The Brainzooming Group

What a week last week!

First of all, thanks to Barrett Sydnor for keeping the Brainzooming blog active with book reviews on some fundamental strategy books for marketers.

For most of the week, I was chairing the 2010 American Marketing Association Marketing Research Conference in Atlanta for the second year in a row. There was tremendous strategic content on business, marketing, and market research from outstanding speakers. But since my focus for the marketing research conference was on emceeing the general sessions and helping produce the conference, I didn’t take the typical copious notes I usually would.

So as I pull my thoughts together into a future blog post, here’s a video recap of the American Marketing Association marketing research conference from Jeffrey Henning of Vovici. Jeffrey Henning has been on the AMA Marketing Research Conference social media team two years in a row, and this year, he wrote 13 blog posts across the marketing research conference which ran from September 26 to September 29, 2010.

Beyond Jeffrey’s take, we’ll have several other videos and reflections from in and around the conference this week. – Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make mart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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If you regularly watch—or as I am, are addicted to—the television show Mad Men you will have heard passing references to David Ogilvy.

I tell students in advertising or marketing (or anyone else in the fields that will listen) that if you are only going to read one book on the subject, it has to be Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy.

Now it was written nearly 30 years ago. Some of the styles are quaint, products unusual and brands long vanished. You won’t find one reference to the Internet. But it is hands down the single best book on advertising ever written.

It is well organized, hansomely illustrated, and Ogilvy is a great copywriter and a natural story teller. Additionally, the book has a wonderful Reading List that will introduce you to other gems that you may not be familiar with.

But a huge part of what makes the book valuable is that so much of what it contains is research based. Ogilvy recognizes that advertising is both science and art, but that without the science you will only be successful if your art is both good and lucky. He attributes this point of view to his background working for the Gallup organization.

The book is a bit of a Rorschach test for people who work in marketing communications. Those who find it hard to live with the fact that advertising is about selling stuff, lots of stuff, are stifled by Ogilvy’s lists and guidelines and how-to’s. Those who are able to recognize that they are using their skills at innovative thinking, creativity and strategy to reach sales goals find those same lists, guidelines and how-to’s freeing.

After all, if you don’t have to worry about what typeface to use in the brochure (according to Ogilvy serif fonts will greatly increase readership in print), you can spend that time and effort—and creative energy—on how to engage the reader and convince her to buy what you are selling.  - Barrett Sydnor

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you. 

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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With Mike busy this week carrying out his duties as chair of the American Marketing Association Marketing Research Council (AMAMRC), I’m sitting in at the Brainzooming blog blogging.

In keeping with the research theme, I originally suggested to Mike that I blog about some of the books with applicability to marketing that have a strong research foundation. I have read or listened to quite a number of them recently. (I highly recommend audio books as a way to make a commute more productive, help a long trip go faster, or distract you from the general pain of your workout.)

The past couple of years have seen several really interesting and well written books with a general theme of behavioral economics. These include Drive from Daniel Pink, Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

Chip and Dan Heath’s books Made to Stick and Switch offer some excellent insights about messaging and organizational change. Likewise Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers have really useful information for anyone who is involved in marketing or marketing research.

But those are the books you might expect me to write about. The title of the AMAMRC conference is “Unfiltered Perspectives Unexpected Opportunities.” So in keeping with that theme I decided to at least provide a twist on the book list by writing about some books that haven’t been in the headlines or best seller lists quite as recnetly. (The books I’ve listed above are all worth your time and I hope to cover several of them in future guest posts.)

There are four books that I regard as foundational in my understanding and practice of marketing, communications, and sales. Each book caused me to think and act differently, sometimes quite differently. I have read each multiple times and I find myself coming back to them repeatedly as I seek to work out a problem or arrive at a fresh solution for a marketing, communication, or sales situation. The other thing they have in common is they answer two of my favorite questions: “Why?” and “How do you know?”

Book 1: The Real Mad Man. – Barrett Sydnor

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

Barrett Sydnor

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Are You in Atlanta? Let’s Meetup Wednesday, September 29!

If you’re an Atlanta-based reader, let’s get together Wednesday, September 29!

Atlanta is the birthplace of the innovation-oriented weekly Twitter chat #Innochat, and since I’ll be in Atlanta next week chairing the AMA Marketing Research Conference, it seemed the perfect opportunity to get together with @StonePayton and @ToddSchnick who were there at the start of #Innochat.  Here’s the online invitation for our get together Wednesday, September 29th at 5 p.m. at Yeah!Burger. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Living Life as an Experiment

If you haven’t seen it, check out Peter Bergman’s article from the Harvard Business Review website about living life as an experiment. The piece details his experience in returning something to a retail store and trying, through a passive approach, to see if he could get out of having the 20% restocking fee deducted from his refund. Sounds reasonable enough to me, but he got raked over the coals in the comments for being unethical! Wow, I don’t get that. Anyway, the experience prompted a similarly engaging post on how to deal with surprise criticism, something we can probably all improve upon.

A New Creativity Trigger

Here’s an online random word generator if it feels like randomness is what you need to get your creativity instigated in a hurry.

Custom Sharpie Markers

Turns out (probably not surprisingly) you can now order custom Sharpie markers with messages, fonts, and colors of your choosing. Since many of you know about my love for drawing with Sharpie markers, my first reaction was to get out my credit card and THEN click the link to see about ordering some. Much to my horror, orange isn’t available as a color! So it’s still a fun idea, but not nearly as fun as it could be if I could get some custom orange Brainzooming Sharpies!

Everything Seems New in the Morning

Morning is a glorious time to do things which seemed impossible (or too boring) to do the night before. Even with a too short night of sleep, the quiet and freshness of the morning so often prove to be just the creative instigator I need to be so much more productive.  – Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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I was talking with BlogTalkRadio maven Tachelle Daniels about strategies to help identify innovative business ideas to stay in front of customers. The topic is intriguing and sent me back into the Brainzooming blog for these 6 strategies which contribute toward achieving a compelling, innovative marketplace edge:

1. Listening to Customers in New Places and Buying Stages with Social Media – Social media provides unprecedented access into customer thinking. Two examples:

• Use social media monitoring to see where and how customers talk about your brand. Listen for challenges to help solve, issues with your own and competitive offerings, and customer-developed innovative adaptations.
• Make it easy for customers to share perspectives through social media-based contests, incenting them to share ideas, register complaints, and react to new ideas.

2. Talk with Lead Users – This Monday’s post discussed a market research strategy we use to talk in-depth with customers and industry experts on the forefront of strategic thinking and implementation. These discussions with people 3 to 5 years ahead of everyone else in an industry help identify what will keep you ahead of the rest of the market.

3. Small but Strategic Unconventional Moves – In many industries, leaders aren’t doing dramatically different things. Strategic insights into subtle (often unarticulated) customer needs and flawless execution in addressing them can be enough to stay ahead of customers and competitors. To generate strategic insights, establish listening posts to monitor customers requests no one is addressing along with both customer and employee-precipitated innovative workarounds in your product or service.

4. Think about Your Business in General Terms – One fundamental in strategic thinking is detaching from day-to-day details of your business to view it in abstract, general terms. Focusing on business models, the broad assets your company possesses, and where/how you create value, put you in a position to unlock innovative opportunities more literal thinkers won’t notice until too late.

5. Move into Adjacent Markets – Nobody has done this better than Apple, with its disruption of multiple markets (video stores, cell phones, record companies, CD players, broadcasting, etc.) that on the surface looked nothing like its traditional computer market.  Anticipate new value you can bring to customers through strategically examining the benefits your company delivers. Then ask which players in other markets could deliver those same benefits. Not only will this signal new potential competitors, it can also point out markets you can disrupt to create innovative value for your customers.

6. Protect and Prioritize Challenging Ideas – Even after identifying moves to keep you in front of what your customers are looking for, you’ll likely have a lot of work to keep decidedly non-status quo, uncomfortable ideas from getting killed inside your business! If your company is reluctant to move forward with game-changing ideas, work to understand potential issues and create a sense of comfort for ideas you’re valiantly working to keep dramatic in the market.

If you have time, click on the links for these six ideas to get a little more strategic background on how to adapt and implement them to better anticipate (and not simply react to) your customers’ needs with innovative business ideas. - Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Want to accurately forecast what will happen in your business to business marketplace in the coming years?

The Brainzooming Groups uses a really effective business to business market research strategy to peer three to five years into the future with a high degree of accuracy: conduct structured strategic conversations directly with the most demanding, far-sighted customers in your market.

We do this by polling the sales force and industry experts to identify significant companies and influencers dramatically pushing supplier expectations with their forward-looking strategies and business models. To understand where the overall market will be several years from now, we then reach out to these influencers and talk with them about what strategies they see as important…TODAY!

Talking with future-focused customers, their needs, issues, opportunities, and strategies are likely the ones which will be on the minds of the rest of the market in three to five years. Since they’re already working through many opportunities and challenges of the future, it takes the discussion out of pure speculation.

Abstract future issues for others in the marketplace are very real to these companies RIGHT NOW, giving you a lot better read than talking with someone who’s merely speculating about what might happen to their business in a few years.

We call these companies “lead users,” and as you think about your strategic planning process, The Brainzooming Group can help you get a sense of what they can teach you about your market five years from now! -  Mike Brown

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement.  To learn how we can structure a lead user study to help guide your strategy decisions email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call us at 816-509-5320.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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In just a few weeks (September 26 through 29), the annual American Marketing Association Marketing Research Conference will unfold in Atlanta. For the second year, I’ll be chairing the conference whose theme is “Unfiltered Perspectives. Unexpected Opportunities.”

We’ve once again designed an overall conference experience intended to challenge market researchers to look beyond our typical roles and responsibilities to really consider what it takes to contribute meaningfully to business – right now and in the future.

Among the exciting elements which make the AMA Marketing Research Conference unmatchable:

• The conference committee, made up of research veterans, is personally involved in recruiting all the speakers. This ensures the 35 interactive educational sessions deliver meaningful content tied to the conference’s strategic theme.
• There’s an incredible line up of smart, strategic business leaders speaking, including many who have been featured in Brainzooming before. These include Gary Singer of Buyology, Joe Batista of HP, and author Kelley Styring of Insight Farm.
• Our conference-in-a-conference format allows attendees to target specific learning agendas, including advanced research techniques, case studies, research tools, and unconference sessions where attendees can actively shape the content.
• An active social media team will document the entire conference to allow attendees to learn even from sessions they don’t attend. The team will be coordinated by Nate Riggs of Social Business Strategies (who has been working with The Brainzooming Group on various social media strategic implementations).

As one person described it, this is the marketing research conference that market researchers put on for themselves.

One of the best parts of last year’s conference was feedback from the audience that the event builds a true sense of community within the diverse group of market researchers who attended the event (including a researcher from Russia who decided to attend in the last few days before the conference). We’ll do the same this year, so if you’re involved in market research, you owe it to yourself to attend.

Download the most current, in-depth version of the conference brochure today and review more details on the conference at the American Marketing Association website.

As a Brainzooming reader, you’ll receive $100 off registration by calling 1-800-262-1150 and using the promo code “VIP” when you register.

Join us in Atlanta, September 26 through 29th. It will be an unparalleled experience in your career! – Mike Brown

When it comes to conferences, high impact presentations, and live event social media content, The Brainzooming Group is expert at shaping the right strategy and implementation to create unique attendee experiences before, during, and after an event. Email us at brainzooming@gmail.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how we can do the same for your event!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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