The blog

An optimistic outlook for 2013! Is your glass half full or half empty? The theme of STIMA’s International Marketing conference[1] last December was “The Survival of Optimism”. The main thesis was that as a marketer we have a choice to look at the glass as half full or half empty.

We have all been confronted with process improvements and adaptation of organization structures. The objective is always to improve efficiency, to be more customer-oriented or to reduce costs. While some are just small improvements, other may have a large impact on the organization and way of working. In both cases we are nevertheless often confronted with questions like ‘do we really need to change the process’ or ‘why should we change a process’. Asking these questions before changing a process is good as we don’t want to change processes only for the sake of change.

In our world-of-any, customers want anything, anytime and especially anywhere. Since our amount of time willing to wait has reduced substantially, multitasking has become common property. In this hyper-fragmented world with numerous sales and communication channels, customers are well-informed and have much more control over the buying process than today’s marketer does. The cross-channel customer is born and is here to stay…

Dashboards are everywhere, in daily life in your car, microwave or heating system. But they are also more and more present in companies. Just yesterday I was in a major customer service center with TV-screens projecting the KPI’s in real time (such as queuing and handling time). This is a very good evolution, but too often not used to its full potential! Isn’t it funny that as a manager, you do react immediately to the signals on the dashboard of your car (e.g. call the garage for servicing when you get a reminder) but just stare at your company’s dashboards and signals in a boardroom meeting?

When I was a kid, my father – a GP in a small Wallonia village – regularly travelled on the account of some pharmaceutical companies. These hoped that a “seminary” on a trendy topic (like the benefits of red wine on coronary diseases) taking place in an inspiring environment (like a sunny Greek island) would positively impact his willingness to prescribe their product. Twenty years later, my father gives his accountant headaches when he so much as receives a pen from any pharma company. So yes, things have changed. The legislator has struck down on practices that Hippocrates might have disapproved, strictly framing the relationship between pharma companies and GPs.

If you put fences around people, you get sheep. This quote motivated Jef Staes to write his book Ik was een schaap. He explains the Switch 3D from the predictable 2D period of permanent improvement to the turbulent 3D era of sustainable innovation through passion and talent. Did Staes perhaps find his inspiration at The House of Marketing?

Apestaartjaren.be’ is a Belgian platform that aims to inform youth workers and teachers about youngsters and their new media usage. They recently conducted an extensive research in collaboration with the University of Ghent to gain insights in how kids (9 – 12 years old, N=286) and young adults (12 – 18 years old, N=1495) deal with these ‘new media’. One can read the full research here. However, the presented results are not only useful for youth workers and teachers. They are indispensable to review for every marketer to gain insights in the digital behavior of the young generation Y. In this short review one can find a few key figures and some critical reflections.