22 July 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin
We, B2B technology vendors, invest a lot of passion and energy in shaping market conversations that favor our solutions. We have a clear mental picture of our target audience and the ways we should construct our conversations with them.
I suspect, however, that the audience knowledge we profess to have draws more from needs analysis and less from the analysis of actual prospect interactions. We can fluently recite customer pain points and sales objections, but have little concrete knowledge of how technology users and buyers perceive us and expect to interact with us.
To remedy this, I recently met with...
02 July 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin
Hey Marketing Exec!
You have a good sense of what's going on in your organization, right? How well your different channels are performing, how your marketing technologies talk to each other -- you have it all figured out. That's awesome! You must have a pretty solid grasp of your digital analytics program. Because, you know, your analytics team, your analytics tools -- that's how you stay on top of things. But what am I saying? You're all good, you're one with the analytics.
Right?
Look, I don't want to shutter your confidence, create self-doubt or anything like that. I am...
17 June 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin
Organizations that are looking to adopt a new marketing solution -- say, a recommendation engine or an attribution service -- often face an interesting dilemma: should they implement a white box or a black box solution?
A white box solution offers full transparency into and control over its operation. It has levers and monitors with which marketers control its data processing, decisioning, and outputs. With a white box product recommendation engine, for instance, eCommerce managers specify the business rules that pair recommended products with a focus product (the primary product for consideration). Similarly with a white box attribution solution, marketers...
05 June 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin
The movie CHEF, written, co-produced and directed by Jon Favreau, tells the story of a restaurant chef who loses his job after an ongoing argument with his restaurant owner about the menu. Chef Casper (Favreau) wants to cook food that inspires people, while the owner wants him to stick with crowd pleasers. After quitting his job, Casper starts his own food truck with the help of his former line cook and his social networking savvy ten-year-old son. The trio goes on a road trip to bring the food truck from Miami to Los Angeles. It's a highly entertaining work, do...
03 June 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin
Facial recognition technology has been around for years. Same goes for personalization and display retargeting. But now advertisers are beginning to bring these technologies together and integrate them in remarkable ways. Coca-Cola, for example, is trialling new beverage dispensers in Australia. The dispensers deliver display ad campaigns that are personalized by facial recognition, geo-location, social and weather information collected by the dispensers themselves and processed in real-time.
The trial is already yielding considerable sales lift for Coke over regular beverage dispensers.
The science behind facial recognition is getting better. Facebook, for example, has reached a high degree of...
29 May 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin This post provides a comprehensive outline of the various issues involving the implementation of experience personalization across digital channels and devices. It enables marketing teams that consider executing or optimizing personalization initiatives to think more broadly and strategically about personalization, rather than to implement personalization tools in an ad-hoc, siloed manner. As this post discusses technology integration issues, I recommend reading The Marketing Architect Imperative. Generally speaking, personalization is the modification of a given experience (message or interaction) to meet the particular needs and desires of an audience member who is the target of said experience. In...
27 May 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin The 2012 book "Leading Change" by John P. Kotter (Harvard Business Review Press) does a great job outlining a clear -- albeit lengthy -- prescription for driving organizational change. Kotter draws from his decades of leadership research to offer an eight-stage methodology for getting firms to adopt and evolve around new strategies. The book starts and ends with the key obstacle that twenty-first-century organizations face when attempting to lead change; namely, that such organizations draw from twentieth-century business dogma that overemphasizes management and underemphasizes leadership. Leadership training is a relatively new phenomenon, and, consequently, we have too many managers...
22 May 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin B2B software vendors who create a new market category or introduce a new offering into existing markets have a difficult decision to make: should their product be simple to use or comprehensive in the range of use cases it covers? Because a product, as a whole, cannot be simultaneously both. A simple vs. comprehensive question may seem bizarre to you as if it's trying to decide between non-mutually exclusive options. But specifically in the B2B world, you're essentially asking yourself: should we offer basic features that cover 70% of the use cases of our target audience (e.g. SMBs) and allow...
15 May 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin Recently, I started this blog as a way to share insights and fresh ideas about modern business and marketing practices. Much of what I cover is inspired by recent developments documented in business literature. So I thought it would be beneficial to share with you my blogging workflow, which is comprised of various products and technologies that I have strung together to turn blogging into a sustainable process. So here goes: I've signed up to various business and marketing newsletters, which provide a steady stream of relevant news. I'm also following Twitter users who point me to excellent content. Once...
12 May 2014 • By Boaz Ronkin Website analytics programs at enterprise organizations are highly complex, typically involving many individuals, processes and reports. I will not attempt to cover all of those in a single post. Rather, I'll focus here on a particular use case that is dear to my heart: the glorious 360-degree view of the consumer (or 'audience member' for those of you in the B2B space). The 360-degree-view carrot has been dangled in front of too many enterprise eyes for far too long without delivering the requisite results. Granted, some exposures/interactions are more difficult to measure than others (e.g. billboard advertising), but that doesn't...
A Modern Strategy for Personalization
Summary
Definition
Book Recommendation: Leading Change by John P. Kotter
Go Simple or Go Comprehensive?
Technology Integrations for Personal Blogging
A Modern Strategy for Web Analytics
