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Kathy Button Bell, CMO and vice president at Emerson, had some useful tips for B-to-B marketers when she spoke last week at a Business Marketing Association Chicago chapter luncheon.

Fair disclosure here, I’ve written about Kathy and marketing she’s done going back to the 1990s when she was in Chicago, so I’m a long-time fan. She joined St. Louis-based Emerson in 1999 and has been transforming the engineer-centric company into one that knows how to do B-to-B marketing. Part of what she discussed was a new Emerson campaign that started in 2009, “It’s Never Been Done Before…Consider it Solved”

As a B-to-B marketer, you “have to be a better pied piper than a marketing person,” she says, meaning you have to be able to lead senior management to the marketing world you want them to embrace.

Continue reading "B-to-B Marketers, Get out Your Flutes" »

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Maybe it’s mid-winter blues, but I’ve decided to accentuate the negative by pulling a first: two losers. And, frankly, these two were such obvious marketing victims I simply had to do it. They say that with pride there is a fall and these two companies’ most recent debacles seem to prove the adage.

Loser Number One:

Toyota.

This car company was on the cusp of becoming the biggest and, arguably, the best worldwide.

But now Toyota’s on the hook for one of the biggest recalls in automotive history and their reputation for great quality at a great price is in tatters.

Continue reading "John Tantillo’s Two Losers of The Week: Toyota & Apple" »

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Folks, without further ado.

The Winner:

Conan O’Brien is our winner of the week for sticking to his ground, recognizing the changing television environment and getting paid an enormous amount of money simply to walk away from The Tonight Show.

Along the way, he also won new supporters and fans by showing that he cared about those he worked for by insisting that even his non-contractual co-workers were taken care off under NBC’s multi-million dollar settlement.

Continue reading "Tantillo’s Weekly Winner and Loser: O'Brien & the Republican Party" »

Posted by John at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

By Kathy Baughman & Steve Hershberger, guest bloggers

If you ask brand managers the purpose of online communities, the reply you’ll most often hear is “customer engagement.” Among marketers, this term is more prevalent than Frisbees at a dog beach.

But the real question is this: Are brands providing meaningful and engaging experiences to their customers through their online communities? Our research on 135 online communities representing 45 major brands indicates that, with few exceptions, the answer is no.

Nearly half of the brands in the study were still in the social marketing experimentation stage, showing fairly robust levels of activity but lacking an integrated strategy across multiple communities and social media. Almost one quarter of the communities were “ghost towns,” mere facades with little or no member participation.

Continue reading "Online Branded Communities: Misguided and Missing the Point " »

Posted by John at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Over in this blog's new sister e-publication, the AMA's Marketing News Exclusives e-newsletter, we're running a regular feature called My Marketing Solution in which we ask members of the marketing community to weigh in on timely marketing topics.

Here's the question from the latest e-newsletter, along with two AMA members' responses. Care to add your perspective? Just add your comment to this post. And let us know if you have any ideas for future My Marketing Solution topics.

Continue reading "Weigh in on this week's "My Marketing Solution" topic" »

Posted by Elisabeth at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)