Mike Moran, IBM Distinguished Engineer and author of “Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules”, recently interviewed me for his blog, Biznology. I really appreciate Mike’s positive endorsement of Bazaarvoice and hope that you will find the interview educational, as it touches on a number of issues relevant to customers of our Ratings & Reviews product as well as companies that are contemplating the use of user-generated content. Enjoy!
Posts Tagged ‘interview’
Interviews, Marketing Strategy, Partners, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, eCommerce
Ratings & Reviews Q&A with Mike Moran, Author of “Do It Wrong Quickly”
September 18th, 2008 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
Partner Interview: Cliff Conneighton, SVP Marketing, ATG
July 14th, 2008 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
Last month, ATG, Bazaarvoice, Forrester Research, and Multichannel Merchant hosted a webinar on personalization using user-generated content. I can’t speak for our partners, but this webinar was one of our best attended, so I decided to draft off its success by interviewing Cliff Conneighton, SVP of Marketing at ATG. Bazaarvoice and ATG share a number of high profile customers and with each additional deployment of our joint solution, we discover new opportunities for leveraging user-generated content and customer word of mouth to drive richer and higher performing personalization and merchandising experiences. Enjoy the interview with Cliff and please comment if you have any follow-up questions or thoughts!
1. ATG is well known for its personalization capabilities. How would you grade US online retailers, overall, on the quality and efficacy of their personalization strategies? What are the key obstacles these companies must overcome to implement more sophisticated personalization approaches?
I think we need to start with a quick definition of personalization, as it is a term that has been used in many different ways. At the highest level I define personalization as presenting the most relevant information to each customer during each interaction through each channel. In my view it doesn’t mean an individual plan for each individual visitor but rather a refinement of the content presented – images, messages, assortments, promotions, etc. – where appropriate, based on your knowledge of the customer and the reason she’s in your store. I believe the “1 to 1” view of personalization in itself overwhelmed many retailers and stalled adoption.
Based on this definition, I would give online retailers as a group a “C” for their personalization strategies to date. There are a few notable exceptions – and of course ATG clients would rate higher – but in general, industry personalization strategies haven’t moved much beyond a segmented email and a welcome back on the corresponding landing page. However, we’re seeing lots of momentum in the market and many of the obstacles holding retailers back have been removed. Retailers have traditionally been held back by either a lack of actionable knowledge of their customer base or a limitation in available resources or tools to act on the knowledge once gathered.
Partner Interview: John Squire, Chief Strategy Officer, Coremetrics
April 22nd, 2008 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer
Apologies for the several week delay between posting partner interviews, but I am pleased to share the following interview with John Squire, Chief Strategy Officer of Coremetrics. John has been quite busy recently, driving the launch of Connect and preparing for a major product release in May, but he took the time to share his outlook on a variety of industry issues. We welcome your comments and invite you to suggest questions and topics for future partner interviews by emailing partners@bazaarvoice.com.
1. It’s 2008. By now, every online business understands that without a web analytics solution, they are flying blind. That said, not all businesses are sophisticated users of web analytics. On average, how would you grade the industry overall?
I think it’s fair to say that most online business owners recognize that flying blind is far from ideal. Understanding an issue and actually working to overcome it are two entirely different activities. I would give the entire industry a C- overall. That said, there’s certainly a class of businesses that are far and away excelling at their use of web analytics.
2. What are companies doing extremely well?
Looking at the leaders in the field of using web analytics to manage their business, a casual observer would likely conclude the secret to their success is that they are actively and constantly monitoring the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) of their web business. That’s a common trait among each of these, but what we’ve seen that separates the high performing companies from the distant followers is that their organizations truly embrace the notion of data driven decisions. I realize that is easy to say, but these companies look at both the macro trends of their business and constantly break down each KPI to understand the causal factors that drive those trends. From that, they build business models that describe how a % increase or decrease in those causal factors will impact the value created servicing their online visitors and customers. It isn’t easy! Businesses that lead in this area work hard to map their online and offline investments to their topline objectives: Sales, Leads Generated, Advertising Revenue Generated, Bookings, Applications, and the many metrics for Customer Satisfaction, Engagement, and Service.
3. What big opportunities are routinely being overlooked and why?
The odd thing about the online business is that there are so many articles, case studies, and books available on the best practices online businesses are deploying, that it can be daunting to know where to start. What I see is that many companies don’t start or don’t value the importance of constantly evaluating their business for improvement. I think there are two areas where a majority of business owners have huge opportunities:
