September 2013

Fire the funnel — 5 stages of the real buyer’s journey

The funnel model of marketing and sales doesn’t reflect reality very well. We know this. Buyers don’t proceed in lock-step fashion down a pipeline. They never did, actually. But the wide-ranging journeys of exploration that buyers can take today on the web have only exacerbated the disparity between the model and reality. This more realistic diagram of the “funnel” by Lori Wizdo of Forrester Research brilliantly illustrates that point. The real funnel doesn’t look like …

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5 Stages of the Buyer's Journey

Ripples from software, to marketing, to manufacturing

We can learn a lot by watching how a revolution moves from one profession to the next. When it comes to rapid prototyping and adaptive development, as a result of digital technologies, the software industry naturally led the way. The very technology they invented helped change the way they work. So, while the early days of software engineering were long cycle projects — waterfall project management at its grandest scale, often spanning a year or …

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Ripples of Revolution

14 rules for data-driven, not data-deluded, marketing

We’re now in the crossfire of a peaking hype cycle for big data and its inevitable backlash. One marketer the other night was yelling on Twitter, “Big Data People need to GET OFF MY LAWN.” I confess, I empathize with his frustration. Of course, I believe that data — the right data, used in the right ways — is immensely powerful in modern marketing. As I wrote in a post about pragmatic marketing, “Relying solely …

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Keep Calm and Use Data Wisely

Front row to the merging of marketing and technology

Bob Lord and Ray Velez, respectively the CEO and CTO of digital agency Razorfish, teamed up to write a book on the intertwining of marketing and technology. It’s called Converge: Transforming Business at the Intersection of Marketing and Technology. How could I not love such a book? Actually, Bob Lord is now the former CEO of Razorfish. He was recruited away for the job of CEO of AOL Networks earlier this summer by Tim Armstrong. …

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Converge Book

Strategic data vs. data theater in data-driven marketing

Let’s face it: we’re swimming in a sea of essentially infinite data at this point. In a recent Teradata report, “lack of needed data” was cited as the least common obstacle to data driven-marketing. Only 22% of the marketers surveyed said that’s what held them back. The most common obstacle? “Lack of process to bring insights into decision-making.” Data may be marketing’s most underutilized asset, but it’s hardly its most scarce. Teradata honed in the …

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Data Theater

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