Tag: growth

Why the CIO and CMO need to work together


Why the CIO and CMO need to work together

CIOs have historically served as business enablers, taking responsibility for the enterprise technologies that allow firms to manage their businesses. CMO’s have historically been tasked with designing, implementing and managing marketing efforts that support sales. The former has traditionally been a more analytical role, while the latter has traditionally been more creative.
 

Those days are over. In today’s data-rich digital marketing eco-system, both CIOs and CMOs need to move beyond these stereotypical role definitions in order to develop and manage a holistic, real-time, 360-degree view of prospects and customers. For the CIO, this requires an understanding of the customer insights necessary to make sense of data. For the CMO, this means turning these insights into informed decisions about where and how to invest marketing dollars so as to generate more sales and profits.
 

Data-rich environments sit at the center of these two vectors and provide a great means by which the CIO and CMO can partner and support each other. In partnership, the CIO and CMO can share the roles of designing the user experience most likely to yield the greatest insights and / or sales outcomes given each of their respective areas of subject matter expertise.
 

This, in turn, requires more than collaboration. It requires the organizational will to support this partnership, the willingness to take guidance from insights delivered as a result, and the platforms necessary to harness and interrupt the data necessary to facilitate all of the above.
 

About the Kabardian Group: We help clients achieve profitable growth. Short, simple and to the point. Our clients include companies large and small and at every stage of their development, including start-ups. www.kabardian.com
 


Why Big Data is so Valuable


Why Big Data is so Valuable

Big data was little more than a theoretical concept just a few years ago. Since appearing on the scene, spending on big data has grown in the high double digits; according to Gartner, spending on big data grew to $13.1BN in 2012. Companies large and small are increasingly looking to harness big data in order to lower the costs of acquiring, converting and retaining customers. Big data refers to a data set so large and complex that it stands just beyond the ability of most analytic tools, methods and instruments. The definition is fluid—there is no magical number that qualifies as “big data”—because technology is always evolving. As long as there are more ways to collect data, and as long as computer processing power and storage capacities are growing, there will be big data.
 

Big data is valuable for several reasons

 

Big provides greater insight into a given phenomenon (i.e. customer acquisitions) that informs investment decisions over marketing and other resources.
 

Big data also allows for real-time monitoring, simulations and relatively inexpensive experiments. Tracking, analyzing and responding to customer behavior in real-time allows organizations to fine-tune how they interact with prospects and customers nearly instantly. At the same time, this same data allows for testing hypotheses and the rapid introduction of new services, offerings and promotions with relative ease.
 

Finally, big data provides a complement (not a replacement) for human-based decision-making. The art of management is to make informed decisions with imperfect information. Big data helps close the gap, but with every answer, there are always more questions, and automated data analysis will never be a substitute for good judgment. Companies that understand this and leverage big data can achieve better ROI and stronger customer retention than companies that fail to grasp these implications. All of these factors underscore two undeniable facts about data: It is here to stay, and firms that leverage the power of big data enjoy greater growth and profitability than those that do not.
 

About the Kabardian Group: We help clients achieve profitable growth. Short, simple and to the point. Our clients include companies large and small and at every stage of their development, including start-ups. www.kabardian.com
 


Marketing is a high-ROI investment in growth


Marketing is a high-ROI investment in growth

Marketing is more challenging, time-consuming and (for some) expensive than it’s ever been.

The costs of printing direct mail pieces has been increasing over the last decade. From 2000 – 2013, the average cost of a simple postage stamp has increased by 39.4%.
 

These cost trends are expected to accelerate, even as response rates for direct mail remain relatively flat. Direct mail is still a valuable part of the marketing mix, but business that want to add more customers and earn more profits need to expand into digital channels.
 

Social media is on the rise

More and more companies are including social media as part of the marketing mix. Social media provides a relatively inexpensive channel through which to engage customers and prospects in a two-way dialogue. It is also a great channel to cultivate brand awareness and get people talking about your business, but social media is difficult to monetize.
 

At the same time, customer behavior is shifting and their privacy concerns are growing. Increasingly, prospects and customers are concerned about sharing their personal data, and regulatory shifts are making it harder to share such data even as digital channels makes it sometimes easier to gather such data.
The simple fact is that the days of discrete “marketing campaigns” are coming to an end. Today’s firms need to engage prospects and customers in a “constant campaign” that targets people based on their personal preferences—not mere interests.
 

This shift means that companies serious about growth need to bring a holistic approach to their marketing efforts. This includes multi-channel marketing efforts that allow prospects and customers to engage seamlessly through any medium they chose, whenever they want. Responding to the challenge means transforming the marketing function from a simple cost center into a high-ROI investment in growth. Sadly, few companies have the organizational or technological capabilities to capitalize on these emerging opportunities.
 

About the Kabardian Group: We help clients achieve profitable growth. Short, simple and to the point. Our clients include companies large and small and at every stage of their development, including start-ups. www.kabardian.com
 


Finding it hard to engage your colleagues?


Finding it hard to engage your colleagues?

Are you a manager finding it tough to break through to the folks who report to you? Maybe you’re a team leader, and you can’t find a way to engage your peers. Maybe you’re struggling to find a way to connect to your reporting manager.
 

The fact is that people at all levels of an organization can find it challenging to really engage with others in meaningful dialogue. Such interactions are important for an organization to perform well, and even more critical when times are tough and business challenges abound.

Ironically, it is exactly in such times when open and honest feedback is the most difficult to come by.

The reasons for this are several-fold; in most organizations, the following are generally true:
 

  • Success is often viewed as “part of the job” while failures are punished
  • Creativity and bold approaches are frowned upon
  • Group think tends to dominate discussion because it is perceived as “safe”

 
In most cases, what is maximizing to the individual is often disastrous for the organization. Firms that fail to take risks rarely seize opportunities for break-through innovation. Novel approaches to seemingly old problems are never explored, and innovation, at best, becomes a process of describing old behavior in new terms.
 

In such cases, firms that are serious about growth and innovation need to get serious about meaning what they say and saying what they mean. Leadership by example is a must, and that leadership needs to come from the top of an organization and permeate through every molecule of the company’s DNA.

This more than top brass holding executive getaways so that they can speak honestly among each other. An open and honest culture needs to find its way into every fiber of a firm’s operations, activities, performance evaluations and compensation schemes.
 

About the Kabardian Group: We help clients achieve profitable growth. Short, simple and to the point. Our clients include companies large and small and at every stage of their development, including start-ups. www.kabardian.com
 


Is Apple no longer able to innovate?


Is Apple no longer able to innovate?

Apple Computer released earnings yesterday, and market reaction has been mixed.
 

Long story short, revenue has been pretty flat and gross margins shrunk. Different sources are interrupting these trends in different ways. Forbes suggested that Apple might be on the verge of a major turnaround, while CNBC provided a more cut and dry report.
 

Few outlets have anything interesting to say, with the exception of TechCrunch. Of all the analyses released, TechCrunch’s seems to be the most insightful.
 

Long story short, TechCrunch’s perspective is as follows:

  • Jobs reappeared in the mid-1990s and reinvigorated Apple
  • Under Jobs, Apple became a powerhouse that pumped out innovation after innovation
  • Now that Jobs is gone, there is still great talent at the company
  • The markets Jobs found under his tenure are not likely to return any time soon
  • Apple will probably be fine, though not the growth powerhouse it has been in the past

 
That’s all fairly remarkable. There’s been a rush of commentary over whether Apple can continue to innovate and grow without Steve Jobs, but relatively less attention has been paid to the macro environment Jobs found when he returned to Apple.
 

The launch of the iMac came at a time when the PC was moving from an interesting tool to a household staple that allowed access to the Internet. Jobs was able to refresh Apple’s computer business just as the web made operating systems less important and just as web applications were breaking down the Windows domination of software.
 

The Internet also made digital music downloads possible; not always legally at first, but these market forces paved the way for the introduction of the iPod.
 

Looking back at several of Apples (failed) innovations of the past, Jobs was able to integrate a personal organizer, a music player, a camera and a phone into the first iPhone, and later introduced the iPad a few years later. These latter two innovations came just as consumers began to grow tired of carrying non-PC multiple devices and then moved on to desire non-PC alternatives to a notebook computer.
 

To be clear, the continued purchasing of smart phones, tablet devices and digital media are not likely to slow down any time soon, but the massive migration and adoption of these items is not likely to take place again any time soon.
 

Put differently, it doesn’t look like there’s any big macro-economic shift on the horizon for Apple (or anyone else) to capitalize on.

 

The implications are subtle, but noteworthy. Apple can easily be just as innovative as it was with Jobs on board; the company could theoretically be even more innovative, but it simply won’t benefit from the macro-economic shifts described above.
 

Innovation is core to a company’s health and growth prospects, but success relies on a fair bit of luck and timing as well. Apple will likely be fine for the foreseeable future, but it is unlikely to deliver double digit growth on a consistent basis as it has in the past.
 

About the Kabardian Group: We help clients achieve profitable growth. Short, simple and to the point. Our clients include companies large and small and at every stage of their development, including start-ups. www.kabardian.com
 


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