More from the Frost & Sullivan Marketing World 2009 Event

Today's recap from the Frost & Sullivan Marketing World 2009 event, highlights presentations from two CMOs - Eduardo Conrado at Motorola (Broadband Mobility Solutions) and Chris X. Moloney at Scottrade.

Eduardo spoke on "CEO Expectations: How Marketing Must Drive Growth in Today's Economy." Among his key points:

• One downside of seeing yourself as a tech company is you lead with technology, not customer benefits. Comment - Every company is susceptible to this. When you're strong at a core capability delivering important benefits, make sure you don't get caught up in the capability and lose sight of potential changes in benefits your customers are seeking.
  
• In positioning new products, Motorola attempts to start with the customer perspective, followed by the Motorola solution, and then adding the product detail. Comment - This isn't revolutionary, yet this solid formula should be kept top of mind when working through positioning, messaging, and customer communications.
  
• Motorola attempts to find communities that have developed offline and create a place to host them online. And to add value, Motorola seeks to aggregate relevant content from multiple sources, including material from outside the company. Comment - Great reminder that a company's social media effort can benefit from going to where people are already being social and adding value vs. trying to lure them to a completely new place with unproven benefit.

Chris Moloney covered "Major Growth and Marketing Opportunities in the New Reset Economy," with metrics and search as important themes:

• Chris challenged sellers to work from the buyer's metrics to be able to best serve them. Comment - Amid the challenges many marketers face in getting a handle on their own metrics, it can seem daunting to consider starting with consumer metrics. Yet this theme is right on target, and has been echoed by other CMOs I've seen in the past 18 months, most particularly Keith Pigues at PlyGem. You have to understand what success looks like from the customer's view, particularly in B2B markets, to deliver the best possible value.
  
• Every marketer needs to understand search in some form, and it's a good area to get good at for the efficiency benefits in can create within your marketing mix. Comment - Search was a big theme throughout the day. Patricia Hursh, President and Founder, SmartSearch Marketing, did an informative presentation on free tools to better understand search traffic on your website. It's an area I'll be exploring more deeply given the predictability of search as a marketing tool.

Tomorrow, we'll recap the innovation roadblocks roundtable I facilitated at the conference, with some really cool ideas from the participants. - Mike Brown