» Customer Centric Transformation – Making B2B Marketing Personal

I was a keynote speaker at the Forrester Marketing Forum today in Miami on driving customer centricity in a B2B environment. It was great fun and I had great questions from the audience. I thought I would highlight some of the key themes I addressed. Let me know what you think.

Read also the summaries by Peter Kim and Josh Hallett

» HP Tops Nielsen's Super Bowl Ratings With 100 Million Viewers

HP topped the ratings during CBS' telecast of the Super Bowl, according to Nielsen Media Research. Our OCC ad was the highest rated commercial minute in the game, drawing 99.5 million viewers at 9:25 p.m. A Toyota Tundra spot was No. 2 with 99.1 million viewers at 8:55 p.m., and a FedEx spot was third with 98.2 million at 8:58 p.m.

» The Impact of Organic Google Search on Social Media – My Favorite Posts

John Battelle had a great post on one of the greatest blogging dilemmas. Blogging is about an on-going dialogue of the author with its audience and blogging brings this great immediacy to their discussion. BUT … A very large percentage of readers (35% in my case) come directly from search, typing in key words in google and landing on this blog.

Not surprisingly, most people find me by typing in google: “what is marketing” (by far #1), “Cyworld Korea”, “video marketing” or “viral marketing”. But the long tail of searches reveals more unexpected searches such as “2 headed person”, “it does not matter anymore”, “growing pains TV show”, “reasons why people would like to live in Russia”, “French sms love”, “java script rolling bar”. Ok, ok, I chose the most extreme ones; most do relate to hp, marketing and social media.

The google searcher/reader lacks the frame of reference about this blog, reads one post, leaves no comment and moves on. John provides great suggestions on how blogging platforms could evolve to “merchandize” blogs, but his post prompted me more tactically to highlight for a new reader the main highlights of this blog.

» What Publishers Are Doing To Satisfy The Needs of Advertisers

» What is Marketing Responsible For?

Spencer Stuart released their updated study on the length of CMO tenure, where they show surprising results that the average tenure has dropped again this year to 23.2 months, the lowest among the C-Suite. ANA Marketing Maestros had a great follow up post, highlighting that the first and most important step for a successful CMO is to establish a contract with the CEO on what he/she expects from marketing.

Marketing has most probably the most inconsistent role of all functions across companies (for example, compared to finance where the role varies less) and aligning on expectations and charter has become essential. My blogging friends over at Marketing Profs sent me an advance copy of their new book “Marketing Champions” (Wiley Editions) and I like their thinking. Their main argument is that CMOs have to a great extent failed so far to draw the linkage between marketing and the harvesting of cash flow.

» ANA Q&A with Gary Elliott, VP Brand Marketing HP

» Marketing as a key driver of business growth

In times of hyper growth in the tech industry, marketers were well known for creativity, great ads and building leading brands. But today as core markets mature, CEOs are demanding one thing and one thing only from Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs): help me drive business growth. However, while the mandate seems clear, few organizations, CEOs and CMOs have successfully implemented this new model. Most marketing organizations have undergone substantial re-organizations in the past few years and CMOs still have the shortest tenure of all C-level executives.

I have recently read with great interest the study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and Booz Allen Hamilton about the structure and practices of marketing organizations.

» Marketing Excellence – next generation wanted

Recently I re-read Spencer Stuart’s excellent study around the average tenure of a CMO. Greg Welch notes “that the average tenure for chief marketing officers at the top 100 branded companies is just 23 months. Compare this to CEOs, who are in their positions, on average, 54 months.”

It’s a tough job. CMOs are required to balance the newest and riskiest job in the C-suite with an ever expanding combination of skills.

» "Made for India" marketing

Brands and Marketing were traditionally dominated by the US, Germany and Japan. In Interbrand’s global brand scorecard, 14 of the top 20 global brands are US brands (HP is #12 by the way). Consulting firms, advertising agencies and market intelligence companies were primarily based in these countries. Product marketers worked in those three countries; they catered to the local customer needs and created products for those markets that would be then exported with little differentiation to the rest of the world.

I was in Bangalore, India recently and I was struck by how much this could become the model of the past.

» So why does Marketing need Excellence?