Is Gamification Just Hype Along With Transmedia And CDJ

 

By Gary Fox

Is gamification just hype or has it become a

Marketing Innovation Or Hype?

Marketing for many seems to be a dark art particularly when it comes down to understanding branding.

Like many other forms of business, marketing can suffer from the rise and fall of popular trends and the hype that often ensues; common sense seems to get left behind.

However, as understanding progresses we see theory move to practice, strategy move to implementation and measures used as feedback to learn and refine programs and campaigns.

There is a multitude of ideas shaping marketing, location-based services, mobile payments, crowdsourcing…, but I have chosen three that represent interesting ways to realise the benefits of digital and social marketing.

They help to shape a more intuitive set of interactions with customers that can provide relevance, entertainment and context.

Here are the three trends and some information and further resources:

Cross-Platform Storytelling (Transmedia)

A narrative approach using parts of a story across different platforms.

Narratives have been shown to lower the barriers to influence a customer through a process called transportation.

Basically, a customer is transported into a story, and as a result, their normal logical critical awareness lowers.

A second factor that comes from story-telling is the sense of empathy and involvement. In other words, you are demonstrating to customers you understand their lives and their journeys.

Gamification (Gaming Marketing Interactions)

Gamification is at a simple level employing gaming techniques to non-game environments to drive adoption, engagement, loyalty, sharing, even sales e.g. use game mechanics – badges, points, leader boards, levels, challenges, achievements…

Customer Decision Journey (CDJ)

Consumers are increasingly demanding and digital channels are ever more important.

In effect, consumers are taking control of what McKinsey terms the “consumer decision journey” – the moments from awareness to purchase to service; but the emphasis is on the influence and experience from social networks to sales channels to paid media.

In reviewing these trends we need to evade the hype surrounding them and focus on their value; determine the potential benefits and apply them to determine their effectiveness .

Of course, the size of your budget affects the level to which you can scale them and harness their full potential; the reasearch and insights, the creativity and technology underpinning any campaign strategy.

However, even smaller businesses can apply these principles in a more simplistic form as a framework for creative new ways to market themselves.

These trends are providing new and exciting ways to engage your customers and create some relevant interactions:

Story Telling Across Platforms

Why is storytelling so powerful?

Storytelling is at the heart of human behaviour and has run through our cultural heritage as a means to provide entertainment, learning, values…it is the glue that cements us from smaller day to day to the life-changing dramas that change lives.

Bernadette Jiwa provides some great points as to how businesses can use storytelling in her book.

We now access information across a multitude of platforms.

By providing access to stories across these customer touchpoints parts of the story can be revealed to build the narrative. However, it is not simply pushing out the same content to different channels.

For instance, a transmedia story may have some of the stories revealed in a video, some through social media e.g. Facebook, and other parts taking place in real life via a live event.

In his book Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins defines transmedia as storytelling that:

“immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.”

The point of transmedia storytelling is that multiple entry points provide a rich (and complimentary) opportunity to narrate.

Transmedia requires a mind shift, a change in the creative process to understand the context of each platform.

Though consideration must be given to how the sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole – amplifying the story. In combination with social platforms, this provides an opportunity for higher levels of relevance and interest.

Gamification

Gamification is a buzzword that is surrounded by a lot of media hype and subsequently is often simply labelled as a method to throwing in some badges and incentives to incentivise customers to engage with a brand (a Pavlovian approach to rewarding customers).

Firstly let’s remove some of the hype around gamification here are two excellent articles that drill into the opportunities and issues facing the development and implementation of applied gaming:

 Gabe Zichermann co-author of a book called Gamification by Design. The other is Sebastian Deterding, a designer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Hamburg studying game design and behavior, posted a long and detailed rebuttal outlining what he believes is wrong with Zichermann’s book.

Yet despite these arguments brands are experimenting with new ways to explore this and indeed it is also expanding into areas such as education. But like Deterding I favour the ideas that we have an opportunity to harness this to explore solving puzzles, meeting challenges (not just large but breaking these down into more bite sized levels of achievement) and recognizing success for self-improvement (for self and among peers). The superficial idea of simply offering badges and currencies without some deeper level of reward and participation could fail miserably.

Customer Decision Journey

David Edelman does a great job of expressing the customer decision journey in the Harvard Business Review article in 2010 entitled Your Spending Your Money In All the Wrong Places.

The old linear approach as a process for how we decide upon purchase has always seemed convenient but counter-intuitive to the multiple influences that are involved.

David makes a convincing argument that marketing needs to extend the customer decision journey into the various touchpoints that the customer experiences with the brand and the organisation – from the service dept to the website to the brand’s presence on social media, and resellers sites.

The focus is on building the brand around the customer rather than delivering to the customer based on the organisation.

This fundamental shift in thinking is about realigning older departmental structures and changing the emphasis to organisational adapt to the customer flow. Likewise, a marketer needs to focus on which platforms that influence the customer e.g. advocacy led products require more emphasis on social channels.

Within this mix of touchpoints, social media plays an important part in creating word of mouth. 

Google came out with some research called Zero Moment of Truth that very clearly and convincingly lays out the business case for social media and how it impacts the consumer’s buying journey.there’s been a fundamental shift in how consumers gather data and how they’re using that data to make buying decisions for products.

Some Final Thoughts

If you look at brands like Nike and Coke they are providing entertainment, facilitating platforms and participation around their brands be it an app for running, a music concert or facilitating conversations around an event. As part of this fusion of offline and online, we are stories unveil from heroic moments to real life emotional insights. Curiosity has led us to explore and can be harnessed to develop the interest and depth of a story across a platform. The danger though lies in the people seeing these as another selling method, an influence rather than an act of delivering value. I suspect many will not get the balance right. But these new opportunities can be used to unveil the stories of the brand community not just the constructed narrative of the brand itself and perhaps this is where the value lies.

https://bit.ly/3Ssq4Th

55 Business Model Patterns. #5 Barter

 

Barter is a method of exchange in which goods are given away to customers without the transaction of actual money. In return, they provide something of value to the sponsoring organisation. The exchange does not have to show any direct connection and is valued differently by each party.

How they do it: In the 1990s, Lufthansa owned a costly retail space in New York which was unused. As they wouldn’t have been able to recover the costs with subleasing it, the company bartered and swapped the vacant real estate for airtime and paraffin.

How they do it: Procter and Gamble partnered up with TV networks and radio outlets in order to exchange sponsoring or funding for the production of the entertainment content, for visibility and advertisement opportunities for its products. Until today, P&G is engaged in this sector, via its subsidiary P&G Entertainment.

How they do it: The first foreign product to be sold in the USSR in 1972 was Pepsi. Under a Barter agreement, PepsiCo offered its Pepsi-Cola drink to the Soviet Union in return for exportation rights of Stolichnaya vodka to America, for which they were granted exclusive sales rights on the American market. This strategy also increased exposure of the Pepsi-Cola brand and availability of the product, especially in the USSR.

Top Industries

Below, the top industries for the pattern "Barter" are displayed, in order to get insights into how this pattern is applied across different industries. We've collected data from 3 firms using this pattern.

Pattern Co-Occurrence

Below, the pattern "Barter" is analyzed based on co-occurrence, in order to get insights into how this business model pattern is applied in combination with other patterns within the firms we studied.

https://bit.ly/3QRkhFk

The ValueHub™ Theory (1)

 

In hindsight, the idea behind the ROUNDMAP™ originated from a meeting in 2012, to which I was invited, to help determine the future of a local radio station considering the online challenges they were facing. While listening to suggestions, an idea started to take shape in my mind, which I would later refer to as a ValueHub™.

The problem: if a radio station wants to attract an audience, it has to offer something that is considered valuable to its listeners. Some people may listen to a particular station because they enjoy the music genre; others may prefer it because of local news and weather reports. Regardless, the radio station needs to create relevant value to attract listeners.

Several suggestions were made to include social media channels. Value creation comes at a cost: local news, weather, and traffic information need to be aggregated, curated, and formatted, adding new value to it before the content can be distributed across various channels.

Similar Pattern

I noticed a pattern. Similar to how content from multiple external sources needs to be funneled to a hub (editor) to be curated and dispersed across various channels (to reach an audience), so does an upstream supply chain that funnels raw materials to a production facility to be processed and distributed (to get a customer).

I stood up, walked to the drawing board, and drew the following image (to the left):

After I got home, I looked at the image and asked myself: What if I were to replace ‘content’ with ‘value’?

It made so much sense that it became the beginning of the ValueHub™ theory. However, it was still a linear representation while returning listeners point to a circular process. I wondered: What was driving some listeners to tune in repeatedly, and how do I represent this in the image?

In the case of the radio station, audience engagement appeared to increase the number of returning listeners. Besides, any response from the audience was a good indication of which content was most valuable, what times attracted the most audience, etc. This allowed the station to create more of the content people loved, thus becoming more valuable, which helped retain more listeners over a more extended period (loyalty).

The solution: Create more audience engagement by getting more listeners involved (f.i. in newsgathering) by utilizing the (social) channels that listeners use most.

Engagement

Then I realized that engagement, in a similar matter, was also driving the customer lifecycle. Engagement drives customers to return or refer – in most cases after having experienced the value delivered to them the first time around, which is, in essence, their first sales cycle.

So I made a few changes to the previous image (and tilted it for better viewing):

The concept was simple: one ValueHub™ has a surplus value (+) while the other has a deficit (-). When two ValueHubs become aware of the value differential (a need that can be fulfilled), the hubs will be pulled towards each other, like magnets. If there is no resistance (f.i. no lack of confidence), the value will start to flow from one ValueHub (+) to the other (-) until the value differential is neutralized, i.e., the need fulfilled.

Usually, this would be a ‘good’ time to depart once the need is fulfilled. However, we also know from experience that for as long as the buyer engages with the seller, and vice versa, their relative positions will not change much. Therefore, whenever the buyer experiences another deficit, he/she/it will most likely repurchase from the same seller.

Provided no other seller had drawn the buyer’s attention to a better (value) offer.

Value Chains and Value Streams

I learned about value chains (Michael Porter) and value streams more recently. In a sense, these concepts are comparable to my ValueHub™ theory.

Value chains contain value creation, value delivery, and value capture. Porter did not mention a value intake. However, he did include the upstream supply chain in his value chain model. I believe the Value Intake is a separate process from Value Creation and should be mentioned separately.

A more contemporary approach, value streams, take the perspective of the initiating or triggering stakeholder – often a customer – rather than an internal value chain or process perspective. Porter also mentioned the buyer’s value chain as a vital source of information to understand the customer’s actual needs.

ValueHub

The ValueHub™ can be perceived as a forwarding process: a series of activities that are unique to the business and offer the company a competitive advantage over others or reverse-engineered from an ‘initiating or triggering stakeholder perspective,’ i.e., seen from a buyer’s need or value deficit.

In any case, the ValueHub™, in my perception, is very much like a black box, and its mode of operation should be considered a trade secret. Similar to how Coca-Cola scrupulously protects the recipe for its lucrative beverage.

Formula

Each ValueHub™ needs internal resources and capabilities to create value. However, it also needs materials from external sources in most cases: this is what I call the Value Intake.

The ValueHub formula is simple:

VH Delivery (p) - VH Intake (c) - VH Creation (c) = VH Capture

VH = ValueHub, p = performance, c = cost

Recurrence

Although value chains and value streams are equally valid, they both miss* what I believe is a vital component: recurrence. This is how I got to create a circular framework: I wasn’t content with the analogy of funnels and timelines to represent the customer lifecycle; it had to be a circle to represent the recurring cycle.

In my following representation, it looks like this:

I believe it is engagement that is capable of driving recurring value capturing. Without it, most purchases will be one-off, and the value that can be captured will remain limited. Provided that the product fits the needs and the experiences match the expectations.

There is one last thing I would like to mention: if a ValueHub is unable to deliver the value it has created (find enough paying customers to cover the cost), the ValueHub should be liquidated. A business can not sustain, regardless of the investment, if it cannot build meaningful and lasting customer relationships at a profit.

Fourth Quarter

In the ROUNDMAP™, engagement, based on shared experiences, is being represented by the RED quarter, named SUCCESS. It is a crucial element in customer lifecycle management, and it has the potential to cross the silos.

(*) The Customer Development method by Steve Blank, the godfather of the LEAN start-up movement, does include recurrence, or rather re-iteration; however, the LEAN methodology is intended to find a product-market fit fast (pose a business model hypothesis, design an experiment, get out of the building and test it), not to lead a single customer through a customer lifecycle.

EDWIN KORVER

Architect of ROUNDMAP™ - Advancing Grandmastership of Business™ ✪ Business Model Matrix™ ✪ Polymath ✪ Generalist ✪ Systems Thinker ✪ Board Member, CEO CROSS-SILO BV

https://bit.ly/3LgJ30x

The Top Performance Metrics Sales Pros are Tracking in 2022

 

Written by Jay Fuchs @Jay_Fewks

It might go without saying, but your sales org can't function effectively if you don't track performance metrics. You need to have a detailed pulse on what kind of results you're seeing if you're going to diagnose whyyour org is over- or under-achieving.

Don't know where to start? Don't worry — HubSpot recently surveyed over 1,000 sales professionals to give you some perspective. Here's an in-depth look at the seven metrics respondents cited as being important to track. Let's dive in.

What are performance metrics?

Metrics are important because they help businesses evaluate performance and inform their decision making based on their analysis of the metrics. For example, if a business is seeing revenue drop from month to month, they'd want to investigate their activities to determine the source of the issue and resolve it.

A business uses performance metrics to determine if its outcomes align with the goals it sets. If a performance metric falls below its target, the organization is likely underperforming. But if an outcome falls within or above its ideal range, the business is either meeting or exceeding its goals.

Why are performance metrics important?

Tracking and analyzing performance metrics help businesses evaluate the soundness of their operations and make better-informed decisions. What the "right" metrics are for you depends on factors like your sales organization's structure and priorities, the nature of your industry, and your broader company objectives.

Here are the seven most important sales performance metrics your sales team should be measuring — according to over 1,000 sales professionals.

Top Performance Metrics

1. Average Profit Margin
2. YoY Growth
3. Conversion Rate
4. Productivity Metrics
5. Quota Attainment
6. Win Rate
7. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

1. Average Profit Margin — 55% of Respondents

What is it?

Average profit margin is a metric, typically expressed as a percentage, that measures the proportion of a company's net margin that comes from sales over an extended period — usually multiple years. It also factors in business expenses, making it an effective measure of how a company can manage costs relative to sales.

How to Calculate It

To calculate average profit margin, you divide net income from a given period by the net sales over that same timeframe.

Why is it important?

Tracking your average profit margin is one of the better ways to understand your sales org's efficiency — it's one of the purest metrics for gauging how much of the revenue you generate is making it to your bottom line.

It tells you how well your team's input is translating to productive output. While tracking revenue is important, it doesn't give you a full picture of how effectively your sales org is leveraging the resources at its disposal.

You can generate impressive revenue figures in a quarter — but if you're investing more into supporting those efforts than you're reaping, those figures might paint a misleading picture of how your company is performing.

2. YoY Growth — 53% of Respondents

What is it?

Year over year (YoY) growth — in the context of sales — is a metric that shows how an organization's sales figures have improved from one year to another. It's typically expressed as a percentage.

How to Calculate It

To calculate YoY growth, take your revenue figure for an initial 12-month period, subtract that number from the previous 12 months' revenue, divide the difference by the latter, and multiply the result by 100.

So if you saw $100,000 in revenue in 2021 and $90,000 in 2020, you would divide the difference of $10,000 by $90,000 and multiply that figure by 100 — resulting in a YoY growth figure of 11.11%.

Why is it important?

YoY growth gives sales leaders a picture of how their sales orgs are performing from a wider lens. Monthly and quarterly figures are relatively limited and more vulnerable to shifts that might not reflect the company's real health.

Annual growth figures help sales orgs gauge elements like the soundness of their sales processes and efficacy of their sales efforts — beyond the influence of factors like seasonality or monthly volatility.

3. Conversion Rate — 52% of Respondents

What is it?

Your conversion rate measures how the percentage of leads that ultimately become customers.

How to Calculate It

To calculate conversion rate, divide the number of your leads who ultimately become customers by the number of leads you generate in a given period. So if you get approximately 500 leads per month, and on average 50 buy your product, your conversion rate is 10%.

Why is it important?

This metric can help you calculate how many leads you need to make your revenue targets. Historical conversion rates also show whether your reps are becoming more effective. If your average conversion rate is climbing — and you’re closing the same or greater quantity of deals — then sales performance is improving.

If your conversion rate is dropping — and your quantity of deals is flat or decreasing — something is probably wrong with your process, team, and/or lead generation efforts.

4. Sales Productivity Metrics — 50% of Respondents

What are they?

The term "sales productivity metrics" is essentially a catch-all term that covers how actively, consistently, and productively sales reps engage in the activities relevant to their roles. It can cover metrics like CRM usage, calls made, emails sent, conversations, or use of sales tools.

How to Calculate Them

Again, "sales productivity metrics" covers a range of figures. "Calculating" them is a matter of tracking reps' individual activity through resources like CRMs or call tracking software.

Why are they important?

Ultimately, an entire sales org can only be as productive as the reps who support it. As a sales leader, you need to know that everyone in the org is staying engaged and pulling their weight. Tracking sales productivity metrics offers a way to hold reps accountable and ensure they're staying active and motivated.

The value of these metrics is twofold. For one, they give leaders a picture of how the broader org performs. Secondly, they offer managers insight into how individual reps are contributing — showing whether they might need extra attention, coaching, or support.

5. Quota Attainment — 42% of Respondents

What is it?

Quota attainment is a relatively straightforward metric. Simply put, it shows whether a rep has hit their quota for a given period — more specifically, the metric represents the proportion of a rep's actual sales to their quota.

How to Calculate It

To calculate quota attainment, divide a rep's actual sales in a given period by their quota for that same timeframe and multiply that figure by 100.

Why is it important?

Like sales productivity metrics, quota attainment offers sales leaders a more thorough picture of how individual salespeople are performing. It might be the purest measure of the results reps are delivering.

As I mentioned, a sales org can only be as strong as the reps that support it. Tracking quota attainment is another metric that lets managers know which of their salespeople need extra attention, coaching, or support.

But quota attainment's value isn't specific to how individual reps are performing. Tracking quota attainment on an org-wide scale can show how sound that org's sales process, messaging, leadership, and goal-setting are.

6. Win Rate — 42% of Respondents

What is it?

Win rate refers to the percentage of final stage prospects who closed and became customers divided by the total number of deals in your pipeline.

How to Calculate It

To calculate win rate, you divide your number of closed-won deals by the sum of your closed-won deals and non-closed-won deals.

Why is it important?

Win rate gives sales leaders a picture of the timeframes, specific reps, or other factors that maximize their orgs' potential to turn prospects into customers. That kind of perspective can inform better-structured sales strategies, lead to more tactful personnel decisions, and help expose flaws in sales processes — among several other elements that dictate a sales org's performance.

7. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) — 41% of Respondents

What is it?

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) refers to the average sum of sales and marketing spend an organization exhausts to convert a lead to a new customer.

How to Calculate It

To calculate customer acquisition cost, you start by determining a timeframe for your calculation — typically a month, quarter, or year. Once you've landed on a designated frame of reference, add your total marketing and sales expenses from that stretch and divide that figure by the total number of customers you acquired over the period.

Why is it important?

Like so many other metrics listed here, customer acquisition cost is a measure of your organization's efficiency — it's a reflection of the soundness of your sales and marketing strategies as well as how effectively both departments are leveraging the resources at their disposal.

A less-than-ideal customer acquisition cost can tell you that your sales process might have some glaring hitches, reveal that sales and marketing aren't properly aligned, show that your reps might not be putting in enough effort, or shed light on other elements of your efforts that prospects aren't receptive to.

One way or another, a poor CAC is one of the better indicators that your organization has work to do — tracking it provides a starting point for determining what you're doing well and where you stand to improve.

It's worth noting that this list is far from exhaustive and won't necessarily cover all the bases you're looking for. The performance metrics you choose to track will rest on the needs, interests, and structure of your sales org.

Still, the metrics listed here represent a solid starting point to give you some valuable perspective on what you're doing well and where you might have room for improvement.

https://bit.ly/3eIUotY

How to Build a World-Class Brand

 Your brand is your biggest asset. It carries your reputation. It is why people do business with you.

Brands can always be improved. We have used our market research experience over the last 16 years to create a 10 step infographic which shows how to build a world-class brand.

To find out how you can build a world-class brand, check out our infographic below.

https://bit.ly/3Du76qL

Marketing Motivation: Salary Is Not Enough

 I’m sure that every marketing director, chief marketing officer, head of marketing department every once in a while ask themselves questions like “Am I paying enough my marketers” or “Am I paying too much?” and even “What if I pay more?”.

And these questions always are followed by even more important one – “How can I motivate marketers to do more?” Of course, there are many non-monetary ways to motivate your marketer or marketing team to do more, to do better, to reach new levels etc. Today I won’t be listing them and leave it for another post later this year.

Today I would like to share with you an exclusive method I used for my marketing team to work harder, more creative, more effective and gain more leads, more potential customers, better potential customers.

Your potentials customers are closer than you think

For every company, and especially, for the B2B industry, the more leads marketing generates, the better our company results in general. For the B2B market, it is always difficult to support a certain amount of new leads per month, and there are some periods with less potential customers, and there are some periods which exceed your expectations.

And of course, as a CMO you want this number to be predictable and controlled. You want to get at least 20, 30 or 50, or even more leads per month depending on your business and your sales team who proceed to work with leads generated by your marketing team.

To keep this figure predictable I tried to come up with some marketing motivation for my marketing team which could guarantee the minimum number of leads we needed to keep up with the general sales plan.

Of course, first, we needed a certain number of leads with certain conversion rate per month. The more the better, of course, and here you can face some problems as well, that’s why you need to be quite careful with just number of leads. If you do not set additional rules, your marketing team can generate hundreds or thousands leads, 99% of which will be worthless.

You do not need 99% of your leads to go there

That is why I set another variable to this marketing motivation method – lead quality.

Every B2B company has a sales plan for a year consisting of sales forecasts from current customers and an additional plan for new customers. This additional plan is divided into 2 parts – one part for the active sales department and another part for the marketing department.

Based on that I prepared a simple formula for my marketing team, using which my marketing team was highly motivated to generate not just a lot of leads, but a lot of quality leads:

Mm = Qpc*Npc*Cpc*S

where:

Mm – marketing motivation

Qpc = PSpc/ASpc*100%

Qpc – lead quality index

PSpc – new leads sales plan previous quarter

ASpc – actual new leads sales previous quarter

Npc = Ppc/Apc*100%

Npc – the number of leads per month index

Ppc – leads plan per month

Apc – the actual number of leads per month

Cpc = PMpc/AMpc*100%

Cpc – customer acquisition cost index

PMpc – customer acquisition cost plan

AMpc – actual customer acquisition cost

S = 1/2 of your marketer’s regular monthly salary

Of course, there should be certain rules and limitations used to guarantee this formula properly works. In my case, I set the following limitation for my marketing team which is to be followed strictly otherwise there is sense to pay extra your marketer.

My marketing motivation limitation was that with Npc<70% or Cpc<70% the motivation bonus wasn’t calculated at all. So it always had to be over 70% and my marketer knew it, and my marketers set their goals to exceed it.

Good marketing motivation leads to good results

All numbers I used to set the plan were based on previous years data. As a result, using this marketing motivation formula in 6 months my marketing team started to generate more quality leads and the sales plan was exceeded by 56%.

Always keep in mind – motivation is everything in marketing. If there is no motivation, there is no marketing, and eventually, there are no sales…

PS: alongside with that formula I used other non-monetary marketing motivation tools to drive my team. I will share them with you later this year.

And while you’re thinking about your marketing team motivation take some time to watch these amazing marketing inspiration movies described in Best Marketing Movies To Inspire Your Team article.

https://bit.ly/3qAwJih