MARKETING HORIZONS

With the rising demand for marketing accountability, and the emphasis being placed on data-driven decision-making, is the intuitive marketer under threat of extinction? Our guest, Susan K. Jones, says that AI and science will allow the intuitive marketer of the future not only to survive but to thrive. Listen in as we discuss how smarter AI and tech will lead to smarter “informed intuition” for marketers everywhere. Susan is the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books. Academically, she is a tenured full professor of marketing at Ferris State University in Big Rapids MI, and she is also a marketing practitioner with a background in banking, collectibles, insurance, and business-to-business.

Is marketing’s focus on the customer misplaced, even harmful? We discussed this radical idea with Tim Parkin, a global consultant and coach to marketing executives at many world-renowned brands. While marketers have been focusing on the customer, Tim contends that we have neglected our internal teams. They find themselves without the processes, collaboration, and alignment needed to make marketing to customers work. Join us as Tim explains why he rates most large corporate marketing teams only a 3 out of 10 and gives us an action plan to make this right. HINT: It is tied to a clever combination of skill-based retention and a disciplined process.

"Small business owners are not marketers,” says our guest Stephanie Schwab, CEO of Crackerjack Marketing. But she can help them become proficient, and successful, if they follow a distinct process that she shares during this episode. As the world enters a time of business uncertainty, Stephanie recommends that owners reassess their marketing, to understand the nature of their unique offering and to take stock of their customers. Listen in, as we explore the details around her process, and her marketing must-dos—including the surprising Top Tip she gives to business owners.

Seth Marrs, the Forrester analyst who follows sales technology, painted an exhilarating picture of the future of SalesTech, saying it will combine with MarTech into an entirely new way of going to market — along with a new organizational function called Revenue Teams. Primarily focused on the B2B ecosystem, but with consumer applications — especially for call centers — this developing technology is enabling an end-to-end customer experience driven by conversational intelligence, NLP (natural language processing), AI, and real-time data capture and analysis. In fact, Seth believes the future will be about opportunities and not leads, and this tech gives us a brand new container for our engagement experience, resulting in more powerful roles for marketing, higher revenues, and customer satisfaction overall. Sounds great. Give a listen!

Recorded live from the Innovation Center at WVU Reed School of Media and Communications, Ruth Stevens and Cyndi Greenglass look at the fascinating marketing trends shared on their podcast over the first half of 2022. Included in the discussion are insights on the complex evolution of the customer experience (CX), the emerging power of Gen X as an audience, the importance of your digital first impression, the future of events, humanizing measurement, and connected TV (CTV). Don’t miss this opportunity to catch the highlights of the first half of 2022 and the marketing waves Cyndi and Ruth are riding over the horizon.

As marketers, we spend a lot of time talking about Millennials. We target them as consumers, employees, and donors, to the point of obsession, as the next cohort after the Boomers. But wait! We are overlooking Generation X, not surprisingly called the “Forgotten Generation.” This is the 65 million people in their 40s and 50s sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials. They represent a $2.4 trillion market. Ignoring them could prove a costly mistake for both businesses and nonprofits.

Marketing is no longer about simply bringing in new customers. Marketers are also responsible for managing customers to profitability. Our guest Steve Gershik explains why customer management is the new horizon, and how we all need to develop the tools and skills to understand our customers deeply. We must become digital anthropologists, examining customer behaviors and signals to infer the steps needed to serve customers and expand their value. Join us for a lively conversation, beginning with Steve’s notion of the “funnel beyond the funnel” and the surprising origins of the AIDA concept.

Marketers are under mounting pressure to demonstrate results. In this episode, the renowned measurement master Katie Delahaye Paine shares her latest tips on how to successfully overcome the challenge while preparing for the new developments ahead. Join us to learn two key reasons this issue persists, why you need to set the right objectives, and how silos and fiefdoms can doom your efforts. Innovative AI-driven tools are on the way, but we must apply them with care.

The landscape of higher education has experienced major changes, but it is set to undergo a sweeping transformation in the years ahead. A smaller Gen. Z cohort, combined with increased talent demands in the industry bring both threats and opportunities for academic instruction. Who will survive, and how will they thrive? In this week’s episode, we tackle two compelling opportunities: how marketing professionals should evaluate the role of higher education in their career ladder, and how schools should borrow from the B2B playbook to competitively market themselves for the future. Take a listen with our esteemed guest, Chad Mezera, Assistant Dean of Online Programs for the College of Creative Arts and Media at West Virginia University. Chad literally “wrote the playbook” on online education, and has turned WVU’s higher education programs into award-winning, innovative online degrees.

In this episode, Brian Hunt explains, in the clearest possible terms, the total scoop on CTV for marketers. We learned its benefits and drawbacks, the differences between CTV, OTT and linear television, and why CTV is an essential medium for us to be experimenting with today. Career hint: Data science majors can write their own tickets in this field! Join us for the details of how television is becoming more digital, targetable and measurable as a marketing communications channel.