Our thinking appears in marketing articles and publications around the world

When thousands of people lost their jobs during the Great Depression, many of them started riding the rails across the country in search of work and food. Hobos, as they were called, had been hopping trains since the 1870s, working as migrant laborers wherever they could find a job. They often traveled by themselves, leading to the inevitable problem of knowing what to expect when arriving in an unfamiliar place. Some cities might be welcoming while others might be less hospitable. A farmer might feed those who worked his fields while others might turn you into the police. A secret language of signs was developed that informed hobos about what awaited them. To the casual observer, the signs were gibberish or graffiti; but to the hobo, they could mean the difference between a hot meal and a night in jail. And therein lies a key question for today’s companies to ask themselves:

For some time now, marketers have talked about methods to measure the economic effectiveness of their programs and have looked for financial metrics suitable to report their activities to the board. A recent survey by the Columbus Business School indicates their success has been limited. Only 30% of the CMOs interviewed use financial metrics for reporting, and 57% of CMOs use no measure of Return on Marketing Investment to evaluate their achievements.

When marketers map customer experience, we start by defining a beginning and an end. To improve the experience for a particular brand, we typically look at the customer’s touchpoints with the brand on that continuum, not acknowledging that our customers live in an ecosystem, transcending any single brand.

Look at any product category and the answer is the same. All of the meaningful changes in market position and sales of individual brands occur only when the brand creates a “must have” for which competitors lack visibility and credibility to be considered. However, most fi rms seldom foster such innovation and bring it to market—and in most cases, it is not because there is a lack of resources. Firms that are profi table and successful are actually less likely to fund market-changing innovation than fi rms that are struggling or in crisis. Why? One answer is the curse of success, which can take several forms.

The only way to grow, with rare exceptions, is to engage in substantial or transformational innovation that will be a game changer, that will create new categories or subcategories defined by qualities that customers deem “must haves” and protected by actively managed competitive barriers. Healthy organizations often have plenty of ideas that potentially qualify but get killed off before reaching the market. As a result, an opportunity to create a platform for real growth is lost.

Nestlé's Nespresso brand dominates the fiercely competitive Swiss market for coffee capsules. But Migros is successfully challenging its powerful competitor with its own brand, Delizio –thanks to a new brand identity and a strong positioning. Success spawns imitators, and Nespresso’s success quickly led to the appearance of numerous competitors: Today nearly a dozen players compete in the portioned coffee market – a market that has seen double-digit growth for the past several years.

For a few years now, the shiniest new toy in the digital marketplace has been the mobile app.

The proliferation has been amazing: The 1-millionth app went live as 2011 came to a close, and the pace has continued through 2012. The trend, Mobilewalla told theNew York Times, has been 15,000 mobile app releases per week.

Everyone wants to get a piece of this pie. And why not? The thing is that for all the really cool, highly successful apps there are hundreds, (thousands?) of others that are dumb, useless, or a joke.

Chaos. If there’s a single word to encapsulate today’s digital environment, that one clinches it. The dizzying pace of change has been hard to keep up with (never mind get ahead of) from every perspective: Channels and platforms. Devices and tools. Customer behaviors…and expectations. For marketers, the challenge is to understand how to best manage the chaos, and that is a do-able proposition.

Brand Valuation is important for us at Prophet because it embodies the intersection of our unique, individual capabilities: brand, marketing, design, innovation, digital and analytics.

In many companies marketing and accounting follow totally separate paths. Accounting is the process of managing income, expenses, assets and liabilities. Marketing is the customer-focused function. This separation is artificial because the two functions in reality are indivisible.

Marianne Caponnetto is a case in point: Change agents can come from anywhere in the organization. At Scholastic, the leading children’s book publisher and education technology company, she’s enabling change from the boardroom after having earned her stripes driving the change imperative in sales and marketing leadership positions at DoubleClick, IBM, and Dow Jones &Co. 

Good business ideas occasionally die an unnatural and premature death. While benchmarks, stage gates, and filters can help prevent bad -- and costly -- decisions, sometimes ideas are just ahead of their time. Revisited periodically, a company’s inventory of dead and discarded ideas may become the source of new opportunities.

Prophet’s senior partner for Analytics James Walker has been leading a book project over the last few months looking at The Future Of Marketing Analytics. We’ve interviewed over 40 CMOs, analytics leaders, business school professors, and leaders of analytical-software vendors. The conclusions are coming together, and we should be ready to publish in the fall, but there are some early learnings around The 8 New Rules of Building A Marketing Analytics Capability.

Out of Aaker's five brand books, what precepts stand out as one of the top ten? Which are most critical “to do” tasks for someone charged with creating or managing a business? What do you need to know to excel at building a brand? 

Almost everything about marketing is sexy and exciting, spanning, as it does, so many interesting areas that are highly visible to the entire organization and public. Marketers manage the brand (or brands), its position, communications, and lead such popular trends as digital strategies, social media, and guerilla marketing. 

And then there’s pricing, decidedly not sexy despite being one of the most critical aspects of marketing. This is where margins are made, cash flow is generated, and businesses grow. It’s the profitability backbone of an organization. It is also the most measurable aspect of a brand, and lends itself to a plethora of analytics opportunities to make these challenges surmountable.

The point of sale is the key consumer touchpoint for many brands (especially in consumer goods) that reflects the moment of truth in a consumer’s purchasing process. A large part of marketing investment focuses on converting consumers at this critical point.

These are tough times for companies trying to build and maintain their reputations. Between the sluggish economy, business toe-stubbing (and worse), and a public with a long memory and an increasingly skeptical nature, recovering from the reputational hits that have hammered U.S. businesses in recent years is going to be a slow process.

Prophet’s third annual corporate reputation study reflected the confluence of these and other factors, as overall reputation scores fell across almost all industry sectors.

Meet James Walker. Prophet’s newest senior partner will be spending the foreseeable future hopping between his home in the U.K. and the States as he helps bring analytics to life for savvy marketers. He’s spent the last 20 years in the marketing sciences, on the big agency (J. Walter Thompson), big consultancy (Accenture) and entrepreneurial sides. He recently shared his views of the new practice area he’s leading, and a peek at other interests that occupy his time.

David Aaker was profiled by Techronicle, the biannually published Business and Technology magazine for senior business leaders.

Prophet senior partner James Walker has spent his entire career in marketing consulting, analytics and research. He was fascinated to see neuromarketing becoming more mainstream, so he met up with Hilke Plassmann, the global thought leader in the application of neuroscience to marketing. Hilke is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at INSEAD where she teaches marketing management in France and Singapore in INSEAD’s MBA program, and neuromarketing in INSEAD’s Executive Education Program. She is currently Visiting Faculty at The Wharton School as part of the INSEAD–Wharton alliance.