For nearly 25 years, I was a partner in an ad agency that had a great roster of national and international clients including the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the Chilean Image Campaign, celebrating Chile’s return to democracy, and domestically, companies like L.L.Bean, Sebago and many food and beverage companies in Europe and the […]
If you read Mike Veseth’s “Theories of the Global Wine Glut “in last week’s Wine Economist and his followup to that article this week or looked at a lot of the recent sales data, you know there’s a problem. “The world is swimming wine” As Veseth points out, “Wine consumption fell during the COVID-19 pandemic […]
Last week, Knowledge at Wharton (their business school’s newsletter) sent out a promotion for a book titled “The Customer Base Audit” by three esteemed college professors. The authors believe an audit is “the first step on the journey to customer centricity”. I can’t argue with that or many of the other points they make about how […]
This is the year to invest in and revise your digital marketing plan. Why? Two big changes are coming in 2022: These two changes will revolutionize how we interact with consumers over email, text and on the Internet. If you didn’t know, first take a breath. Then, download this excellent article and overview of the changes from McKinsey […]
Over the past five years, the amount of data being acquired by marketers has risen steadily but here are three key questions: If you’re like most companies, you’ve acquired information on where your customers live, their gender, age and transactional history with your company. If you’re using a email marketing platform, you may also know […]
On August 13th, we held a webinar for 99 participants from the wine industry. We presented findings from two surveys that we conducted overlaid on top of data from three other sources. Included were: Our two surveys were conducted over a six-week period from late March to early May. Our data led us to some conclusions […]
Market research has a problem. It can’t, by itself, acquire, engage or retain a customer. That sounds obvious but it’s a real problem because without the ability to build business, research loses influence and utility within a company’s structure. In fact, it’s often one of the first cuts that is made to marcom budgets. The […]
Algorithms, the core formula behind Big Data, are not objective facts. They are opinions embedded in math, In the words of US data scientist Cathy O’Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction (2016). Watch this brief entertaining video to better understand how algorithms work as well as the potential mistakes we make in relying too […]
(When I meet with business executives, I usually ask “what’s your strategy for growth?” At a trade show I attended a few weeks ago, that question was often met with silence or a list of tactical programs that had no overall direction other than selling. I wrote a similar blog post to this years ago and received […]
Frustrations are essentially unmet needs. Understand customer frustrations and you have the requirements for successful innovation. Otherwise, you’re operating in the dark. The challenge is how to ask and understand customer frustrations and get the information that will really help. Most approaches to understanding real customer frustrations fail. The failure rate for corporations, both big and small, […]
