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Portfolio: Paid Search Marketing Best Practice Guide
A quick outline of Econsultancy’s 2016 paid search report.
Download the full report at http://bit.ly/1Xy3u8I
Portfolio: Econsultancy’s Career and Salary Survey 2016 preview
Building on our inaugural Career and Salary Survey in 2015 (previously called The Salary Survey), Econsultancy collaborated with sister brands Marketing Week, Design Week and Creative Review to survey nearly 8,500 people across the marketing, digital, design and advertising industries.
This report is based on data provided by those who classify themselves as general marketing and digital professionals, numbering over 4,300 individuals.
The full report can be downloaded here: http://bit.ly/1R6Q6nk
Video: The 2016 Customer Experience Masterplan
Customer experience (CX) marketing is complex, crossing organizational and communication channels throughout the entire company. That’s why many companies rate their efforts low.
This is a presentation I delivered at a Dotmailer briefing in February 2016. Watch this video to understand how a holistic approach to your marketing can help you succeed and grow.
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/13231/196389/the-2016-customer-experience-masterplan
The Customer Experience Imperative, presentation at Dublin City University’s Get Social conference, 11th November 2015
This is a presentation that I delivered at Dublin City University Business School’s Get Social conference on 11th November 2015.
Volkswagen and the scope of Marketing and developing trust and a sustainable business in the 21st century
I wonder what the fallout will be for other car manufacturers as the Volkswagen scandal continues to unfold. Is it an opportunity for them or will Volkswagen’s dishonest dealings negatively impact upon them? Indeed, it’s possible that some of the other manufacturers have their own skeletons in the closet?
It’s been 45 years since this was first published but Akerlof’s paper “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality, Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism“. This paper is only 13 pages long and is well worth a read. You can read it here (http://socsci2.ucsd.edu/~aronatas/project/academic/Akerlof%20on%20Lemons.pdf). In the paper, Akerlof identified a weakness in traditional economic reasoning. Most analyses in economics began by assuming that the parties to any transaction were fully informed and thus making rational decisions in their own self-interest. Akerlof took aim at the first part of that assumption – that we’re fully informed. He enlisted the used-car market for what he called “a finger exercise to illustrate and develop” his ideas.
Used cars for sale he said fell into two broad categories: good and bad. Bad cars, or “lemons” are less desirable and so should be cheaper. The issue is that with used cars, unless the buyer is a car expert, only the seller knows whether the used car is a “lemon” or a “peach”. This leads to what he calls “an asymmetry in available information”. In other words, the seller is fully informed while the buyer is not.
This creates issues. In the case of used car sales for example, the buyer may be suspicious and so wonders if the car is worth the price being asked meaning that they may only be willing to pay far less than what the seller is requesting. On the other hand, and this is where I think it gets tricky for Volkswagen’s competitors, suppose they are selling vehicles that they know are peaches, will buyers start to treat them like lemon peddlers? “Dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market”, Akerlof wrote. “The presence of people who wish to pawn bad wares as good wares tends to drive out legitimate business”.
In the 21st century, a fundamental tenet of commercial sustainability must surely be trust. Trust in a brand is based on the pillars of competence, honesty and concern for the customer. Volkswagen’s behaviour would appear to have breached these pillars. Volkswagen’s reputation may be difficult to repair, if possible at all.
Now for many kinds of products and services, this asymmetry of information is no longer an issue. Consumers have the ability to purchase reviews via social media and dedicated review sites meaning that sellers who actively try to dupe customers won’t, one would expect, be in business for long. However, like the analogy of used cars that Akerlof used to make his point, the same reasoning could be applied to products and sectors where the seller is far more literate than the buyer about the product being sold, banking and insurance products come to mind. It’s no wonder then that the only two words of Latin that I can remember from school are “caveat emptor” – buyer beware.
What has this go to do with marketing? The discipline of marketing is far more than simply pushing out the kinds of messages that portray the company the way it wants to be portrayed. Marketing is everybody’s responsibility, from the CEO all the way down to the workers on the shop floor. Trust-based marketing focuses on customer advocacy techniques that assist consumers in making informed purchase decisions based on provide accurate information to support consumers from pre purchase all the way through to post purchase relationship management and support. While we don’t yet know if Volkswagen will weather the storm, the lesson for its competitors should be that being honest and open is the best path to building consumer trust , creating a more loyal customer base and remaining competitive in the 21st century.
Some highlights of my time at Dublin City University
Next month I will move to London and therein end (or postpone) a relationship I’ve had with Dublin City University for the last 5 and a half years. Considering I also completed my undergraduate studies at DCU, I’ve now spent eight and a half years of my adult life at DCU, nine and a half if I include Erasmus.
What does that mean for me? Well, if truth be told I feel integrated into DCU life and that’s something that I will find hard to turn my back on. I was part of DCU, a university with big ambition and some very dynamic people. As well as doing meaningful work, I’ve made some good friends at DCU. Unlike corporate environments where at times, people can put on a professional front, in a University people can be, and are expected to be themselves. As I look ahead, I find it difficult to align myself with a single profession. In DCU I’ve been lucky to wear a lot of hats! I have managed over 150 funded projects with industry from SMEs through to multinational companies. I coordinated the online delivery of a Masters in Management (Social Enterprise). I’ve taught students from undergrad through to postgrad level and I’ve supported mature students returning to education after a long time. That might not sound like much but consider what we take for granted as everyday tools such as Moodle, webinar technology, Google Apps and online library databases, returning to education can be a huge challenge. This becomes an even bigger challenge when ones thinks of part time exec students who are used to being the boss in their organisation and now find themselves working on teams with their student colleagues.
Life before DCU
After a short but reasonably successful (in terms of promotions etc.) career in financial services, my girlfriend, now fiancé and I packed our bags in 2008 and set off on a yearlong round the world trip. I left a well-paid corporate banking position at Ulster Bank that I liked, a lot. I had been growing in confidence in my position and abilities and I had spent the previous year and a half making a huge effort to integrate myself into the organisation and get to know colleagues across lots of different departments. This is something that not everybody did. Banks, like civil service organisations can be, or at least were quite segmented organisations. Upon reflection, I realise that building these internal relationships has been one of my strengths as it has often allowed me to bypass bureaucracy and get things done more quickly than other colleagues. Anyway, I was in the career stream and had a manager who believed in my abilities and took every opportunity to highlight my achievements to senior management. In 2008 when I handed in my notice, Ireland was very much on the precipice of a new reality that we now simply call “the Recession”. Back then though, nobody wanted to talk about recession and instead used words like “soft landing” and in the banking world where I worked – “the credit crunch”. The day that I handed in my notice and told my boss that I was going to leave this great job to go backpacking, he told me that I had just been promoted but it hadn’t been made official yet. He asked me if I was sure about what I was doing. After all he said, the Ireland that I would return to in 12 months might look very different to the Ireland that we were in then. For years during the boom, young people had been leaving good jobs to go and hang out in Sydney for a year only to walk straight back into their old jobs when they returned. My boss and I knew that those days were over. Sure enough, when I arrived back in Ireland a year later I met that boss and another Director of the bank for lunch and they told me of the organisation wide recruitment freeze. In an odd twist, I learned of a colleague who had started at the same time as me was offered a redundancy and was going to stick the payment in his back pocket and …… go travelling for a year. Good for him I thought!
Returning to education
I wasn’t heartbroken though. As much as I had loved working in corporate banking, I never dreamt of working there as a child (who does?) and so I went back to education to do a Masters in eCommerce at Dublin City University. As depressing as those days were in 2009 from an economic point of view, I felt quite positive and looked forward to learning new things and creating new opportunities. The course was tough. There is something about Business School education that seems to demand so much from course participants. It’s not just about good time management. The workload was huge, partly due to a brand new 20 credit module which was being piloted that year and also the amount of team work involved. Once team work is introduced to the mix, you are no longer in control of your own schedule. When working on multiple teams on multiple projects, it can be incredibly difficult to coordinate times to meet and work together. Sounds like no big deal? Throw personal commitments such as relationships and working to pay the bills into the mix. Personal relationships are most certainly challenged! I experienced that but I have seen it time and time again since I have worked in DCU. But that’s for another post. Still, one of the great things about completing the programme that year more so than any other year of that programme before then or since is that there was a diverse range of people participating. I was not the only one returning to education and trying to define a new path for myself! There was a good balance of genders and the age range went from 22 – 50.
University life or back to corporate?
At the end of the year, the Course Chair who I had gotten to know asked me if I would like to come and work with him as his Research Assistant. The job would not be well paid but I would have opportunities to work on some very interesting projects and with some interesting clients, continue learning, work with smart people and do some travelling. At the very same time, my old boss from Ulster Bank got in touch to let me know that a position comparable to the one that I had left two years previously had become available and would I like to return. That was a tough decision to call. The Ulster Bank position was far more lucrative and offered a clearly defined career path. DCU on the other hand wasn’t well paid and had no clear career path. It did however offer me the chance to continue learning and work in education. It was a tough decision to call. At the time there was a lot of negative press about the banks. This certainly had an effect on me. I recall meeting up with a former colleague to ask their advice on what I should do and I remember they implored me NOT to come back. The bad press, the pressure to manage toxic relationships and loan facilities of clients who were no longer able to meet their commitments and new regulatory requirements meant that the working atmosphere in the bank wasn’t what I had remembered. In the end I made a decision based on values. I valued learning and further, I realised that there are few careers more satisfying and valuable than education. I wanted to create value by supporting SMEs and teaching. I found it difficult to see value in calling in bad debts. And so in the spirit of Robert Frosts “The Road Not Taken”, I chose the less trodden and less clearly defined path of DCU.
So what’s the goal of this meandering post? Well, for anyone that takes the time to read it, I just wanted to rationalise why, in 2010 I made the career choice to work in DCU rather than in banking. Also, I’ve already highlighted some of the types of work that I did while in DCU but I would also like to record some highlights of my time at DCU in terms of fun and interesting experiences. This is as much for my own benefit as anyone reading! For potential employers, hopefully this post will convince you that I haven’t spent the last four and a half years sitting in an office reading books!
- 2010 Attended World Expo in Shanghai, China
- 2010 Returned to Shanghai to deliver a series of Social Media Marketing Bootcamps at Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade
- 2011 Attended the BETT Show, the world’s leading technology in education trade show
- 2011 Research trip to the United States. Drove from Boston to New York and then New York to San Francisco. Flew from San Francisco to LA. Along the way we visited:
- University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
- Centre for Talented Youth, John Hopkins University, Baltimore
- Velocidi, New York
- Enterprise Ireland, New York
- Slingshot SEO, Indianapolis, Indiana
- University of Illinois, Chicago
- PayPal, Omaha, Nebraska
- Intellectual Ventures, MountainView, California
- Klout, San Francisco
- ClickStream Technologies, San Francisco
- Happeo, San Francisco
- School of Business and Management, Pepperdine University, Malibu, California
- 2011 Coordinated and led a research trip to Bangalore India for Masters Students. The trip included visiting companies such as:
- Accenture
- PerceptKnorigin
- Microsoft Research Labs
- Professional Access
- Project Management Group
- Attended a 2 day Search Engine Marketing conference
- Ninestars
- Google Labs
- IBM Innovation Centre
- We also attended a two day Search Engine Marketing Summit where we got to learn about the state of search marketing in India.
- 2011: Coordinated and led a research trip to Shanghai and Beijing, China for Masters Students. Some highlights included:
- Visiting the Irish community in Shanghai
- Visiting Tourism Ireland to learn about how they are packaging Irelands value proposition as a leisure destination for Chinese travellers
- Visiting Ireland House to learn about the local activities of Enterprise Ireland and the IDA
- Meeting the Head of Marketing (an Irish lady) at PepsiCo for the APAC region and learning about marketing in a very different cultural environment than what we are used to in Ireland
- Walking the Great Wall of China
- Visiting the Forbidden City in Beijing
- 2012: Attended the Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas, Nevada
- 2012: Delivered a two day Digital Marketing Bootcamp for UK Business School Deans at Cass Business School, City University London
- 2012: Coordinated and launched an online Masters in Business Management (Innovation in Social Enterprise) to be delivered to social entrepreneurs in Ireland and Wales
- 2013: Delivered a 2 day digital marketing bootcamp to social entrepreneurs at University of Bangor, Wales
- 2013: Tokyo Japan. Business meetings and delivered a social media workshop to business students at Musashino University.
- 2014: Coordinated Irish researchers to go to Japan in a drive to increase collaboration with Japanese companies, research institutions and universities. The four-day visit, organised by ISCA Japan (Science Foundation Ireland’s new Ireland-Japan science collaboration programme), in close cooperation with IDA Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland in Japan focused on information and communications technology research with a particular emphasis on big data analytics and cloud computing. The visit commenced on September 30th and included meetings with leading Japanese and multinational corporations, research institutions and universities to present Irish ICT research and identify opportunities for collaboration. It culminated in a one-day conference on Friday, October 3rd at the Delegation of the European Union in Japan, entitled “EU-Japan R&D Cooperation, Horizon 2020 and the Irish ICT Research Opportunity.” With over 100 attendees, the conference was addressed by representatives of the European Union, the Japanese and Irish Governments, Fujitsu Laboratories, and the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communication Technology.
- 2015: Coordinated and led a research trip to Bangalore India for Digital Marketing Masters students. We stayed in the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. As well as attending a number of sessions for educating expats on doing business in India, the trip included visiting companies such as IBM Innovation Centre, Edelman India and IPG Media Brands India. We also built in a number of cultural visits including a visit to Mysore, one of South India’s most famous tourist destinations ,known for its magnificent monuments and buildings including its World Heritage listed palace.
- On top of all of this, I have organised a number of conferences covering topics such as Social Media, Start Ups, Mobile Technology and Cloud Computing.
I could write blog posts about each of these highlights. Perhaps I will reflect on that another day. In the meantime, I look forward to the challenge ahead in London with mixed emotions
