B2B Marketing
In a recent piece in Marketing Week, the The B2B Institute‘s Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo opined on how AI is going to positively impact B2B market research. As the authors testify, it’s certainly true that there’s plenty of positive advances that AI can contribute to the research process: for example, augmenting questionnaire design by using ChatGPT to suggest answer sets to quantitative …
Continue reading “Why AI isn’t killing B2B research just yet”
Picture the scene: a CMO faced with a rapidly changing market needs to get to the heart of why too many target prospects are buying from their competitors, and needs to know how to finesse their own proposition so that more prospects entering the top of the funnel actually make their way to the point …
Continue reading “The 3 key mistakes CMOs make when commissioning research – and how to avoid them”
Thought experiment. A recession looms, and the business you work for decides to tighten its belt. All discretionary or uncommitted marketing spend is put on hold until the business feels it has seen off the worst. All of your competitors, bar one, facing the same recession, do the same thing. The odd …
Continue reading “How to out-think the competition in a recession”
Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover seems to be following the classic phases of the “Move Fast and Break Things” mantra. That’s fine for Musk: right now he’s the richest being on the planet. If he breaks things and fails fast with Twitter – no matter how expensively or publicly – he knows he’ll still live …
Continue reading “How to fail quietly – and succeed in the process”
Many years ago I worked alongside the sales team of a B2B2C financial services company. The Sales Director was getting frustrated at the lack of sales being closed, and became even more frustrated when he discovered that his sales managers weren’t sticking to the agreed script when they went out to see prospects. He’d …
Imagine for a moment there are two luxury car brands. Let’s call them…oooh, I dunno…Mercedes and BMW. Let’s imagine both are facing a downturn in sales as inflationary pressures bite into household expenditure, and customers think they’ll delay renewing their existing model for another year. (No idea if this is true, by the way, but …
Continue reading “Why savvy marketers aren’t abandoning brand investment just yet”
A couple of weeks back on LinkedIn, I posted a link to an article that hailed the advent of the Metaverse as new tech that would completely revolutionise businesses everywhere. The article was sponsored by a management consultancy urging CEOs to get on board with this brand new disruptive tech before their own company gets …
Continue reading “Why promotion is dead, and marketing is the Next Big Thing”
There’s an awful lot of brand BS spoken by “practitioners” who deliberately muddy the waters with endless funnels, spidergrams, flowcharts and the like. It’s almost as if they thrive on confusion rather than clarity. Those “practitioners” (I use the word advisedly) would be dismayed to learn that perhaps the most powerful piece of …
Continue reading “When the secret of successful brand research really is simplicity”
At one point in his life, Sam Walton – the founder of Walmart – was the richest man in America. Once a week, every single week, even at the height of his wealth, Sam would travel to a random store in the chain, and spend the morning working on the tills. This wasn’t so he …
