The Age of Conversation 3 is now published, available, and earning money for children’s charities. It is also a very good read and full of ideas and “war stories” that should help marketers challenge their own predispositions and win in the world of Social Media. Yes, I am contributor, but only in a small way…I am one of 171 authors who have contributed at least one chapter. The real powers behind this effort are Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton, pictured above.

Subtitled “It’s Time To Get Busy,” The Age of Conversation 3 echoes our efforts with so many of our clients: It’s time to quit being so “wowed” by the opportunities afforded by Social Media and actually get out there and commercialize them. (I used to say, “exploit them,” but my partners said that was too aggressive).

Before I go any further, let me just say this: BUY THIS BOOK! Here’s the Amazon link. I mean it. There is great value in this…I have learned much from my work on the previous two editions. And, you’ll be doing something good for the children.

While you’re at it, buy Drew’s first book!

Here’s the public propaganda:

Almost three years ago, an online conversation between two marketing pros—an American and an Australian—evolved into a collaborative writing effort by more than 100 bloggers from nine countries, and was aptly titled The Age of Conversation. Fast forward to today and the abstract experiment is now a concrete treatise on the state of social media and marketing best practices as a whole. With Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton still firmly at the helm, the third book in the Age of Conversation series has become a veritable “who’s who” of the world’s leading marketing bloggers. Age of Conversation 3 (202 pages; hardcover; paperback; Kindle; ePub) was published by new digital publishing company Channel V Books (www.ChannelVBooks.com), and is now available through all major online retailers, as a Kindle e-book, and will soon be available as an ePub for other digital readers.

Age of Conversation 3 captures the distinct shift from social media as a hypothetical consumer loyalty tool, as it was considered only a little more than a year ago, to its current state as a staple in the modern marketing toolbox. Although the book covers more than just social media, the topic is ubiquitous among the book’s 10 sections: At the Coalface; Identities, Friends and Trusted Strangers; Conversational Branding; Measurement; Corporate Conversations; In the Boardroom; Innovation and Execution; Influence; Getting to Work; and Pitching Social Media.

“We have seen an incredible shift in the role of social media over the past three years. It has moved from an outlier in the marketing mix to one of the strategic pillars of any corporate marketing or branding exercise,” said Drew McLellan. “And it doesn’t end there,” adds Gavin Heaton. “As the many authors of this new book explain, the focus may be on conversation, but you can’t participate in a conversation from the sidelines. It’s all about participation. And this book provides you with 171 lessons in this new art”.

Buy this book.

In case you have any doubts about its provenance, here are the authors…every one of them outstanding marketers.

Buy this book.

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It’s true! For all you 21^st century globetrotters, Stopwatch Marketing is now available in Korea. Actually, the English version has been available there for some time, but now, the locals can get it in their own language.

For this week’s pop quiz, can you tell which of the above is the new Korean edition?  Which is English?  Which is Japanese?  No hints.

And questions for my friends:

CK – can you set up a Social Media program for Stopwatch Marketing in Korea?

Gavin, Drew – do we have Korean and other language rights for AOC 2010?

Tom - I know you’re headed to Asia on Ruskin business soon…I expect a full report on retail distribution in Seoul.

Bill - Isn’t Globalization the result of the Most Powerful Idea in the World?

And for everyone else, don’t forget that Drew’s book is also a very, very, good marketing book.

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  • Invest in today and tomorrow will take care of itself.  Now is not the time to extinguish your advertising, promotion, research, and innovation budgets; now is the time to wisely use your budgets to better understand your consumers so your offering remains meaningful in the present and the future.
  • Go-to-market together.  As marketing budgets must be maximized in the new year, marketers should consider partnering with complementary brands (for example:  Heinz ketchup and French’s mustard) to share in research costs, advertising dollars, in-store displays, etc.  Knowing how your consumers shop (e.g. what else they buy and/or use with your brand) will help you identify appropriate brands to consider approaching for collaboration and coordination of your precious marketing budgets, calendars, and initiatives.
  • Aim for customer monogamy, not just customer loyalty.  Loyalty means that your customer is shopping in your store, your category, or your brand most of the time – and probably your competitors on a less frequent basis.  If you truly want to maintain and grow your heavy user base, aim to deliver on all of their needs so your customer has no reason to be tempted to switch.
  • Make customers feel good about shopping.  Right now, shopping (except for everyday necessities) feels wrong, foolish, and indulgent when news headlines continue to communicate economic woes.  Appeal to your customers’ emotions that they are doing the “right thing” with their savvy purchases.
  • Understand that “value” means more than “cheap/low prices.”  Consumers are savvier than ever and want the best value for the time, money, and effort they spend shopping and using the resulting goods.   Reward their efforts by making it easy for them to shop your store, your category, and your brand.
  • Walk in your customers’ shoes (or boots).  You rely on research to ground yourself in the facts about your customers – the demographics, psychographics, purchase behavior, purchase interest, brand preference, etc. that lead you to the insights used for strategic decisions.   However, you need to also look up from the numbers once in a while and  look at the people behind the numbers.  Observe how your customer lives – walk around their neighborhood, watch them deal with traffic headaches,  note their mood when they walk into their office (vs. when they leave their office), shop in their stores, and eavesdrop on their in-store purchase decisions.  Remember that your target more than likely lives a life that is different than your own and that he/she will make choices different than you will.   Respect their footsteps and their path in life.
  • Remember that shopping isn’t just an in-store or online activity.   In some way, consumers never stop “shopping” – they are always recognizing new problems or dealing with recurring problems and looking for solutions.  Sometimes, consumers are merely asking friends for quick advice; other times, they are going online or to a store to look for an actual solution.  At its essence, a marketer’s role is to be a problem solver.  Identify when your customers start to think about the problem that you solve and remember the rule of “rights” – right product, right placement, right message, right timing, and right price. 

All the best for a successful 2010!

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The Four Pillars of Profit-Driven Marketing is, indeed, another book just as good as Stopwatch Marketing. In fact, it’s an outstanding book that deals with the most important issue in marketing today. I meant that last comment: I do believe that developing some discipline around the measurement of productivity – ROI – of marketing efforts is more important than “understanding Social Media,” or “marketing in the downturn,” or “tapping into Gen Y,” or “outsourcing,” or “media fragmentation,” or any one of a number of other issues marketers confront today. In fact, measuring performance and using it to guide future marketing decisions is the critical issue that affects all those others. It is certainly representative of the most frequent question I get from my clients: “How do I measure success of marketing efforts?”

Written by a couple of Booz consultants, Leslie H. Moeller and Edward C. Landry, Profit-Driven Marketing offers an easy-to-understand rationale and approach to answering that question and, more importantly, institutionalizing an ROI-driven attitude into marketing departments.

Like all genius, the Four Pillars themselves, seem simple and straightforward, prompting one to ask, “Why didn’t I think of that???” They are:

1. Analytical Understanding

2. Decision Support Tools

3. Embedded Processes

4. Aligned Organization

    

The book contains a few well-chosen case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of embedding a disciplined, ROI approach. Capital One’s rise to the upper reaches of consumer banking – and reasonable success surviving the current crisis – was driven by clear-headed focus on documenting and acting on the ROI of each marketing program, consumer segment, promotion, etc.

More illuminating for traditional marketers may be the Kellogg’s TPE (Trade Promotion Excellence) program. This program, built on ROI models of each cereal brand and trade promotion, empowers local sales representatives to pick and choose among a menu of trade promos (rather than a single national one) in conjunction with their retail buyers. So, Jewel and Dominick’s or Shaws and Stop & Shop make be promoting different cereals / sizes at the same time, based on disciplined analysis of each chain’s customers and needs. Now here’s the kicker, pay attention: Moeller and Landry’s ROI-focused approach is emphatically NOT REPEAT NOT a surrogate for driving marketers to more easily measured marketing tactics: The Kellogg’s TPE program “…enabled Kellogg’s to divert investment dollars from trade promotions to brand building and new product innovations.” That’s right, FROM trade promotions. For all those old-fashioned marketers who avoid detailed, ROI-driven measurement protocols, here’s what you’ve been looking for: If you build an appropriate and effective model and IF you are right – brand building trumps trade promotions – then the model will prove the effectiveness of your long-term gut instinct and arm you with the tools to do that brand building!

Bottom line, you can’t be disciplined enough and you can’t get by today without an effective, quantitative model of the marketing efforts you are working with. In our own work with clients on new product development, we have built an very nice business with our Desktop Strategizer^SM model that empowers product development types to run endless “what if” scenarios that predict the ROI of the anticipated product intro.

This is an excellent book, and belongs A) in you briefcase for your next airplane trip and B) next to Stopwatch Marketing on your bookshelf.

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Yes, it’s true! Stopwatch Marketing is now available in Japan. A great client, and friend, currently based in Tokyo alerted us a month or so ago that he had seen the book positively reviewed in the Nikkei, Japan’s most respected business newspaper. More recently, we received copies of the Japanese edition, pictured above.

For those of you so inclined, below is the link to the Amazon.co.jp page:

http://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4798117749/ref=s9_subs_gw_s0_p14_i1?pf_rd_m=AN1VRQENFRJN5&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1VTD021E1NDY94C3ER5J&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=463376756&pf_rd_i=489986

What an exciting moment – especially since AnnaMaria is, as I write this, off to a meeting with yet another of our Japanese clients, Takeda, the huge pharmaceutical company.

Note to Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan: Do we have foreign language deals on Age of Conversation?

Japan is, of course, my favorite foreign country (not only because of our great clients there). A few years ago, I promised my sons that if they got straight A’s, I’d take them with me to Japan. One of them made the grade and, in a burst of surprising integrity, I delivered on my promise. Here’s a picture of me explaining some arcane, esoteric, and generally useless fact about the palace in Kyoto to my son. He looks so proud to have me for a father, doesn’t he?

And here we are at the summit, having climbed Mt Fuji. Pretty cool, huh?

By the way, that Japanese client who alerted us to the book review in Nikkei is none other than Hidenori Nishi, recently named COO of Kagome CO, Ltd. It’s a truly great company – the next time you are in Japan, try some of their fruit & vegetable juices. Below is their corporate credo:

I’m currently trying to figure out how to take credit for Stopwatch Marketing principles in launching and driving Nishi-san’s stellar career at Kagome. And, be sure to pick up a copy of Stopwatch Marketing in Japanese and be visible reading it on the subway!

Finally, our weekly quiz: Which of the following is AnnaMaria, which is my favorite Buddha, which is Nishi-san of Kagome, and which is me?

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All ideas are BORN, not created in their initial stage. That means they are like babies. Babies are very fragile, very easy to kill – or, at least, to dislike. They are very messy; they exude liquid from multiple orifices. They are smelly when they do that. Life is much simpler without them. Yet, for life to continue AT ALL, they are necessary. In fact, it is necessary to protect and nurture them at least beyond adolescence. Just as new (baby) ideas are messy and disruptive for our organization – they require us to do entirely different things and think in very different ways. They threaten our habits, our comfort. But they are necessary if our company is to thrive. In fact, we have to nurture them at least until adolescence.

Consequently, I was quite happy to see that one of my favorite recent advertising campaigns, the e-trade baby, has been nurtured, refreshed, and continued into 2009.

All too often, the advertiser becomes fatigued with a campaign long before the public does. Especially when the advertiser reorganizes every year. Some stupid brand manager, out to make his/her career in advertising (not management!) decides that “The answer is…we need a new ad campaign!! Very soon!! Now, what was the question?”

I learned this lesson early in my career at the Quaker Oats company, owners of one of the truly classic commercials of the 1960’s & ’70’s – “He likes it, Hey Mikey:”

This was a spectacularly funny and successful ad, propelling Life Cereal into contention with the humongous brands from Kellogg’s and General Mills. Rather than ride it very hard for a decade, or upgrade and refresh it into an ongoing decades-long campaign, the company got tired of paying all the royalties the actors were receiving and moved on to some other (less successful) ad campaign.

What a waste.

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“We will not participate in the recession!”

Those words were spoken by Tom Edwards, the president of Ruskin Air and Sound Control, a fifty year-old, Kansas City-based company at whose annual sales meeting I was recently asked to speak. While my topic was, of course, Stopwatch Marketing, I couldn’t help but be blown away by the actual work of this meeting – and of this special company. Consider:

1. They manufacture – and successfully market – traditional, industrial HVAC products such as Air Measuring Products and Industrial Dampers:

    

2. Much of this manufacturing takes place in North America

3. They are completing a record year

4. Ruskin has added enormous amounts of new materials and electronics technology to their systems to improve energy efficiency and improve control and diagnostics of system performance

5. They employ 3,300 people around the world

6. They plan to continue investing heavily in people, technology, and marketing to make sure that they not only “refuse to participate in the recession,” but come out the other end of it poised to unmercifully exploit the infrastructure boom sparked by the Stimulus Plan

It was, indeed, a pleasure to be with these guys for a couple of days. “These guys” includes their independent reps, consulting engineers, architects, etc. from around the world. Not once did I hear words like “survival,” or “scary” when they referred to current business conditions. This was as can-do a crowd as I’ve been with for a while. It was also a pleasure to talk with them about their vision for the future of their industry – this is a group that is actually doing something to radically reduce energy use AND save lives (that’s what they do…air handling, energy transfer, smoke and fire protection, etc.), as well as producing ever more effective and intelligent systems for the buildings we all take for granted. And, to repeat, they do it by engineering and bending metal in North America, not financially engineering subprime mortgages, outsourcing call centers overseas, or importing videogames.

Their website is worth looking into, if for no other reason to enjoy, as I did, the simplicity with which they communicate their vision and their reverence for the performance of their products. If you wish to participate – as I do – in their future prosperity, check out the stock of their corporate parent, Tomkins PLC (TKS).

Finally, our periodic quiz: Which of the following is their president, Tom Edwards, which is AnnaMaria, and which is me?

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