Decker Marketing

VP of Marketing Responsible for Shipping & Logistics?

Harry Joiner, a marketing recruiter and good friend, asked me to comment on his blog regarding what a VP of eCommerce or VP Marketing candidate should be asked or should answer regarding shipping & delivery logistics. Here's what I said...

 

As you know, I believe word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing and sustainable growth. So, a VP of marketing candidate needs to have an appreciation for the overall customer experience.

Shipping logistics are a huge part of that experience. You can weight the satisfaction and loyalty impact of each part of the customer experience – researching products, buying, receiving and using a product (support). The weight of impact is correlated to the the emotional residual for that part of the experience.

Shopping and research is a relatively forgettable experience, unless there is severe frustration. The buying experience is overshadowed with the emotional weight of the receiving and the out of box experience, as well as resolving customer service and support issues (downstream activities). Amazon is consistent with shipping and logistics. Apple and Chumby have great out of the box experiences.

So, word of mouth and branding (and thus, top line revenue over the long term) are driven from upstream decisions (great products, packaging) and downstream logistics (shipping, service, support).

A great VP of marketing should realize they have to balance between immediate, short term tactics to drive revenue and the sustainable long-term activities that may even be out of his direct control. In this case, marketing is a "chief accountability officer" and has to champion improvements and investments in the overall customer experience. You can no longer mask logistical and service blemishes with good midstream activities (marketing/advertising).

One last point on logistics, as it relates to online. Nearly every customer utilizes tools to check status, manage returns, and resolve customer service issues. Amazon and Zappos do the best job I've seen of integrating their logistics with online content and functionality. A strong candidate will understand the need to look at things from a customer task / customer process perspective and make sure that they build it from there back to the logistics team. Technical and political savvy are very helpful assets to accomplish a great customer experience...and thus a great brand.

Top 10 Best and Worst Speakers of 2007

Every year Bert Decker (disclosure: my father), Chairman of  Decker Communications, publishes his Top 10 Best and Worst speakers of the year.

The top 3 speakers of 2007 are:

• Gov. Mike Huckabee
• Dr. Mehmet Oz
• Al Gore

Click here to see all Top 10 Best Speakers

The 2007 worst three speakers are:

• Attorney Alberto Gonzales
• Michael Vick
• Robert Eckert (Mattel Chairman)

Click here to see all Top 10 Worst Speakers

         

Bert Decker is a national communications expert, best selling author and entrepreneur, founding the communications training company Decker Communications, Inc. He has been featured in the NY Times, Business Week, 20/20, as well as being the communications commentator for the NBC TODAY Show for the Presidential Debates.               

• Coach to Charles Schwab, U.S. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, former Mattel CEO's John Ammerman and Jill Barrad, Olympians Bonnie Blair and Tom Dolan, SF 49er All-Pro Brent Jones, and dozens of other executives
• Founder, Chairman and CEO of Decker Communications, Inc., a leader in communications training and executive coaching.
• Consultant to Siemens, State Farm, Schwab, Met Life, and many others
• Professional Speaker and best selling author of "You've Got to Be Believed To Be Heard" and "Speaking With Bold Assurance"
• Co-producer of an Academy Award documentary
• Entrepreneur, founder of four companies, Chairman of Bold Assurance             Ministries, NBC TODAY Communications Expert commentator, Advisory Board Salvation Army

Prioritizing Marketers' Top Priorities

This morning I got a research brief from Mediapost summarizing the findings from the Marketing Effectiveness Networking Group (MENG) and Anderson Aanlytics study. This study surveyed marketing executives to identify key trends and strategies of effective marketing. The subject line of the email said: "Marketing Execs Say Basics Are Most Important in 2008".

By "basics" I thought they meant strategies such as becoming measurement-oriented, shifting ad portfolio, investing in email infrastructure, build operational data warehouse, and improve web site.

However the 'basics' by definition from this study were more customer-centric and more concepts and objectives rather than strategies. And unfortunately for most companies, they're not all that 'basic' in achieving success.

60% of marketing executives said the following 'marketing basics' were important:

• Customer satisfaction
• Customer retention
• Segmentation
• Brand loyalty
• ROI

I have a copy of the study. To be clear, the study asked marketing executives to choose from over 60 concepts or buzzwords (such as the 5 above) which were then categorized. Other categories, in order of votes, included:

• SEO (by itself)
• Personalization: concepts include Data mining, CRM, Lead Generation, Personalization, Ecommerce, Competitive Intelligence
• Green Marketing:
• Multicultural / Ethic issues.
• Breakdown of old media
• Innovative Branding
• Viral / WOM: concepts include viral, WOM, blogging
• New Media: concepts include Web 2.0, Mobile, CGM, Long Tail, Social Networking
• Macro Economics
• Tech Strategy
• Outsourcing
• Social Issues
• Other

Now, as a marketer, if I participated in this study I may have answered the same way. After all, the 'marketing basics' are overarching objectives. What can beat those? And in fact, many of the other concepts feed into driving satisfaction, retention, and ROI. It's not a fair comparison to put customer satisfaction next to "SEO" or "Data Mining". Yet for many marketers, SEO and data mining may take up the majority of their resources.

Some of the concepts above are objectives, some are strategies, and some are just concepts. Some strategies drive the results of other strategies. For example, many concepts under the Viral, Innovative Branding, and New Media categories are becoming THE biggest strategies to drive customer satisfaction, the way to reach new segments, and the biggest strategy to achieve ROI. Why? Because of "Breakdown of old media", ironically. Product reviews, for example, are driving 50% higher conversion on many web sites. Social networks and green marketing are two strategies key to reaching Gen Y crowds. And Web 2.0 and social networking actually drive a lot of SEO (the #2 concept above).

In a recent Internet Retailer article, Walmart.com CMO Cathy Halligan reported that the top three initiatives last year for them were:

• Pick up in store capability
• Product ratings and reviews
• "Find a Store" functionality

Granted, all of these are within an ecommerce business (one of the concepts above), but Walmart.com is a $1B business, ad their top marketing initiatives last year were Web 2.0 and multi-channel capability (not on the study above).Yet, I  bet Cathy would answer this survey the same way. Customer satisfaction and retention are paramount for them, as she stated in the Internet Retailer article, "Our secret sauce is customer focus."

In our company (Bazaarvoice, a B2B software as a service provider), customer satisfaction and retention are also top objectives. If I took this study I'd vote them to the top, because if we achieve these we garner "word of mouth" which BECOMES "lead generation" (two concepts voted lower) which results in "ROI". Therefore, word of mouth is our #1 strategy.  But, it gets more complicated. The four pillars to achieving customer satisfaction and retention, and driving word of mouth, are not even on this list: Customer service, support, innovation, and reliability. Data mining, personalization, and breakdown of old media have nothing to do with my B2B strategy; yet these were my top priorities when I was at Dell.

What would be very helpful is a study that separates objectives from strategies, and surveys the effectiveness of the strategies towards the objectives, preferably by B2B vs. B2C, and perhaps by industry.

In the end though, I think that this study got it right in highlighting that the end goal for marketers are the marketing basics of satisfaction, retention, loyalty and ROI. But the absolute numbers and comparisons of concepts to each other may not be as relevant, other than to gauge top of mind awareness of marketing concepts and buzzwords. Each industry, company and marketing strategy is different.