Marketing Articles About Leadership

Marketing Articles About Leadership Search Results

Results for: leadership

27 items found:

Obama: With Biden, Thinking Like a CEO. In choosing Senator Joe Biden as his running mate, Obama has shown impressive leadership. Biden complements Obama's strengths, and Obama is putting the party's interests first

(08/23/08 09:00 AM)

Women leaders are set up to fail..

Economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett?writes in her Harvard Business Blog, "Winning the Talent War," with the recent dismissal/demotion of Erin Callan (Lehman Brothers), Zoe Cruz (Morgan Stanley), and Sallie Krawcheck (Citi), a 2005 article in the British Journal of Management entitled "The Glass Cliff: Evidence that Women are Over-Represented in Precarious Leadership Positions" is being scrutinized anew.

(08/08/08 09:01 AM)

Some Thought Leadership on Thought Leadership Marketing. I had the distinct pleasure of presenting to the Reno-Tahoe chapter of the American Marketing Association today. The topic was Thought Leadership Marketing. What a fun group! The deck from the event is below.

Thought Leadership Marketing

view presentation (tags: thought leadership marketing)

(07/23/08 09:01 PM)

Thought Leadership Toolkit Mindmap.

I find that most projects I work on wind up depicted with a MindJet MindMap at some point in the process - thought leadership marketing is no different.

Here's the mindmap of the Thought Leadership Marketing Toolkit.

Download the full resolution image from Flickr.
Download an 11x17 PDF of the Thought Leadership Marketing toolkit mindmap.

(07/23/08 09:01 PM)

P&G's Sustainability Initiatives -- Not So Sustainable.

On a prematurely springlike day in Cincinnati, Len Sauers's workday begins as it often does -- with a meeting. On the 11th floor of Procter & Gamble's corporate offices, seven members of its Sustainability Leadership Council huddle around a table in a small conference room. Ten others listen in by phone from P&G offices around the world. The topic at hand is the company's commitment to develop $20 billion worth of "sustainable innovation products" in the next five years, a significant addition to P&G's current $76 billion in annual sales.

(07/22/08 09:01 PM)

The 5 Stars of a "Rockstar" Employee. When you say an employee is a “rockstar” you are saying they will have a great future. They are excelling in their job – that’s a given – but to be a rockstar is to say their career is expected to shoot up like a rockstar’s record on the charts! They will scale, and are competent and trusted enough to do well in almost any job. Obviously you want to be a rockstar and you want to hire a rockstar. So what does a rockstar look like? How do you interview for them? On the plane to San Jose this week I started thinking about this, as we’re doing a lot of hiring at Bazaarvoice. In my career I’ve worked with hundreds of people, interviewed a few hundred, and hired over 100 people. A minority of these folks (say 10%) were rockstars, a minority I’d never hire or want to work with (another 10%), and the rest are in the middle. From my perspective, these are the characteristics I saw in the top 10% whom I’d be honored to work with anytime. The 5 stars of a rockstar… 1) Initiative To me, maybe because I see what entrepreneurialism and change leadership can do for an organization, this is the most important characteristic. I’ve posted on this before with my 12 career tips, about taking initiative outside your "triangle" and taking bigger risks. Rockstars must have initiative because someday they will call the shots, and as such they need to be... (07/22/08 09:00 PM)

Coaching Excellence Series Rolls On. My monthly expert interview series continues in July with a live session with David Meerman Scott on Wednesday, July 16th Noon CDT. David is an online thought leadership and viral marketing strategist and author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach [...]

(06/30/08 09:00 PM)

Insight for Ad Agencies - Listen or Go Back to Print.

This is quite possibly the most timely and exciting article I've read as of late (come to think it, this I've been rather busy and this might be the only thing I've read of late...nope, this really is the best).

Joseph Dumont penned a piece for Imedia entitled "Why Agencies are Failing" in it, he lays out several of his own observations that are founded in a report from Forrester (might be worth the $279 price tag if you're seeking some Forrester Research Therapy for your agency) and compiled from his keen insights into the agency world.

This article really hits home as it comes at a time when I'm doing a bit of work with a few agencies that I regard with the utmost respect and I can't help but see some of their challenges echoed in this article. Those are the agencies that are truly students of advertising, marketing, customer behavior and have a genuine purpose in this world. They will succeed because they can learn, they can grow and like energy (you know, never at rest) they are always moving and changing and they're on the right path.

On the other end of the spectrum are agencies who are truly stuck. They're afraid of stepping outside of their comfort zone, afraid to admit that they need help, don't have a mastermind group internally that's challenging their age-old positioning and their clients are suffering as a result by way of crusty old strategies, reheated ideas and basically an ignorance of the end customer that we're all trying to reach. Those agencies will fail a they aren't even on a path - they're standing still.

Here are a few observations that I took from Joseph's article. I really recommend read though it with you highlighter handy - there are some real nuggets in there. If you're an agency, take this to your next staff meeting and discuss it. It's that important. If you like, buy the Forrester report (and tell me if it was worth it!)

1. Damnit, get out there and do the hard work to really understand how your client's consumer has changed their habits, where they hang out and what they want to hear from you. Media kits are for armchair advertisers. You need to get out there, listen, react and move. Oh, and get your client's leadership and front line folks on the same page too. Customers are smart. They see through the disorganization.

2. Watch political marketing. I've said this for years and I'll say it again "the harbingers of the next generation of marketing are working in politics". Watch all 3 candidates and how they leverage the digital space. Also, pay attention to their budgets. They're moving mountains and spending very little (comparatively) online...they reach the masses on TV and the influencers through digital (online) means...it's a great country we live in!

3. Interactive does NOT mean Internet. It means really in-ter-acting... get people involved, acting and interacting and engaging. Most of what's called "interactive" is anything but.

4. User generated content is not the holy grail. User generated genuine interest in a brand that excites consumers and pushes their 'loyalty button' is what we're really seeking. There are many UGC campaigns that are bolt on piles of crap... If UGC is not aligned with your brand and the only respondents are professional contestants, you should rethink things a bit. Just because it's cool doesn't mean it's you (or that an agency should sell it to you)

5. I actually think that we're in pretty good shape - there is BRILLIANT marketing going on out there (just read iMedia, Marketing Sherpa and others to see the kick ass campaigns and strategies that are rocking the marketing world)...but there's always room to do better. Both agencies and internal marketers can't afford to get lazy. The entire profession of marketing is founded on a "faith in the future" perspective! That's why we market - for the future...so hurry up and let's all get there!

(06/09/08 09:00 AM)

Insight for Ad Agencies - Listen or Go Back to Print.

3. Interactive does NOT mean Internet. It means really in-ter-acting... get people involved, acting and interacting and engaging. Most of what's called "interactive" is anything but.

(05/29/08 09:00 PM)

Marketing Champions: Interview With Cisco's Luanne Tierney. Luanne Tierney, Senior Director US and Canada Channels Marketing at Cisco, has had a 20-year career in technology marketing?the past 12 years at Cisco, and before that at Apple, HP, and 3Com. She is a "Marketing Champion," because she drives cash flow for Cisco by helping channel partners market more effectively. Excerpted here is her philosophy of leadership in marketing. (05/27/08 09:00 AM)

How to LIVE RICH. A good friend and ex-Dell colleague passed away on Friday, April 25, 2008, after a courageous and inspiring battle with brain cancer. I want to celebrate and share the piece of his life I knew, and the words of wisdom he left for all of us. Two months after I joined Dell in March 1999, a curly-haired Harvard grad moved into the cube next door. Over the next seven years Rich and I worked together to help build Dell’s consumer eBusiness to a $3.5B business, and then on Dell’s CRM and segmentation strategy (he worked on corporate strategy while I worked in Consumer division). But what he worked on is not as important as HOW he accomplished his goals. Rich exemplified leadership. In fact, he had the rare quality of being a Level 5 Leader, as outlined by Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. He excelled through confident humility amidst a (typical) corporate environment of politics, ego and alpha aggression. He always put decision in terms of what was right for the business, and helped others grow in the process. Everyone loved to work with Rich or for him. So many of us were awestruck at Rich’s knowledge and wisdom. Rich often put up ‘observations’ on his small whiteboard in his cube. One time he made the observation that time and quality of mission statement are inversely related – graphed on the board, the more time spent on the mission statement the less it resonates. So true. And so funny.... (04/29/08 09:01 PM)

#1 Lesson from 2007: Using a Sense of Urgency in Marketing.

If there's one theme that keeps coming back to me from the past year, it's got the be the proper use (and the ease of misuse, if you're not careful) of a sense of urgency about doing business with you and your company. I'm not talking about the cheezy 'limited time offers' that you see over and over on TV (limited my ass...you mean, limited by your budget for spewing out shitty ads...) but genuine urgency created by inflection points in your business which moves the needle on buyer behavior.

Keep in mind here that I'm talking mostly about B2B, which, from my perspective, makes this even more exciting. B2C gets all the urgency in the mass media, and sometimes it's a rare day for most B2B organizations to be able to substantiate a genuine sense of urgency within the base of prospects.

That said, urgency is not for everyone. It's a powerful weapon that's not to be used without forethought and and crisp and clear understanding of not only the immediate implications, but also future consequences of the slippery slope that it can create, as discussed in a concise little bit about urgency in the Marketing Experiments blog.

So, what's this urgency thing all about and how do you create it?

I guess that this will be different for everyone, but frankly, the most successful levers that I've found are timing around pricing and production and availability, quotas and caps. I'm keen to hear more about what you think. Again, I'm talking sustainable things here - not just a 50% off sale or something....

Timing and production to create urgency:

This is the fun one. A great example is an impending price increase. If you've been doing a great deal of lead nurturing with your base of prospects, this is especially useful because the already know and trust you. On the other hand, if you don't have a base of prospects that you're nurturing, then you're just another average dude with a deal. Seriously, there's a lot of you out there...this type of urgency play almost has to come from a position of trust to be truly effective. Sure, you can impose urgency on a facelist list of prospects, but your conversion will suffer.

Proper planning improves urgency results:

Again, you can take this for what it's worth, but like everything I preach about when I talk about thought leadership marketing or 'altruism before capitalism', you can't just wake up one day and say "I need to create a sense of urgency and get more sales." Crap, what's first. Wrong way Charlie. Not going to work. You need to plan this. You need to understand what the next inflection point in your business will be (obsolescence of an old product, price increase across the board, new product design coming out, office move/clearing inventory...something that's almost 'external' to you yet internal at the same time) and work in a sense of urgency into your marketing to coincide with (or, preferably leading up to) the genuine, non "manufactured" inflection point.

Quotas, caps and limited availability:

Take a page from event marketers (if any of you are attending sold out football games as we near playoff time, you understand the acute sense of urgency that surrounds ticket prices and the limited availability in stadium seating) and keep an eye on your quota for items, or your geographical territories that are quickly filling up or the number of 'limited edition' items that you can produce in one quarter. From a services perspective, such as social media speaking or marketing consulting (things which I have some familiarity with) the best creator of urgency is the calendar and the limited number of dates you have available.

This is not the end of the story. There's so much more to this urgency thing (like neuromarketing and buyer behavior) but for now, that's enough.

Action Items:

What ideas do you have for creating urgency? Please share in comments!

(12/31/07 09:00 PM)

Thought Leadership Marketing is Market Focused.

Steven Van Yoder posted an excellent summary of how Cisco embeds thought leadership marketing into its culture and plays off this philosophy as its marketing mainstay.

Most companies give lipservice to TLM the same way that few marketers understand the fundamentals of marketing in that the 'product focus' mentality of the twenties is dead and that we're still very much in the era of 'market focus'.

Therein lies the inherent power of Thought Leadership Marketing - It's market focused and puts the needs of the market first. More to the point, it puts the credibility, reputation and growth of the company truly in the hands of the customers. Thought Leadership is bestowed upon a company by its customers - it cannot be created in a vacuum without an intuitive revervence for the market or markets served.

Specific to Cisco, and others that use Thought Leadership Marketing, there are a few keys that make TLM what it is:

Leadership demands that every executive establish and nurture his or her own reputation for thought leadership
Pursue blogging, public speaking, and writing articles
Become an industry purveyor of executive thought leadership
Align your website with with links to research reports, papers, podcasts, interviews and other content from around the industry which supports and furthers your TLM position
Publish newseltters for customer segments and the industry in general
Host thought leadership events that bring together academia, industry, goverment and customers to address very specific topics related to your business and industry

That is not a be-all end all list to be sure, but it's a heck of a start on your Thought Leadership Marketing strategy.

(10/04/07 09:01 PM)

Organizational Culture. I am writing a chapter on organization culture and I thought I would share two interesting quotes from Edgar Schein's book, Organization Culture and Leadership. Schein is a pioneer in the field of Organization Development.“I will argue that the term... (08/30/07 09:01 AM)

Fireside Chat with Kevin Eikenberry. Rome was not built in a day and neither is the craft of leadership! Chat with Kevin Eikenberry During this 31 minute podcast, I chat with pal and fellow blogger Kevin Eikenberry, author of Remarkable Leadership: Unleashing Your Leadership Potential... (08/30/07 09:00 AM)

The Accountability Trap. I love this post from pal Starbucker called, Leadership and the Accountability Trap. Here's an enticing snippet:That is, how do you avoid what I call the "accountability trap", where teammates are so focused on what happens if they run afoul... (08/30/07 09:00 AM)

Rule #3: Leadership Is Confusing As Hell. http://www.fastcompany.com/online/44/rules.html (08/10/07 09:01 AM)

Leadership: What Are You Wearing?. http://blog.fastcompany.com/experts/rsherman/2007/08/leadership_what_are_you_wearin.html?partner=rss (08/09/07 09:00 AM)

Effective Change Happens BEFORE Change Occurs. I stayed with my Uncle on a business trip to OH the last couple days (we save money wherever we can! :-). He used to be a C130 pilot in Vietnam, a Colonel in the Airforce, a program manager at Rockwell/Boeing, and is now an MBA professor. In the Airforce he managed a team that acccepted 8,000 page, $5B proposals, and when he went to Boeing he created these proposals. Obviously a $5B project in any organization brings about a tremendous amount of change, on either side. In our many discussions he brought up a great reminder on effective change management and leadership... Most change slows down when you have to spend so much time cleaning up and handling crisis management at the back end of the change program that was improperly planned. Smart change management is spending the right time up front to 'ready the ship' to accept the change, thus allowing it flow more smoothly and quickly through the organization. I remember this lesson from launching customer segmentation marketing at Dell. For the first few months I made little progress at getting other functions to change the way we did business. They had to change their process, their measure of success, and accept a new way of doing things from outside their function. It wasn't until I formed a 'council', got executives from other functions involved, got buyin from the top and bottom, that the program moved forward (relatively) smoothly. This principle also reminds me of a post... (07/31/07 09:01 AM)

Notes on "The Likeability Factor" (Tim Sanders at Austin Texchange). Last week I became president of Texchange, a local association of Technology entrepreneurs and executives. At our June event we had Tim Sanders, formerly of Broadcast.com, Yahoo, author of Love: The Killer App, and more recently The Likeability Factor. He spoke to a June audience of 130 entrepreneurs and shared some sobering statistics, research, and recommendations. Thanks to Josh Toub at BluefishGroup and Secretary of Techange, I can share these notes for you. [Note: if you are an Austin-based technology entrepreneur or in a Austin-based startup, email me to join]. Biology behind increased importance of emotion in business and everyday life The amygdala (part of brain in charge of emotion) has grown ~1% in the lat 35 years Makes liking the people you do business with much more important than it once was EVP When Tim evaluates a company to invest in or do business with, he evaluates three things: What is the emotional value proposition What is the emotional cost of ownership What is the emotional compensation plan Did research at Yahoo about the essance of loyalty--it's all about emotional attraction In life, the likability factor is almost always the tie break Every presidential election since 1976 has been won by the likability factor. What is likability? Not about charimsa Not about being popular It's about reciprocity, not attraction Emotional Attraction (EA) Leadership An emotionally attractive salesperson will gross 40% more than a neutral person 3 benefits: Reduced risk Doctors who smile are much less likely to get sued... (06/18/07 09:03 PM)

50-Strand Template for Building a Word-of-Mouth-Worthy Business. It’s been a month in a half since my last post. Yikes. I’m hoping you (haven't) noticed. :-)I’m back.One of the reasons for the absence has been a lot of traveling, including a trip to London. See my picture here in downtown York. U.S. history is nothing compared to a place like this! I also spent one day in the UK with David Rance, CEO of Round. I worked with David to bring a customer centricity framework into Dell several years ago. There are two powerful parts of the Round system. First is the simplicity of a baseball metaphor and measurement system. As you analyze the customer centricity of your company, you move along the bases, closer to a home run. The bases even bring a language that your people can use to explain why things don’t line up. Second is the sophisticated part of the system: the “Strands”. The Strands represent key areas in your organization, each of which can be measured towards customer centricity based on feedback within the organization…like looking in a mirror. Strands are things such as leadership style, employee engagement, customer data, marketing metrics, etc. On a jet-lagged bank holiday at David's 400-year-old house in northern England, I shared my opinions of what it took for a company to have word of mouth. David opened up his laptop, opened his software, and over the next hour we identified the key strands that are critical for a company to earn word of mouth. Brand Values Collection... (06/18/07 09:03 AM)

Being Good Can Be Great!. Here's an interesting post from Nick McCormick – author of Lead Well and Prosper: 15 Successful Strategies for Becoming a Good ManagerBeing Good Can Be Great! When it comes to leadership management training, there is no shortage of superlatives. The... (06/14/07 09:01 AM)

12 Rules for Self-Leadership. http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/12-rules-for-self-leadership.html (05/04/07 09:00 PM)

What type of posts do you want to see?. I've been blogging for about four years now, and as you can see from my categories I blog about diverse topics in marketing, ebusiness, leadership and life. I'd like to hear from you what category is your favorite? Which category most interests you?... (03/01/07 09:00 PM)

How to Become a Thought Leader and Attract Customers. Would you like to be more visible and generate sales leads on a limited budget? Become a thought leader! Thought leadership gives you an edge to combat commoditization and attract more business. RainToday recently released the results of a new,... (02/28/07 09:00 AM)

[scottberkun.com] Why You Must Lead or Follow. http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/essay42.htm ...For the sake of this essay, and the topic of leadership, I’m a dichotomist. We are social creatures and have ingrained in us the behavior for how to lead or follow others. In any context, at any time,... (12/12/06 08:04 AM)

Yahoo's 15 Bullets of Pain – Can You Feel Them Too?. Today I read a memo published in the Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch from Yahoo’s Brad Garlinghouse on problems Yahoo faces, and his suggestions to improve. What struck me about this memo is it describes a situation that is not unique to Yahoo. Show this post or his memo to smart friends at large companies and their heads will start to nod. I’ve organized key statements Brad made in his “Recognizing Our Problem” section and other sections. I reordered a few of them, because in the right order I think it tells a story. Read through these 15 statements, and say “Therefore” in front of every bold (*) statement. You can start to see how large, entrepreneurial companies lacking strong leadership or vision can spiral into lower performance, and what appear as problems are really symptoms. We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. We want to do everything and be everything — to everyone. We’ve known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like — rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy. *We are separated into silos that far too frequently don’t talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn’t to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but... (11/19/06 09:01 PM)

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