service of appliances.  Why does that matter?  Because loyalty is the name of the game.  If they make the experience of owning a machine better, even when it is getting old and needs some new life breathed into it, they can increase their base of loyal active customers.  

The more customers that are active with a company the more they will make.  If Sears can increase the number of loyal customers by offering a superior customer experience of ownership, they can drive more sales in other areas.  It is the process of rebuilding trust with a brand.  If I knew buying an oven will have a longer shelf-life and the company where I was buying it can make that happen, then it makes where I buy more interesting.  

So many times in the retail space it comes down to price.  Everyone sells ovens and mostly from the same manufacturers, so there is very little to differentiate.  The easiest rode to differentiation is price.  The problem is when competing on price, the business can never win.  They are not cultivating loyal customers, in fact they are probably selling to the exact wrong customer.  If a customer is only going to choose on price, they are by definition not loyal customers.  If Sears can differentiate beyond price and experience in the stores, they can grow their loyal database.  That's a big win.   

The Dangers of Data-Driven Marketing

Marketing has gone digital, and we can now measure our efforts like never before. As a result, marketers have fallen in love with data. Head over heels in love—to the point where we want data to drive our marketing, instead of people, like you and me. I think this has gone too far.

I'm a big proponent of data-driven marketing, in this article Ezra Fishman uses semantics to say this is bad, but what he is trying to get is there is a need to go beyond just the data.  As I wrote in Data + Insight = Action, data all by itself cannot create actionable outcomes.  

Data-informed marketing

Instead of focusing on data alone, data-informed marketing considers data as just one factor in making decisions. We then combine relevant data, past experiences, intuition, and qualitative input to make the best decisions we can.

Instead of poring over data hoping to find answers, we develop a theory and a hypothesis first, then test it out. We force ourselves to make more gut calls, but we validate those choices with data wherever possible so that our gut gets smarter with time.

This is what I was trying to articulate in my article.  To be an excellent data-driven marketing organizations takes a little bit of "science" and a little bit of "art" to determine the best course of action.  When a data scientist is driving your organization, there are years of experience being unused to help him understand even further what the data is saying.  

Most times when a data scientist is off on their own, it takes an inordinate amount of time to come up with a conclusion, mostly because they lack the context of how the business is generating the data.  How the strategy manipulates the data.  How a customer being underserved may be an intentional outcome.

The ease of measurement trap

When we let data drive our marketing, we all too often optimize for things that are easy to measure, not necessarily what matters most.

Some results are very easy to measure. Others are significantly harder. Click-through rate on an email? Easy. Brand feelings evoked by a well-designed landing page? Hard. Conversion rate of visitors who touch your pricing page? Easy. Word-of-mouth generated from a delightful video campaign? Hard.

Right on!  Of course the organizations that take the easy way out are ones that I would not consider to be data-driven.  KPI's are a great item, but they can be deadly.  There are usually so many moving parts that make up the business and the data being generated.  This can cause business KPI's to look fine, yet drilling down into the performance from a customer perspective may show some very scary trends that would cause alarm.  However, a non data-driven company will continue with their strategy because of the KPI's (hello RIM/Blackberry).  

The local optimization trap

The local optimization trap typically rears its head when we try to optimize a specific part of the marketing funnel. We face this challenge routinely at Wistia when we try increase the conversion rate of new visitors. In isolation, improving the signup rate is a relatively straightforward optimization problem that can be "solved" with basic testing.

The problem is, we don't just want visitors to sign up for our Free Plan. We want them to sign up for our Free Plan, then use their account, then tell others how great Wistia is, then eventually purchase one of our paid plans (and along the way generate more and more positive feelings toward our brand).

This can be combined with the previous bullet.  When analytics is only seen from a high level, simple statements like "we need to increase the number of signups, which will flow down at the same rate as we currently have, will increase conversion."  Nothing could be further from the truth.  To increase anything there needs to be an additional action.  This action may include advertising to a different group of individuals or giving an incentive that will increase signups.  The issue with this thinking is these aren't the same individuals that are converting in your current funnel.  The proper strategy is to figure out the converters and try and target customers like them, which may actually decrease the size of the funnel if done right.

The data quality trap

We are rarely as critical of our data as we ought to be. Consider, for example, A/B tests, which have become the gold standard for marketing experimentation. In theory, these tests should produce repeatable and accurate results, since website visitors are assigned randomly to each page variant.

In practice, however, there are lots of ways even the simplest A/B tests can produce misleading results. If your website traffic is anything like ours, visitors come from a variety of sources: organic, direct, referral, paid search, and beyond. If one of those sources converts at a much higher rate than others, it's easy to get skewed results by treating your traffic as a single, uniform audience.

One should rarely just take the conversion or redemption results from the A/B test without digging into the data.  Making sure all segments are driving the results is key.  Don't take for granted the customers that were randomly selected for each group ended up being totally random.  Ensure there was proper representation from each segment of the business and identify any other changes that could be tested based on different behaviors within the segments.

Data vigilance

As marketers, we should continue to explore new and better ways to harness the power of data, but we also must remain vigilant about becoming overly reliant on data.

Data can be a tremendous source of insight. Harness that. But don't pretend it's something more. And definitely don't put it in charge of your marketing team.

This reminds me when I was a product manager and we would receive these RFP's to determine if we were the right company to supply them with our product.  Sometimes the requirements were such that we wondered if the company wanted humans to continue to work for them.  I would comically refer to some of these as automated manager.  It seemed companies wanted to press a button and have a system do everything for them.  This is the trap Fishman is referring.  Humans have great insight.  Humans are the "art" in the equation to actionable outcomes.  This is equally important as the "science".

Shoot for the Stars! 4 Ways to Bring It with Your Marketing Automation Platform

...marketing automation is an all-in-one marketing powerhouse, allowing you to generate leads, follow up with consumers, and even demonstrate return on investment. Think of your marketing automation platform like it’s a video game. Lead scoring and personalized email campaigns are just the first level. As you move up through the levels, you access more gold coins, superpowers, and additional lives until you are a powerhouse marketing machine! Below are four ways to move on to the next plane of marketing automation…and you don’t even have to battle the boss to win the game!

Many companies who purchase a marketing automation platform are doing it with a few use cases in mind, but embracing your marketing automation platform can change the way you do business.  Because these platforms can take in data, segment, manipulate and target communications, while also writing out to databases, these tools can enhance many business practices in the organization.  

Your marketing automation platform allows a change in thought process of what a communication is.  For instance, you might have an email marketing team, a mobile team, a social media team.  Well all of these are channels of communication and your marketing automation platform can manage a lot of the content being driven through these channels, while maintaining a consistent message to the customer.

3. Real-time Personalization

Imagine this for a moment: what if everyone who visited your website received a personalized experience? Let’s say you serve a number of different industries. Using a marketing automation platform, you can set up your website so that when someone in the manufacturing industry visits, she sees a different set of content, calls-to-action, and web copy than a visitor in, say, the finance industry. Each visitor has different needs—period. So, giving each individual a targeted experience, whether that’s providing him an industry-specific case study or inviting him to an industry-specific event, makes the information more relevant and encourages conversion.

Most organizations would never consider using their "email marketing system" they just purchase to delver personalized content to their website in real-time, isn't marketing automation an outbound tool?  Not necessarily.  Because marketing automation tools can listen for events and trigger a realtime campaign for 1, and then deliver results through web services, it allows for ultimate customization, even for inbound.

4. Go Mobile

Mobilization is becoming increasingly necessary. According to Nielsen, the average consumer spends more time online via mobile devices than she does via a desktop or laptop computer. And the majority of that time is spent on apps—not the mobile web. All-in-all, companies need to go mobile, but without the right tools, it can be difficult. Not only do you need a strategy, but you also need to work with much more data. But with the data from marketing automation platforms combined with mobilization strategies, companies can effectively implement mobile campaigns, whether that means a native app or an optimized page.

I'll continue to harp about the mobile strategy.  This is a channel that needs to be targeted to customer behavior, however it will be the ultimate channel when used properly.  The marketing automation tool can listen for cues, such as geo location and deliver a customized mobile experience for the customer, whether that be in-app content or push notifications, the marketing automation tool should be at the center of your mobile strategy.  

The Missing Connection Between Big Data and Great Insights for Data-Driven Marketers

Data-driven marketers today are wondering how they can gain insight from big data. The answer? The ability to change is the connection between big data and insight. Data-driven marketers today know that their roles are changing: 68% of marketers think that marketing has seen more changes in the last two years than it has in the past 50 years, according to a recent survey.  The changes are due to a renewed focus on customer experience within their jobs, and the need to use big data to improve that experience.

Customer Experience is the buzzword over the last 2 years, combine this with the other buzzword of "big data" and you can understand why 68% of marketers think marketing has changed so drastically the last couple of years.  I think what is causing all this change is how technology has shifted the paradigm of marketing.  

For many years marketers were able to call on plays from the same playbook and be very successful.  The technology was never really able to advance the playbook and very few companies were pushing the boundaries.  Today, marketing technology companies are driving the sea change, creating platforms which make creating authentic customer experiences possible on a large scale.  

Companies are having to tear up their playbook and turn their strategy on its head.  This goes well beyond just the marketing playbook.  Companies are having to start culture change throughout the organization as the customer experience goes well beyond just the marketing department.  As customers interact with all parts of organizations, there is little care of operational silos within companies.  

The biggest sea change is what Adobe refers to "marketing beyond marketing".  No longer can marketing leaders be focused on the message and bring in customers, only to wipe their hands after the customer starts engaging with the brand.  Marketers are learning they are the leaders of the customer experience renaissance.  Marketing is having to drive the experience of the customer throughout entire organizations, which is not a skill-set a traditional marketer has.  This change will be driving "big data" initiatives as marketers are learning to understand their customers in new and interesting ways.  

Don't Persuade Customers -- Just Change Their Behavior

Most businesses underestimate how hard it is to change people’s behavior.  There is an assumption built into most marketing and advertising campaigns that if a business can just get your attention, give you a crucial piece of information about their brand, tell you about new features, or associate their brand with warm and fuzzy emotions, that they will be able to convince you to buy.

On the basis of this assumption, most marketing departments focus too much on persuasion.  Each interaction with a potential customer is designed to change their beliefs and preferences.  Once the customer is convinced of the superiority of a product, they will naturally make a purchase. And once they’ve made a purchase, then that should lead to repeat purchases in the future.

This all seems quite intuitive until you stop thinking about customers as an abstract mass and start thinking about them as individuals.  In fact, start by thinking about your own behavior.  How easy is it for you to change?

It's very hard to change behavior.  Given to their own devices, individuals will continue to behave a certain way unless nudged in the right direction.  I often refer to this concept as proactive vs reactive marketing.  In proactive marketing, the business is using direct marketing to communicate in an effort to change behavior.  This often takes the form of an offer or incentive to  incite the behavior change.  In reactive marketing, money is spent to gain awareness and then it is left up to the customer to interact with the business by clicking on the ad that has been served up multiple times.  Both of these models are important for the overall marketing strategy, but one is much more cost effective than the other.

First, you have to optimize your goals. 

For marketers, this means focusing on how to get consumers to interact with products rather than just thinking about them.  As an example, our local Sunday newspaper often comes in a bag with a sample product attached that encourages potential consumers to engage with products.

Interaction is the most important part of proactive marketing.  Be sure to measure the results on the behavior you are trying to change.  Remember, the biggest thing to watch when analyzing behavior change is did you change enough behavior to compensate for any increases in offer to entice the change?  Inevitably there are many customers that won't change behavior, but will take you up on your increased offer, so you just reduced margins for the same behavior.   

I try to instill into my team to focus on the individual and try to understand the mindset of our customer.  Are the incentives we are giving going to change their behavior?  Try to ask, "if it were me, would this offer convince me to engage with this communication?"  Always put yourself in the shoes of your customer and focus on their experience to achieve the desired behavior change.

How Not To Use Marketing Automation

Normally I would never suggest not using a marketing automation for anything, but it is a funny title so I'll let this slide.  I would even argue that bad marketing automation is better than no marketing automation, but not by much.

Generic Broadcasting – The time that you save with marketing automation should be used to not only improve your content in the first place, but also to personalise through segmentation. Consumers in all market places are becoming more and more sophisticated, and can spot poorly executed marketing automation. And their perception is likely to be that you don’t care about the communication.

This is the first step of marketing automation.  So many times the implementation strategy of the marketers installing the new system is to do what they are currently doing, but in a new fancy tool.  I think this is an okay step if the desired outcome is to QA the output to make sure all the data is correctly hooked up.  Other than that, marketers should have an understanding of what the new capabilities of the tool they have purchased and at least start with a few general segments to make sure there are some differentiation in the messaging.

My advice is to bring in a group that has experience in the tool who focuses on the strategy behind utilizing the tool to help build a roadmap.  It's okay to start broad, in fact I recommend it.  But don't tart from scratch.  Start implementing the "low hanging fruit" opportunities in your business right away.  This will be your baseline and then you start to grow from there.

Being A Spammer – Automated emails are a great way of engaging with recipients who have shown an interest in your email, but you should still spend time focusing on the quality of your communication. Avoid the usual spam trigger words and don’t go sending an email to thousands of people all at the same time. Marketing automation can increase the risk of spam, but a good email provider will help you with this.

All the good Email Service Providers (ESP) will provide services to assist you in "warming up" your domain to the Internet Service Providers (ISP).  This is a necessary first step to make sure everyone can see your emails when you send them (deliverability %).  

However, this does not mean your job is over.  If you decide automation will allow you to send emails to your customers everyday with messages which do not resonate with most of them, you will quickly be flagged as spam.  If this happens too many times, the ISP's will block your emails.  When I started at one property, Yahoo was blocking all the emails and the deliverability rating was in the high 60% range.  It took a long time to get unblocked, so make sure your content is relevant and you stop sending to customers that are not opening your email.

Bad Time Automating – Automated communications are tricky: you’re writing them at a time where the context of how the communication will be received isn’t known. Most of the time, this is absolutely fine as you are only scheduling a few hours ahead, but beware of shifting events. 

Most of the time your emails will not be "set it and forget it".  You may run with an automated email blast for customers that signed up today with an offer to engage further, and that is fine in most cases.  In a lot of the cases the automation is used to increase the segmentation capabilities, not to create a generic email blast to all your customers over and over again.  

If you run into this problem of timing, then forget about scheduling too far in advance.  Take your time and make sure the message is relevant to the customer at the time the email is sent.  This will save you from looking like someone that doesn't understand the customer at all.  That is the worst thing that could happen.

Communicating Constantly – With marketing automation, communications with your audience should become a lot easier. But don’t get carried away. If it is easier, then the temptation will be to communicate more often, but this is as off-putting for a recipient as communicating poorly. It can also have a detrimental effect on the size of your audience.

The quickest way to being marked as spam or unsubscribed is to over communicate through email.  Just because its easier to do, doesn't mean you should.  Make sure you are communicating a little more than your customer is engaging with your brand.  Its okay to communicate everyday if your customer is buying something everyday, but this is usually not the case.  If your customer purchases a product once a month, maybe every other week is a good cadence to start.  Remember, the beauty of a marketing automation tool is your customers don't have to all be on the same communication cadence, they can be on their own, as long a you have enough content to make that strategy make sense.

Send And Forget – One of the objectives of most communications is to elicit a response. Whether that is an open from an email, a click on an advert or a reply / share from a social media post. So when you are automating, you should always have a process in place for monitoring their impact – you should be able to set this up as an email or smart phone notification. Ignoring this can result in recipients not talking (positively or negatively) to anyone, something to avoid at all costs.

As I said above, this strategy can be detrimental to having a marketing automation tool.  Never send without analyzing the results.  All marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities, they need to be changed and enhanced constantly, because as you change behaviors the communication cadence and the offers need to change with it.  There are also segments of customers in the campaign who are not getting what you are throwing out, so constantly look for opportunities to enhance the campaigns taking these customers into account.  Analyzing is the most important step of the process.

Why CEOs Say Yes to Marketing Automation

Ten short years ago, it was rare for a company to have a marketing automation platform in place. Since then, it’s become ever more clear that acquiring marketing automation (and applying the expertise to make it hum) is a huge competitive differentiator. SiriusDecisions research indicates that 80% of the organizations with the highest-performing demand waterfalls (based on the number of won deals per 1,000 inquiries) have implemented marketing automation platforms. This tallies with other research; the 2015 report “Rethinking the Role of Marketing” from Gleanster and Act-On found that Top Performers were 20% more likely than the average organization to use marketing automation technology..

I think it is still rare for most organizations to have a marketing automation platform, but what is even more rare are companies who are taking advantage of their platform.  The promise of marketing automation is very enticing as this article articulates.  The benefits of a well-run marketing automation program is an extreme competitive advantage.

1. Marketing Automation Lets You Put the Customer in the Center of Your World.

List management. Marketing automation lets makes it easier to segment your lists by field values (explicit data such as title, department, industry, company size) and by implicit, inferred factors (often actions) such as web pages visited, eBooks downloaded, emails clicked on. It also lets you sync chosen data back and forth with a CRM system.

Well beyond the realm of salespeople, marketing automation lets you manage your customer base on a level of personalization that is not possible otherwise.  Some say these platforms make the relationships with customers less personal, but that is a fallacy.  With the amount of personalization and targeting capable with these platforms, the customer gets a more personalized experience with marketing automation.  

The amount of time manual processes take to manage the customer, it is impossible for these processes to really give the best experience to the customer.  There is just not enough time in the day.  However, a marketing automation platform can create customized communications based on all of the data described above, including behavioral information, geo aware messaging and preferences of communication channels.

Campaign management. Automated programs can save time (which is money, yes) and take a little human error out of your programs. You can set them up to replicate successful lead nurturing or onboarding programs, for example, and they will run exactly as programmed, no matter who misses work on Tuesday. You can add prospects as they enter your world (perhaps through a form) and exit them (perhaps to another program, or to sales) as you learn more about them, or as they become increasingly qualified. You can set up trigger emails (thank-yous, congratulations, expiring trials) and landing pages that make offers or fulfill requests, showing how responsive you are.

Campaign management is a difficult process if you have different programs pulling lists, then fulfilling communications and measuring results.  The amount of time saved by having a platform where everything is integrated and can trigger off the behavior of the customer is very powerful.

6. Marketing Automation Takes Care of the Established Customer

The platform gives you a structure you can scale in your retention strategy. Start with using a nurturing educational strategy to support onboarding. Move on to keeping your customers in the loop, educating them about new features, showing them new plays with old features, and keeping them abreast of changes in the industry that affect them. Take the same techniques you use to notice when a lead is warming up and apply them to noticing when a customer is looking at an upsell … or needs attention to prevent churn.

Retention is the most important part of the database.  The greater the number of sales coming from your established customer base allows for the greatest growth in your business.  Marketing automation at its heart is best for the established customers.  The platform is designed to drive more business from this segment.  Since the majority of most companies revenue comes from loyal customers, having the ability to grow this groups sales is essential to a longterm stable business model.  The marketing automation platform should be at the center of this model.

7. Marketing Automation Spurs Revenue and Growth

These benefits are all pieces of a puzzle that every company using marketing automation puts together in its own unique way. The common denominator is that most companies that apply marketing automation – whether they use every feature or just the basics – will see faster growth and post more top-line revenue.

Well who doesn't want that?

How CMOs Can Make Sure Their Companies Are Customer-Obsessed

CMOs are charged with making their companies customer-obsessed — so they can win in an age where customers are highly empowered. But the irony is that many marketing shops themselves are not customer-obsessed.

I am continually thinking about the customer-centric approach and who should own it in the organization.  The CMO is the obvious choice, however are they the best choice?  I have seen where organizations have a C-level position, something to the tune of Chief Customer Officer.  This is also thought because it ends up being another level in the organization, another potential touchpoint in the organization that has to bring different groups in the organization together around one common goal.  I think it comes down to having the right person.

Marketers are predisposed to think about the market first. So why are marketers not naturally predisposed to be customer-obsessed? The answer lies in gravity — the gravity of the P&L and the associated product, solution or service performance.

It's always about the customer.  Everything should come back to customer analytics.  I think Finance departments have too much power in some organizations where high-level KPI's are all about a product or a service.  The problem with these KPI's is they don't go far enough down to the "people" who are driving those metrics.  It is similar to fixing a symptom instead of the actual source of the problem.

For example, the company sells 1,000,000 widgets and they want to grow this by 3% in the next quarter.  This is the entire wrong approach to the problem.  Widgets don't grow by 3%.  3% more customers buy widgets in the quarter.  It is imperative to start with the customer because they are the ones that are purchasing these widgets.  So to grow those numbers, marketers need to embrace the customers to grow their numbers.

I have spoken with many CMOs — across industries and geographies — and this common theme has emerged: Marketing’s relevance and performance is now predicated on putting the customer at the center of the universe. This is neither elective nor minor surgery. Most believe an overhaul — not a simple refinement — is needed to make marketing customer-obsessed and truly able to drive growth.

Changing to a customer-centric organization is a complete change in culture.  This does not happen overnight.  It takes a dedicated team with a singular focus many months to accomplish.  I once read to change a culture, a great organization with amazing focus will take 18 months.  There are not that many of these organizations out there.  The average is 4 years.  So organizations need to start their culture change today.  There is no time to waste.  The customer-obsessed organization will be the most successful in the new customer empowered buying dynamic.  

Decision Trees: An Overview

A decision tree is a popular method of creating and visualizing predictive models and algorithms. You may be most familiar with decision trees in the context of flow charts. Starting at the top, you answer questions, which lead you to subsequent questions. Eventually, you arrive at the terminus which provides your answer. (If you are unfamiliar with flow charts, this humorous image illustrates the concept.)

Decision trees tend to be the method of choice for predictive modeling because they are relatively easy to understand and are also very effective. The basic goal of a decision tree is to split a population of data into smaller segments. There are two stages to prediction. The first stage is training the model—this is where the tree is built, tested, and optimized by using an existing collection of data. In the second stage, you actually use the model to predict an unknown outcome. We’ll explain this more in-depth later in this post.

A very thorough article that describes what a decision tree is and what they can be used for.  They are my favorite first step in doing most kinds of data modeling.  Even though they may not be the most sophisticated algorithm, they provide very good insight into the data.  The output of a decision tree is easily readable up the organization, so communication of findings is much easier than more sophisticated, blackbox modeling techniques such as neural nets.  

When it comes to actually building a decision tree, we start at the root, which includes the total population of atoms. As we move down the tree, the goal is to split the total population into smaller and smaller subsets of atoms at each node; hence the popular description, “divide and conquer.” Each subset should be as distinct as possible in terms of the target indicator. For example, if you are looking at high- vs. low-risk customers, you would want to split each node into two subsets; one with mostly high-risk customers, and the other with mostly low-risk customers.

This goal is achieved by iterating through each indicator as it relates to the target indicator, and then choosing the indicator that best splits the data into two smaller nodes. As the computer iterates through each indicator-target pair, it calculates the Gini Coefficient, which is a mathematical calculation that is used to determine the best indicator to use for that particular split. The Gini Coefficient is a score between 0 and 1, with 1 being the best split, and 0 being the worst. The computer chooses the indicator that has the highest Gini Coefficient to split the node, and then moves on to the next node and repeats the process.

This gets a little into the weeds, but effectively the computer decides which variable is the best indicator at predicting the target.  Once it does that, it continually iterates through each branch of the data and picks out the best variable for the next group.  It does this until there is not a good split for the data and then it ends the branch.  

This is why I love decision trees.  Each subset gets tighter and tighter as it goes down a branch.  This is where "art" comes into the science.  Even though a tree may not be good at predicting the future, it provides great insight in the data for testing.  

Decision Trees can be anywhere from really simple.

To much more complex and everywhere in between and beyond.

For example, the target variable could be high-worth customers.  The branch may break off on gender of female, region of South and age between 35 - 55.  This group is said to be likely high-worth.  A good testing hypothesis is to find all the females aged 35-55 that live in the South who are not high-worth and see if they may have a higher propensity to spend with you than they currently are.  Now this is a simplistic example and this general of a group will probably not show up on a tree, but you get the idea.

Business Intelligence vs Analytics vs Big Data vs Data Mining

To help you navigate the terrain of business data concepts, we’re going to give you a basic summary of what some of the most common terms refer to and how they relate to each other.  

This is a very good article on definitions in the data space.  So many times I hear executives talk about topics such as "big data", but they are really referring to analytics or data collection.  

Five Ways to Win with Data-Driven Marketing

Data-driven marketing has come to the forefront for companies that want to better engage their customers and prospects. With data-driven marketing, firms are able to gather, integrate, and assess data from a variety of internal and external sources to help enhance value.

Marketing automation starts with data.  In fact, in the digital age, almost all marketing initiatives start with data.  Companies who are data-driven have a distinct advantage over their competitors.  When a company is data-driven, they focus on their strengths, enhance their weaknesses and they don't obsess over their competition.  They have the data to understand how they can improve.

1. Determine what really makes customers tick. According to the DMA, data-driven marketing is about discerning what customers want and need and engineering the company to provide it: “The more firms can use data to develop a 360-degree, multi-channel view of what customers think and want, the more the customer will truly be king.” Through the use of both internal and external data, companies are learning how to “crown” their customers — truly understand what makes them tick, and then develop campaigns that engage them in the most effective manner possible.

This all comes with data analytics.  Understanding what drives your customers behaviors is step one to developing campaigns and offers.  Without an understanding of what your customers want, there is not an efficient way to determine what they would like from you.

2. Set baselines for campaign effectiveness. Data-driven marketing has effectively replaced the traditional “hit-or-miss” test component of the typical direct marketing campaign.

Baselines are a very important piece to understand when analyzing campaigns.  This is the beginning of the journey to understand the effectiveness of any changes that are made.  If an organization cannot answer what a particular program is bringing them, they should test the campaigns without the program and determine what, if any, the effectiveness of the program is bringing.  

3. Block out the “noise” and focus on what’s relevant. When assessing data over multi-year periods — and across different marketing channels — it’s not unusual for things to be extremely “busy” at the outset. There’s a lot of static and responses are all over the place. However, by using proven data-driven marketing techniques, you can start to pull out the relevant information, analyze it over time, pick up on traffic patterns, and drill down to specific marketing touch points (i.e., number of website hits that come in when a specific direct-response show airs).

This is a lot harder than it sounds.  Marketers are the kings of taking a piece of data and selling their story with it, even though it is just noise or a small sample of customers.  This is where the "art and science" approach is necessary.  Being able to combine data mining techniques with the business acumen is key to focusing on the relevance of the data.

4. Determine exactly how customers are responding.

Again, this is important to understand multi-channel marketing.  The ability to reach your customers on the right channel at the right time is only possible through data.  

5. Reach extremely targeted customer bases.

The promise of 1-to-1 marketing is arriving.  Be careful to shoot for this level of personalization, because it is very expensive and the pearl is not worth the dive for the majority of your database. However, being able to target your best customers in a very personal nature could help grow the business exponentially.  This takes extreme focus.  

Closing the Loop on Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is starting to come into the mainstream, but many companies are not using the toolset to create amazing interactions with their customers.  I know many brands that have sophisticated toolsets and it is used to show me points and my name.  I get the same exact email that all of their customers get with my name attached, this is not an amazing interaction.

Data and Analytics as the Foundation

Seems logical, right? You would be amazed at how many brands are still working through “We don't know how to get our transactional point-of-sale integrated with our demographic and third-party purchase data.” Solid data management and extract, transform, load processes form the foundation from which a solid enterprise marketing platform is built.

Data is the backbone of any marketing automation solution.  This may be why the technology isn't as pervasive as it should be.  Getting all of the data into one location in a consumable format for marketers is not an easy task.  This is the first step in the marketing automation journey.  Starting with the data will increase the chance to have amazing interactions with your guest.  The more knowledge about the customer, the more customized a communication can be and this is what delights the customer.

Integrate, Orchestrate and Optimize

This is a large category, but an important one as far as customer engagement is concerned.

First up is integration. Integrate marketing programs across channels — leverage insights from outbound marketing programs to better serve customers on inbound channels and vice versa. With consumers switching channels as frequently as they do today, this is imperative.

Marketing automation tools today can currently run many inbound tasks.  This is especially true when sub second response is not necessary.  When giving the customer an option to to click on a button to serve up an offer or promotion, use the marketing automation tool to serve up the offer.  This way it ensures the customer is seeing the same offer they saw in an email you sent yesterday.

Orchestrate campaigns and their offers so that the timing and sequence, as well as the channel delivered, make sense based on individual consumer preferences. 

So many brands are tied to their own timing of communication, not the customers.  For instance, we alway send our bi-weekly communication on every other Tuesday.  This makes it easy for the marketer, however this does not take into account the customer.  

All customers should be on their own timeline.  Marketing automation tools are very sophisticated and can handle this type of philosophy.  Planning the interactions with customers based on their behavior will result in much higher response.  This is the type of delightful interaction customers expect.

Optimization is the final step in the execution phase. Make sure you use analytically based optimization across all channels to avoid over-contact and saturation of consumers. Consumers are only annoyed by receiving an email offer for a product or service that they just signed up for last week during an inbound contact center conversation.

Be sure to optimize constantly.  Marketing automation campaigns are living and breathing entities.  They are never finished and there is always money to be found in optimizing the programs.  Optimization goes much further than over contacting the customer, just as bad is not contacting the customer at the time they want to purchase.  Even worse is offering the customer something they would never be interested in, especially if they have been your customer for an extended period of time.  Tiffany, I already bought my wife the diamond, stop telling me about how amazing it is, you had me at hello.

The last step is to close the loop in order to perform truly integrated marketing. Take the information you learn from the delivery of both inbound and outbound offers: Did a customer open an email, respond to a social message or accept a verbal offer delivered via the contact center? If so, what effect does that have on downstream marketing efforts?

It all comes back to constantly learning.  The more your customer interacts with the brand, the more they tell you about themselves.  I am not the biggest fan of over surveying the customer and when asked why that is, I say its because I survey my customer all the time.  I send them outbound communications with call to actions and if they reply, they are telling me what is more important, voting with their wallet.  If they don't reply, they are telling me they don't appreciate this offer, or maybe it is this time, etc.  Learn from these interactions and enhance your campaigns.

Remember, Data + Insight = Action.  Always be looking for actionable data on your customers and using that in your marketing automation programs.

6 Rules for Creating Killer Email Campaigns

Email marketing still reigns supreme for most businesses when it comes to ROI.  The funny part is how many businesses are not taking full advantage of the medium.  Email is a channel and should not be seen as a strategy unto itself, it is just another way to communicate to the customer.  But because of its low cost and effective targeting capabilities, it is a channel that should be at the top of most companies priority list.

1) Map out the customer flow

Once upon a time I worked on the growth engineering team at Twitter. We were tasked with building something that could turn new signup users into die-hard Tweeters. The secret sauce to user activation was…email! But before we knew when to use email, we had to map out the Twitter user journey.

This is key to a marketing automation.  The first step of a campaign is to identify the goals for the campaign.  After that, the visual mapping of the workflow will save hours of time and allow for better if/then scenario processes to take place within the campaign.  When done visually, it also is easier to see pitfalls and mistakes.  This may seem like double work, but it is an essential step.

2) Master the balance of building your list, while not asking for too much

You’re ready to begin building your email list and customer base. You’ve also heard that the more info you have on a customer, the better. Besides, how are you supposed to create highly personalized email campaigns without any data on a user? Before you start pushing sign up forms with 20 form fields to all of your website visitors, you must first understand that customer intelligence should be built over time.

I am a big fan of finding out 1 thing about your customer in every interaction.  Transactional data about what your customers are buying is the best information to have, but also asking your customers a question with each interaction is not time consuming for them and through time will build a plethora of information for you which then can be used to further segment your customers.  Be careful what you ask.  If you ask something specific about behaviors, your customer may expect you to use this information right away and if you don't, they may become disenfranchised.  

3) Embrace marketing automation 

People say marketing automation isn’t personal and ruins your brand reputation with robot-like communication. I’m going to argue that it actually makes your communication more personal because it can be used to send messages based on individual behavior. Marketing automation makes it so that no two people receive the same messages.

This is a must in my book.  There is no better way to have targeted, individualized communication with large sets of customers without it.  Marketing automation tools should be a fundamental piece of the marketing technology.  It allows for the management of the customer, regardless of the channel.  It makes multi-channel communication possible.  I believe this is the center for all outbound communication, regardless of the channel.

4) Offer value with every touch  (Eat24)

You don’t need a reason to call grandma, but you should have a reason for sending an email to your subscribers. Promotional blasts are the bread and butter of ecommerce companies, and I’m not saying they’re a bad practice, since they do generate revenue. But, before you send another marketing campaign, you should always ask yourself, “Will my customers care?” The answer of course should always be, “Yes!”.

I worked with a company that did an email blast every 2 weeks regardless of if there was anything new to communicate.  The offer that was sent was usually the same offer with a different twist.  

Not only does this approach start to feel the same, which will lead to customers ignoring the email, it also doesn't create a sense of urgency for the customer.  If there is always a timed offering and it is always the same offer, customers will not feel the need to reply to the call of action.  They will start to learn there will be this new offer next week so maybe I'll just wait until then.  This limits the effectiveness of your communications.

5) Recognize lapsed users and bring them back  (Memebox)

Customers sometimes leave. While some loss is inevitable, others are absolutely preventable. A bad marketer doesn’t know who has left or who is about to leave. A good marketer recognizes the signs of churning and targets those users with the perfect message to bring them back.

The best time to market to a customer is before they become inactive.  Once a customer is inactive or has left, it is usually too late and those customers are very hard to regain.  It is very important to identify customer that are about to churn or are changing their buying habits in a negative fashion.  

For instance, a customer may purchase from you with a frequency of once a month, however over the past 3 months they have not purchased anything.  Lets say in this instance your active customer database is purchases within 12 months.  If someone who consistently purchases every month, but has not in the last 3 months, you as a marketer have to change your communications with this customer.  This customer is in danger of churning and you can't wait for 9 more months before they become inactive to recognize this.  At that point it will be too late.

6) Perpetually tinker with A/B testing

Email campaigns, like fine art or software, is never finished. There will always be something else you can do to improve the performance of a campaign. When looking for an email platform, find one that allows you to A/B test any part of your email.

Marketing automation campaigns are never finished.  They are constantly evolving no matter what the situation is.  Testing should be a standard part of all your campaigns.  It is important to remember that a baseline needs to be established before the testing takes place.  Also, be careful not to overlap tests that may have influence on results at the same time.  You always want to make sure you understand what changes drove what results.  If there are too many tests and changes at once, there is no way to possibly understand the impact of the tests.

I would add a number 7, analysis

Find yourself a good, easy to use business intelligence tool and analyze the performance of these email campaigns.  Create many different attributes of your customer.  Slice and dice the data to look for opportunities.  Identify groups of customers that aren't performing up to the standards of others, these are the customers that become new segments to target with different communication and content strategies.  This also is a must in my book.

Yelp is Looking For Buyers

In reading the daily update on Stratechery by Ben Thompson, which I highly recommend, he discusses Yelp being on the market.  Yelp is definitely underperforming compared to other social network advertising platforms.  Their revenue is very small, $377 million in 2014 and the growth is not as large as it needs to be for a corporation the size of Yelp.  

What strikes me as interesting in the case of Yelp is their strategy.  Yesterday I commented on an article about strategy and how to assess if your strategy is valid.  I believe Yelp has a strategy that is destined to fail.  Yelp is running the same strategy as the market leaders, which is as an advertising platform.  

The issue I see with their strategy is it is not differentiated.  In fact, their offering is worse than the market leaders when it comes to their ad product.  One may argue their product is differentiated because if a customer is searching for example Mexican Restaurants, then as a Mexican Restaurant it can't get more targeted than an ad for someone looking for that kind of food in a small geographical area.  The problem with this is customers aren't looking for ads on Yelp, they are looking for advice.  An ad is the opposite of what they desire.

 I frequently hear in the tech community that Twitter doesn't understand its product.  They want the product to be something other than what it is.  I fear Yelp may be in the same boat.  Yelp is an aggregator of reviews, they are the trusted source of "where should I eat".  That trust comes from customers reviews.  

elp has the opportunity to differentiate their business.  Their strategy should be the opposite of the strengths of Google and Facebook.  

Loyalty

Yelp has a loyal customer base, however they do not take advantage of this.  Their product has not really changed much since its inception, especially in mobile.  With the advent of technologies, such as beacons, it surprises me that Yelp hasn't taken advantage of its loyal base and struck up deals with local businesses to do a loyalty program with Yelp.  Businesses rely on having great Yelp reviews and this can be parlayed into some kind of loyalty program with a beacon backbone that would identify if a customer was at the business and how much was spent using new location aware technologies.

Recommendation Engine

Because of the amount of data Yelp has it is surprising they haven't developed a more intuitive recommendation engine.  I am always looking for places that I would enjoy and it would be nice if an app told me where I should go and what I should order or what services I should buy.  Yelp is in such a unique position to deliver this.  

I believe they have the ability to enhance their product by allowing customers to rate something without writing a review.  This is something that doesn't have to count to the external rating of the restaurant, but as a means to gather likes of an individual.  This is easy and more customers would rate the businesses in turn.  They can then use this information to have the ultimate "lookalike" recommendation engine.  This is far more powerful than anything Google or Facebook can do.

Targeted Ads and Data

With this lookalike system in place, Yelp can then sell back to the businesses in the form of ads and data.  Since they will have information on all the buyers who are interacting with Yelp, not just the people who take the time to write a review, Yelp can then sell all the information about the customers back to the businesses for a fee.  The ads can then become more targeted because advertisers can get on the home screen of the app with a customer that is highly likely to enjoy the businesses offerings.  As customers see the recommendations are more accurate and they enjoy the businesses experiences, they will end up buying more items through Yelp advertising because of the accuracy.  This will drive higher ad prices for Yelp and bigger returns for the business as they can attract customers that will become more loyal.

I would love the opportunity to innovate at Yelp.  They are in such a unique position to do something different, but they are building the exact same monetary offerings as their competition.  The problem is they don't have the scale.  Just like Twitter, they have to be better and more accurate with their advertising.  This will drive advertising dollars their way because it is more efficient spend and that is what advertisers are looking to achieve.

The First Question to Ask of Any Strategy

A great article by Roger L. Martin regarding Strategy.  

Sadly, like the majority of strategies that I read, this firm’s strategy failed my sniff test and for that reason I would bet overwhelmingly that it will fail in the market as well. The test I apply is quite simple. I look at the core strategy choices and ask myself if I could make the opposite choice without looking stupid. For my wealth managers, the opposite of their “where” choice was to target poor individuals who don’t want and aren’t willing to pay for comprehensive wealth management services. The opposite of their “how” is to provide crappy customer service.

The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you. That means that you are likely to be indistinguishable from your competitors and the only way you will make a decent return is if the industry currently happens to be highly attractive structurally. The wealth management company was targeting the exact same clients as every single global competitor and, like every other global competitor, they planned on giving them “great service.”

I recently wrote about the differences between strategies and tactics, this gets to the heart of defining a good strategy.  It is a really interesting take on the definition of the strategy itself.  I am a big fan of differentiation of the a strategy.  Unless your business is the market leader, following the same strategy as your competition is a recipe for disaster.  You will never overtake the leader.  This is an entirely different take on competing with a strategy that is opposite of a winning strategy.  

Most market leaders and successful companies have good strategies.  They make a lot of money and have a lot of customers.  Sometimes as a business you have to take a strategy that is opposite of what those competitors are doing.  For instance, Apple looked at the smartphone landscape and determined their competitors were tailoring their products to business minded individuals, but Apple decided their strategy was not to go after that market, they decided to make a phone for consumers.  Yes this was in their wheelhouse, but it is an example of not following the competition.  Only later in the iPhone's life did it add features to compete in business, but that was secondary.