When Jeff Hayzlett joined Eastman Kodak Company three years ago, the imaging company was in the midst of a transformation. As the newly appointed CMO Hayzlett needed to refocus the company's marketing efforts to correspond with those changes. During his keynote presentation early this week at Marketing World 2009: A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange, Hayzlett shared some insight into his approach.
Sometimes building a one-to-one relationship with customers takes two--partners, that is. That was the case for New York Life when the insurer wanted to reach out to women and position itself as their insurance and financial services preferred provider. According to Barbara Cerf, corporate vice president, the company wanted an expert partner to reach that market; one that would be willing to take a non-traditional approach to achieve a "wow" factor that would help transform its marketing efforts into closed sales.
Should email marketing be more mature by now? Some industry experts think so. But many marketers are still drawn to the ease of blasting to a broad audience, instead of targeting for maximum impact among those most likely to respond.
At a recent Responsys customer summit I had the opportunity to chat with several executives who are focused on the latter. Here's a bit of what they had to say:
There are two main schools of thought on how to tackle current economic conditions: hunker down or charge ahead. "These are two sides of the same coin," said Ram Menon, executive vice president, worldwide marketing, for Tibco Software, when we talked earlier this week. "Marketing will get cut. Everything will. Take that as an opportunity to do better. Everything can be done better."
Menon, who was in New York to speak at a CMO Club event, explained that viewing current conditions as an opportunity is the approach Tibco is taking. "The economic crisis forced us to take a good look at who we sell to," he said. It used to be that the company would buy lists and "be glad for the conversions," and then buy the next list, Menon said. "But a company our size needs to have a razor-sharp focus on customers." So he and his team selected the 1,000 most growable customers within sectors that are also ripe for growth to create a "rich and meaningful" target customer list. "It makes the problem go away of who we should spend our time and money on," he said.
Menon shared some other advice about how to succeed despite the economy:
What does it take to be a Chief Marketing Officer? The CMO Council surveyed 4,000 members to discern some common attributes.
