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Richard Rosen, "Convergence Marketing: Combining Brand and Direct Marketing for Unprecedented Profits"

Offering a common language, better processes, and a set of practical tools, Convergence Marketing is a real-world guide that successfully combines the best of brand and direct into something more powerful and effective than either can be on its own. Convergence marketing offers the kind of real-time accountability that positions marketing as a vital and effective component of leadership's overall business strategy. Convergence brings brand and direct together with respect to both disciplines, within the same silos. And it offers the necessary tools and processes that deliver better results. Our global market demands nothing less than this fully integrated approach. Convergence Marketing is the key to shifting marketing communications efforts from a cost-based to a profit-driven model and will have your CFO begging you to spend more money.

Summary: Must Read for Marketing AND Sales Management

Rating: 5

If you consider yourself a brand manager or a brand creator, you must read Richard Rosen's book. If you believe yourself to be an expert on direct marketing and shy away from anything that smacks of brand, you must read Rosen's book.

Convergence marketing respects branding with all of it's goals and then makes a case for deliberately using and integrating direct marketing's aggressive tactics into brand tactics to create sales. By introducing his Rosen Velocity Scale he inserts into language and lexicon a thinking process that the neophyte and the most sophisticated marketer can grasp and instantly use.

While Richard has used this as his approach to brand and direct, until I read his work and actively used it with clients in attempting to separate branding and direct marketing, I didn't understand the power of the Rosen Velocity Scale. For instance, in my own client discussions I would ask them, "How aggressive do you want to be?" I contended they could use traditional print media while using direct methods to create stronger and more measureable responses. I talked about it and diddled in with it, but he has actively proven how do it so it works.

It was while meeting with a client that I decided to venture into explaining the Rosen Velocity Scale and how to grade promotions from V1 to V10 (pure brand to pure direct). The client immediately grasped the concept and said, we need to be in the V6-V8 range.

Before I give too much away, there are three parts to the work:

Part I: Convergence of Brand and Direct: The Setup, why it's needed.

Part II: Measuring the intention and Success: Process Tools and Practical Applications

Rosen Velocity Scale, Sales Cycle, Ask and the Offer, Value, Real Time Accounting, the Brand Interaction Accelerator

Part III: Performance and Balance: Case Studies and the Last Word.

For me, Chapter Four is the gold mine, with 31 pages devoted to the Rosen Scale and a perfect step by step example/case study from TaylorMade Golf products. I like the "Ask and the Offer " Chapter (6), but my results orientation drove me to spend time rereading the "Real Time Accounting" chapter ( 8).

This book will have an impact on both brand and direct practitioners that will last throughout their careers. I recommend buying two copies. One to read and keep and one to immediately give away to someone you have as a client, peer, subordinate or boss, ok so that's five copie. Once they understand the concept, your life will be easier because now you have allies as you embark on, Convergence Marketing; Combining Brand and Direct for Unprecedented Profits.

Summary: Marketing by the Numbers

Rating: 5

As the marketing director for a sales-dominated, B2B transportation software services, I report to the Sr VP of Operations. He cares about one thing: does our marketing work? What's the ROI for every dollar we spend -- because I'm a cost left. Our weekly meetings are punctuated by a single expression: show me the numbers.

In our case, the numbers have to do with leads. We know that X leads equal Y engagements by the sales force, and Y engagements yield Z sales based on our historic close ratios. (We get these numbers through web analytics, our CRM, and examining all of our lead sources.)

But how do the integrated marketing campaigns we run perform? Which components of the marketing mix perform better? I.e., what's their ROI?

Here's a book that not only shows you the numbers, it shows you how to get to them: the "velocity" scale that tells you whether an ad is going to promote the brand and/or generate leads or help you clear out your inventory with a bake sale; the brand-interaction worksheet that will show you how to calculate the ROI of individual components of your marketing mix; and the customer dialogue strategy that will help you figure out how to communicate with your prospects based on where they are in their BUYING cycles rather than your SALES cycle. You'll also learn how to turn the "A" leads over to sales, while you cultivate the "B" leads, and chuck the "C" leads -- in fact, your profitability lies in all those "B" leads who will adhere to James Obermayer's Law of 45. (i.e., within a year, 45% of all prospects who raise their hands will buy something that addresses their need -- whether or not they buy it from you.)

There are also some very common sensical notions, such as empathizing with your customer (novel concept), that brand isn't nearly as important as your customers' relationship with the brand, and what works for Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Nike, or Starbucks just might not work for you unless you have beaucouples of money, a visionary CEO, or you might just happen to work for a pretty good company with pretty good products and pretty good people -- but no celebrity CEOs or brands.

I picked up Convergence Marketing because it promised to combine "the school of advertising and the school of business." It does just that.

In fact, after I picked up one copy, I got a dozen more and gave them to the marketing team, the product marketing managers, and the sales directors -- and my boss. We paused the old way of planning -- based on "gut" and historic precedents guided by a percentage of last year's marketing budget factored in with this year's revenue projections. Now we're "marketing by the numbers," so we can accurately measure the return on our marketing investments and feed the winners more and either get rid of or fix the losers -- according to the principles found in Convergence Marketing.

Caution: I mentioned principles in the sentence above. Rather than "can't miss" techniques that some business books tout, you'll get verifiable principles. All you have to do is apply them to your business, whether it's B2B or B2C. The beauty of it is, you only have to try something, test it, measure it, and then do the math.

Just one quibble: the title is a bit misleading. When I saw the words "Convergence Marketing," I thought it had to do with something other than the merger of advertising (creative) and business (numbers.) My guess is that when the 2nd edition comes out, the title will be closer to the essence of the book: Marketing by the Numbers, something my senior VP loves. Me too.

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Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123