New practices need new language to describe them. When IDC's smart, experienced, forward-looking, clients and special guests got together at our recent Marketing Leadership board meeting in New York, I jotted down these terms they used as particularly useful for describing their challenges and ideas.
- Product selfie: A type of content where it's all about the product and nothing about the buyer/user (Guidance: Keep to a minimum – you know why.)
- Snackable content: Short-form, easy-to-consume, desirable, content (Guidance: As attention spans get shorter, you'll need more of this.)
- Brand-as-a-Service: Offering beneficial, free, and minimally-self-serving, customer service that extends your brand promise. Examples: USAA offering car-buying services, Pantene offering tips for creating celebrity hair-styles during an Academy Awards social media campaign; (Guidance: Powerful! Find yours.)
- Budget slush fund: Holding back 5-15% of your budget so that you can respond with agility to unexpected opportunities such as a social media fire or an idea from a regional marketer that is worth testing. (Guidance: Great strategy to you get beyond the same-old, same-old, but you'll need a seeking and vetting process to make sure this doesn't go to waste)
- Off-domain: Use of non-owned capabilities such as content syndication, outside point-of-view, 3rd-party voices; curated content, and community/social/partner media or events (Guidance: This fast growing practice will require a different mind-set than the traditional "owned and ads first" Start with some pilots now and plan to expand.)
- Hunting in the zoo: A derogatory term for the frustrating propensity for sales people to prospect only in well-known territory and ignore leads from new companies (Guidance: While I'm reluctant to promote language that contributes to the marketing - sales conflict, I think we have to give witness to this reality. It's not likely to change without CEO intervention, so build reality into campaign and metrics – work with it or around it.)
- Multi-screening: Consumers are learning to use multiple devices in complementary ways to achieve their goals. Example: Using a mobile phone to research and buy a product seen at a tradeshow kiosk. (Guidance: One more reason to get beyond your internal org structure and think about what customers are trying to accomplish. Break down silo's within marketing. But also bring marketing closer to all company functions that touch customers.)
- RACI: This acronym (pronounced "racy") stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. A RACI grid is used to clarify roles in cross-functional practices. (Guidance: Accept that almost all tasks today can't be accomplished in a vacuum. RACI is an indispensible tool for helping people work across silos)
- Orchestrate: Arrange and mobilize multiple diverse elements to achieve a desired result. (Guidance: Think of campaign managers as orchestra conductors who lead groups of experts each playing an instrument critical to the beauty of the concert. This model is more in tune (pun intended) with agile marketing than traditional top-down management.)
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