Self Fulfilling Prophecy

Self Fulfilling Prophecy

First off, why did I call this "Self Fulfilling Prophecy?" I don't know. Call it a Holy Spirit thing. Intuition? Honestly, I was told to call this article that, but it has nothing to do with that, really. It has to do with Markethive going viral, exponential growth. And my call out to you to be part of this amazing venture.

I also have to say, I love Markethive, I mean I really love this system, I am passionate about it. It is my life's work, my calling and I know many of you feel the same way. I am humbled the Lord has called me to build it. So there, now you know. OK here is the article I have spent a week writing.

Nice illustration huh? Again doesn't have a lot to do with this article, but then again it does. While writing this article I have also been completing our Pitch Deck, Financials and Business Plan. I have made a ton of Infographics like this as well. All in preperation for Markethive going viral, gaining perspective and acquiring. We are now gaining interest from Angel Investors. We are on our way. So here is the article.

I am calling upon all of you to help propel Markethive exponentially. There are 3 things we need you to do and I am asking you to do this so, I can leverage your assistance to turn Markethive into one giant Entrepreneurial Ecocenter driving huge results, results that will reward every single one of you.

  1. Acquire the Alexa Browser Exchange and log into Markethive every day and post, comment, blog, and register your social accounts.
     
  2. Make referring 3+ new subscribers to Markethive a daily commitment.
     
  3. Upgrade to Entrepreneur.  As of this notice, Entrepreneur is now classified Entrepreneur One. Explanation to follow.

Primary Mission: More Customers and More Revenue for you with Markethive
Markethive is a Commerce Platform (look for the coming Store Fronts), an Inbound Marketing platform (nearly identical to Marketo) that recently sold to Adobe for 4.75 billion, an integrated social community (navigation familiar to Facebook and LinkedIn), and a Digital Media Network (like Western Journal, Cointelegraph,  Mashable and Techcrunch) all integrated and fully operational right now.

Alexa Ranking. Credible Traffic 3rd party confirmation:
To help build a solid ecocenter for the entrepreneurs, being able to publically display our traffic with a 3rd party is necessary to establish Markethive’s credibility.  Each member can assist us by installing the free browser extension from Alexa @ https://www.alexa.com/toolbar. We are now approaching 100,000 unique daily visitors. Our internal tracking, Alexa and WorthofWeb all confirm this. These numbers are critical to establish our rates for members to pay for our advertising and marketing services.  Allowing us to reference similar digital media networks like AMBCrypto and Blockonomi .

  1. AMBCrypto Alexa 23,841 : Price: $5,500
    https://coinbound.io/buy/ambcrypto-banner-ad-top-content/
     
  2. Blockonomi Alexa: 54,230 Price:$1,850
    https://coinbound.io/buy/blockonomi-banner-ad/

Therefore it is to all of ours focus and recognition is that traffic and credibility are the key aspect of our strategy and you can help. BTW: As we continue to develop Markethive’s “Infinity Bounties” Markethive will eventually recognize your Alexa browser extension as you login and give you additional ranking, bounty and advantages in the “Infinity Bounty” program. The core of Infinity Bounties is you registering your social accounts with Markethive and then following Markethive’s social networks. Doing this increases your earnings in the faucet system. There is more to it as well, but that is the foundation of this service, now….

Refer 3 to activate your faucets
Markethive requires you to refer at least 3 people to activate some of our services, particularly the Faucet and the Hive Ranking. The Faucet system is a micropayment system that all Markethive usage like posting, commenting, blogging, emailing, etc. pays you in MHV coin for your activities and other members activity in reaction to your activity (blog swiping, blog subscribing, tipping, etc.). The Hive Ranking rates your activity and popularity and the higher your rank the greater your faucet earnings. So the more you use Markethive and produce quality content the more you make in MHV coins which have value that can be used for Markethive services, exchanged for Bitcoin, sold for fiat, or used at other 3rd party systems, stores and services.

Entrepreneur One Upgrade
The current Entrepreneur Upgrade is the premium highest level you will ever have the opportunity to acquire. It contains all the leveraged advantages you need to accelerate your success in Markethive:

  1. Associates Control Panel: Gain full data, their social networks, verified phone and text, verified email and a contact management system that tracks data, stores dated notes, sends messaging and calendars events reminding actions on your Markethive calendar like call backs, email, etc. with the Associates Control Panel (Part of your Friends section)
     
  2. Primary Matching Airdrop Bonus: Receive 100% matching bonus from the new registration airdrops. This can be a significant reward for those that aggressively build “associates” the term used for the leads, Markethive provides (profile page and default capture page). Our first infinity airdrop will be 500 coins, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to offer a system as powerful and valuable as the Markethive system that also rewards new members with an immediate 500 coin reward. You can easily promote this and build 1000s of referrals that will add up to significant coins and customers.
     
  3. Secondary Matching Airdrop Bonus: When your associate customer upgrades to Entrepreneur, we airdrop them 100 coins and you will also receive 100 coins as a matching bonus.
     
  4. Matching ILP Loyalty Program:  You also get an equal ILP share after 12 months of continuity with the Entrepreneur program. This is only available for the first 1000 Entrepreneur upgrades. What that means….Liken to an ICO, your monthly payment is accrued and if you stay current for 12 straight months, we contribute to you a full 10% ILP and continue to offer this 12 month reward for 10 years or your stop payment. This offer is limited to the first 1000 active upgrades.
     
  5. Banner Ad Program: You also get unlimited 1st level Banner advertisement in all of our traffic portals and Internet properties. This offer is incredibly valuable. Markethive properties are already receiving significant traffic and as we grow, this traffic is included with this Entrepreneur upgrade.
     
  6. Press Release Program: Markethive will also be delivering a Press Release system as a hybrid liken to PRNewswire (traditional distribution) to  include Forbes, Yahoo! Finance, CNNMoney, MarketWatch, TheStreet.com, Bizjournals.com, Business.com ,  Wired, Tech Crunch, Engadget, Computerworld, CNET News, InformationWeek, R&D Magazine and more in the Tech industry.  Our Media List will be greater than 4000 media organizations, journalists, reporters, bloggers, producers, freelance writers and editors across print, online, blogs, radio and television.

     It will also publish to our growing social network followers (40,000 and growing via MH subscribers) and our growing members WordPress blogs (about 3000 and growing with MH members). When Markethive reaches 1 million members our Social Following is projected to be at (700,000 – 2 million followers total) and about 150,000 WordPress sites. These WordPress sites will be mini news media and vertical news media like http://aimhigh.news along with publication to Markethive’s portfolio of sites like https://Markethive.com , https://Markethive.net ,  http://allaboutco.in, http://aboutbitco.in , and http://aboutco.in .

    Cointelegraph, a vertical tech news media organization, which charges about $8,500 per release with an Alexa rank (2,646) social followers (1.3 million) and 16,000 subscribers justifies their price. Markethive’s press release will be priced accordingly and increase as our subscribers reach grows.  The second biggest digital news media site to Cointelegraph is CNN with an Alexa rank (10,899) charges $1800 and only posts to their main site front page.

    The Entrepreneur One Upgrade will include one Press Release per month for life as long as your Entrepreneur One Upgrade remains active and current. This does not accumulate. Additional Press releases will be discounted.
     

  7. Sponsored Article Program: Sponsored content is a piece of brand journalism that lives on a publisher’s website. It’s usually written by the publisher’s staff so the article matches the tone and voice of rest of their content.  Sponsored article are published to the same distribution Markethive articles are published on plus, notification of articles is sent to our social network, and the 1000s of connected WordPress sites. Sponsored articles run from high end media sites like Cointelegraph for $7500 to an average of $1200 for most other media systems in the general markets.
     
  8. Co-Op Customer Acquisition Program: Markethive strategic campaigns will designate %60 to %80 of our revenue into Marketing and Advertising campaigns.  These campaigns will point to Markethive assets like:
    Markethive.com
    Markethive.net
    Aboutco.in
    Allaboutco.in
    Aboutbitco.in
    Ewav.net
    Iwav.net

    Traditional Customer Co-Op programs charge $50 to $100 per customer. Cooperative marketing programs foster teamwork between a brand (Markethive) and its channel partners (Markethive Subscribers). Channel partners often don’t have large marketing departments.  Markethive is more equipped to create professional advertisements and deal with media placement. Markethive Entrepreneur Upgrade subscribers create the demand and. Co-op marketing programs take advantage of the sale channel’s local presence. This benefits both the partner and the brand.
     

  9. Commerce Portals: To sell on our commerce portals, like Big Kahuna (A website builder like WIX), Beelancers (A freelancer service like Freelancers), Markethive Exchange (A full service crypto exchange like https://idex.market/) you must be an active Entrepreneur One Upgrade to sell or trade. This eliminates processing fees and commissions like found on Freelancers, Upwork, Guru,  etc.  Buyers have no obligation other than free registration with Markethive.  This change in services where it is traditional to be constrained into the platform and pay high processing fees and commissions is eliminated with the Markethive Entrepreneur Upgrade system.
     
  10. Crowd Funding Portal: If Markethive engages (likely we will) with a crowd funding campaign, promoted to top crowd funding systems like ICOranker, ICObench, Tokentops, Airdrops.io and Cryptoslate.com etc. We will be sharing the campaign traffic via all Entrepreneurs through our crowd funding portal @ Markethive.io and giving all Entrepreneur Upgrades their own self replicated portal to help in the campaign. These portals will earn equal matching shadow shares if they bring in new ILP purchases and will also be traffic portals earning new members as well.

So I have to ask, what are you waiting for? And now a word (audio) from the CEO

David Ogden
Markethive Entrepreneur 1

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

TradeCoinClub

TradeCoinClub

THIS may well be the best I have found, perhaps ever….

I have been laying low a bit lately while searching out and researching the best stuff online today, trying to fully and carefully apply whatever wisdom I’ve gained in some 16 years of working in this minefield.  And… I am SO happy to have MAJOR News for you! THIS may well be the best I have found, perhaps ever….

BITCOINS, YES –

Most knowledgeable online workers now prefer to use Bitcoins in business, for many very good reasons. Among the most knowledgeable, many have been looking for a TRADING PLATFORM for CRYPTOCURRENCIES and using Bitcoin, but there has not been anything genuine to date.  THAT HAS NOW CHANGED. 

WE CAN NOW –

–>> PASSIVELY EARN FROM FULLY AUTOMATED TRADING OF THE TOP TEN CRYPTOCURRENCIES.
–>> LEVERAGE BITCOIN AND EARN DAILY PASSIVE BITCOIN
.–>> DIVERSIFY PASSIVE BTC EARNINGS IN A POWERFUL NEW WAY.
–>> ACTIVELY EARN STILL MORE BTC BY REFERRING TO THE PLATFORM.

TCC: WHAT IT IS –

Trade Coin Club is an offshore registered company offering an automated trading platform for major cryptocurrencies.  Management is international and highly qualified. TCC trades in cryptos with licensed software that performs many millions of trades per day in ten of the major cryptocurrencies like Litecoin, Dash, BTC, etc. TCC itself works entirely with Bitcoins. Globally in a launch and pre-launch in different regions.

The company is full-function and earning and paying now

The site is sophisticated and well developed already and fully activated. TCC is uniquely well positioned in a high-demand global niche.  It is super-attractive for builders and leaders as well as for those who simply want to remain passive and leverage their Bitcoins into ever larger numbers.   Miners too will find it a highly attractive diversification that will likely earn a lot more strongly for them.

BENEFITS –

PASSIVE:
Recent member reports  daily “trading” profits with no losses – in dynamic rising Bitcoins!  Set it and let it run.  Those returns are substantially better than “mining”.

ACTIVE:
Members who refer receive 10% on both levels one and two, and lesser amounts down to as many as 8 levels.  Plus referrers can earn 8 to 10% daily from a binary structure too.  And there are MORE referral bonuses. It’s rich, but it is also very smart.
Compounding of one’s choice of all or some earnings is available. Withdrawal of earnings is on demand.

Ride the BTC Rise: 
We are working 100% in Bitcoin, so as BTC rises we enjoy the full benefits of its rise – to who knows what heights!  This is in contrast to some online options that actually work in dollars and only use BTC for pay-in’s and out’s.  In these, as BTC rises your dollar based payout in BTC falls.

GUIDANCE –

It is scant on the site at the moment, as it is so early in the life of TCC, so the guidance to signing up, getting set up and learning, etc., is currently best obtained in Youtube videos and not so much in the back office… as yet

Learn more:
TCC Details and OVERVIEW Videos and PDF –

TCC Presentation and background by boss, Joff Fortune, short, 20 min:  https://youtu.be/NiI7Joi_kag
TCC office in Belize: https://youtu.be/JHEDZ3PXx5Y
TCC PDF manual:  http://dreameagles.info/TCC/TCC_Manual_2-23-17.pdf

My personal advice is to dig in and enjoy these resources.  But do not get bogged down and too delayed in your explorations.  There can be good benefits to making your move quickly.  Be sure to have some Bitcoins, and a wallet to use for business.  I am personally using Coinbase and Blockchain as my bitcoin processors.  There are several choices.

How to Proceed –
Let’s keep this smooth and simple and let the videos take care of the heavy lifting.  Use them to ease your way and to avoid simple errors.
Cost Notes:  Joining is free, so you can do that immediately.
Minimum to participate actively is 0.30 BTC (0.25 plus a one time 0.05)  Other entry levels are at 1 BTC and the highest at 5 BTC from which one will earn the most the fastest.
Referring?  Edit this info page if you wish with your reg link.  Duplicate the process of sharing these resources if you decide to build teams, pass these instructions on. 
(Note: You need to be upgraded to at least the lowest Apprentice level package to refer.)

REGISTRATION LINK -> https://office.tradecoinclub.com/register/INFORMATION
Be sure your sponsor is listed as:  INFORMATION

INSTRUCTIONS VIDEOS, use these as detailed guides, follow these.

1. SIGN UP PAGE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8dFkcWlEF4&feature=youtu.be&hd=1

2. BUY YOUR PACKAGE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPnZaKO4mnA&t=633s

3. HOW TO ACTIVATE YOUR WEEKLY AUTOMATIC TRADE: https://youtu.be/sneX_yRH8Og

. PLEASE MAKE SURE TO LOGIN EACH WEEK BETWEEN SUNDAY EVERY WEEK, WE MUST NOW SET OUR TRADES BECAUSE OF LEGAL DEPARTMENT RECOMMENDATIONS4PM PST AND MONDAY 3:59PM PST TO RESET YOUR TRADES ACTIVATION.

4. SUBMITTING DOCS CORRECTLY:  (AT YOUR CONVENIENCE)  documents can be submitted later but before requesting withdrawals.
https://youtu.be/zVAM7jDlwOk

5.  Refer if you wish.  Edit this email to make it your own, with care to the signup link, and share it with your favorite contacts and friends.

6.  WHY IS THE EXCHANGE RATE WALLET ONLY SHOWING HALF OF YOUR DEPOSITS?

https://youtu.be/E8D4MhTmowA

7.  HOW TO COMPOUND YOUR EARNINGS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mHr6jcHIfw&t=370s

8.  More info:  http://www.tradecoinclub.info

9.  ENJOY A BETTER LIFE IN A RICHER WORLD. 

Once again…

REGISTRATION LINK -> https://office.tradecoinclub.com/register/INFORMATION
Be sure your sponsor is listed as INFORMATION

P.S. keep this page for future reference and edit it to suit your needs.  Thank you. 

David Ogden
Entrepreneur
.

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

I’ll say it: the days of outbound marketing are over.

I’ll say it: the days of outbound marketing are over.

entrepreneur

The "Wolf of Wall Street" mentality of harassing customers over the phone, sending spamy emails, and going door-to-door to close deals has become much less effective in recent years. Customers have access to so much information every day, they’ve become increasingly resentful of marketing intrusions. The rise of blocking tools such as caller id, spam folders and ad blockers is not coincidence.

Inbound marketing is the new normal. That’s the idea that if you provide value to customers first, they will respond by returning that value back and doing business with you.

To get a peak under the hood inbound marketing, and get tips on how others can use it, I had a chance to chat with A.J. Agrawal – an entrepreneur who built his business, Alumnify, around it. A.J. is a fellow contributor at Entrepreneur as well as at Forbes, Huffington Post, and others.

Here’s an edited version of our e-mail interview:

Why begin with universities?

We started there because we saw a strong decrease year after year in alumni engagement. Right now, alumni engagement is at an all time low – under 10 percent. It was obvious that institutions were struggling to adjust to the new ways their alumni were communicating and engaging. So we saw the opportunity.

For about 85 years, alumni engagement was pretty steady. Then all of a sudden, in the 90’s it began to fall drastically. In panic mode, many schools chose to double down on the outbound marketing tactics that worked in the past: cold calls, snail mail, and increased email addresses. They also deployed better data tacking and software to help optimize open email rates as well as make the giving process easier for graduates.

But these strategies had no effect (or even a negative effect on engagement) because they were built on an overall strategy that was broken. So we decided we would build inbound marketing solutions to provide value to alumni first. 

How do you begin inbound practices?

First, make sure you know what inbound marketing is. At its core, inbound is anything that provides a tremendous amount of value to your target customer without asking anything from them in return. There are tons of ways to do this and the best part is that most of the major strategies can be done for minimal cost.

One thing we recommend to companies we work with us is to start by getting a blog set up and to have someone be responsible for publishing regular content. One of the nice things about inbound marketing is that it requires companies to build major assets for their business. Your content library is a huge asset and will eventually help your SEO, and pull in more customers to your website.

Other popular inbound strategies include webinars, eBooks, infographics, mobile apps built to help your customers, and optimizing your social media.

Each business is different, so the strategy depends on factors including audience, industry, and expertise. Like most things, the hardest part is just getting started. Once you find an inbound strategy that starts to work, it becomes much easier to fine tune and expand on your traction.

Do you avoid outbound strategies?

Not at all. While inbound is definitely the future, some customers still respond well to outbound strategies. Even as an inbound company, we still cold call customers and send promotional emails once in a while — but as part of a complete plan.

When thinking about the brand I want for Alumnify, I don’t want prospects and customers avoiding our phone calls. The image of a customer seeing an Alumnify Team Member calling them and saying “Not these people again” is my worst nightmare. And it should be any entrepreneur’s nightmare too.

Instead, I believe that the key to getting customers to love us is to provide value without asking for anything in return. For example, we have a free inbound marketing email list we just launched yesterday with weekly tips and webinars. And I’m always happy to help any fellow entrepreneur hammer out an inbound strategy. That type of approach may take more work in the short run, but it’ll also help build a much better brand to our customers in the long run.

Article writen by:

Inbound Marketing solution

 

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden

The Ultimate Marketing Machine

The Ultimate Marketing Machine

  • A Strategy & Execution Case

In the past decade, what marketers do to engage customers has changed almost beyond recognition. With the possible exception of information technology, we can’t think of another discipline that has evolved so quickly. Tools and strategies that were cutting-edge just a few years ago are fast becoming obsolete, and new approaches are appearing every day.

Yet in most companies the organizational structure of the marketing function hasn’t changed since the practice of brand management emerged, more than 40 years ago. Hidebound hierarchies from another era are still commonplace.

Marketers understand that their organizations need an overhaul, and many chief marketing officers are tearing up their org charts. But in our research and our work with hundreds of global marketing organizations, we’ve found that those CMOs are struggling with how to draw the new chart. What does the ideal structure look like? Our answer is that this is the wrong question. A simple blueprint does not exist.

Marketing leaders instead must ask, “What values and goals guide our brand strategy, what capabilities drive marketing excellence, and what structures and ways of working will support them?” Any Structure must follow strategy—not the other way around.

To understand what separates the strategies and structures of superior marketing organizations from the rest, EffectiveBrands (now Millward Brown Vermeer)—in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers, the World Federation of Advertisers, Spencer Stuart, Forbes, MetrixLab, and Adobe—initiated Marketing2020, which to our knowledge is the most comprehensive marketing leadership study ever undertaken. Co-author Keith Weed, the CMO of Unilever, is the chairman of the initiative’s advisory board. Todate the study has included in-depth qualitative interviews with more than 350 CEOs, CMOs, and agency heads, and over a dozen CMO roundtables in cities worldwide. We also conducted online quantitative surveys of 10,000-plus marketers from 92 countries. The surveys encompassed more than 80 questions focusing on marketers’ data analytics capabilities, brand strategy, cross-functional and global interactions, and employee training.

We divided the survey respondents into two groups, overperformers, and underperformers, on the basis of their companies’ three-year revenue growth relative to their competitors’. We then compared those two groups’ strategies, structures, and capabilities. Some of what we found should come as no surprise: Companies that are sophisticated in their use of data grow faster, for instance. Nevertheless, the research shed new light on the constellation of brand attributes required for superior marketing performance and on the nature of the organizations that achieve it. It’s clear that “marketing” is no longer a discrete entity (and woe to the company whose marketing is still siloed) but now extends throughout the firm, tapping virtually every function. And while the titles, roles, and responsibilities of marketing leaders vary widely among companies and industries, the challenges they face—and what they must do to succeed—are deeply similar.

Highlights from the Survey

 
Building Needed Capabilities

% of respondents who said that their organization’s training program was tailored to the specific needs of their business

 

 

Winning Characteristics

The framework that follows describes the broad traits of high-performing organizations, as well as specific drivers of organizational effectiveness. Let’s look first at the shared principles of high performers’ marketing approaches.

Big data, deep insights.

Marketers today are awash in customer data, and most are finding narrow ways to use that information—to, say, improve the targeting of messages. Knowing what an individual consumer is doing where and when is now table stakes. High performers in our study are distinguished by their ability to integrate data on what consumers are doing with knowledge of why they’re doing it, which yields new insights into consumers’ needs and how to best meet them. These marketers understand consumers’ basic drives—such as the desire to achieve, to find a partner, and to nurture a child—motivations we call “universal human truths.”

The Nike+ suite of personal fitness products and services, for instance, combines a deep understanding of what makes athletes tick with troves of data. Nike+ incorporates sensor technologies embedded in running shoes and wearable devices that connect with the web, apps for tablets and smartphones, training programs, and social networks. In addition to tracking running routes and times, Nike+ provides motivational feedback and links users to communities of friends, like-minded athletes, and even coaches. Users receive personalized coaching programs that monitor their progress. An aspiring first-time half-marathon runner, say, and a seasoned runner rebounding from an injury will receive very different coaching. People are rewarded for good performance, can post their accomplishments on social media, and can compare their performance with—and learn from—others in the Nike+ community.

Purposeful positioning.

Top brands excel at delivering all three manifestations of brand purpose—functional benefits, or the job the customer buys the brand to do (think of the pick-me-up Starbucks coffee provides); emotional benefits, or how it satisfies a customer’s emotional needs (drinking coffee is a social occasion); and societal benefits, such as sustainability (when coffee is sourced through fair trade). Consider the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, which defines a set of guiding principles for sustainable growth that emphasize improving health, reducing environmental impact, and enhancing livelihoods. The plan lies at the heart of all Unilever’s brand strategies, as well as its employee and operational strategies.

In addition to engaging customers and inspiring employees, a powerful and clear brand purpose improves alignment throughout the organization and ensures consistent messaging across touchpoints. AkzoNobel’s Dulux, one of the world’s leading paint brands, offers a case in point. In 2006, AkzoNobel was operating a heavily decentralized business structured around local markets, with each local business setting its own brand and business goals and developing its own marketing mix. Not surprisingly, the outcome was inconsistent brand positioning and results; Dulux soared in some markets and floundered in others. In 2008, Dulux’s new global brand team pursued a sweeping program to understand how people perceived the brand across markets, paint’s purpose in their lives, and the human truths that inspired people to color their environments. From China, to India, to the UK, to Brazil, a consistent theme emerged: The colors around us powerfully influence how we feel. Dulux wasn’t selling cans of paint; it was selling “tins of optimism.” This new definition of Dulux’s brand purpose led to a marketing campaign, “Let’s Color.” It enlists volunteers, which now include more than 80% of AkzoNobel employees, and donates paint (more than half a million liters so far) to revitalize run-down urban neighborhoods, from the favelas of Rio to the streets of Jodhpur. In addition to aligning the once-decentralized marketing organization, Dulux’s purpose-driven approach has expanded its share in many markets.

Total experience.

Companies are increasingly enhancing the value of their products by creating customer experiences. Some deepen the customer relationship by leveraging what they know about a given customer to personalize offerings. Others focus on the breadth of the relationship by adding touchpoints. Our research shows that high-performing brands do both—providing what we call “total experience.” In fact, we believe that the most important marketing metric will soon change from “share of wallet” or “share of voice” to “share of experience.”

McCormick, the spices and flavorings firm, emphasizes both depth and breadth in delivering on its promise to “push the art, science, and passion of flavor.” It creates a consistent experience for consumers across numerous physical and digital touchpoints, such as product packaging, branded content like cookbooks, retail stores, and even an interactive service, FlavorPrint, that learns each customer’s taste preferences and makes tailored recipe recommendations. FlavorPrint does for recipes what Netflix has done for movies; its algorithm distills each recipe into a unique flavor profile, which can be matched to a consumer’s taste-preference profile. FlavorPrint can then generate customized e-mails, shopping lists, and recipes optimized for tablets and mobile devices.

Organizing for Growth

Marketing has become too important to be left just to the marketers in a company. We say this not to disparage marketers but to underscore how holistic marketing now is. To deliver a seamless experience, one informed by data and imbued with brand purpose, all employees in the company, from store clerks and phone center reps to IT specialists and the marketing team itself, must share a common vision.

Our research has identified five drivers of organizational effectiveness. The leaders of high-performing companies connect marketing to the business strategy and to the rest of the organization; inspire their organizations by engaging all levels with the brand purpose; focus their people on a few key priorities; organize agile, cross-functional teams; and build the internal capabilities needed for success.

Connecting.

In our work with marketing organizations, we have seen case after case of dysfunctional teamwork, suboptimal collaboration, and lack of shared purpose and trust.

Despite cultural and geographic obstacles, our high-performing marketers avoid such breakdowns for the most part. Their leaders excel at linking their departments to general management and other functions. They create a tight relationship with the CEO, making certain that marketing goals support company goals; bridge organizational silos by integrating marketing and other disciplines; and ensure that global, regional, and local marketing teams work interdependently.

Marketing historically has marched to its own drummer, at best unevenly supporting strategy handed down from headquarters and, more commonly, pursuing brand or marketing goals (such as growing brand equity) that were not directly related to the overall business strategy. Today high-performing marketing leaders don’t just align their department’s activities with company strategy; they actively engage in creating it. From 2006 to 2013, our surveys show, marketing’s influence on strategy development increased by 20 percentage points. And when marketing demonstrates that it is fighting for the same business objectives as its peers, trust and communication strengthen across all functions and, as we shall see, enable the collaboration required for high performance.

Another way companies foster connections is by putting marketing and other functions under a single leader. Motorola’s Eduardo Conrado is the senior VP of both marketing and IT. A year after Antonio Lucio was appointed CMO of Visa, he was invited to also lead HR and tighten the alignment between the company’s strategy and how employees were recruited, developed, retained, and rewarded. CoauthCo-author Weed leads communications and sustainability, as well as marketing, at Unilever. And Herschend Family Entertainment, owner of the Harlem Globetrotters and various theme parks, has recently expanded CMO Eric Lent’s role to chief marketing and consumer technology officer.

Marketing has become too important to be left just to the marketers. All employees, from store clerks to IT specialists, must be engaged in it.

Inspiring.

Inspiration is one of the most underused drivers of effective marketing—and one of the most powerful. Our research shows that high-performing marketers are more likely to engage customers and employees with their brand purpose—and that employees in those organizations are more likely to express pride in the brand.

Inspiration strengthens commitment, of course, but when it’s rooted in a respected brand purpose, all employees will be motivated by the same mission. This enhances collaboration and, as more and more employees come into contact with customers, also helps ensure consistent customer experiences. The payoff is that everyone in the company becomes a de facto member of tCo-authoring team.

The key to inspiring the organization is to do internally what marketing does best externally: create irresistible messages and programs that get everyone on board. At Dulux, that involved handing paint and brushes to thousands of employees and setting them loose on neighborhoods around the world. Unilever’s leadership conducts a quarterly live broadcast with most of the company’s 6,500 marketers to celebrate best brand practices and introduce new tools. In addition, Unilever holds a series of globally coordinated and locally delivered internal and external communications events, called Big Moments, to engage employees and opinion leaders companywide directly with the broader purpose of making sustainable living commonplace. Research shows this has led to a significant increase in employee commitment. Nike has a marketing staffer whose sole job is to tell the original Nike story to all new employees.

Inspiration is so important that many companies, Unilever among them, have begun measuring employees’ brand engagement as a key performance indicator. Google does this by assessing employees’ “Googliness” in performance appraisals to determine how fully people embrace the company’s culture and purpose. And Zappos famously offers new hires $3,000 to leave after four weeks, effectively cutting loose anyone who is not inspired by the company’s obsessive customer focus.

Focusing.

When we asked eight global marketing executives in one organization to list their top five marketing objectives, only two goals made it onto everyone’s list. The remainder was a motley assortment of personal or local objectives. Such misalignment, our data show, increases the farther teams are from an organization’s center of power. With marketing activities ever more dispersed across global companies, that risk must be carefully managed.

By a wide margin, respondents in overperforming companies agreed with the statements “Local marketing understands the global strategy” and “Global marketing understands the local marketing reality.” Winning companies were more likely to measure brands’ success against key performance indicators such as revenue growth and profit and to tie incentives at the local level directly to those KPIs. Ironically, almost all companies were meticulous in planning and executing consumer communication campaigns but failed to devote the same care to internal communications about strategy. That’s a dangerous oversight.

Marc Schroeder, the global marketing head for PepsiCo’s Quaker brand, understood the need for internal cohesiveness when he led a cross-regional “marketing council” to develop and communicate the brand’s first global growth strategy. The council defined a purposeful positioning, nailed down the brand’s global objectives, set a prioritized growth agenda, created clear lines of accountability and incentives, and adopted a performance dashboard that tracked industry measures such as market share and revenue growth. The council communicated the strategy through regional and local team meetings, including those with agencies and retail customers worldwide, and hosted a first-ever global brand stewardship event to educate colleagues. As a result of those efforts, all Quaker marketing plans are now explicitly linked to one overall strategy.

Organizing for agility.

Our research consistently shows that organizational structure, roles, and processes are among the toughest leadership challenges—and that the need for clarity about them is consistently underestimated or even ignored.

We have helped design dozens of marketing organizations. Typically we enter the scene after a traditional business consultancy has done preliminary strategy, cost, and head-count analyses, and our role is to work with the CMO to create and implement a new structure, operating model, and capability-building program. Though we believe there is no ideal organizational blueprint, our experience does suggest a set of operational and design principles that any organization can apply.

Today marketing organizations must leverage global scale but also be nimble, able to plan and execute in a matter of weeks or a few months—and, increasingly, instantaneously. Oreo famously took to Twitter during the blackout at the 2013 Super Bowl, reminding consumers, “You can still dunk in the dark,” making the brand a trending topic during one of the world’s biggest sporting events. That the tweet was designed and approved in minutes was no accident; Oreo deliberately organized and empowered its marketing team for the occasion, bringing agency and brand teams together in a “mission control” room and authorizing them to engage with their audience in real time.

Complex matrixed organizational structures—like those captured in traditional, rigid “Christmas tree” org charts—are giving way to networked organizations characterized by flexible roles, fluid responsibilities, and more relaxed sign-off processes designed for speed. The new structures allow leaders to tap talent as needed from across the organization and assemble teams for specific, often short-term, marketing initiatives. The teams may form, execute, and disband in a matter of weeks or months, depending on the task.

New marketing roles.

As companies expand internationally, they inevitably reorganize to better balance the benefits of global scale with the need for local relevance. Our research shows that, as a result, the vast majority of brands are led much more centrally today than they were a few years ago. Companies are removing middle, often regional, layers and creating specialized “centers of excellence” that guide strategy and share best practices while drawing on needed resources wherever, and at whatever level, they exist in the organization. As companies pursue this approach, roles and processes need to be adapted.

Marketing organizations traditionally have been populated by generalists, but particularly with the rise of social and digital marketing, a profusion of new specialist roles—such as digital privacy analysts and native content editors—are emerging. We have found it useful to categorize marketing roles not by title (as the variety seems infinite) but as belonging to one of three broad types: “think” marketers, who apply analytic capabilities to tasks like data mining, media-mix modeling, and ROI optimization; “do” marketers, who develop content and design and lead production; and “feel” marketers, who focus on consumer interaction and engagement in roles from customer service to social media and online communities.

The networked organization.

A broad array of skills and organizational tiers and functions are represented within each category. CMOs and other marketing executives such as chief experience officers and global brand managers increasingly operate as the orchestrators, assembling cross-functional teams from these three classes of talent to tackle initiatives. Orchestrators brief the teams, ensure that they have the capabilities and resources they need, and oversee performance tracking. To populate a team, the orchestrator and team leader draw from marketing and other functions as well as from outside agencies and consulting firms, balancing the mix of think, do, and feel capabilities in accordance with the team’s mission.

Companies are using this model to create task forces for a range of marketing programs, from integrating online and physical retail experiences to introducing new products. When Unilever launched Project Sunlight—a consumer-engagement program connected with its sustainable living initiative—the team drew talent from seven expertise areas. The international cable company Liberty Global uses task forces to optimize the customer experience at key engagement points—such as when customers receive a bill. These teams are led by managers from a variety of marketing and nonmarketing functions, have different durations, and draw from each of the three talent pools in different measure.

The task-force model is both agile and disciplined. It requires a culture in which central leadership is confident that local teams understand the strategy and will collaborate to execute it. This works well only when everyone in the organization is inspired by the brand purpose and is clear about the goals. Google, Nike, Red Bull, and Amazon all embrace this philosophy. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos captured the ethos when he said at a shareholders’ meeting, “We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.”

Building capabilities.

As we have shown, the most effective marketers lead by connecting, inspiring, focusing, and organizing for agility. But none of those activities can be fully accomplished, or sustained, without the continual building of capabilities. Our research shows pronounced differences in training between high- and low-performing companies, in terms of both quantity and quality.

At a minimum the marketing staff needs expertise in traditional marketing and communications functions—market research, competitive intelligence, media planning, and so forth. But we’ve seen that sometimes even those basic capabilities are lacking. Courses to onboard new staff and teach targeted skills are just the price of entry. The best marketing organizations, including those at Coca-Cola, Unilever, and the Japanese beauty company Shiseido, have invested in dedicated internal marketing academies to create a single marketing language and way of doing marketing.

Senior managers across the company can benefit from programs for sharing expertise on consumer habits, competitor strategy, and retail dynamics. Virgin, Starbucks, and other corporations have created intensive “immersion” programs for this purpose. Executives at the director level can profit from advanced courses that focus on strategic considerations such as portfolio management and partnering. We find that senior leaders often gain a lot in digital and social media training, as they’re frequently less well versed in those areas than their junior colleagues are. Appreciating this, companies including Unilever and Diageo have taken their senior leaders to Facebook for training. We’ve collaborated with partners at Google, MSN, and AOL to develop similar programs, including “reverse mentoring,” which pairs very senior managers with younger staffers. Even the CMO can benefit from continued, targeted training. Visa’s Antonio Lucio, for instance, hired a digital native to teach him about social media and monitor his progress.

Underperforming marketers, on the other hand, underinvest in training. Their employees receive just over half a day of training a year, on average, while overperformers give people nearly two full days of tailored, practical training by external experts. At first blush, the Marketing2020 study reveals what you might expect: Marketers must leverage customer insight, imbue their brands with a brand purpose, and deliver a rich customer experience. They must connect, inspire, focus, organize, and build, as detailed here. The finding that’s striking—and should serve as both a warning and a call to arms—is that most organizations haven’t been able to put all those pieces together. Our data show that only half of even high-performing organizations excel on some of these capabilities. But that shouldn’t be discouraging; rather, it illuminates where there’s work to do. Regardless of how marketing delivers its messages in the future, the fundamental human motivations that marketers must satisfy won’t change. The challenge now is to create organizations that can truly speak to those needs.

David Ogden
Helping People Help Themselves

David Ogden – Http://markethive.com/david-ogden