Michael S. Kerman

In preparing for a recent client presentation and proposal, I re-read Deloitte’s January 2019 report, “Beyond Marketing”. I’ve found this report to be extremely accurate and insightful as it paints the ever-evolving picture of marketing’s evolution, obstacles and desired-state. “THE new world of marketing is personalized, contextualized, and dynamic. Increasingly, this world is orchestrated not by outside parties but by chief marketing officers partnering with their technolog

Most blogs and articles tell you how to avoid worrying about this and that. This blog is different. With the shortest tenure of any of the C-suite positions, Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) instinctively worry and the list of concerning issues is vast. Rapid changes in customers, technology, data privacy and more make it a very challenging time to be in marketing. However, here are 5 good ideas for CMOs to really focus on: 1. Customer Research. Everywhere you turn, the focus i

I just finished an interesting project. A marketing VP asked me to help him examine and potentially “right-size” his event spending. He was spending approximately 45% of his program budget on events and didn’t have a lot to show for it. We spent a lot of time in spreadsheets, looking at different events, counting prospects and leads(?), tabulating total event costs and more. I also had him walk me through the event planning and decision-making process. After a few days of bac

I was delighted to read Denise Lee Yohn’s an article in HBR entitled “Why Great Innovation Needs Great Marketing”and finally see someone reinforce such an important linkage. However, I finished the article and felt uneasy - there was something incomplete or missing. It took me a while, but finally I realized that the article had two main shortcomings and having spent more than 20 years in high technology and marketing, I'd like to share my perspective. First, I couldn’t help

Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about attribution. Some people think about their summer plans or the Oscars or Spring Training. I, on the other hand, have been thinking about attribution. The underlying questions are really quite simple, aren’t they? What is driving our pipeline and revenue? Every marketer wants to know this so we can stop doing things that aren’t working and double-down on what is working. The challenge, of course, is that at any givin

Even after all of these years, I still hear the common lament which comes in two forms: “Marketing produces all of this content and nobody reads it” “Marketing produces all of this content but we don’t know if any of it is of value” One of the key pillars of any marketing plan, especially in the B2B world where purchase decision are increasingly complex and where buyers typically consumer 6-10 pieces of content before making a purchase decision, is the creation and distributi

A few days ago, I received a call from a CEO who wanted to get some advice on marketing. He has a head of marketing, but he was particularly troubled by, surprise, the General Data Protection Regulation or "GDPR". We met for lunch and he shared with me his situation which can be translated into the following statement: "How can I have a European marketing plan with GDPR in place? What can I do where?" Now, the first thing I did was to mention that he should get legal counsel