Dan Scott, Chief Marketing Officer,
Scott Kay, Inc.

Dan Scott presently leads worldwide marketing for Scott Kay, Inc., and has been doing so since 2002. As CMO at Scott Kay, Dan manages all aspects of global brand communications and digital ventures, directs public relations, and produces award-winning, multimedia consumer and trade content. Previous to Scott Kay, Dan served as QVC's (pre-launch) first multimedia marketer. For eight years thereafter, Dan was constantly credited for groundbreaking and highly effective multimedia marketing platforms for QVC, many of which are still employed today. Dan holds a Masters degree in Marketing from New York University, proudly sits on the North American Advisory Board for the CMO Council, and was recently selected as a finalist for the top five CMOs in America. Dan is also a requested conference speaker, educator, author, and recognized member of several esteemed marketing groups and alliances worldwide.

Q&A

What role do digital marketing channels play in Scott Kay's overall marketing mix?

Digital marketing has grown to be a heavy component within the Scott Kay world. And by digital, I need to disclaim that it doesn't just mean online in the world of social websites and traditional forms of digital. We go a step further in doing things like new forms of digital integration with consumers. For example, we create new forms of direct mail that include interesting videos for our lifestyle campaign that link directly to something, or we provide a sweepstakes opportunity, doing handouts at the point of sale. So to us, digital isn't just what most would think about. It definitely incorporates a wider array of properties for both entertainment and educational purposes.

What changes are you seeing in your go-to market approach relative to the consumer segments you target?

It absolutely would be reminding ourselves every single day that it's about pull versus push. We never want to make the consumer hear a message. We'd rather invite them to give us their thoughts on our message. The more we're engaging them as one of our own, the less we seem like the corporate giant on the mountaintop. We want to know everything they feel and think. The more reaction we receive from our customers, the more we can make ourselves better and learn from potential mistakes or successes.

If you would have asked me that question 10 or 15 years ago, I would have said it was about the advertising message—the means in which we're crafting or creating. Now it's about the listening. I personally make it a point every day at lunch to go and see what consumers are saying. In some cases, I will even reach out to them if they provide their email address and ask them additional questions. Some might see this as a time waster, but I see it as a major attribute to the brand and the development, as well as getting to know who we are. I think that is why we're now the largest designer brand in America.

How do you determine the impact each element of your marketing mix has on sales and/or brand performance?

Scott Kay tags all of its advertising as print-specific. We begin with print because we have franchise positions in key books, like a two-page cover one slot, which is, of course, the very first ad one would see. We also rely on word of mouth and other forms of quantitative analysis. We always want to know as soon as possible when an ad for Scott Kay runs and what the reaction is. If there's no call to action in the ad, which oftentimes is not the case, it's just an introduction to a product or maybe a reinforcement of the brand. We will then generally tag the ad with, for example, ScottKay.com/BR, for Brides magazine.

The goal is to direct consumers to our website, but it allows us to tabulate how many people came from that ad. There are many touch points to this because we cannot be reliant on the consumer putting in that extra "/BR." Yet, when it comes to new media or other forms of advancement within all of our advertising platforms, there's always a means to tabulate if there was a reaction, how quick the reaction was, and if it was a positive or negative reaction.

What are Scott Kay's primary in-region resources for gathering external customer insights and data?

We have a small group that actually polices our websites. They are not permitted to comment on blogs, adversary groups, or anything that has been placed through MSN, AOL, Yahoo group, or the different sites of which we sell through and to. However, they do police them, meaning they check to make sure that the information is correct. If it's not, then it can be brought to the online publisher's attention to make a correction statement from the online publisher's standpoint.

We feel that it's all about understanding that canvas, and again, not being reactionary to it by commenting online. Rather, gaining the information, placing it within the right type of information file, and then moving according to the online publisher's privacy statements and various other legal components to make sure we're trying to fix whatever might need to be fixed and learning from it.

Most of this comes from information on people we are talking to. For example, we had a situation most recently where we have a ring called Heaven's Gate. It's a gorgeous hand-tooled filigree design. It took years to create this model. It's absolutely stunning, but we didn't know if it would be stunning to America. So we pushed on advertising and did a little testing, and sure enough, everyone responded very favorably. We didn't expect that the Latina market would be so incredibly infatuated with this ring. So the Latina market proved to be one of the strongest sectors, and as a result, we started advertising in Latina magazine and some other sources and pushed the product a bit more in areas like California and Florida. From this example, we learned that it can be a very effective tool to understand our customer base and align our product selection accordingly.

In your opinion, what regional issues or dynamics do global marketers need to better understand?

To truly understand the world is to understand a grassroots approach. We never will go global on anything without starting in our own backyard. I don't want to say it's testing as much as development and understanding of a grassroots campaign.

A clear example of this is in public relations, which again I hope people don't see as a distant cousin to marketing. Rather, it's a brother or sister to marketing. The right type of communications, be it public relations or other like forms of releases or awareness that a company puts out for marketing, has to be gauged, effectively tracked, and checked against ROI. And most importantly, perhaps, is the need to understand what the reaction is. PR is then a key component to marketing. To understand global, you have to go grassroots, and it starts with things as simple as public relations, where a breaking story in a small-town newspaper can literally be as effective for that regional demographic as it would be by getting in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or multiple papers throughout the world.

What I mean by that is good news, a good story, and a well produced message is critical on a local level and should be looked at equally on a global level. In other words, if it works in the neighborhood, it should work globally and vice versa. Yet just trying to release to the masses and hoping it filters down to you probably means it won't, or it will be so diluted or changed that the message won't be effective.

Peggy Anne Salz

Publisher, Chief Analyst, and Founder of MSearchGroove

Peggy Salz most recent series of practical how-to white papers covers the basics of mobile advertising and mobile analytics earned her a reputation as a leading mobile advertising expert. Peggy has established a successful career based on vision, insight, versatility, and more than 15 years of industry experience. Her work, which includes more than 300 articles on mobile content and applications, has appeared in magazines and online destinations such as The International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Mobile Entertainment, Mobile Media, New Media Age, and in the Agile Minds column in EContent magazine, among many more. Peggy is also the author of the Netsize Guide, an annual mobile industry almanac published by Netsize, a company belonging to Gemalto.

Image and Twitter Handle

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership, and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision--makers across a wide range of global industries. The CMO Council's 6,000 members control more than $300 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. The CMO Council has recently sharpened its focus on mobile, launching programs to educate marketers about the opportunities and options. Executive Director Donovan Neale-May discusses the shift from traditional marketing to Mobile Relationship Marketing (MRM) and why it is destined to become the focus of all marketing across all verticals.

As you point out, the massive shift to MRM is transforming the marketing mix and enabling brands to “engage at every stage” of the consumer lifecycle. Please define MRM and the opportunities it opens up for brands and marketers.

Customer insight, intimacy, and engagement are essential to sustaining successful brands. Yet for many companies, especially those who sell through indirect channels or to cash-only customers, connecting with and influencing the customer is a serious struggle. Consumer marketers around the world are now trying to overcome these traditional obstacles by leveraging the power of the web and mobile social networking to create more direct relationships with customers.

MRM is the new mantra for companies across multiple industries to ensure continuous customer touch and interaction, sustained support and service, closer and more dependent connectivity, as well as greater insight and intimacy. MRM has vast potential to create business value, improve process efficiency, trigger product consumption and use, further loyalty and repeat purchase, and increase customer feedback, assistance, affinity, and advocacy.

Using new mobile apps, location-based messaging, proximity marketing, and smart merchandising systems in-store, marketers are now able to attract and engage consumers in any place where they are willing to interact, transact, or stay in contact with brands. This includes retail, sports, entertainment, destination, education, mass transit, and travel environments. An effective MRM strategy integrates social interaction; customer insight gathering and listening; consumer engagement and loyalty; market listening; purchase incentive or inducement; and lifetime revenue optimization, all through optimized use of the mobile channel.

Creating brand affinity and advocacy are ambitious objectives. What is the value of mobile, and where does it fit?

Mobile devices enable marketers to provide contextual messaging, just-in-time inside advice, and notification bulletins, and they assume a different type of role with the consumer that they value. Consumers will always appreciate brands that are helpful, and mobile can be this electronic concierge. The big value of mobile devices is the just-in-time messaging they enable, delivering messaging that notifies, advises, alerts, reminds, and--ultimately--drives consumption or use of products and services. Additionally, this messaging can provide assistance and help at the moment when somebody’s trying to make a purchasing decision or looking for the best deal. And  in cases where you have time-based messaging, proximity-based messaging, and location-based messaging, you have important context that enables companies to send messages to their customers in the right place, at the right time. 

Mobile is the only channel that can do that. This characteristic makes mobile a significantly powerful way to do individualized relationship marketing, and that’s where marketers have to move toward. 

Marketers must move past pushing out messages, blasting out offers, and paying for positions or displays to get their communications out to the market, and focus much more on engaging, interacting, assisting, and enabling. 

This is a good fit with mobile for several reasons. For one, it's accountable. Investments in mobile relationship development are bound to have a higher return on investment because it's more quantifiable, tangible, and measurable. Second, mobile also enables customers who have strong brand advocacy or affinity to share and communicate this. Increasingly, mobile also enables these same customers to transact.

At the end of the day, these all-in-one connected devices are not just about communication. They're becoming transactional, behavioral, and an essential part of people's lifestyles.

Mobile has earned a seat at the digital marketing table. What are the touch decisions and choices that face marketers as they map out their cross-media strategies?

Marketers can get more creative about where advertising can be placed; they can insert it into digital signage systems at gas station pumps, embed it into mobile content and games, and integrate it into mobile apps. Advertising will always be an essential component. The question is how to allocate your spend to get the best return.

There are no hard and fast rules here. For some brands in some regions of the world, the most efficient way to promote the brand is still to advertise on TV or the radio. In many parts of the world, it is also difficult to deliver rich media marketing through mobile devices. However, messaging can be done anywhere, any time, and with very low bandwidth consumption. 

In my view, mobile messaging is a valuable way to invest your money because it can be helpful. Whether you’re reminding people to replenish their prescription or notifying farmers that the climate’s just right to spray their crops, these are all interactions that can help trigger consumption and purchase.

Mobile can also extend the impact and value of advertising. So, if I’m putting up point-of-sale displays or doing different types of outdoor signage, I can have a quick response tag in there. I can have near-field communications. I can track the degree to which that advertising is attracting the attention of consumers, prompting them to interact and engage with the brand using their mobile devices. In print media, innovations such as 2D barcodes make it possible for consumers to access more information about the product and even interact with the brand.

Thus, mobile complements all advertising and presents marketers with a mechanism for measuring advertising effectiveness and its ability to drive response.

Across the board, campaigns have to be designed differently. And they have to take advantage of the impact of mobile. A good example is branded apps, which are proliferating people with mobile devices who like them and use them. Marketers can harness apps to define and shape perceptions of their brand. They can enable consumers to interact and have an ongoing relationship through apps. But it's not just about branding. Apps make it quicker and easier for companies to deliver a product, service, or experience to a user. Apps also enable commerce, allowing consumers to buy a ticket, redeem an offer, or make a transaction.

You stated that campaigns have to be very different from the way they are right now. That tells us that a huge rethink is necessary and impending. Could you please elaborate on that? What needs to be different and why?

Marketers need to understand this channel and what is possible. They require more research and insight into the content, services, and applications utilized by their target audience. They also have to listen to their customers and understand the degree to which consumers want to access content, receive messages, and opt in to different types of marketing and CRM programs.

Marketers also have to get the value exchange right. They have to give consumers an incentive to engage with the brand.

This isn’t just about developing a creative strategy, producing advertising, and buying space in a complex way to make sure you saturate the market across all channels. Today, it’s about the interaction. It’s about the information. It’s about the advice. To be clear, mobile is not just an add-on to an ad campaign. It’s not just another channel of content delivery. It's part of a larger strategy that can impact all facets of your business--not just promoting your product, but supporting your customer, your channel, your field organization, and your supply chain.

Mobile also plugs into the business to present us with a variety of different ways to predict, forecast, and plan. Marketers have to think this through carefully because there is a whole other set of considerations here when it comes to developing and executing a mobile strategy. And you have to think differently about the consumers. Addressing them on mobile is based on who they are and how they embrace mobile in their everyday lives. Different groups of consumers are in different stages of understanding and using mobile technology. For example, reaching senior citizens may require a very different approach than it would to reach consumers in their teens.
 
The mobile channel also allows customers to connect with other customers, an interaction that impacts customer awareness and opinions on brands and companies...

Yes. And that's why there is more disruption with mobile. With mobile, I may be notified by a friend about a hot new offer, or I may find somebody’s tweeted something. So all of a sudden, my awareness and my sources of awareness are different. 

From the perspective of the consumer, these sources are more trusted, and they may result in a quicker purchasing cycle because somebody in the social network has already validated the product or service. If someone I trust tells me about a great restaurant, then I don’t need to consider it any further. Joe says it's great, so let’s go there.

Products and services are consumer-voted and consumer-verified. This input drives, influences, and shapes buying behavior. This same interaction paves the way for more impulse buying because mobile enables impulse behavior.  I’m in the neighborhood…where should I go eat? I can access a social network or review the recommendations to get what I need to make that decision immediately. Where do I go and what do I buy? It may be that I make these decisions because I have a LivingSocial offer, a Groupon offer, or a Travelzoo offer. Whatever it is, I am making a decision based on it.

Consumers are not getting information in a traditional way across traditional channels where the brands and marketers controlled the message. Mobile means it’s also indirect and communicated via a variety of sources, including the social media networks consumers are interacting with on the move.

Of course, this thinking feeds back into the work you have pioneered around MRM. What are the plans and projects in the pipeline, and what can we expect?

We will start with an audit to determine where companies and brands are in the journey. We want to understand what they’ve invested in or what they intend to do relative to the mobile channel. We also want to understand their level of comprehension and knowledge, as well as where they see the potential obstacles and objections.

The role of technology in marketing is also important, which is why we will look at the cool, new things enabled by mobile and mobile devices. This insight will allow us to evaluate and assess what sort of paradigm shifts and changes are on the horizon. Additionally, this will allow us to provide companies with aggregated insight into all the enabling solutions and services that are out there to help them embrace the channel more efficiently and more effectively.

Finally, we also want to identify the brands that are leaders in MRM adoption and use--companies that have already developed longer term plans and thinking around evolving their services and product offerings to optimize the mobile channel. From retail to transport, mobile impacts many verticals in many ways, and it opens up all new opportunities once you understand that the focus on marketing moving forward has to be more on advising and less on advertising.

Kim A. Whitler

Kimberly Whitler is a three-time CMO and instructor at Indiana University, currently working on research designed to address contemporary CMO issues. She has worked in the U.S. and internationally in both marketing and general management roles for a variety of companies, such as Procter and Gamble, PetSmart, and David's Bridal. She holds an MBA from the University and Arizona and attended the United States Air Force Academy.

Marketers: Reclaim Your Influence

We’ve been watching over the past couple of years with increased interest at the quantity of articles prognosticating the end of marketing and the influence of marketers, as we know it. With the establishment of a more formal social networking environment, one article after the next has basically beaten a similar drumbeat: “Marketers, get out of the way—the consumer is in control.” While the concept is provocative, it comes dangerously close to leading the marketing field in a direction of passivity rather than empowering marketers to use the new social networking tools to enhance, strengthen, and significantly influence the relationship development process.

The first question is whether marketers have really ever been in control. Hasn’t the marketer’s role always been to understand the consumer and then translate these insights into strategies and tactics designed to influence consumer behavior? At the tactical level, we have always used whatever vehicles we had at our disposal to persuade the consumer—TV, radio, print, store signage, packaging, and yes, word-of-mouth. 

Over 20 years ago, research was executed on a market-leading grocery store brand to understand which of the different marketing vehicles had the greatest influence on consumer behavior. Not surprisingly, the top influencer was “friends and family.” In another study on a very expensive and high-involvement durable product, we found that “consumers who have used the product” had the greatest influence. Entire marketing campaigns were created around the concept of leveraging word-of-mouth. While we didn’t have technology-enabled social media, we were still able to influence consumers by understanding social behavior. Today, the importance of peer-to-peer perspective has not increased; the vehicles have simply changed as the Internet has scaled and automated the “information marketplace.”

The pervasive importance of social networks throughout time suggests that marketers have never really been in control. The job has always been about influencing—rather than controlling—consumer behavior. The key here is that influence means active involvement, guidance, and leadership of the relationship. It doesn’t mean abdicating responsibility to the consumer. If we believe that “the consumer is in control,” then we have, by default, assumed a followership position.   

Yet influence, the ability to have an effect on someone, seems to be something of a bad word. It doesn’t mean to coerce, manipulate, or deceive. Positive influence is achieved by doing four things well:

1. Fully understanding the consumer
2. Developing an appropriate business and marketing plan
3. Creating solutions that help address consumer needs and deliver on the strategic plan
4. Creating a give-and-take relationship that enables the marketer to convey the right information (through a variety of effective vehicles)

As an example, consider a market-leading fashion retailer that used online social chatter valence to help figure out what was driving customer dissatisfaction. To combat the negative chatter, they created an engaging, network-based, online program that drove positive buzz. This program achieved two objectives: it significantly improved the positive/negative comment ratio, and it helped to identify the core issues that were hampering the business. While this was a successful way of leveraging social media, it was still a tactic that flowed from business objectives and was measurable, hence something that required marketing judgment and leadership. 

So, the love-fest over social networking needs to be put into perspective. While a very interesting and powerful vehicle, it doesn’t change the responsibility of the CMO or the marketing department. It doesn’t negate our ability to influence the consumer, but rather adds one new vehicle, just as television and the Internet once were. Smart marketers know when to leverage social media and when to identify a more situationally appropriate medium to help enhance business performance.

Rather than talk about who is in control or who isn’t, let’s focus on doing what great marketers have always done—leveraging consumer insights to create strategies and tactics that respond to consumer needs, influence behavior change, and build the business.