Execs Agree: For Reaching Critical Business Goals, Face-to-Face Meetings Are Best(MeetingsNet.com)

When the goals of a meeting include persuasion, leadership, engagement, inspiration, decision-making, accountability, or candor, U.S. business executives overwhelmingly believe that holding a face-to-face gathering is the only way to go.

In a June 2009 survey of 760 executives from businesses of all sizes, Forbes Insights found that 84 percent of them prefer in-person, face-to-face business meetings, citing those as more effective than webconferences, videoconferences, or teleconferences for reaching a dozen goals, including those listed above. (Forbes Insights is a custom research division of Forbes Media, publisher of Forbes magazine.)

However, technology-enabled meetings have their place as well. The respondents deemed virtual meetings best for “information dissemination” and “data presentation.”

The 16 percent of executives who preferred virtual meetings overall cited a savings of time and money as the top two reasons for their preference, followed closely by “flexibility in location and timing.” Their fourth reason for preferring virtual meetings—“allows me to multitask”—is one of the reasons other executives worry that virtual meetings do not meet business goals as well as face-to-face meetings. (And in fact, more than half the respondents said they surf the Web, check e-mail, or do unrelated work while “attending” virtual meetings.)

Despite the clear preference for getting face to face, current economic and other conditions have made this a tough year for business travel. Some 58 percent of respondents said they are traveling less frequently than in January 2008, with just over one-third (34 percent) reporting that they’re traveling “much less frequently.” Meanwhile, a corresponding 57 percent reported their companies’ use of technology to conduct meetings has increased compared to January 2008. Visit GGE.Com to see how you can get the most from your face-to-face spend.

By Rohit Bhargava
There was a time when age used to matter for marketers. We would buy media based on presumed age ranges of audiences in the hopes that this bit of demographic information would help us reach the right people. In fact, this is one of the most time-honored traditions of marketing planning. It is also one of the dumbest. The thing about age is that it was always used as a proxy for interest. If you knew that someone was a male between the ages of 18-34, you could make a guess that they might like sports, or need deodorant, or drink beer.

The inherent problem with this model is that you are just guessing at relevance–but at the time this was the best you could do. Today, you can do better. Online, people are telling you what they are interested in. They are broadcasting their interests. Their activities are not a hidden black box, they are out in the open. So you don’t have to guess that a 25-year-old male who is watching football might eat your pretzels–you can use social media and active listening to find the 41-year-old mom who has already told her friends those pretzels are her favorite food in the world. Oh, and by the way, you can find the five friends she shared that with too.

This is the power of the online environment and the new ability of targeting. Marketers don’t need to rely on the crutch of age demographics any longer. The problem is, most sites and publications selling advertising still rely on these. So the TV spots, magazine ads and online banners are still being sold largely through these empty demographics, while what marketers need to care about is far different. Here are a few concrete reasons age demographics are generally a waste of time:

1.People are age shifting and not living lives based on traditional stereotypes for their ages.
2.The top end of a demographic (34) usually has almost nothing in common with the low end (18).
3.Age demos leave out influencers, gift buyers, and others for whom a message may be relevant, but don’t fit the age requirements because they aren’t the ultimate recipient of the product.
4.Focusing on age can take you away from emotional or relevant benefits.
5.People lie about their age all the time.
So if you do leave age aside, what matters more? Relevance. If you find the right 25-year-old who thinks like a teenager, or a 36-year-old mom (who may technically be outside your age demographic), then that’s a good thing. The only way to do it is to stop blindly thinking about age demographics and refocusing on methods of targeting that actually matter such as interests, affinity groups, location. This doesn’t mean you can forget about tailoring your message to different groups and age ranges, but the point is that you need to think of your audience in terms of action and interest–not artificially created groupings of age.

Once you do that, the places you buy media will start to follow suite. They will sell advertising based on what their audiences do and what they say and not what drop down box they chose as they were trying to register hurridly for access to a site. You have the power to demand more intelligence from the places you spend your marketing dollars. The marketers who do so will be the ones that do more than simply filling out columns on the same measurement spreadsheet year after year.  As a side bonus, they will be the ones that find their marketing working much better as well.

Read more of Rohit Bhargava’s Influential Marketing blog [1] on Fast Company. And visit gge.com for relevant marketing ideas!

Branding Today: Why It’s Ineffective, Irrelevant, Irritating, and
Impotent
By Augustine Fou , July 31, 2009

Why do advertisers still do “branding”? Probably because they’re trying to drive sales. But many advertisers don’t realize that
branding as it is done today is irrelevant, ineffective, irritating, and impotent. It’s not their fault, really. They’ve been led astray by agencies practicing the false religion of branding. Paraphrasing Lucas
Conley, author of “Obsessive Branding Disorder:” “Branding is a quick, easy alternative to true innovation, offering the
satisfaction of a sense of change without the real, hard work. In the blind pursuit of this escapist religion, their frenzied efforts –
perfecting names, wordsmithing brand essences, debating ‘robin’s eggshell blue’ as brand color — almost feel like genuine
work.” But branding today involves advertisers shouting our carefully crafted brand messages at target consumers, beating them over
the head with every opportunity we get.

A Brand Used to Be a Symbol Burned Onto a Cow’s Butt
A brand on a cow’s rear end identified the ranch where the cow was raised. Because that ranch had a long-standing reputation
of raising healthy cows, the brand was its symbol of quality. The buyer could rest assured he was buying healthy cows once he
saw that brand. It simplified purchase decisions. But once the “-ing” was added to the word “brand,” and agencies started to ply
the black art of “branding,” a brand was no longer the symbol of quality and reputation earned over time. Instead it was
something that was just made up by ad agency creatives “applying ingenuity to the disingenuous,” Conley points out.
Advertisers spend enormous amounts of money making up what they want consumers to think or believe about them and even
more money on blasting the message out through paid media (TV, print, radio, banner ads). Excruciating attention is paid to
which shade of pink best represents the brand. But, honestly, few consumers can tell what the official brand color of Victoria’s
Secret is. Even fewer care. The exact shade of red in Circuit City’s brand color scheme has little bearing on my willingness to
shop there; the more modern-looking yellow-on-blue tag in Best Buy’s logo never got me to actually buy something from that
store. In place of genuine innovation, good money and time are squandered on perfectly describing how the consumer should
think, smell, taste, hear, touch, or feel about the brand. But these made-up dimensions are hardly ever effective in simplifying a
potential customer’s purchase decision, like a true brand used to do. Modern consumers need more information than can be
delivered in the 30-second feel-good TV ad or the beautifully photographed (and Photoshopped) print ad.

A Brand Is No Longer What the Advertiser Says It Is
A brand is now what consumers think it is and tell others it is. “Digital” broke everything. The house of cards that is modern-day branding can no longer stand in an environment where
consumers can talk to each other and their conversations are spread far and wide and are even archived and available to
inform future users. Consumers can review and rate products and give each other feedback and recommendations. A brand
shouting its message is no longer the only source of information; consumers have many other sources of trust and objective
opinions.

Even if a brand claims it has great customer service, how consumers actually perceive the brand and how they describe it to
others has far greater weight in the minds of future consumers. Further, digital channels break through information and
geographic boundaries. Consumers can now compare features and prices of dozens of similar products — e.g. digital cameras -
- rather than rely on the measly in-store selection and the limited information on tech spec cards. Consumers can also now buy
products that better suit their needs, even if those products aren’t available in their local stores. Branding claims are irrelevant.

Consumers are empowered now and will speak up. Nowhere is the new level playing field more painfully apparent than in the movie business, where examples abound like an
extremely low-budget movie. “Blair Witch” (No. 210; $6 million budget for production and advertising) outranks a super highbudget
movie, “Matrix Revolutions” (No. 217; $160 million budget for production and advertising) in gross sales on the All Time
USA Box Office List, according to IMDB.com. Despite millions of dollars of new beer advertising, some big beer brands
reportedly suffered a double-digit drop in sales over during the July 4th holiday period compared to a year ago; perhaps the
product does not have as much “drinkability” as its glossy ads claim.

Big Don’t Need Branding; Small Brands Don’t Need Branding
Big brands and small brands both need sales. Big brands like American Express don’t need more branding. American Express
already has 100 percent unaided recall. What it really needs is more people signing up for credit cards. The brand campaign of
comedian Jerry Seinfeld speaking with Superman certainly was delightful, but did it accomplish the goal?

Small brands don’t need branding either. They especially need sales. Sweetriot, a brilliant 3-year-old startup on a mission, has
not done any branding. Yet its chocolate sells for more per ounce than Valrhona or Ghirardelli. In the same vein, Apple never
said in its ads that it was about beautifully designed products that are easy to use; but its products were and have consistently
delivered on this promise. Google never said it was about efficient, accurate, and clutter-free search; but it was and still is.
Zappos never said it was about great customer service, but it was, so its satisfied customers told others that it stood for great
customer service.

The true brands never do branding; they never make it up or even say it. Instead the brand is earned as great products and
services substantiate and deliver on the brand’s promise continuously. In this way, a reputation is earned over time and the
brand is a symbol of this reputation, which helps new customers simplify their purchase decision. Fake brands, on the other
hand, are the ones that make up what they think customers should think or feel about them; typically, they shout the loudest at
consumers. Modern consumers have enough information overload during the day that they are irritated by advertisers finding
crafty new ways to shout at them everywhere they turn — e.g. “on urinals, golf holes, beach sand,” writes Conley.

What to Do if You Can’t Do “Old” Branding Any More
Branding that involves made-up claims and fanciful brand smells, colors, or auras has been rendered completely impotent by
the habits and expectations of modern consumers. What should an advertiser do in this Darwinian new world of empowered
consumers? First, make a kick-ass product. Second, make a kick-ass product. Third, repeat one and two — remembering that
the “kick-assed-ness” of your product evolves over time and you need to continue to innovate to stay ahead of very capable
fast-followers (i.e. copycats). But how do you make an awesome product and do so continuously? You listen to your customers
and then listen some more. And then you change internal business processes so that the insights gained from this listening can
be quickly turned into new product features, value-added services, and more.

We are talking about real product innovation here — “true innovation” as Conley calls it. It is hard work. But digital also provides
the tools and venues where feedback from customers is readily and continuously available. Advertisers can review user
feedback, comments, and archived suggestions. Instead of branding, practice brand stewardship. Brand stewardship is
constantly being aware of what your customers think of your product and what they need. With this knowledge, advertisers are
empowered to innovate their products and services to substantiate their promise to customers and earn a reputation over time -
- i.e. the brand. Good brand stewardship is not branding.

A true brand exerts brand gravity. What is brand gravity? It is the accumulated reputation that attracts new customers to buy
and keeps current customers in orbit. The new branding is true and rapid. It calls for continuous innovation, informed by realtime
consumer feedback that leads to consistent delivery of stellar products and an earned brand reputation is earned. That is
why branding (as we do it today — shouting made-up messages) is ineffective, irrelevant, irritating, and impotent. There is a
correct way to do “brand-ing” excellence.

Visit gge.com to learn how to build on your customers’ connections with your brand.

Planet Metrics: A New, Carbon-Cutting Tool for Product Developers
By Cliff Kuang
 

You hear about green products all the time–but most of these are just a massive greenwash, for one simple reason: The carbon emitted in creating a product isn’t about whether the materials are recycled or organic. Not even close. Upwards of 90% of a product’s carbon footprint lies in its supply chain–the diffuse network of materials suppliers required to create the product in the first place. T-shirt made of organic cotton? Doesn’t matter if that cotton comes from thousands of miles away, and was shipped on boats, planes, and buses before it got to the factory.

Which is why Planet Metrics [1] is such a potentially powerful tool. The software, recently released in beta [2], allows companies to model their supply chain. From there, it estimates the exact carbon footprint that each link entails, using a database that factors in the electricity used, the transportation means, and the miles traveled, among other things. The software is then able to suggest replacement components with lower carbon footprints, and show exactly how these alternatives might affect margins. Brilliant! But not so fast. As Treehugger points out [3], Planet Metric’s database doesn’t factor in the non-carbon components of sustainability–fair wages or ethical business practices, for example.

But their second point is the sharper one: Will Planet Metrics even matter, if consumers don’t know how it’s effecting a product? It might be well and good to cut a product’s carbon footprint in half, but unless that becomes a key selling point, there will never be enough demand for Planet Metric’s services to keep the company going (and effecting change).

That said, there seems to be a decent number of companies for whom carbon footprint is an inescapable part of their brand: Method, for example, already uses the software. Which makes us think: As Planet Metrics expands, perhaps they should double down on some sort of co-branding campaign. After all, think of the runaway success of “Intel Inside,” and how it turned something obscure–that is, computer chips–into a key selling point.

Related:
Hara Software Helps Large Organizations Make Small Footprints [3]

[Via Treehugger [4]] 
——————————————————————————–

Links:
[1] http://www.planetmetrics.com/howitworks.html
[2] http://www.planetmetrics.com/PM-Method-PR.html
[3] http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/is-supply-chain-emissions-software-the-silver-bullet-for-businesses-to-get-green.php
[4] http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/06/is-supply-chain-emissions-software-the-silver-bullet-for-businesses-to-get-green.php

Why Ugly Sells
By John Edson

A while back, I was standing in a checkout line at a drug store, passing the time by wondering who would ever buy the ugliest clock I’d ever seen, on display at the front of the store. It wasn’t a regular sort of ugly. It was nuclear ugly.

Sliced from some unsuspecting tree trunk that never hurt anybody, the heavily shellacked face of the clock preserved pictures of red roses and drippy script type that read “LOVE.” The hands and numbers were plastic with a cheap layer of shiny gold-crap covering them.

I was on a roll, hating this thing.
Then, out of the blue, the woman in front of me pointed at it. “Honey,” she said to the young girl accompanying her. “Go see how much that is.”

My own mother is known for a number of sayings which I carry around with me. One of them is an old standard: There’s no accounting for taste.
The nightmare for product managers is working for months on a new product launch only to see their brainchild fail because the market says, “Ew, are you kidding me? That’s ugly!” I think this is the reason why so many things we buy are just ‘nice’: They are perfectly fine products that focus on their functional appeal while borrowing their aesthetic from some other successful thing on the market.

In a recent focus group, we were getting feedback on preferences and habits related to certain electronic products. “They should all be black and silver,” declared a rather vocal leader in the group. Everyone else nodded in submission. “Yes, black and silver,” they droned. Then the moderator pulled out her Motorola Cobalt phone, a lustrous blue folding number with silver trim. Everyone ogled the phone. And they changed their votes.

The real trick is to resist navigating consumer taste and understand the emotional sources for taste so that you can to them instead.

For the rose-clock lady, I suspect that she was responding to personal associations that I didn’t have with the clock, a collection of pleasant memories centered around the idea of home. A remembrance of grandparents, warm times opening presents Christmas morning, the hearty family dining table. The natural grain of the wood showing through the clear overcoat, like a windowed view on nature, captured and brought indoors. Nostalgia. Nature. Nurture.
Around the same time as I encountered the rose clock, we designed a kick scooter, the Xootr, whose design was rooted in the very same framework of meaning as the clock. Its simple use of low tech materials, wood and aluminum and steel, is reminiscent of homemade scooters. Exposed mechanisms and lack of flourish appeal to our sense of so-called simpler times. Xootr triggers feelings of nostalgia subtly and without literally replicating the object of yesteryear.

So ultimately, don’t all these things sell by tapping into a person’s sense of what is meaningful? I would suggest that they do. That’s why some ugly stuff sells, and some beautiful stuff sells more.

What ugly products have you seen being embraced by consumers? Or is beauty in the eye of the beholder?

gge.com would like to know what you think

Seen on FastCompany.com

It isn’t often that we at gge.com see a good guide to planning trips outside the U.S. Alec Drew has provided us with this one.

Tips on: Planning a Trade Show

Well that’s it all sorted out. We have just booked our stand at a Trade Show in Birmingham next June, paid the deposit and the pack will be with us in the next fortnight. We will have a look at the situation about two weeks before the show and order all of the extras that we need like pens, brochures and graphics. There is plenty of time. WRONG! – this is an all too familiar situation that some companies find themselves. The end result is panic, budgets exceeded, opportunities lost and a promise to do it better next year.

But there is a better way which involves a simple planning process that will give you a much better return on your investment. Hopefully this simple ‘checklist’ will help you.

The Show

Is this a once-off show or multi-venue show? (Yes) (No)

Will this show target the right audience? (Yes) (No)

Is it well known and well attended? (Yes) (No)

Is it a show with other non-related products? (Yes) (No)

Is the size of our stand suitable? (Yes) (No)

(Who are we located beside, will their stand overpower anything we have?)

Have we agreed electrical points, internet access, fixtures and fittings? (Yes) (No)

Is a Carnet document required? (Yes) (No)

Staff

Who is going to man the show?

(For example if it is a twelve hour day you will probably need three people at a minimum).

Have they any experience? (Yes) (No)

Have travel arrangements been made? (Yes) (No)

If someone falls ill is there a replacement? (Yes) (No)

The Stand

Is it a bespoke stand? (Yes) (No)

Who is building it and who is dismantling it?

Are the organisers supplying the stand and graphics? (Yes) (No)

Show Material

Are you sending out invitations? (Yes) (No)

Are promotional items being distributed? (Yes) (No)

Have you got support material? (Yes) (No)

(brochures, product information sheets)

Have you a proper enquiry pad? (Yes) (No)

(who is going to follow them up?)

The Return

Have all contacts been properly sorted, (Yes) (No) logged and followed up?

Have you set up a tracking system (Yes) (No) to measure return on your investment?

The Cost

Have you allowed for all of the above? (Yes) (No)

We would like to look at the whole area of cost in more detail and identify each of the areas that will affect your budget. Companies make a decision to enter a trade show for a number of reasons. Whatever the reason it is important to look at the true costs so that you can gauge the potential for your business.

The Stand

Identify the actual size of the area you are getting. Is it sufficient for your needs? Could you work within a smaller space? Use a sheet of grid paper and mark in the items you will have with you such as machinery, computers, displays, furniture etc. You may also need an area for small meetings and hospitality. This will give you an accurate picture of the space required.

Cost One – Space

You will then need to identify other items for the stand.

Option 1 – shell unit

These are the walls provided by the promoter. You may also get X number of lights and a socket. You will also need graphics of some sort and there are restrictions on how you apply these to the walls.

Cost Two – shell unit

Option 2 – build your own unit.

This is for the experienced exhibitor. If you intend to exhibit on a regular basis or need to make a large impact then this is worth considering. Costs here include stand design, transport, building on site, removing from site and storage when not in use. You will definitely need public liability insurance (you may not be allowed on the site without proof from your insurers).

Cost Two A – specialised unit

Some stands come with basic lights and may or may not include an electrical socket. Will you have sufficient lighting and sockets? If not you will need to order them in advance and give their location points.

Cost Three – lights and sockets

Documentation & Transport

You may need a Carnet document to allow you to move your samples in and out of a country without having to pay duty. This can be done through the Dublin Chamber of Commerce and involves a fee. You also need to allow for the costs of shipping your samples/stand material.

Cost Four – document and transport costs

Staffing the Show

How many people will be needed for the stand? The costs here include travel, time lost from normal duties, accommodation and meals. Can the stand be left unattended, if not you need at least two people and with many exhibitions open for up to twelve hours you may need three.

Cost Five – staff

Promotion

You will have to inform people that you will be attending the show and this can be done through direct mail and advertising. The direct mailer can be sent to existing customers or you may decide to buy a database list. You may advertise in trade journals, newspapers or in the promoters catalogue. You should also cost in a follow up mailing with your full catalogue to all people who attended.

Cost Six – direct mail/advertising*

What will you give people on the day of the show? Will you have special literature or a promotional pack?

Cost Seven – stand collateral*

Get advice*

it is important to talk to your Marketing Director or seek advise from your Design Agency well in advance of the show. Both of these areas when planned carefully will make a huge difference to both the response you get and the amount of money you can save.

You need to have realistic budgets in place if you are to make a success of it.

Maximise your investment. Some of the items mentioned may seem trivial but they do make a difference.

The stand

Many people order furniture for a stand for the wrong reasons. It looks nice, its handy to sit down when you are tired or perhaps it will be used as a display for the brochures. The problem with furniture is that it becomes a barrier. Unless you need to sit down to write orders you are probably better off without it. For example if you place brochures on a table you will probably do what most people do and that is arrange them in a nice pattern. Believe it or not most people do not like disturbing items arranged in a nice pattern so they probably won’t take one. You are better off either having a proper brochure stand (which you can hire) or handing them out. Free samples and promotional items left on a table will be picked up by everybody. If you are happy with that, fine, but if these are expensive items you can be more discerning by handing them out. Furniture also restricts movement on a stand and people like the ability to move about unhindered.

The people on the stand

If you are not use to standing all day, then you will find that Trade Shows are one of the most tiresome, energy sapping, crippling exercises around. Long hours on your feet, hot lights and the quiet, boring moments that seem to be endless. This affects the attitude of the representatives on the stand and usually manifests itself with arms folded, bored looks, and a mental picture that says ‘do not disturb me’ - certainly not the place to go if you are a visitor. The seasoned rep. knows how to handle visitors, put off time wasters, use spare time to look at other stands and collect information on competitors. As with all things in life there is a right way and a wrong way but the good news is, there is a short cut to learning the art – training videos. They are a great tool and should be viewed by all those intent on exhibiting.

Collecting the information

You set up a stand to a) sell your goods to a new or existing audience or b) introduce yourself or a new product line/service – in other words you want to add to your database. You will not do that efficiently unless you have a clearly defined method. You should either design an enquiry pad in advance so that you have worked out the information you require (make sure that you have a stapler to clip business cards and also make sure your people write legibly) or allow people to register online.

Backup and follow up

It is important that the executives on the stand have office support. All enquiries, contact notes and orders should be collected as soon as possible, brochures/quotes sent immediately and appointments made. It is amazing sometimes to find that all of the expense and enthusiasm put into a trade show ends up with a potential customer’s first experience being a negative one. Information collected and lost, promises of brochures/quotes sent weeks after the show or not sent at all and appointments not made. The worst part of it all is that the show whether it is good bad or indifferent will be blamed for being a disaster.

Finally, I hope that the information supplied is of value and that the world of Trade Shows has been made more accessible. Good hunting.

Alec Drew

In BtoB, Pat LaPointe, managing partner at Marketing NPV, suggests five patterns for “doing more with less” with finesse and success. Based on observations from deep inside dozens of large marketing and finance organizations, there appear to be five patterns of how “doing more with less” works.

First, the best clearly define what “doing more with less” really means. The most common metric appears to be “marketing contribution efficiency”—an increase in the ratio of net marketing contribution per marketing dollar spent. This seems appropriate when budgets are falling (recognizing the need to monitor it over time, as it can be manipulated in the near term).

Second, they cut strategically. Most of us didn’t take budget cutting 101 in business school. After eliminating travel, and consultants and other easy stuff, bad decisions creep in under mounting political pressure. If you’ve made cuts across the board, or cut proportionately to a percentage of spending, you’ve been there. “Successful” cuts are smarter and in line with strategy for competing both today and tomorrow.

Third, they watch the risk factors. CFOs want to cut marketing spending to increase the likelihood of (aka decrease risks against) making short-term profit goals. Yet when marketers try to do more with less, risk exposure rises in ways never imagined—especially if it wasn’t clear which elements of the marketing mix were working before the cuts.

This is the “risk paradox.” If you want to make sure your “less” really has a chance of doing “more,” manage the new risks that have silently crept into the plans.

Fourth, they avoid the “ostrich effect.” Just because there’s enormous pressure today, the best don’t ignore the fact that tomorrow is right around the corner in the form of a 2010 plan. And when looking ahead, the only thing certain is that historical norms are no longer a reasonable guide. So the best are anticipating the key questions for their 2010 plan and working on getting some answers now. They’re committed to leading the process, not getting dragged behind it.

Finally, the best push their marketing business case competency further faster. The marketing skeptics and cynics have more political clout now. Untested assumptions, like ostriches, will not fly. Better business case discipline is the new currency of credibility.