Longbow Marketing Blog

Our secret sauce

08 Jun 10 - Mark Klein

We’re often asked why our predictions are so uncanny, how we are able to achieve such success for our clients. Here we reveal our secret sauce. Everything we do follows from four principles:

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Solving an age-old problem

25 Mar 10 - Mark Klein

Marketers continue to puzzle over how to divide marketing dollars between recruiting new customers and keeping their current ones.  They know they must spend money to keep current customers and get more sales from them. But the chase for new business is important too, and demands investment.   It’s a dilemma that is often swept under the rug.  But there is an answer.

A lot of marketers do their allocation with the oldest tool in business: seat of the pants.  Even though most of their revenue comes from existing customers they tend to spend more where they think the action is - on customer acquisition.

The best practice is to apportion marketing dollars according to how much revenue comes from each group.  To simplify that process we’ve developed a formula that does the job.
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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.
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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.

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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.

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