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This Paper discusses the following premise: That the ratio of Offline to Online Influence in the majority of B2B markets is directly proportional to the perceived ticket price of the product or service in question. The lower the price, the greater the Online Influence. The higher the price, the greater the Offline Influence. This raises the obvious question. If this is the case why do vendors selling higher-value products (say >$1000) try to influence at all online? And if it is simply a straight-line graph, why aren't marketing depts. spending accordingly?. |
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This Paper discusses the following premise: With all the recent online coverage of Online Influence it would be easy to believe that the world of influence - who's influential, who's being influenced, and how people are influenced - has moved almost entirely online in the past few years. But our work with major name clients over the past few years shows that this is not the case – and that many heads of marketing may be wasting their budgets if they expect to reach their customers’ real influencers online. |
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This Paper discusses the following premise: When the money returns to company budgets, it wont be poured back into traditional Marketing departments. It will instead go into three areas - Sales Generation, Customer Loyalty, Customer Acquisition. And Marketing stands to lose a significant slice of its current power. Heads of Marketing departments need to be aware of this, and reposition both themselves and their departments to address this issue now. In the downturn, market leaders have become increasingly rich.They have banked this cash and will soon have to reinvest, but it won't be in Marketing - either offline or online. It will be much more focused, based around just three or four important long-term goals. Marketing will suffer because it isn't a goal. Whereas Customer Acquisition and Customer Loyalty are. |
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This Paper discusses the recent upsurge of interest in social media measurement tools. Are they really measuring online influence as some vendors claim, or are they just measuring online noise – interesting, but far less useful. And how do online conversations relate to real-world influence? Read the blog world and other online platforms and you could be persuaded that social media has rapidly become the most important medium for today’s B2B influencers. Certainly there is now a whole industry around social media monitoring tools portraying themselves as tracking these key online ‘influencers’... |
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Where is our client-side research leading us? We've been spending quite a bit of time thinking about this. Considering where our research is helping take our industry. Marketing will migrate from one founded on a series of discrete activities as it has been for twenty or thirty years, towards one based on end-user effects. Traditionally those in charge of the marketing function within companies look at the skillsets and budgets available to them, decide what they want to communicate and estimate how best to reach their target audience. End-users have negligible say in this. That will change. Whole campaigns will be designed by customers, mirroring their own experiences when buying. Vendors will reward them with heavy discounts. You see it at a basic level with testimonial-based adverts, customers speaking at vendor conferences and sales call references. That will become just the tip. Customers will commonly take a special place on the vendor’s management board. What better way to understand your customer than to report to one? All this means that customers themselves will significantly increase their influence, across every industry sector. Our measurement will need to take this trend into account... |
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This Paper discusses how today’s in-house Corporate Communications department is unlikely to survive the demands now being asked of it by senior management. In its place will likely be the Influencer Relations dept., one that will be sales-focused and more accountable to the needs of the business. There are already signs of such a transition emerging. It’s easy to see the trends relating to today’s CorpComms function. In the current environment, with companies only willing to fund what they can measure, CorpComms is already having a hard time justifying its position. Within the top companies such a stand-alone function is unlikely even to exist in just five years time. Giants such as HP and SAP are already morphing their traditional outreach to an influencer-based model. And it’s requiring a strategic change in their thinking... |
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This Paper explains how the role of analyst relations needs to change in order to better argue its business case. How can in-house AR programs adapt to encompass the rapidly emerging category of broader buy-side influencers? Here are 10 ideas. The tech sector has fallen in love with influencers. Influence is the latest disruptive force. Yet the new influencers seem to have little to do with the traditional industry analysts. More and more often, analysts fail to make highly publicized lists of ‘top influencers’. Those who do make these lists are as likely to attribute their high ranking to their blogs as to their analyst employer... |
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This Paper explains the role of WOM in influencer-based marketing, both in B2B & consumer markets, and the supply-chain. How are consumers being influenced?, and what are the limitations of WOM? Word of mouth marketing (WOM) is an extraordinary mechanism that communicates marketing messages throughout a community. To paraphrase a popular slogan from the 1970s, WOM reaches the parts other marketing tactics cannot reach. There are few marketing approaches that can have had as much discussion in the twenty-first century as WOM. WOM is immensely powerful. Arguably it has created the most powerful brands of today, that of Google. Starbucks, Ikea, Nokia, Prada, Skype and Tamagotchi were all built predominantly or exclusively on WOM. Sometimes, however, WOM goes wrong ... |
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This Paper explains how influencers actually influence. Do they influence intentionally or is it a by-product of their work role? In order for you to map onto those identified influencers you need to know how they exert their influence, and how this is changing as organizations transform. If you know anything about influencers you’ll know that they are a mixed bag. This, of course, means that they come from different disciplines and professions, since diversity is at the heart of a functional influencer ecosystem... |
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This Paper examines the reasons behind the decline in analyst influence, the criteria for assessing which individuals do have influence and why, and what this means for the marketing and sales strategies of technology companies going forward. IT vendors spend a great deal of time and money cultivating relationships with industry analysts. They do this because they believe that analysts exert a high degree of influence on buyers. Indeed the terms ‘analyst’ and ‘influencer’ are often used interchangeably. However, analysts form just one category of influencers, and their importance is declining. In fact, in our research, analysts appear to account for just 18% of those who directly influence technology buying decisions...
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Tech marketing is caught in a vicious circle, where an increasingly sophisticated buyer community views marketing messages with escalating scepticism. he impact of marketing therefore diminishes. Ever-growing competition for attention means marketing organisations must increase effort to gain a decreasing share of awareness. The typical response, of course, is to further increase the amount of marketing, sending more messages to more people. Yet the more marketing a customer sees, the less likely they are to respond to it... |
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This Paper examines how marketing is broken, how to recognise when your marketing is broken, and offers some pointers on what to do about it. Marketing budget increases are averaging 7% in 2006. Yet revenue increases in our sector are averaging 5.5%1. Marketing is costing more and achieving less. Business needs have changed, customers have changed, and technology enablers have changed. Marketing has not changed, but it expects different results. It’s insane... |