The biannual Duke Fuqua CMO survey highlights growth strategies that are inward-focused, as well as incorporating the strengthening of marketing capabilities, a significant increase in strategic channel partnerships, continued growth in social media spending, and the continuing emergence of AI.
While digital age marketing channels such as social media marketing and mobile marketing has captured the public’s attention, the view from the Chief Marketing Officer’s desk is more measured, according to a new survey of marketing leaders in the U.S. Social media marketing continues to grab more and more of the marketing budget, for example, but measuring its impact on the bottom line remains elusive.
With traditional marketing losing its impact in today’s overcrowded marketplaces, marketers are developing creative covert campaigns to create buzz around their products. Sometimes, however, these covert campaigns can backfire.
Reflecting the impact of customer review sites, new research shows that independent hotels are adjusting their advertising spending based on reader reviews — the better the reviews, the less they spend.
New research reveals the potential benefits and pitfalls of including paid social media endorsers in new marketing efforts. The research notably revealed that paid endorsers are either eager to participate or very effective — but rarely both.
A series of psychological experiments reveal that people will imitate others’ preferences, but not their actions — a revelation that can have marketing implications. For example, Facebook ‘likes’ are more influential than lists of best-selling products.
Shoppers find consumer reviews to be less useful, and are less likely to seek out such reviews, for experiential purchases (events to be lived through such as vacation packages) than for material products (objects to keep such as electronics).
The phrase “big data” puts the emphasis on quantity — and it’s true that the data available in the world continues to grow exponentially every year. But for businesses wanting to make the most of big data, it’s not quantity that counts, but what you do with the data. Companies are losing millions of dollars because they are not fully exploiting the data they are already gathering. Given the complexity of big data, visualisation software tools are required to help companies avoid this mistake.
Companies will be steadily increasing their spending on social media marketing in the next few years, even though most marketing executives cannot measure the financial impact of such spending. The shift in consumer buying patterns to online makes a shift to social media marketing a logical step, despite the current inability to demonstrate ROI. The pressing issue now is for companies to integrate social media activities into their general marketing campaigns.
Rating scales, such as those used in online review platforms or stores (for example, Amazon or Tripadvisor) or by government rating agencies (such as agencies rating energy savings), allow consumers to evaluate the performance of products or services. However, new research shows that when the scale levels of the rating scale are not distinguished visually (e.g. by colour) or linguistically (e.g. using the linguistically different A, B, C, D rather than A, A+, A++, A+++), consumers are more likely to ignore them — and this can hurt the sales.
While it might seem easy for competitors to hurt a rival’s sales by posting negative reviews, research reveals that many of the most negative product reviews are written by loyal customers trying to influence company strategy.
New research shows that developing product search engine rankings based on best value factors — the logarithm for a hotel site search engine would be calculated not just on price but also on proximity to beach and/or proximity to shopping areas, for example — generates greater revenue than rankings based on one criteria, such as price. The research also explores a number of other issues related to product search rankings, such as how rankings impact click through rates for various classes of products or how consumers react to personalised rankings.
The proliferation of devices and channels has brought new challenges to just about every organization in delivering consistently good customer experiences and effectively joining up service provision with marketing activity, data and content. A good multichannel strategy and execution is increasingly becoming essential to marketers and customer experience professionals from every sector.
Increased awareness of the power of online word of mouth (WOM) in marketing means many companies now offer people financial incentives to write reviews of their products and services. But this could be a short-sighted strategy. Recent research suggests that knowing a review has been ‘solicited’ leads to negative pre-conceptions about products among potential consumers – and that these could prove quite hard to reverse.
Publishers and media owners who provide sought-after online content can profit financially by charging for it – rather than relying on declining online advertising revenues. But it is crucial how a fee-based charging structure is implemented: charge too little and you are missing out on valuable subscription revenue; but charge too much – or for the wrong content – and you will lose viewers, further undermining advertising revenues. The key is for media companies to take a flexible approach, charging optimal fees for selected content
The advent of Web 2.0 – the use of social media tools for marketing – has created new ways to communicate, collaborate and share content. Businesses that market their products or services to consumers (B2C) were first to realise its potential, not least through social networking sites such a Facebook. But research suggests that the benefits can be just as significant for businesses that market to other businesses (B2B).
Many companies have now launched brand-specific online communities. Using data from a specific retailer, a research team from University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and Wilfrid Laurier University sought to measure the actual revenues generated by an online community — also known as ‘social dollars’. Their findings confirm the effectiveness and profitability of online communities. Nearly 20% of the revenue from community customers in their research could be traced to their joining the community. Social dollars also persisted over time — the spending was not a temporary spike due
Increases in online communities have led to behaviours that influence online activities, such as shopping, becoming more and more important for executives to understand if they want their businesses to flourish. One of these behaviours is word-of-mouth communication (WOM). In this Idea, the impact of WOM on consumption is analysed, with a discussion of those strategies that work and those that do not.
All businesses want to increase their visibility, but for small businesses this is even more of a concern. Could Twitter be the key to getting your firm noticed by investors? According to new research, small businesses that use Twitter to communicate with investors may experience an increase in the demand at market value of their stocks, helping to level the playing field between them and larger firms.
Technology, and especially social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn, has fuelled an ‘always on’ culture. The pervasiveness of social media is fundamentally altering the methods through which buyers and sellers interact — salespeople feel obliged to respond immediately to communications from anywhere in the world, at whatever time. Potentially there is a revolutionary change in the way contemporary selling is conducted, driven in large measure by social media technology.
