Use Demographic Segmentation Tools Not Only For Marketing

Filed Under Creative Marketing, Ruminations, Consumer Behavior | Leave a Comment

People always fascinate me: different lifestyles, different backgrounds, different races and different behaviors. I never get tired of observing more and more about what drives them, what makes them engage in certain activities and what happens afterwards once “the pot gets stirred” skillfully by social trends or sometimes by actions of fellow-marketers.  Simultaneously, this entire process serves my own purpose as a consumer of the environment I want to be in. What I find myself doing is segmenting the “market” of a social event or a city to see what experiences I can have as a consumer of a social interaction. Perhaps, all of us do that. And yes, nothing beats the hands-on approach of going into the “field” and actually experiencing all the combinations in that or this zip code yourself.  But, as they say, being forearmed is half the victory.

So, while thinking about potential move to a bigger city like San Francisco, Chicago or New York (with all the benefits we already know), I find it useful to utilize PRIZM or other demographic segmentation tools to see the degree of how those cities can be attractive to me based on the social crowd.  And it might not be the news as we all have learned about the stereotypes, and some, are, granted valid in describing what to expect, I still believe it pays extra to dissect the population into more statistically accurate attributes. By doing this, you can predict the quality of your social life, professional success and other experiences based on the patterns discovered. As consumers, at least here in the states, we became very sophisticated and educated at what we want, like, dislike and how it should be served. Sometimes, this thought scares me when I feel like I have to look for niche-services already since I know what works well.  Sometimes, I wish I were as open as a child - when simpler choices were of existence.

Going back to the segmentation tools, as an example, I wanted to first validate the accuracy of experiences I had in Seattle and only then quick-check the potential Chicago can provide. I also wish that US. Census got more up-to-date and more detailed reports, as most of the information is based on 2000 reports - Hello?! It has been almost a decade and people moved, changed in proportion due to natural causes considerably since then.  Thank God, we have commercial software that can solve those problems and allow us see the light or to be precise the stripes on the map.  What if you do not have access to this information through those tools? Again, US Census or city-data.com site can provide you with rough but workable ideas on the demographics (alongside some extra ads).  Example, for Bellevue showcases graphs on gender distribution, age, income and housing situation and I must say it is very close to accurate even if the site uses 2000 census data and 2005 projections. 

But, what I found most exciting is the information on foreign-born residents (remember, one of the attributes of the social mix I was looking for?), it provides a neat chart as well! It describes the following distribution of nationalities (hence potential social interactions flavored by cultural attributes): 

  • Mexico (13%)
  • India (10%)
  • China, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan (7%)
  • Vietnam (5%)
  • Korea (5%)
  • Russia (5%)
  • Ukraine (4%)

Information like that can provide me with insights on how diverse the locality is and will the mix be appealing to my social taste?

Digging deeper, there is always PRIZM, a tool that can share the details on lifestyle preferences.  According to the report on my zip code, the groups are: 44% New Beginnings, 22% Young Influentials, 21% Gray Power, 19% Home Sweet Home and 8 % Executive Suites.   If we take Young Influentials into consideration, the tools describes the segment as ” Midscale, Younger without Kids yuppies that reflect the fading glow of acquisitive yuppiedom.  Today, the segment is a common address for younger, middle-class singles and couples who are more preoccupied with balancing work and leisure pursuits. Having recently left college dorms, they now live in apartment complexes surrounded by ball fields, health clubs and casual-dining restaurants. ” It also goes into the details of: median income ($47,976), lifestyle traits (plays racquetball, drives mazda 3), demographics traits (suburban crowd, midscale income, age < 35, mostly renters without kids, college graduates, mix of ethnic groups). Very neat tool! You can definitely learn much about your audience! How about a Lifestage group? “Young, hip singles are the prime residents of Young Achievers, a lifestage group of twentysomethings who’ve recently settled in metro neighborhoods. Their incomes range from working-class to well-to-do, but most residents are still renting apartments in cities or close-in suburbs. These seven segments contain a high percentage of Asian singles, and there’s a decidedly progressive sensibility in their tastes as reflected in the group’s liberal politics, alternative music and lively nightlife. Mainstream Singles segments are twice as likely as the general population to include college students living in group quarters.”  Each segment shares this level of granularity. Now, knowing all that does make a difference while making a decision where to live, work and play!

Too much information? If all that is too overwhelming, you can always turn to wikipidea that will outlay lightly some of the basics!  

What Do Product Marketers Do?

Filed Under Professional Development, Ruminations, Product Marketing, Product Management | 1 Comment


The definition for Product Marketing seems to be quite different, when one tries to draw the scope of roles and responsibilities. In some companies, it a very strategic multi-dimensional position, in some it is shared by a number of people.  There are functional overlaps with Product Management, there are functional overlaps with Market Research. So pondering on the scope of work or some sort of viable range of activities, I plunged on the journey to define the role myself. Why is that relevant on this blog? Because knowing the difference can actually redeem the value to the type of work Product Marketers do and  clarify the myths and misconceptions.

To start, I turned to wikipedia’s definition: ”Product marketing frequently differs from product management in high-tech companies. Whereas the product manager is required to take a product’s requirements from the sales and marketing personnel and create a product requirements document (PRD),[2] which will be used by the engineering team to build the product, the product marketing manager can be engaged in the task of creating a marketing requirements document (MRD), which is used as source for the product management to develop the PRD. In other companies the product manager creates both the MRDs and the PRDs, while the product marketing manager does outbound tasks like giving product demonstrations in trade shows, creating marketing collateral like hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets, data sheets, and white papers. This requires the product marketing manager to be skilled not only in competitor analysis, market research, and technical writing, but also in more business oriented activities like conducting ROI and NPV analyses on technology investments, strategizing how the decision criteria of the prospects or customers can be changed so that they buy the company’s product vis-a-vis the competitor’s product, etc..

In smaller high-tech firms or start-ups, product marketing and product management functions can be blurred, and both tasks may be borne by one individual. However, as the company grows someone needs to focus on creating good requirements documents for the engineering team, whereas someone else needs to focus on how to analyze the market, influence the “analysts”, press, etc. When such clear demarcation becomes visible, the former falls under the domain of product management, and the latter, under product marketing.

In other words, Product Marketer is a hybrid between Product Management and Marketing Communications? It also appears, that Product Marketers will pick up from the first “P” in charge (Product Manager) the developed product and translate its functionality and usage patterns for the communications specialists. They will also match back the functionality against the competitive products and validate the value with the customers that they chose and identified. In short, Product Marketers will take the product message and bring it to channels by working with communications and sales. Still blurry if described in words.

To my luck, I stumbled upon a new post on Steve Johnson’s blog, where he shared a new ebook that clearly defines functional lines between Product Management and Product Marketing.  But what I liked the most is the functional org chart he shared in the ebook where the roles not only well-defined, but also shown as a team with dependencies based on qualifications and expertise.  As an example, according to this ebook: “The Product Marketing Manager - (PMM) provides product line support for program strategy, sales readiness and channel support. This position requires close interaction with Marketing Communications and Sales Management.  Strong communication skills are a must.  Duties include converting positioning into key market messages and launching the products into market. The PMM owns:
- Defining buyer personas and determining market messages
- Maintaining product launch plans
- Identifying best opportunities in lead generation
- Creating standard presentations and demo scripts
- Writing white papers and technical communications
- Facilitating direct sales and channel training
- Supporting trade shows and other company-sponsored events
- Limited online channel support and phone assistance  The author also brings into the picture Technology Product Manager as another functional hybrid. 

 In conclusion, both sources (wikipedia and Pragmatic Marketing ebook) and even Geoff Moore referenced in the latter agree on the external focus of Product Marketer, who “usually talks to the market”, while Product Manager “listens to the market”.  The role is well-defined!  

Suggestions to Marketing Folks (Brand Managers) at T-Mobile Directly from My Customer Experience

Filed Under Ruminations, Consumer Behavior | 1 Comment

Today I faced with a reality of being a tiny customer for a giant company that does not care enough to get the feedback on how they can improve their service and make their customers love them more. It happens very rare when I blog about a user experience from my personal experiences, but I had to devote a post for that as not only my customer dignity was lost, but my professional advice was disregarded.

I truly believe that T-mobile marketing folks would appreciate some feedback from the actual customers coming to them directly, perhaps even in a form of a packaged idea. Or maybe not! The worst has happened already - as a loyal customer, today I felt duped and almost helpless. I was trying hard to deliver my feedback through the customer service rep and she kept on repeating that no one is going to care about my suggestions. I guess in the worlds of giant corporations a tiny customer‘s voice is just a nuisance. I have to use my blog for that as there is no other channel that exists that can provide that kind of a feedback for them. The rep confirmed that my feedback is useless and no one is going to check and she has no way to pass my suggestions through. I just have to deal with it! On the other hand, it made me think a lot about how much does a brand value matter to the fellow marketers at T-mobile in relation to one but still an eye opening experience from an average customer? Thus, the purpose of this post is not to bash the brand, but to try to deliver my feedback to the folks that can make a difference in the customer experience. Or not, as they can always disregard it. And lose me and lose a few more of the customers like me one by one.

So, I went back to the corporate site and I had a hard time finding a mission statement with the values! I guess, the assumption that the customer is right and important was my imaginary assumption. The company never made a promise to serve me well. That does not help.

I always did not pay much attention to the ads that show how big telecommunication companies treat their customers as opposing to the emerging internet-based providers. Heck, as a customer I was quite irrational while making a choice who is going to be my cellular carrier. I just liked Katherine Zeta-Jones and the coverage seemed to be national, so I chose T-mobile. Very typical irrational, but short-cut based decision. Now, having experienced the reality, I think twice who I should have chosen. Going back to the commercials, I never related till today to the jokes that are played on major carriers with multiple rules. In fact, I was ok to comply to those rules as I always felt I will be heard – till today! As an example, Vonage has a great piece of an ad that makes fun of the giant communications providers. It is pretty new and only available on TV. Other examples include the following videos.

Now, I am thinking about switching to Alltel, who cares about $200 cancelation fee when they never notify me on the overage and I might as well save the trouble?

My complete T-mobile user experience story
To depict the situation better, here is my actual description of the experience as a T-mobile loyal customer. The customer that was not cared for…
Yesterday, I renewed my contract with T-mobile and felt pretty happy to get a new phone and play with it. As a user I had positive feelings about the brand. Today, I could not understand why my phone was so silent till I realized that my service was suspended due to overages of $150. Ok. Could T-mobile notify me with a text message prior to my overage or even prior to suspending my service when I lost an ability to connect to my clients and lost $$? How do I know about the overage? I never check my minutes as a user! Do you ever check you minutes on the cell phone? I never do. In fact I care less. I have yet to meet someone who checks their minutes all the time. Yet, the customer service rep told me that it is my responsibility and they care less about it. Ok, I might have talked too much on the phone this month and the past month and I am ok to pay the overage and I am ok to switch to the more minutes plan. But, there is no way that the T-mobile can devise a program, can create an automated text messaging system to people when they go over their minutes! There is no way it can happen and there is no way to suggest this idea to the customer service to pass along to marketers! I felt as if I was speaking gibberish and the customer rep could not understand my suggestion and passion behind passing the idea how they can still keep my loyalty as a customer if they make those changes – create either email or a text message system that notifies me about the minutes and overage before I have to pay $200. I can pay that, money is not a problem these days – but it appears that T-mobile would rather charge me overages all the time and let me know explicitly that I have to check my minutes! I do not want to check my minutes. I have no time in my life to do that. Why not you as a brand and as a service provider – make it easy for me to be loyal to you? Why not you prevent a trouble of overpaying for me for cell phone usage and notify me about the overages with a text message? How costly is that? Cheaper than a commercial! Or even a customer service call! And I will keep being your customer longer than a contract! Now, I am seriously thinking of switching. I feel cheated. I do not care. I am not loyal any more because you felt that it is ok to keep me in the dark and ignoring my suggestions! Pursuing the lock-ip strategy is not a long term strategy that insures success. At some point, your customers and your competition will figure out how to get away from this bad relationship. Do you care as a brand? Or you don’t?

My suggestions to T-mobile marketing folks:
1. Listen to your customers – create a channel where they can share their suggestions before you lost them!
2. Make it easy for them to be loyal to you! Create an automated communication program (text message or email that notifies your customers about overages beforehand)! Or keep collecting the short-term profit of an overage and lose a lifetime value of steady income.
3. Make sure your customer service rep communicates the customer voice to you directly.

The Difference Beween Private and Public Decisions Consumers Make

Filed Under Ruminations, Consumer Behavior | 2 Comments

It always amazes me how people arrive at certain decisions, what makes them select an alternative in regards to the environment they were exposed to while being at the final stage of buying behavior. And it is not a novelty that private choices, thinking and actions are very different from the ones we do in public - meaning those choices are very visible and easily to be judged, evaluated by the other people who’s opinion we value or rely on. Thus, instead of plunging into the consumer behavior magazines to seek the answer to the question that was burning my head all week, I turned to psychology and sociology studies by Wharton scholars.

I had an assumption in my mind that regardless of the difference in the private state of mind and public image we portray - the two worlds invariably overlap or feed off each other, thus similarities occur - unless we have a case when both worlds almost never coincide, interact or see each other. I do not plan to get too into the psychoanalytical aspect of it, but in the psychology field - they call it a “split personality” syndrome, very rare occurrence, but quite possible - when the two worlds do not have a chance to integrate. Extrapolating on that definition, we can easily see why private and public choices could be totally opposite to each other. As an example, a consumer can appear to be predisposed to one type of behavior and share the reinforcing thinking that favors his private choice (let’s say of consuming some type of media that is prevalent in one environment he mostly resides in). At the same time, he/or she might take an opposite selection while being surrounded by other people where his/her the choice is quite visible.

How do we marketers - find the consistency in the behavior of the users we study? Obviously, we have to observe them from the both sides, in both worlds. What if we do not have that privilege? What to do next?

According to the research in the decision-making process by Mark Pauly (Wharton Business School), “Private behavior more closely follows expected utility models, while public decisions move in the opposite direction. “ Thus, when the choice is private – we pick what is best and most beneficial for us, when the choice is public – we tend to make choices that contradict the most expected utility choice (even if it might be indicative as a value for a group of folks that would benefit from it as well) or make decisions that do not make sense! Go figure! Pauly proves his point by illustrating the decisions consumers make in relation to health care products (insurance) – “People avoid deductibles publicly, but prefer to pay them privately. They want their insurance companies to pay for their preventative care even if it might be cost effective for them to pay for it themselves. “

Even though the example included health care products, I believe one can see the “light” for the topic in discussion for other services we provide and promote or decisions we make while building our lives. The key reasons for this divergence include:

1. Misperceptions of Value
2. Reputation
3. Benefits Distribution

As I see it, there is no other way around it but trying to get into the both worlds. Perhaps, ask our customers invite us into their worlds and see if we can decipher behavioristic patterns that are universal or similar for both worlds? Why do that you might ask yourself by reading this far? Well, to be truly successful in our field – understanding your users, clients, and customers – is the key. Understanding them and catering to their needs by adjusting our products and services in time– is the marketing nirvana we all try to reach. What does our scholar suggest in this case?

- Watch for public-private divergence. If we look at our own decisions, in any case that involves both public and private decisions – we should try to examine the question through both lenses. “For a public decision, especially when there are reputational issues at stake, consider if you would make the same decision in a private situation. Also, look at whether the decision really provides the highest expected utility.”

- Expect that people will not do as they say. This recommendation allows you to better predict and anticipate consumer behavior. People would say one thing in public, but be willing to accept a very different option in private. Understanding that allows you to tailor your communications based on the environment your user currently has chosen to interact with you. Will people actually follow their public positions in private decisions? Is there a way to allow your customers make the decision you advocate that still preserves their reputations? Explore the last question and you can be rather successful despite this truth of life!

- Look for redistributable mechanisms. If we devise our programs when the benefits are funded by the group and redistributed by the need of some members of the group to another – see how it can affect the decisions of your individual buyers and what efficiency you can gain in the process. Consumers are more prone to agree to participate in the shared benefits plans where redistribution process exists, as one man’s garbage can be another’s treasure while both of them pay for the “membership”. Look for those opportunities!

Measure Your Marketing with These Handy Metrics

Filed Under Ruminations, Marketing Metrics | Leave a Comment

Measuring your marketing expenditures and re-evaluating what you have accomplished can be rather daunting and rewarding at the same time. But the most crucial benefit is how your actions are to be affected based on your findings. It is not the news that measuring your actions is followed by better decisions, however it is so common that most of us (marketers) are mostly 99% focused on just launching our campaigns, accomplishing the laundry lists of the pre-planned roadmap and creating new one before we can catch a breath and take a minute to look back. Metrics can help us maximize our effectiveness and identify our strengths and weaknesses on both strategy and execution. And of course, there are no perfect models to assess our actions. However, when I was reviewing my recent readings on marketing metrics by Paul W. Farris et al, I chose the following top eighteen (because ten is not enough) to adopt into the arsenal.

From the category of shares (hearts, minds and markets)
- Loyalty - measures future revenue streams. Usually, includes a combination of share of requirements (a.k.a share of wallet, a given brand’s share of purchases in its category), willingness to pay premium, willingness to search.
- Top of Mind - I love this one = The 1st brand that comes into a customer’s mind when he or she is asked about a category. The percentage of the customers who the given brand came out on top can be measured.
- Willingness to Search - implies the likelihood that customers will settle for a second-choice product if their first choice is not available. ( I know I do that for my dining experiences).
- Willingness to Recommend - includes a percentage of customers surveyed, who indicated that they will recommend a brand to their friends.
- Sole Usage Percentage - measures the proportion of a brand’s customers who use only the given brand’s products and do not buy from the competitors in relation to total brand customers.

From the category of margins and profits
- Marketing Spending – includes total expenditure on marketing activities (advertising and non-price related promotions, can include sales spending). Very useful metric. It is advised to have 2 formulas for it: fixed and variable marketing spending. Fixed marketing spending includes sales force salaries and support, major advertising campaigns, marketing staff (our salaries!), sales promotion materials and cooperative advertising allowances. Variable marketing costs comprise of sales commissions, sales bonuses, bill -backs for local campaigns, rebates, early payment terms expenses. To calculate the latter, you should use your revenue number multiplied by the percentage of variable selling cost. Total marketing costs is a basic sum of both.

From the category of product and portfolio management
- Brand Equity Metrics - helps to monitor health of the brand. This is the hardest metric and has a number of models, true moneymaker for the agencies and consultants. Interbrand and Young & Rubicam are the leaders in evaluating brand monetary values. The Y&R evaluates a given brand based on the perceived differentiation on the market, relevance to consumer lifestyles, the esteem the consumers hold due to the brand and the perceived knowledge about the brand those consumers possess. Strong brands show higher degrees across all four values. Growing brands illustrate high levels of differentiation and relevance. Declining brands show relatively higher degrees of esteem and knowledge. Personally, I like the Brand Equity Methodology (a.k.a Moran), that calculates brand equity based on the multiplication of effective market share, relative price and loyalty index. Loyalty index can be calculated by a percentage of brand customers that will repurchase the brand in the next year.

From the category of customer profitability
- Customer Lifetime Value considers the present value of the future cash flows attributed to the customer relationship, allows to budget acquisition and retention initiatives. Very useful metric for contractual customer relationships, where you have a projected timeline, average usage/purchase number, price, retention and frequency values. If margins and retention rates are constant, you can calculate the CLV as follows: multiply margin into the retention rate divided by a difference of (1+ discount rate) and retention rate. Valuable metric to identify the limit on acquisition spending.
- Acquisition vs. Retention Spending -the former represents the average cost to acquire a customer and is the total acquisition spending divided by the number of new customers. The latter illustrates the cost of retaining a customer (your retention spending and number of the “saved” customers).

From the category of sales force and channel management
- Direct Product Profitability includes the adjusted gross margin of products, less direct product costs.

From the category of the pricing strategy
- Price Premium implies the percentage by which the price of a brand exceeds a benchmark price.
- Reservation Price means the maximum amount an individual is willing to pay for a product. It is a key metric to predict the demand for your product.

From the category of promotion
- Average Deal Depth - comprises of sales via coupons divided by total sales. Quick and easy metric to see brand dependence on promotional efforts.

From the category of advertising media and web metrics
- Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM) Rates is our standard advertising basics- is calculated as cost of advertising divided by impressions generated. My only concern and eternal question - how much is the noise or extra in the total impressions number and how much is the actual working range?
- Share of Voice quantifies the advertising presence of a brand, in relation to total advertising in a given market. Helps to evaluate the strength of the advertising program.
- Visitors - implies the number of unique web site viewers in a given period. I still trust only this web metric, love it for its ability to measure the reach of the website, identify its loyal visitors and content effectiveness during the time you were testing your messaging.

From the category of marketing and finance
- Return on Marketing Investment is different from the common return on investment due to the fact that we take a risk and expense our initiatives in the current period. The formula suggested: (incremental revenue attributed to marketing multiplied by contribution % minus marketing spending) divided by marketing spending. In other words, you have to attempt to identify the revenue piece you brought divided by total invested marketing resources.
- Project Metrics: Payback, NPV, IRR are our favorites from the finance departments. I mostly prefer the payback and NPV as applicable models to justify your spending.

To sum it up, various measuring models might evolve over time: some will be rejected, some will be re-established, and some will be invented. However, the more you are aware of various metrics, the better you are in your decision-making process, the more accuracy and tangible benefit you will receive for your marketing programs. It is just a challenge at times not to forget to apply them. However, imagine the benefits of testing various metrics and seeing through practice what makes sense and what does not?

P.S. Forrester Research folks have recently posted a video on marketing metrics. There are more metrics discussed outside the above list, like customer advocacy related to customer-centric marketing. Check it out for your listening pleasure yourself!

Website ROI: Getting Key Performance Indicators Right

Filed Under Ruminations, Online Marketing | 2 Comments

You got a project on a web site redesign and somewhere along all the project planning deliverables you reach the point when the key performance indicators (KPIs) are to be defined. Where do you start and what would you pick up on the way to the ultimate metrics portfolio?

The main question to ask is why you are doing that? What are the top 3-5 goals you want to achieve? What do you visualize your customers and other visitors do while engaging with your content? Provided that you have a pretty clear segmentation map and are in tune with your customers and industry, it would be quite a simple exercise to go through. Add from 3 to 7 discussions with the top stakeholders, be it a small company or a mega corporation, and you are good with the prep work to move to “the main dish”.

While perusing through your notes, Googling the terms and scanning the top 5 web strategy sites or blogs for that matter, you might get lucky to be enlightened by the following folks that made it all simple for us:

1) Avinash Kaushik at his blog and published work suggests to use an always referenced conversion rate but take careful look at what info it might provide. Even a slight move by a point in the conversion rate might translate into millions of profit for a business. At the same time, obsessing with this metric might become a short-term focused strategy that takes away from the quality of a user experience. Moreover, it also focuses only on small portion of the site visitors, that might not be even interested in all that content and interactivity. What about the rest…that stumble upon purposefully or not? You lose them. Thus, he advises to use an alternative metric: “task completion rate by primary purpose”. Thus, you start driving your efforts to develop a site that helps all potential users/visitors to accomplish their “missions” .

2) Jason Burby with ClickZ, identifies the KPIs as ” indicators that help organizations achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress”. He also suggests that the KPI include organizational goals to make them applicable to your business. They must help your business to reach success. They must be measurable over time and agreed upon the organization. The latter piece is so true, never try to skip that one!

3) Various experts, including Aurelie Pols state “unique visitors” to be the best web analytic metric as it allows to be more accurate in defining visitors’ behavior. You know they came once and viewed your content. “Cookies never lie”.

4) Cost per Customer/Lead Acquired helps you to test if your customers are worth the cost of their acquisition through this new/re-established channel- similar to the customer lifetime value. I think it is one of the best KPI’s so far and directly relates to the bottom line.

5) Cost per Order allows you to determine the cost-effectiveness of an ad that you placed outside to drive that visitor to your site. I like this metric as it helps to track and measure the return on the external placements in a more relevant way than clickhroughs and CPC.

Overall, I think it is useful to pick top 5 metrics that are most relevant and more accurate to your business activities and customer interactions and stick to them to gain consistent insights overtime. It goes without saying that they also should be interpreted into user experience/user behavior patterns and trends to make impact on your further marketing investments.

The Essense of Passion

Filed Under Ruminations | 2 Comments

Well…I have been asking number of people on ”What makes you wake up in the middle of the night to think about what you do (for a living)?” Why you are doing it? Why this industry? and I must confess I get perplexed when I find no passion in the profession a person is engaged into. I think being passionate about the cause of your actions is so important. It is like having a quality experience. It is like being in a continous process of extending your imagenary limits….I can understand people have mortgages to pay and children to feed. But, why not find something you enjoy and be passionate about it and get the bills paid? I also observed that in some industries there is a bigger percentage of passionate people than in others. Why? In my opinion, there are variations of passion in the industries that have those: it could be a strong brand of the company that drives the culture and creates a cult (which is not a bad thing), or the venture is so exciting and going to change the way we do things. But, I will never understand doing things just because you have to…why not do the things you care about and can invest maximum energy?  I also found that being around passionate people creates an invisible aura of can do attitude which actually gets realized in real life. In reverse, lack of passion is so infectuous that it makes me want to run (cause I do not wish to catch it). Am I too idealistic in what I expect? Do not think so.

How To Communicate the Idea To Inspire Action and To Actually Have Things Done

Filed Under Effective Communications, Ruminations | Leave a Comment

Teamwork, group projects and things that need to be done moved me to revisit the basics of how to get some action out of group communication process. I found a very useful framework of natural planning techniques from David Allen’s book (Getting Things Done) that I would like to share. It is a 5 phase process:

1) Purpose - never hurts to ask the question “why we are doing it”, helps to focus, define sucess, align resources, motivate and expand options.

2) Principles - “a great way to think of principles is to complete the following sentence” - “I would give others totally free rein to do that as long as ….” , thus they provide guidelines on the packaging or points of reference.

3) Vision (Outcome)…how would success would look like, feel like, sound? I really liked the qoute ” You often need to make it up in your mind before you can make it happen in your life”, very powerful and I know I can do that!

4) Organizing - get all the ideas OUT OF YOUR HEAD - in front of your eyes - thus patterns and relationships emerge from the “invisible world”! Sort those out by components, sequences and priorities.

5) Action - Next Steps. Clarify what can be done today, who should be doing what, what you will be waiting for.

The idea is to walk your team through this process and the project should be implemented with ease or at least save time in the preparation stage. The trick is to walk yourself through the same process first, utilizing “the outside your head tracking system”. The work of the “communicator” is never done!

 

EQ Important Factors for Marketing Professionals

Filed Under Professional Development, Ruminations | 2 Comments

It was interesting to see how the EQ (Emotional Intelligence Knowledge) is applicable to work success within various business functions. According to Steven Stein and Howard Book, there are 5 top factors that are relevant to work success for marketing professionals:

1) Optimism - one has to have it while looking for market opportunities!
2) Reality Testing -  to accurately/ballpark assess the situation
3) Independence - to be able to make decisions on your own
4) Impulse Control - to be able to think before leaping
5) Social Responsibility - to be able to see far enough to not step on someone’s toes

Great insights. I think, personally, I would focus on working more on reality testing, impulse control and self-regard.

Oddly enough, for a marital bliss, interpersonal skills come last on the list. The most important factors in priority are happiness, self-regard, self-awareness and self-actualization and reality-testing.

It Pays Off To Start Actively Developing Emotional Intelligence

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This week I felt a need to seriously engage into learning more about emotional intelligence. Juggling a myriad of projects, interests sometimes get on the way of being always present and aware of what is going on in the current environment. I started looking for a good book to immerse into the subject and went through a number of HBR articles. I found a few on leadership, controlling emotions and becoming a master that can perform under stress continously and can make his team deliver quality results.  It takes practice to achieve that and sometimes takes years. For me it is a challenge as my passion for a topic or a project or an idea gets on my way sometimes. It is great in its nature to support continious delivery, but it gets on the way of being a good leader. Can one have both? Yes. I met a few people who were passionate and emphatic. Some people are born with it, some people get it through experience. It is also something that can be learnt as long as you practice every day or at least intensively in the beginning. So, this is hope! Being realistic, learning continously, watching the language and connecting on the emotional level are the basics of EI. I wish I could find bloggers - experts on the topic. Perhaps, it would be a good supplemental reading before going to bed.

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      Everything posted on this blog is a product of my own thoughts, ideas, reflections based on the professional interests. It is based on the public information, works of the colleagues and fellow researchers that are cited respectfully and my opinions as an industry professional.