November 2012

“Every customer experience is a brand moment of truth.”

The reason why I like Google’s term “ZMOT” — the Zero Moment of Truth — is because I really do visualize that the distance of most prospect’s initial moment-of-truth with a company has collapsed to effectively zero. It’s the distance someone’s finger needs to travel to click (or tap) on a link that holds forth a promise, explicitly or implicitly. Does your brand live up to that promise? In all channels, digital and physical? The …

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Technical expertise is more important than agency experience for CMOs

The Economist Intelligence Unit is on a roll with its marketing industry research. It just released another report, sponsored by SAS, titled Outside Looking In: The CMO Struggles to Get in Sync with the C-Suite. The gist of the report, a global survey of 389 executives, is that marketing is in a period of great change, it’s becoming more strategic, and many organizations are not yet in agreement on what that means for the CMO’s …

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Why marketing may solve the innovator’s dilemma

You may have heard of the recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Cultivating Business-Led Innovation. The big conversation nugget that has been appearing on a number of marketing industry sites is the survey result stating that more than twice as many executives cite marketing as involved in bringing innovative ideas to market than IT. Yes, 45% of senior executives say marketing is involved in birthing innovative ideas, but only 19% say their IT teams …

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Moving marketing beyond the arts and crafts department (interview)

While the marketing technology landscape is vibrant and crowded with innovators of all kinds, there are only a handful of companies that can legitimately take credit for having — near single-handedly — changed the very way marketers think and talk about marketing. HubSpot, the people who invented “inbound marketing,” is one of them. So it was great to ask Mike Volpe, their CMO, a few questions about how they manage their own marketing — including …

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What agile marketers can learn from the U.S. CTO

Think your organization is too large or too political to adopt agile marketing? You might take inspiration from the U.S. CTO Todd Park, who has ignited a number of agile projects in the U.S. federal government and — isn’t there a law against this? — is actually getting stuff done. Park, who has a successful background as a tech-savvy entrepreneur (he co-founded Athenahealth in the 90’s), was the CTO of the Department of Health and …

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Econsultancy’s CEO: Marketing needs pi-shaped people

Ashley Friedlein, the CEO of Econsultancy, has a great op-ed in Marketing Week today, Why modern marketers need to be pi-people. That’s “pi” as in the capital Greek letter pi that looks like this: Π. It’s a riff on the label “T-shaped people” that has been popularized in digital marketing over the past few years. T-shaped people have a specific expertise where they go really deep (e.g., graphic design, software development, data analytics, etc.), but …

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3 enterprises where marketing leads marketing technology

I’ve been advocating for marketing to lead its own technology for almost 5 years now. I believe that the splicing of code and data into the DNA of marketing is one of the big picture meta-trends of our industry. Forrester has recommended a marketing technology office within the marketing department. Recent Gartner research shows that 72% of high-tech marketers now have a chief marketing technologist role in their organizations. Even IBM is now championing the …

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The “marketing technologist” of U.S. elections

There’s been a lot of furor over the years about Nate Silver’s FiveThrityEight blog for predicting the outcome of U.S. elections using more math than mouth. His critics usually include those who disagree with the predicted outcomes of his models and those who make their living crafting, um, less analytical narratives for the heated horse races of American politics. (You can read a brief history of FiveThrityEight and its controversies on Wikipedia. As noted elsewhere, …

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