Wanted: Change Agents
We hear it all the time among clients, within companies and at meetings. Everyone understands that if you stand still in today’s rapidly changing environment, then you’ll be choking on the other guy’s dust as you fade into irrelevance. The ability to get ahead, much less to transform, is today’s business imperative. But it takes change agents to lead the charge. In recent months, Prophet has held several webinars featuring senior-level marketers and executives who have taken on the mantle of change agent for their businesses. In sharing their stories, several common themes emerged.

Customer Experience — It's Not Just for B-to-C Players Anymore
For decades, companies in the consumer space have been developing brand experiences around their products and services. These experiences help forge loyalty and create a purpose that resonates in profound, emotional and lasting ways. Consumer brands have invested billions to create experiences built upon distinctive combinations of products, services and people. Companies on the business-to-business (B2B) side, however, are typically less focused on creating customer experiences as a way to achieve competitive advantage. And that might seem to make sense. Yet a closer look shows that the attributes describing B2B winners — reliability, accuracy, quality, ease — are often the hallmarks of a great customer experience.

Partnerships With Staying Power
2011 was a year filled with great partnerships. Who could forget William and Kate’s grand wedding watched by billions around the globe, or the unions of Reese Witherspoon, Daniel Craig, and Nick Lachey? There was also the 72-day marriage of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries — okay, so maybe not all partnerships are meant to be.

Business Shifts Demand Capability Shifts
Many business leaders are making important strides in transforming their marketing strategies to address changing competitive environments, emerging product and service categories, and evolving customer needs. They’re thinking in terms of solutions rather than products, stakeholders rather than customers, and redefining rather than upgrading. To be sure, these are significant advancements. Too often, however, leaders expect new marketing strategies to be successfully executed with old marketing capabilities. The fact is that great strategic plans have failed in the absence of capability shifts.

Understanding and Delivering Customer Experiences that Count
The ability to create and manage the customer experience is something more businesses would like to get right. It's an attainable goal. All it takes is the mindset combined with consistent and thoughtful deployment of tools that allow customer experiences to be monitored and optimized. 

Marketing’s Missing Link
In this article, Fred and Chiaki outline the concept of Signature Touchpoints, the third dimension of marketing, which is just as important as new product development or campaign development to achieve breakthrough in both B2B and B2C markets.

Marketing Middleware
In this article Jeff Gourdji and Jeff Smith explain how to better connect business strategy and marketing execution.

The Inspiration Discipline: The Path to Sustainable Innovation
In this article, Andy, Fred, and Jesse explain how every organization can become a productive source of inspired and actionable ideas by practicing the Inspiration Discipline.

How to Come up With a Breakthrough Marketing Idea
For years, companies have been equating performance with speed and “lean” thinking. They have invested in streamlining processes, reducing costs and applying stringent “Six Sigma-esque” criteria to kill ideas that don’t deliver ROI. What they do not do is explore the world of possibilities.

Are You Shifting? The Time Is Now
In this post from Scott Davis’s blog on Forbes.com, Scott talks about marketers’ ability to evolve beyond tacticians to become visionaries.