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My Random Musings On Business

Seven cutting edge social media and digital strategies which most leading companies follow

January 16, 2012 Deepthi Bathina No comments

I have not attended MITX (The Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange) events prior to Dec 2011, but it is a great organization to be involved with. Emily Green, Chairman of Yankee Group, reached out to me last year regarding MITX and I was recently invited as a judge to the 16th Annual MITX Annual Awards. I should say it was quite an interesting experience! The award event was a very fancy (and fun!) event at Sheraton Boston starring John Michael Higgins (the hilarious Hollywood star), where I was able to meet with many interesting marketing organizations.

We received entries from companies ranging from small local firms to Fortune 500 firms. My category to judge was mainly focused on digital marketing strategies and it was great to see how many companies from several industries are leveraging cutting digital strategies to increase their revenues and brand presence. Based on the entries I evaluated, here are the most popular result oriented digital strategies deployed by companies to promote their products and services in the new social media era.

Social causes: Many companies tried to link their campaign to “give back” or “social service” causes which seem to resonate well with various segments ranging from teen community to technology professionals.  Some of the companies created socially enabled microsite with highly engaging and fun content featuring interactive polls, quizzes, video PSA’s, and sweepstakes. Few months ago, I attended Oracle Open World and it was interesting to see how Salesforce attracted many people to its booth through this same strategy. (According to their facebook, Hundreds of Oracle World Conference 2011 attendees visited the Salesforce Foundation booth to give their time to support four worthy organizations: Project NightNight, Playworks, UCSF and WorldVision).

Social media connectivity: For some companies, user experience experts streamlined the website’s navigational structure, making website exploration and social media integration seamless. Social media integration throughout the website enables visitors to share site content with their social communities, thus greatly extending the reach.

Involve influencers in the industry: A key driving strategy which some companies used was to directly involve influential people or celebrities in the campaign. Promotional videos with celebrities were used online – across social channels like YouTube and on their microsites – and at retail, if relevant. By leveraging multiple channels, they increased and amplified campaign reach and engagement.

Twitter parties: Some companies leveraged influencers to host a Twitter party around the topic core to their campaign, with all of the participating bloggers posting about the product leading to several thousands of total impressions.

Drive consumers to Facebook: One overall strategy which companies used was to drive consumers to a Facebook application that would drive them to the online store, and vice versa. Some chose to use Facebook as a platform because more than half (53.5%) of Facebook users are aged 18-34 – if the age range is part of your target audience, this will be a great strategy for your company. For example, one particular retail company created a custom Facebook application that would track votes. The school with the most votes in 30 days would host the concert of their favorite star. Programs like this will give reciprocal relationship between e-commerce sites and their Facebook presence– giving current and potential customers incentive to not only purchase products/services, but to engage with the brand.

Leverage online games: If you are looking for ideas that play to the “adventure” feel as well as the “fun” feel of your target audience, online games can help you. Develop virtual applications with fun game elements, add layers of daily contest and a sweepstakes on the game to help encourage repeat play and visits. One popular example of this strategy is Dunkin Donuts facebook game where users can blast ice by controlling virtual water cannons. Click here to read more about it.The 4 week program garnered over hundreds of thousands of entries in the game, millions of Facebook impressions and PR impressions.

Mobile marketing campaigns: The mobile market is big and growing. There are over 400 million 3g wireless subscribers worldwide, with 101 million in Europe and 135 million in North America (source: ITFacts.biz). Mobile Internet usage indexes highest among affluent users who are target prospects for some companies. Companies could develop relevant iphone apps that appease to the core target market. Some companies have forged strong partnerships with mobile device manufacturers to cross-promote their various applications for different platforms.

Results measured by…. continue reading…

General, Global Marketing, Strategy, Technology ,

Interested in conducting a formal “Voice of the Customer” session at work? Understand what you are signing up for and why it is worth your time!

September 7, 2011 Deepthi Bathina No comments

Understanding customer needs is extremely critical to develop a successful product. During my first week at one of the companies I previously worked at, the Director of Development at that time asked me “Here is the product we developed, could you please let us know what the value of it is to our customers?” Yes, I was as shocked as you must be right now. Would you develop a product and “hope” that it solves some kind of a market problem? Or would you rather understand your customer needs as the very first step and actually develop something to solve their problem? With the latter, there is no hoping and praying, you know your work is worth it. This is your answer to the “Why” (Why should I care about the Voice-of-the-Client?) question.

Though there are several qualitative and quantitative methods to understand customer needs, for today’s discussion, I would like to focus on the formal Voice of the Client (VOC) method that you could use to understand your customer needs. VOC is a qualitative research approach and as such, findings from this work are directional and subjective in nature.

Let me get something straight before you raise your hand to sign up for this at work- it will take a lot of time and energy to do the formal Voice of the Customer (VOC) session, and even more time to follow-up on the strategic initiatives that may result from this session. This is no trivial task that you could do in your “spare time”.

Key aspects that you need to understand about VOC:

Three core principles of VOC are 1) Developing 360 degree view of your business 2)Understanding context from your customer’s aspect and 3)Recognizing “by chance” opportunities (you don’t know what you don’t know – be as open minded as possible)

Who? (Who should you interview?) First and foremost, identify your strategic objective to drive the Voice of the Client session. Then ‘who’ should be interviewed for the VOC session will easily come to you. Current customers are the primary source of information if your aim is to understand the current market. Potential customers are the primary source if your objective is to explore an adjacent market or to enter a completely new market. If you are choosing current customer, make sure you invite both the happy ones and the disgruntled ones to make sure the results are not skewed one way or the other.

How many? (How many interviews) The number varies and is typically determined by the type of product, complexity of your market, number of current clients (in case of current market) and the profile of your target customers. The goal of some VOC sessions is to get “directional” data about customer needs and for some, the goal is to get to statistically valid level in capturing customer needs. I have typically aimed to get 25 to 30 interviews in the past and a quick online search shows that the research for a range of products indicates that, on average, this is 20 interviews.

How to? (How to conduct the session?) While conducting the interview session, use open-ended verbs like explore, uncover, understand and discover to frame a question.–. Avoid close ended questions and be an active listener. Sometimes, customers will get carried away by a feature or functionality that they would like you to add, but you, as the interviewer should steer the conversation and try to understand the root source of the problem so that you can come up with the corrective solution later.

What next? (Possible outcomes of a VOC session) Based on the VOC workshop (read the tactical section below for full details), you will derive some strategic initiatives and key action items for your business in the order of priority based on a point system. Possible outcomes could include anything ranging from a mere feature to an acquisition (I have seen both happen). Whatever is the outcome, the most important thing is to assign a management team member to each of the key action items to make sure there is a follow-up and ensure the team’s collaborative effort is worth all the time and energy. Follow-up work will include validating your findings with further market research and developing business cases to understand all the resources these projects may consume ,especially needed when the action items involve multimillion dollar investments.

Many product managers know what a VOC is about, however, they do not know what it exactly  takes to organize one. So, here are the tactical steps involved in doing the VOC session:

Tactical aspects that you need to understand about VOC: (There may be several other ways to do it, but here is one way to do it)

VOC method is based on a well researched approach developed as part of the MIT Sloan research – originally tested by highly renowned companies and applied across several industries continue reading…

General, Global Marketing, Product Management, Strategy , , ,

Three ways to collect the win/loss data and one way to offend your sales team

July 22, 2011 Deepthi Bathina 3 comments

 
Couple of weeks ago, I attended an event where Pragmatic Marketing’s Steve Johnson was the speaker. It was a very interactive conversation and Steve asked the attendees a question while discussing win/loss analysis – “if you asked your sales people, what is the biggest reason for their losses, what would they answer?”, the attendees unanimously answered “product”, he then asked “from sales perspective, what would be the next big reason for losses?”, the crowd had another unanimous answer “price”. Now, he asked “what is the biggest reason for wins?” The answer ofcourse is “sales execution” ;-) The group included around 100+ product managers and marketers from companies of various sizes and industries.

I was laughing out loud because it was funny in a way to see how so many companies were facing the same exact perception problem I faced through years of my experience.
Based on my good, bad and the ugly experiences with the win/loss analysis over the past decade, here are three ways to do the win/loss analysis and one way of presenting the final analysis that could offend your sales team – so stay away from it!
 
I recommend the first method outlined below for your win/loss analysis. The other two have a big caveat – the data will be skewed by sales perceptions, but hey, something is better than nothing!
 
Method1 – 3rd party firm:
Hire a 3rd party firm to interview the clients/prospects directly about the wins and losses. You can set the standard questionnaire in advance. I know how tempting it is for you to be on that call, but please don’t. Answers will be skewed once the customer knows that you are on the call. However, the 3rd party interviewer will let the client know that this interview is being done for your company. Here is one firm I used in the past and they do a good job: www.primary-intel.com (no, they did not sponsor this blog to get a good review, referring them here only because of their good work!).

Pro:
Third party analysis based on client interviews is the most unbiased data you can get.
Con:
Getting all the win/loss data to the 3rd party firm promptly can be tough. Do not rely on your sales people to keep sending all the contact info for their wins and losses to the 3rd party firm. Figure out a way to send the data to the firm directly – I had one of my employees collect the data from salesforce and email it directly to the firm and it worked well.

Method2 – sales interviews:
You could interview sales people about each of the deals.

Pro:
You will get a lot of more insight into the deals, pipeline, sales process and customer problems during these in-depth interviews. continue reading…

General, Global Marketing, Product Management, Strategy , , , ,

Can your idea become a viable Product or Service?

With 26 executives and managers from product management and marketing community from the Boston area, we launched the 2011 BPMA Executive council last week. Executives and managers come from 24 different companies ranging from corporate firms like CA, ADP, Cisco, Fidelity to start-ups like Netprospex, Centage and Ankota. The group comes from diverse backgrounds and industries, which enables us to have rich conversations loaded with great information and experiences. We had some interesting discussions about a couple of product strategy topics and career topics. Here is the summary of one of the topics:  Can your idea become a viable product or service? Once you determine the answer is yes, a business plan needs to be developed to further validate your analysis. The following points will give you an idea of the initial list of factors to be considered.

  • Does it fit your company’s Core competencies? The idea should be in line with the core competencies of the company- sometimes it may or may not be aligned with today’s strategy of the company.
  • Do you have the right resources to execute? Product Manager should think of resources that are required for implementing the idea – can your company afford it today, ecosystem fit etc.
  • Need-Pay-Urgency-Pervasive: It is just not enough for idea to be “cool”, but product management should bring in the perspective – does it really solve any key market problem?  Is the market ready to pay for this product/service? How urgent is the problem to be solved? How pervasive? etc.
  • Opportunity Cost: Consider what the company will have to stop doing if this opportunity is pursued – opportunity cost, cannibalization effect etc.
  • Budget cycle and investment plans don’t always match. continue reading…
General, Global Marketing, Product Management, Strategy none

Is it “Who you know” or “What you know”?

One of the topics discussed at our recent Executive Council event is to understand what helps your career the most – is it who you know or what you know? Based on the collective wisdom, here are some key points:

                                                                                                     

You need both: Most of the opinion was to have a combination of both the “What” and “Who”. The “What” part is required to give you credibility in your community. Whereas the “Who” part will create the opportunities to grow further.

Inside and outside: The “Who” part will help you with recommendations, references within and outside the company. “What” part is important for what you are known for, both inside and outside the company.

Sometimes the least expected gets picked up, so to take advantage of it – always, do your best! One of the CMOs seated at my table mentioned that this is especially true when presenting to the Board of Directors since you never know when they may be impressed with your performance and what opportunities it may lead to.

Attend atleast one networking event per month: Attending external conferences, forging relationships outside your department, being the voice of the customer within the company will help you grow in the long-term as well as in the short-term. continue reading…

General, Global Marketing, Product Management none

Thank you for suing us

February 3, 2011 Deepthi Bathina No comments

How many of us can actually run a full page ad like this? Taco Bell’s confidence is admirable to do this in response to the recent law suit claim that their beef taco filling doesn’t actually contain all that much meat (whether they are really thankful or not is a whole different story..).

Three things that Taco Bell did well to ward off the lawsuit crisis:

  • Be confident- Straight forward and confident message from their President Greg Creed posted on their website played to their favor- establishing credibility is extremely important in crisis scenarios like this.
  • Act fast- “lie repeated often enough becomes the truth” – Taco bell aggressively curbed it right from the start; don’t delay the action!
  • Reach out wide- Social media is the way to go for this – Taco Bell used twitter, blogging, you tube video (As I write this, it has 125,225 hits) to clarify their stance. Taco Bell set a text book example of how best to leverage social media to avert media crisis like this.

Be ready to see a case study on Taco Bell for crisis management!

General, Global Marketing, Strategy none

How can General Managers handle budget cuts?

December 12, 2010 Deepthi Bathina 1 comment

In the current economy, most companies expect GMs to accomplish results with fewer resources and more budget cuts than ever before.  Nothing changes with your budget cuts though – you are expected to achieve the same top line growth and same NOI growth slated for you – just don’t ask us for more $s – sounds familiar? Here is some collective wisdom based on my personal experiences + a discussion we recently had at the BPMA Executive Council:

  • Exercise your “powers of persuasion” to get the resources you need to accomplish results.
    • A colleague of mine mentioned this word ‘power of persuasion’ and I loved the way it was articulated. Since cuts are across all business units, you need to persuade harder against other units and initiatives competing for the same finite resources.  A solid and well articulated business case is very important in these competing situations.
    • The boss may want you to do it all – but again, use your power of persuasion to reduce the number of priorities – need to make the hard cuts!

 

  •  Think creatively and develop synergies with other business units to better utilize existing assets.
    • This tip especially holds true in large companies with multiple business units, where one unit may not be aware of what the other unit is doing from processes and operations perspective. Collaborate with other business units to cut down the costs.

 

  • Rather than hiring FT staff, bring in individuals (contractors) for staff augmentation.
    • If the project requires niche expertise or quick tactical work, consider an external consultant or agency.  Niche needs will take longer to train an internal resource continue reading…
General, Product Management, Strategy none

I did everything right, but why did it fail? …Does the situation sound familiar?

October 5, 2010 Deepthi Bathina No comments

A few years ago, one fine sunny Tuesday morning, as I was trying to get through my regular marketing meetings, our Executive Admin dropped by to deliver a surprise news (not positive though) – that my boss’s boss is visting us in a week and I need to present a full fledged business plan for a new solution which I had proposed in the past. A full fledged business plan, as shown in my template below, will take a good 4 to 6 weeks to develop – however, in this case I didnt have the luxury of time.  To add to my thrill, the V.P of Operations with whom I’m supposed to discuss some key details of the solution, has been on sick leave for a week and wont be back for another 2 weeks.  Struggling to complete the full plan within a week, I have covered every aspect “I” thought was important to the solution – pulled together some credible market research from third parties, worked on financial projections, talked to our key customers, did pricing analysis etc etc.   Given the time constraints, it did not even occur to me that I need to validate my assumptions and run my timelines by the V.P of Engineering team.  After working day and night including the weekend, finally, on the day of the presentation, I walked in with a nicely done power point (including print outs of  the full plan filled with fancy charts) – to present to our Sr. Executives. Surprise! I see our V.P of Engineering seated right next to our President with a not-so-happy smile.

continue reading…

General, Product Management, Strategy none

Business plan templates that work!

September 27, 2010 Deepthi Bathina 4 comments

Based on my experiences writing business plans for both start-ups and Fortune 500 corporations, I have developed a template that can be used as a business tool in any scenario. Given below are two versions - detailed and short. Use the short version first to see if your executives/investors have interest in the idea. If they do,  your time and energy will be well spent on the detailed version, which will take a lot more market research and internal colloboration with cross functional teams to develop. I welcome your suggestions and comments on the template.

Business Plan Template 

1. Executive Summary 

 2. Industry Overview 

 a. Comparison to other Industries 

 b. Current Market Value & Volume 

 c. Market Forecast 

 d. Market Segmentation 

 e. Market Drivers 

 f. Market Barriers 

 3. Competitive Analysis 

 4. Solution Description 

 5. End-to-end solution in two phases (customize the number of phases based on your business) 

 6. Marketing Plan 

 a. Situation Analysis (E.g. SWOT analysis, PEST analysis, 5 Cs, Porter’s 5 forces – if written for a high-tech product, use etc) 

 b. Market Need and Value Proposition 

 c. Potential Market Size and Opportunity 

 d. Addressable Market 

continue reading…

General, Global Marketing, Product Management, Strategy none

Fun Photo shoot for JWMI with Addictive Networks

July 19, 2010 Deepthi Bathina 1 comment

Last month, Suzy Welch asked me if I would be interested in being featured in a marketing video for Jack Welch Management Institute (JWMI).  I said yes and was totally happy to do it as it is my honor to talk about what I really felt about the Jack Welch MBA and the value it adds to professionals all over the world.  I expected a serious interview when I was scheduled for a video shoot.  Addictive Networks team arrived home on a bright, sunny morning and the whole video shoot was a fun and casual experience – thanks to the energetic team that made it so much fun and put me at ease to talk about my thoughts on JWMI.

Will post the video here when they have it ready. Meanwhile, check out the webiste of addictive networks – it is a trendy digital production and creative marketing firm specializing in cross platform media solutions:

http://www.addictivenetworks.com/

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