Gary Loveman, chairman, president and CEO of Caesars Entertainment Group, spoke to more than 180 Wharton students as an executive-in-residence guest of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI) in partnership with the Wharton Leadership Lecture Series. The wide-ranging interest in analytics among students in Loveman’s presentation, titled “Analytic Rigor and Glitz: Two Paths to Success in the Gaming Industry,” is a testament to the explosion and growth of customer-level analytics and its application in business.
Loveman joined Caesars in 1998 and was dubbed by the press as “the professor” who’d come to save Harrah’s. He went on to develop the gaming industry’s most successful loyalty and analytics program—Total Rewards—which boasts more than 40 million members. Loveman’s success exemplifies what customer analytics is all about and its potential to disrupt or transform entire industries.
Gary Loveman, chairman, president and CEO of Caesars Entertainment Group, speaking to Wharton students
Posing the question, “Why not observe what customers teach you they care about?” Loveman told Wharton students his story of growing the famous casino brand. With profit margins in the millions of dollars, he helped Caesars grow into the eighth largest entertainment company in the world, grossing $9 billion a year—all by elevating customer-level analytics to a central strategy for growth.
Throughout the talk, Loveman drew parallels to other industries, helping students understand how the same analytics challenges in gaming translate to all industry sectors and to companies of all sizes. When Loveman began working with Harrah’s, the company could not invest in new real estate, the biggest names in celebrity entertainment, or even new casino room floors.
With this backdrop, Gary surveyed students on possible next steps—ultimately noting that no matter the industry, if you can’t always compete on the “glitz” of your products, you must compete at the customer level. Offering customers an increasingly tailored experience, based on data you already collected—and what data customers were willing to share for future rewards—you can leverage analytics to secure a competitive advantage. And as new revenues flow in, Loveman noted, business leaders can again turn to customer analytics to help determine which new products and services to develop.
As the Total Rewards program succeeded, Caesars began integrating analytics in all strategic decision-making, and the rest was history. Loveman instructed students to look beyond the disconnected or overwhelming sources of market information, and instead see the huge opportunity that comes with new technology: the ability to run experiments, listen to what people actually want, determine their customer lifetime value (CLV), and then deliver products and services that meet these demands. For Loveman, working with one customer at a time quickly moves from small experiments to companywide changes.
Loveman’s lecture gave students a great sense of practical applications within the analytics space, and exemplifies the importance of WCAI’s mantra that companies should focus on “people doing things over time.”
Coincidentally, Joshua Kanter was in Philadelphia the same day, and Loveman introduced him as both a colleague and Wharton student. Kanter, enrolled in the Wharton MBA for Executives Program on the San Francisco campus, was recently interviewed for Wharton’s Executive MBA Blog. He works with Loveman at Caesars as senior vice president of revenue acceleration and Total Rewards. Besides being in charge of Ceasars’ Total Rewards Program, Kanter runs marketing operations, marketing technology, interactive customer relationship management (CRM), big data, marketing capabilities, payments and consumer insights.
Marc Rowan, W’84, WG’85, a managing partner at Apollo Ventures, owners of Ceasars Entertainment, helped make Loveman’s Feb. 26 event possible through generous financial donations toward WCAI’s student programming.
Leslie Revitt, WG’09[/caption]
Finally, she was sold on a chance to work within the industry: on the three-person omnichannel team at Macy’s. That was in 2012. Since, she’s become Macy’s vice president of omnichannel and leader of that team, which has grown to eight staffers and is recognized as being on the “leading edge” of omnichannel.
Fast Company named Macy’s one of the “
Omnichannel: the notion of "everywhere retail"[/caption]
MBA students from the 
Leo Levinson, W’74, CEO of Philadelphia-based GroupLevinson[/caption]
Levinson got his start as an ad man for local retailers as a Wharton student in the early ‘70s—such as the Jasmine House Chinese restaurant at 40th and Chestnut. First, it was newspapers. Then when local advertising grew cheap enough, ad money moved to broadcast media. Levinson and company got used to the VIP treatment from radio stations. Clients would buy six to seven figures in TV spots.
The move from print to broadcast, "it reinvented the whole industry," Levinson tells us.
Yet it was just moving dollars to another ad-based medium.
Now, with the trifecta of digital, mobile and social, a revolution has occurred. His job is to help clients create an environment to close sales and nurture customer loyalty, to help them find like-minded customers. No matter whether they are business-to-consumer or business-to-business, clients find new media far more efficient to build brands and awareness, to start conversations with consumers and other businesses.
"Which is one of the reasons so many companies have abandoned traditional media," he says, adding with positivity: “There is an excitement and a newness to our industry that keeps everything fresh."
It keeps Levinson fresh too.
"I am very much running my business at full tilt on a day-to-day basis," he says. "I am still looking to do great things."
His “juices” get flowing when working with a global life sciences consultancy that seeks his firm’s services to help build its thought leadership through PR and social media. Or working with Penn-inspired startup 
By speaking in “me talk,” it is as if you the marketer is challenging the prospect to guess how your product or service can help them. This is a big assumption, and one that usually performs poorly because busy people won’t bother to think through to another step. They simply pass over your message.
Everyone believes they know what certain products and professions do … or they think they know. We call this generic certainty. If your company is an accounting firm or a financial consultant, a supermarket or a sneaker manufacturer, everyone believes he or she knows exactly what you do.
A “me talk” message does not dislodge this generic certainty because it doesn’t tell them anything distinctive or disruptive. In most cases, customers and prospects will merely move along to the next message because they feel they know everything about the generic you, and they assume that their needs are filled.
If “me talk” isn’t as effective as “you talk,” we wonder why so many businesses continue to craft their messages this way. Here are three reasons:
Prof. David Bell[/caption]
The Wharton faculty member presenting during the March 26 webinar—
Consumers still buy plenty of diapers (and other goods) in brick-and-mortar stores, though online shopping can be liberating.[/caption]
“What we found was actually quite profound,” Bell told the audience.
And that was: “Isolation offline becomes liberation online."
Market B saw 50 percent higher category sales and 120 percent higher niche brand sales. Why? Simply because shoppers could not find the diversity of choices in the isolated market. The brand preferences in the brick-and-mortar stores were being dictated by the tastes of the majority.
“The practical implications of this were pretty straightforward,” Bell said. Use census data to identify ZIP codes that are high in geographical isolation and look to sell there.
The relationship between real world and virtual world becomes inverted with Warby Parker’s data—in which case virtual sales were improved through touch, taste, sound and smell realities on the ground.
As a primarily online retailer, Warby Parker from its start has confronted the problem that the Web fails to fulfill the touch-and-feel need of consumers. One strategy it’s employed to overcome this has been its innovative home trial program, whereby you can get up to four pairs of glasses in the mail to try on at your leisure. Another has been to open showrooms in cities like New York and Philadelphia.
Enter Bell's experiment. He looked at data from two cities: one control city and another "treatment" city where a Warby Parker showroom opened. In the treatment city, sales went up 8.8 percent; Web sales rose too, by 3.5 percent. Sales from the home trial went down 5 percent, although the program's conversion rate increased by 1 percent.
The takeaway for Bell is simple: "When you're a virtual-world company, there's a lot of good things that can happen when you go into the real world."
Editor’s note: Watch Bell’s “
I study âIdentity Loyaltyââthe curious case when brands become a part of consumersâ self-identity and consumers connect deeply with a brandâs values, use the brand to express who they are, sing the praises of the brand and defend the brand with fervor. One really interesting aspect of BlackBerryâs amazing rise to greatness, and its current challenges, has to do with the social psychological takeaways that exist from a branding perspective. They can perhaps inform those who are in charge of shepherding a turnaround.
The Fools Gold of Focusing Only on Product Features. Sure, you have to have a product that works. But thatâs really the easy partâor maybe I should say the part that is necessary but somewhat insufficient. The other path is to build something into that product to tell a story about why consumers should use your brand to self-identify and communicate a shared sense of values to other consumers. Take, for example, the Nike Swoosh. Most of what Nike does is to talk about what the product means, a story of the celebration and empowerment through sport. Thatâs brand marketing. Consumers see the Swoosh and immediately generate the cohesive associations that create the meaning behind the brand.
Creating an Identity and Creating a Category. Apple is another iconic company that created a lifestyle, an emotional story to shroud the brand and enhance its product features. There were many MP3 players in the marketplace in 2001. Creating a digital music store was important to attract customers, but so was a story about those little white ear budsâ and creating a categoryâthrough the brandâs identityâa story about the person using them: creative, fun, interesting and social. This was not an MP3 player but an âiPod.â Think about that. This difference existed purely in consumersâ minds, but it created a powerful psychological distance between all those âotherâ products. The same positioning was used for the iPhone. There are smartphones and then there are iPhones.
I know you are but what am I? When focus is too much on features, it often allows your competitor to define who you are. Even some of the worldâs most successful companies have found themselves in the crosshairs of those competitors. Apple did this to Microsoft superbly. Before Microsoft knew it, Apple had messaged the idea that the Apple user was creative, hip, young, fun; PCâers were archaic, stodgy and boring. When Microsoft finally countered with the message, âI am a PC,â it was already working from a psychological deficit. Rather than being able to have cart blanche to create its own identity, Microsoft had to counteract what Apple had already established for it.
Among the teachable moments here for BlackBerry: It is critical to proactively create your own brand identity, to control your own internal narrative about your brandâs why and its personalityâbefore your competitor does it for you.
Art credit: Peter Crowther[/caption]
What is good news? What is bad news? It all depends on your perspective, doesnât it? For journalists working on a story, any news about your subject can be good news, except if that particular piece of news forces you to throw out everything youâve done. The same holds true if youâre writing a bookâif something major happens in the midst of your writing, itâs got to be good news, regardless of the particulars, doesn't it?
Thatâs the situation in which I found myself in early 2010, when former McKinsey managing director Rajat Gupta was first implicated in the Galleon insider trading scandal. Iâd been working on my history of the legendary consulting organization, The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business, since the fall of 2009. I received numerous emails from friends congratulating me on having had the foresight to write about an organization that suddenly seemed capable of exploding in an Enron-like conflagration at the perfect time for me, Duff McDonald, author. And I will admit being somewhat âexcitedâ about what was certainly a painful experience both for Gupta and McKinsey itself. Not in the sense that I enjoyed their pain, but in the fact that it had the potential to help sales of my book. Iâm just being honest here.
The Galleon debacle made for a more dramatic ending to my own book than it otherwise might have had, but the really interesting thing about it was not what it did to McKinsey but what it didnât do. While the firm could certainly have done without all the negative publicity engendered by Guptaâs ethical and legal transgressions, the experience is already receding in the rear-view mirror for McKinsey, which has emerged from the whole experience largely unscathed. The fact that it has is testament to the power of what may be the greatest brand in the history of professional services.
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Thatâs the kind of consideration you earn from your clients not just by doing good work, but also by doing it for yearsâor decades.
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How is it, you might ask, that an institution built on a foundation of trustâclients trust that McKinsey consultants know what theyâre talking about, that they will keep their secrets, that they have the clientsâ best interests in mind and not their ownâwas able to survive what seems, by any reasonable interpretation, to be a complete breach of that very thing? For McKinsey, the Galleon imbroglio boiled down to this: At the same time that Gupta was breaching the confidentiality of his board seat at Goldman Sachs, another McKinsey partner was selling client secrets to Galleon in an utter violation of the consulting compact. How did they not bring McKinsey down with them along with Galleon itself? (While the news of Guptaâs travails did indeed prove to be very good for one author, it wasnât me. Rather, it was Anita Raghavan, Câ86, writer of The Billionaireâs Apprentice: The Rise of The Indian-American Elite and The Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund.)
One reason that I was given by several of McKinseyâs clients, including the CEO of an accounting firm that had been working with the partner in question, is that most CEO s of giant companies subscribe to the bad apple theoryâtheyâre prepared to give an institution the benefit of the doubt when it appears that a problem is the result of one bad actor and not an institutional failing. The directors of McKinsey immediately launched an internal investigation to see if others within its ranks were subverting client trust. It was not the case, and thus every single client CEO that I spoke to was willing to see the case for what it was: The crimes were of an individual natureâ not an institutional one.
Thatâs the kind of consideration you earn from your clients not just by doing good work, but also by doing it for yearsâor decades. While thereâs no shortage of critics of the management consulting industry or of McKinsey itself, thereâs a reason that some 85 percent of McKinseyâs business comes from repeat customers; it has made a habit of delivering on its promises to clients. The nature of those promises has changed and expanded over timeâfrom the firmâs original claim to speak truth to power (i.e., telling the CEO something everyone else is afraid to say) to providing what I call âde facto industrial espionage,â to giving a board of directors comfort that the alternatives of a decision have been thoroughly consideredâbut McKinsey nevertheless has a long and well-documented history of satisfied customers.
How did it get that way, and how has it stayed there? To explain that would take a bookâyou may feel free to purchase mine if youâd like the long answerâbut the methods McKinsey used are quite obvious, if also remarkably difficult to actually put into practice. First, know who you are and what you do. Second, hire the best people, invest heavily in their training and development, but also cull your ranks of nonperformers with the same vigor. Third, face up to your mistakes,learn from them and evolve. And fourth, believe in yourself, even if there are those who donât. Thereâs a reason that people who have left McKinsey even decades ago still use the word âweâ when describing the firm in the present tense. In all my years in journalism, I have never come across a company that becomes a bigger part of the self-image of those who work there as McKinsey. The whole Gupta scandal did more damage to McKinseyâs own opinion of itself than it did to anybody elseâs. But they will recover. They always do.
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Duff McDonald, W'92[/caption]
Duff McDonald, Wâ92, is a New York-based journalist. A contributing editor at The New York Observer, he has also written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, New York, Esquire, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Conde Nast Portfolio, Fortune, GQ, WIRED, Time, Newsweek and others.
Jordan Lloyd Bookey, husband Felix Brandon Lloyd, and kids Cassius (4) and Florence (2).[/caption]
The trip to LA was intriguing, and nerve-wracking. Like CIA agents, Bookey and Lloyd couldnât tell anyoneâeven Bookeyâs parents who were babysitting the kidsâwhy they were headed to LA. They vaguely claimed to be on a business trip, one that would last four to five days, while the couple sat in a hotel room awaiting their turn to pitch the Sharks. Yet there was no guarantee they would ever surface before the Sharks, and even if they did, that there presentation would make the cut in an episodeâwhether they got funding or not.
How did they bide their time? Preparation.
âWe watched several seasons several times over,â Bookey recalls.
They created a spreadsheet of every question the Sharks had ever asked over four seasons.
Eventually, they made it before a panel of producers, who provided feedback on the practice pitch.
Cue the âJawsâ theme. They made it before the Sharksâthe likes of Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Daymond John and Kevin OâLeary.
âThe first time you see the Sharks is the first time you see the Sharks,â Bookey recalls. âSo it's nerve- wracking."
It was only a couple of weeks ago that they finally found out that they would appear on the show. âFor a new business like Zoobean, to be handed such an amazing one-of-a-kind marketing opportunity, it was difficult to wait and have so much ambiguity about when and if it would air, says Bookey.
Now, though, it is time for Zoobean to take advantage of an opportunity that two other Wharton alumni entrepreneurial teams have faced. Craig Isakow, WGâ08 and his product Eyebloc appeared in January on the show. And last year, the team at VerbalizeIt had a strong showing against the Sharks.
Not only have fellow Wharton alums been on the show; they have provided priceless assistance to Zoobean since its inception. Bookey gives particular shoutouts to Dave Krieger,Wâ95, who responded to her request with hours of advice and encouragement, and Prof. David Reibstein for helping them hone their marketing strategy.
"Wharton was very significant for me in making this happen," Bookey says of her startup and her classmate's and former teacher's proclivity for networking and sharing knowledge.
Now as for the rest of the Wharton community, the least we can do is watch them take on the Sharks! The episode airs Friday, April 18 at 9:00 p.m. EDT on ABC.
Prof. Peter Fader in action in a Wharton classroom.[/caption]
The concept of strategic thinking is often a topic of executive staff meetings or one burrowed deep in the mind of a business owner. I found a great source of inspiration on the topic through a professor from the Wharton School, 
The idea behind customer centricity, says Prof. Peter Fader, is to âfigure out who are the good customers, and then roll out the red carpet" to them.[/caption]
Fader proposes that some of the answers lie in the improvements that have been made in the way we can gather data on customers and shifting from the mindset that data isnât just about numbers, but about getting to the real story that is being told.
Fader notes that âcreating a blockbuster product or service is increasingly hard to do, especially given increased competition.â Companies can adjust by âdoing what a lot of small businesses have figured out implicitlyâunderstand customersâ unique value and their unique needs.â Businesses can change the focus from what is being presented to the customer (the product), and instead find out what the customer really needs. The idea is that it is better to look at it from the perspective of the most important grouping of customers versus looking at it from the point of view of making or selling products.
And why not scale things for efficiency? Why not automate as much as possible?
Fader notes that, in this regard, âAmerican retailing actually took a step backwards. Making strides in operational excellence was good, but there is only so much more that can be achieved. The focus needs to change.â He notes that big companies should be looking to replicate the mom-and-pop feel of smaller businesses. Do you outsource your customer service overseas, or hire an army of hand-holders to work with every customer? The answer probably lies somewhere in between.
How should we look at market segmentation differently?
Fader points out that âwith todayâs ability to obtain better data and the computing technology to process that data, combined with a better understanding of analytics, we can gain a better understanding of customers than ever before.â For example, defining the market segments based on product usage might be a different approach that can allow for better segmenting. Instead of defining a segment as âmiddle-income moms in their 30s,â we might define a segment as âpeople who go camping.â Thus, what youâd offer someone based on how theyâd use it for camping would have more value than targeting the customer based on gender or age.
OK, so weâve determined a better way to segment our customers, but so what?
We need to determine the profitability of each segment to target the customers with the most value. And, as Fader notes, âthe ability to define the profitability of the segment needs to also include the concepts of projecting what the customer is worth in the future, and where the customers is on the buying cycle trajectory.â
Fader notes that companies are often scared of budgeting based on guesswork versus hard data, and guesswork about the future is not as comfortable as hard historical data. And, one does have to be smart about the guesswork. There may be a segment that âlooksâ great, only to uncover that it is a segment filled with once-in-a-lifetime buyers who are hard to access.
Editorâs note: In 
One reason for this is that the technology weâve been developing in this space has focused on collecting, storing and processing more and more data. Not enough efforts have been directed toward developing reliable metrics and models that can consistently link the data to company performance.
Recently, The Walt Disney Co. started piloting wristbands that allow resort guests to unlock their hotel rooms, pay for meals, enter the theme parks and obtain passes to attractions and rides. You can imagine how much data this technology would generate. You can also imagine the potential insights you can extract from the data. But for those who have had the privilege of managing data analytics efforts, you can also imagine drowning in pages of reports and metrics. How much money do guests spend on an 85-degree day versus a 60-degree day? How frequently do guests return to their rooms during their stay and when?  Is gift shop purchasing correlated with what rides and attractions visitors get passes for?
Disney has the sophistication and resources to effectively use  this data for their marketing and operations efforts, but we canât all be Disney. So how do we handle all of the data and metrics generated from our technologies, ranging from sales metrics and social media metrics to market research and customer tracking data?
1. Stay focused. The first step is to start with strategic goals, and structure the data collection and analysis around those goals. This is common knowledge in offline marketing research but somehow it has been lost in the world of big data analytics, where analysts are seduced by interesting metrics and data visualization. Instead of asking, âI wonder whether gift shop spending is correlated with passes for rides and attractions?â we should be asking, âWho are our heavy spenders and how can we identify them?â The first question results in an interesting correlation metric that may inform a strategic decision. The second question stimulates a suite of metrics that would clearly inform segmentation and targeting strategies.
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How does Disney do data for marketing and operations?[/caption]
2. Measure what matters. Too often, we build metrics based on what is easy to measure instead of measuring what matters. Thus, once we identify our strategic goals and questions, we need to hone in on the metrics we would need to answer those questions. We want our strategic objectives to guide our analysis and data collection rather than letting the data structure define the metrics and analysis. When we let the data drive the process, we often end up with an abundance of metrics that we donât really know what to do with.
3. Establish a baseline and set benchmarks. While it might be great to know how much the average customer spent in the gift shop after riding Space Mountain, itâs not clear if that is good or bad, or if any of our marketing efforts around the Space Mountain experience worked. What we need are baselines and benchmarks to measure success. Before launching any new promotion, we need to establish a baseline to tell us what our performance metrics normally look like. We also want to set a target for the metric that will tell us if our promotion was successful, profitable and worth the investment.
4. Monitor past success. In the world of metrics overload, it is important to monitor success by tracking the metrics linked to the organizationâs strategic objectives and comparing them to baseline and benchmark metrics after the campaign. Better yet, smart organizations should maintain a library of baseline, benchmark and outcome metrics to improve service. This would allow the organization to identify elements of their past activities that worked and those that fell short, and learn how to optimally design their activities moving forward.
How can marketers focus on optimizing the customer segments with the most value, then service those customers ?[/caption]
What about the focus on customer retention versus new customer acquisition? Fader points out that most businesses see customer relationship management (CRM) as a priority over new customer acquisition. This makes sense on the surface, as once you have a customer, odds are that they are likely to buy again once they know you. Compare this to the costs of going out and getting new customers. However, Fader points out that, in the classical model of 20 percent of the customers accounting for 80 percent of a companyâs revenue, a company should find out what makes that 20 percent different from the 80 percent. Then, go and find more like them. In the end, there is more value to be had in getting more of those key customers than practicing CRM on all 100 percent of the customers.
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Prof. Peter Fader[/caption]
But, how do you determine that 20 percent segment? How do you know if a segment really has the ability for repetitive growth? Ironically, the shotgun approach of âscratching the surface of each segment, finding out how valuable each segment is, shifting spending towards the more valuable segments, updating estimates, and then repeating the process on a continual basisâ is a method Fader recommends on those most valuable customers. Every segment may not behave the same, and it is important to go to segments that are replicable and predictable, otherwise you may end up chasing after a segment that cannot be chased.
The concept of the importance of the future value of a customer also relates to how a company works with and evaluates its sales force. Fader relates that âmost sales people push product the old way, have quotas from management, get marching orders from the marketing people, etc.â But, he sees the modern salesperson as someone who should be measured on how much they âbuild forward looking lifetime valueâ with a customer. This may include forging better relationshipsâand  even giving product awayâin  order to build long-term value. Thus, the company and its sales force might sacrifice short-term sales targets in exchange for a longer term relationship.
Who else is using these tactics? Fader points out that a lot of companies try, but fall short. They may gather the data, but then they donât take steps to do anything with it, or they donât understand the science behind the data or the story that the data are telling. A company can ride the buzzwords of CRM, social media, big data and retargeting, but companies need to understand what these things are really doing for them and, as Fader notes , âmost companies donât have that level of sophistication.â He notes that the technology to gather the data is getting ahead of the science of what the data really mean, to the point where companies even do creepy, intrusive things âbecause they canâ and not necessarily because it increases value. His advice is to âstart simple, capture patterns, then look at technologies.â
He provides examples of companies that are taking action, such as the video game giant Electronic Arts. The company is moving away from the blockbuster mentality, and instead, looking at who are the valuable customers and what games should be developed for them. He notes that Starbucks isnât as focused on bringing the next blend of coffee to market, but is now looking at its customers and increasing their value by learning from baristas. By gathering data from the people who work with the customers every day, Starbucks is able to develop profiles to create recommendations based on what other customers with similar habits have enjoyed.
By looking a little differently at products, customers, segments, data and technology, companies can develop a customer-centric strategy that can make them smarter and more profitable.
Editorâs note: In 
Wharton Prof. David Bell in action discussing the interplay between online and offline in marketing and sales. Photo credit: Shira Yudkoff.[/caption]
Bellâs power to entertain and inform comes in part because of the depth of his topicâthe intersection of online and offline retailâand because of the professorâs talent at delivering material in both a structured, as well as completely off-the-cuff, manner. Bell, the Xinmei Zhang and Yongge Dai Professor of Marketing, appears to be able to emit knowledge at will.
In the case of the master class he taught on Friday, May 16, attendees walked away with gems of 21st century marketing knowledge, which Bell offered during tangents in his own presentation and in response to alumni questions. They included:
[caption id="attachment_25814" align="alignleft" width="500"]
Wharton Reunion attendees enjoy Prof. David Bell's Lifelong Learning master class. Photo credit: Shira Yudkoff.[/caption]
⢠âItâs not necessarily about coming up with the next Facebook.â Here, Bell stressed that entrepreneurs and innovators in the retail space are more often improving upon whatâs been done for a century, rather than trying to start a revolution.
⢠Marketing today is about creating dialogue and crafting an ongoing narrative. The maxim that âbad brands can kill a great productâ is truer than ever, Bell said.
⢠2014 is the âage of the deep, organic celebrity,â when âanyone has an audience to whom they can connect.â Bell pointed to 
If youâre only distributing your mobile app in one language, more often than not youâre missing potential customers and neglecting the value of the hours sunk into building, testing and launching your app. 
Prof. Jonah Berger. Photo credit: 
âMichal Clements and Luca Ottinetti
Michal Clements, WGâ89, is a market strategy consultant and co-author of the book 
Luca Ottinetti, WGâ89, is the managing director of 
Are marketing executive job prospects so dim that CMOs may rather change professions to coffee barista?[/caption]
To start, we need to extinguish the belief that cool companies are cool to work for. Thatâs hard to dispel when you look at companies such as Coca-Cola, Disney and Facebook.
I used to think that way until I worked at some great brands and realized that the work environment didnât exactly fit the brandâs outwardly cool factor. Itâs not always the case, but if weâre looking for a healthy career, we need to dig a little deeper and look beyond how we perceive the brand from a consumer standpoint â itâs not all Mickey and Pluto and loveable polar bearsâand see it for what it really is.
What I discovered was that the brand of the company doesnât really matter as much as having a solid working environmentâone where you are supported and are set up for success. Weâll get into the litmus test on the next entry, but goal is to find yourself in a job surrounded by a great management team, a working product that customers like, and a budget you can spend.
Editorâs note: David will expand upon what makes for a good career fit for a CMO, and how to determine it during the job interview process, in Part 2 of âWhen Marketing Jobs Become Uncool.â
âBrian Epstein is my historical mentor," Tiwary said. Note: Tiwary stressed heâs a mentee, not a fan, and as such looks to Epstein for what to do, as well as what not to do.
Tiwary shared his six rules during a presentation to the Wharton Club of New York in May.Words of warning: As Tiwary told his Wharton audience, âNone of these rules mean anything unless you believe your product or service is the best."
1. Define Goals Clearly
Brian Epstein receives the Edison Award for the Beatles in 1965. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons, Dutch National Archives[/caption]
Contributor David T. Scott offers a three-part litmus test for the perfect marketing executive job.[/caption]
Test #1: Do you like your prospective boss?
The job responsibilities, the perks and the money may be great, but none of it matters if you donât get along with (or hate) your boss. Trust me, it happens.
What should you look for in a new boss? You need to know that he or she is a person you can respect. Most importantly, you have to know if your boss will have your back.
The interview at this level is a two-way street, and you should put them through as much scrutiny as they do you. What is their management style? How did they get along with your predecessor? Who do they admire as a leader and why? These questions reveal very specific qualities in the person you will be spending a lot of time with and help lead you into, or steer you away from, taking the job.
Unsolicited feedback becomes invaluable when evaluating a place of employment and potential boss. Take the time and use the resources you have at hand, such as social media and your own personal network, to see if you can talk to someone who has worked for the company and with your potential new boss.
âGetting the perspective of current and former employees, partners and vendors would be really useful in building a complete understanding of culture, values and expectations,â Jose Ramos, CMO for Astrum Solar, said to me.
Pay attention to where your new role sits within the organization. Peter McStravick, principle at Heidrick & Struggles (an executive recruiting firm), explained to me that one way to determine how strategically relevant marketing is within an organization is to see whom the CMO reports to.
âIf the marketing head is a direct line into the CEO, then it suggests the company is at least market oriented.â
As many questions as you ask and people you talk to, nothing will replace your gut. The ultimate question should be: Do you trust this person? If your gut says no, run the other way.
Test #2: Do you believe in the product? Does it work?
Can you market a tobacco product if you donât smoke? Can you sell the next Grand Theft Auto if you hate video games? You probably can, but itâs certainly easier if youâre passionate about it. This issue is probably more likely to occur in the technology field where, a lot of times, the product doesnât perform as promised. Marketing a product that doesnât work as intended can make your job harder. Instead of marketing, it simply becomes lying.
âA lot of things are expected of the CMO, but lying shouldnât be one of them,â Mitch Bishop, CMO of Moovweb, told me. âThe magic of good marketing is when all you have to do is amplify the truth in the product, not bend it. If the product works and you believe in it, it makes the job that much easier.â
Whatever you do, donât just take the companyâs word for it that the product is great. When you receive the offer, make sure you ask for a demo or sample. Play with it. Taste it. At the very least, talk to someone who has used it. So when the time comes, you can and will stand behind the product because you know firsthand how great it is.
Test #3: Are you set you up for success?
Raise your hand if youâve ever walked into a new job only to find that your budget has been cut, your staff is inexperienced or your boss believes marketing is a bunch of hocus-pocus. If I could, I would have three hands raised right now.
Before you sign on the dotted line, youâll want to make sure that youâre in the best position to be successful. So here is what you want to ask: