Longbow Marketing Blog

Windows 7 Report

04 Jan 10 - Mark Klein

This blog is about marketing, but my recent experience using Windows 7 is so positive that I feel some obligation to share what I’ve learned. (Full disclosure: Microsoft is a long time, major Loyalty Builders client. However we have never pulled any punches when describing their products and have often given them—privately—critical reports.)

Installation was done as an upgrade over Vista rather than as a clean install. Once I cleared away enough space, it went smoothly but took slightly more than one hour. Specifications say 16GB are needed, but an on-screen message said I needed 12 GB. Before I started clean-up, I had 9 GB free. I cleared out a total of 13 GB and then installed. After installation and putting back some files, I had 19GB free, so W7 is definitely more space efficient than Vista. All of my programs, files, bookmarks, and settings were preserved.
 read more

A distributor's "other" set of customers

12 Dec 09 - Mark Klein

Most companies describe their “customers” as people who buy products and services from them.  Distributors, however, have another kind of customer - the manufacturers they represent - to whom they must sell themselves - and their value as a distribution partner. Their manufacturer partners are true customers in every sense of the word.

For a manufacturer, a distributor sells its services in getting goods through the channel to the ultimate end user. Manufacturers pay for these services in the form of commissions and with marketing development funds, or marketing co-op dollars. Distributors use these funds, hopefully but not always, to promote the products of the manufacturer supplying the funds.  These funds are often the core financial support for the distributor’s marketing efforts.

read more

That Dammed Denominator

23 Nov 09 - Mark Klein

The fashionable marketing metric today is Marketing Return on Investment (MROI), meaning simply how much revenue do you get for your marketing dollars.  This is expressed as a ratio: you divide your total revenue (the top number, or numerator) by the total of all of your marketing costs (the bottom number, or denominator). In principle this is clean and neat and tells you whether your marketing efforts are earning their keep. In practice it is a mess. It’s easy to find your total revenue. The problem is that damned denominator. What goes into total marketing costs? Is it what it costs to send out a campaign? Do you include advertising? The salaries and benefits of your marketing team? Is marketing’s share of the company overhead part of the total costs? There are too many possibilities, so MROI becomes a very squishy number.

read more

Six things I've learned during this recession

13 Nov 09 - Arthur Einstein

Over the years I’ve discovered business is more fun when times are flush.  But I’ve also learned a lot in times when customers are pinching pennies.  What I’ve learned in past year may seem obvious at first - but if everyone was following these lessons, nobody would need us.

1. Take good care of the customers you have.  They don’t want to switch vendors if they don’t have to - it’s time consuming and disruptive.  We work hard at customer happiness and in this miserable business climate the loyalty of our customers seems better than ever.

2.  Segmenting customers and contacting them based on their needs is one excellent customer care tactic. (You can’t cut costs forever).  Dollar for dollar a differentiated customer contact strategy is a better way to improve revenue and profits.

read more

Customer Segmentation and Customer Migration

19 Aug 09 - Mark Klein

There were a lot of “I told you so’s” going around our offices last week.
 
One of our clients has really been leveraging their segmentations, with different messaging and different mail frequency to the various groups in their customer base. From this activity our client generated some reports with concrete proof that their two middle tier segments, the Underperformers and the Faders, were the segments most susceptible to influence by their direct marketing campaigns. This result reinforced our hard-learned experience that these middle tier customers are the best candidates to move to higher ranking segments, and these mid-tier segments are the best places to find incremental revenue.
 read more