Blog Archives

Beware of What You Reward (Part 2)

7/22/2015

by Charlie Dietz, CIO at SMB Value Partners, Inc.

I had a very wise boss once, and I still remember his point today:

“Beware of what you reward, as you will get a lot more of it”. Sounds trivial doesn’t it, but this is an important business concept and a corollary to the “you get what you measure”. Check out our popular, first post on this theme HERE

Here are some additional examples on how proper measures support your business goals and drive accountability:

In one large distribution operation, the item picker had an option to bypass picking a particular customer’s order line item. The intent was to allow them to move on if an item wasn’t found. But it also allowed the picker to bypass a difficult pick that would slow down their pick rate and move on to the “easy” picks. (To the detriment of customer service). Once realized, a revised measure was instituted to segregate inventory / location issues from “dropped” picks, and catch anyone “gaming” the system.
In another organization, an important business objective was to improve customer service, and a “daily orders and shipments” report was being used as the measure. In the first iteration of the report, the numbers looked good month after month, but the company was still getting complaints from the customers. After some re-thinking, the group realized that they were:
a) taking a too high-level view (dollars); and
b) were not taking into account all of the customer’s expectations.

What the customer wanted was 100% on-time, 100% complete first order shipments. In the second iteration of the report, they added new measures that also looked at the percent complete and percent on-time calculated at both the order / shipment and line levels, rolled up into two reports. One report summarized by customer types and regions, and the other summarized by product classes, distribution centers, and manufacturing plants. A separate detail listing of all of the “misses” went to the planners for analysis. The added measures made a big difference in service performance.

In these examples, we see that measures are important, and they need to cover all the aspects of an operation, and not allow for gaps. Proceed thoughtfully when setting measures for your business goals, and
“beware of what you reward (or allow), as you will get a lot more of it”.

Be sure to see our wide-ranging SMB Value Partners blog posts in our BLOG ARCHIVES by Month FOUND HERE

How to Build a Brand Dynamics Model: Measuring and Achieving Awareness, Visibility and Value

7/1/2015

By Deb Dietz, President and CEO of SMB Value Partners, Inc.

How to Build a Brand Dynamics Model: Measuring and Achieving Awareness, Visibility and Value

Any growth-oriented marketing strategy involves communicating your company’s value proposition to your existing customers. In addition, it includes communicating to prospects, with the goal of converting those prospects to customers. Do you have a baseline measure of brand awareness for those prospects? That’s your starting point. Once you know your baseline Brand Dynamics, you can implement your marketing and communication campaigns and then measure the impact of those campaigns in moving those prospects from awareness to engagement with your brand, and your company.

Traditionally, there are three pathways for measuring awareness or visibility:
Pathway 1 – Customer-Based Brand Metrics
Pathway 2 – Incremental Brand Sales/Revenue – financial impact metrics
Pathway 3 – Branded Business Value – financial impact metrics

We will focus here on developing a strategy for Pathway 1. This consists of determining quantitative and qualitative measurement approaches to understand the market’s current brand awareness. This approach tracks changes in prospect / customer awareness and perception over time.

Initial Value Chain Metrics Include:
Presence – does the marketplace you serve know about your brand?
Relevance – does your company fulfill a need/offer the market something of value?
Performance – can your company deliver?
Advantage – does your company offer the marketplace something better than others do?
Bonding – nothing beats your company in this market (you want to be here!)

A critical success factor to ‘move’ a prospect/customer along the value chain above is to be able to see changes in the relationship between the prospect / customer and your company that can be traced to various marketing, communication and delivery activities. Further, we can also include methods to identify and track customer value drivers, customer satisfaction and customer perceptions of quality.

How-To Steps in Creating Your Brand Dynamics Model:
Survey the marketplace to determine baseline metrics about your brand. This approach will define the base level of awareness, or relationship, with your brand.
Develop an integrated marketing and communication strategy whose objective is to move prospects and customers along the value chain; from presence, to relevance, to performance, to advantage, to bonding.
Then, conduct a second survey 3-6 months out to determine changes in the relationships and trace those changes back to the marketing and communication programs that have been implemented during that time frame.
Then, measure the ‘net change’ in scores for each value metric.
Over time, implement other marketing and communication programs that are tied to moving prospects and customers further along the value chain to drive customer retention, engagement and loyalty.

Once your baseline metrics are in place, your organization can consider movement towards Pathways 2 and 3. Pathway 1 would be considered the ‘soft’ measures, while Pathways 2 and 3 actually measure incremental customer revenue, product sales, and other income flows which could be considered incremental growth for your business and the economic worth of your brand to your company and customers.

As with most things in life and business, the devil is in the details. From our years of experience, SMB Value Partners can help you achieve the success from these processes.

Be sure to see our other SMB Value Partners blog posts at: http://smbvaluepartners.com/our-blog-postings.html