PMA President Bonnie Carlson introduced him as a retail prophet, then RetailNet’s Senior Analyst Keith Anderson backed it up in front of a packed ballroom at Chicago’s Westin River North Hotel as Game Changers 2012 moved into its second day.

Mr. Anderson capped his in-depth, one-hour look at the retail landscape with the following list of operating principles for brands hoping to get it right in today’s world.

INTEGRATION: Integrate online and offline even though it’s likely a 24-month transition.
REINVENTION: Don’t see it solely as a cost. View it as an opportunity.
ATTRIBUTION: Measure digital influence on sales.
DISRUPTION: Manage impulse and upsell in a digital world.
OPTIMIZATION: Find ways to do more with the same staff and same budgets. Find places to cut when prudent.
COORDINATION: Digital is not an afterthought. Retailer, Agency, Brand, Shopper Marketer, and Digital all need to be at the table from the outset.
SPEED: Failure will happen. Fail better and faster. Adjust budget and staff accordingly and re-focus.

We just announced our 2011 Call for Papers & Presenters yesterday.  This call is in conjunction with our upcoming Annual Conference–Game Changer: The Marketing Conference of Big Wins and Bold Thinking–which will be in Chicago on April 5-6, 2011.  This event is super special because it kicks off our Centennial Celebration.  That’s right: The PMA turns 100 in 2011!

We are looking for educational, insight-filled papers that explore new trends and research in any area connected to integrated promotion marketing.  Focus areas might include (and this isn’t an exhaustive list):

This is my initial blog and I appreciate the opportunity to host a forum that provides a voice for the experiential space. There is no shortage of blogs in the advertising, marketing and promotion arena, but none that truly hones in on the depth and perspective that experiential marketing brings in the totality of the marketing experience.  Here are a few of the many reasons why I presume to write:

1. The consumer is changing
2. Measurement, measurement measurement.
3. Convoluted media messages
4. There is a lot of conversation we need to share.

The consumer is changing

Arguably we are leaving a recessionary year that has impacted consumers, business, politicians, and the social fabric that we all have taken for granted for a long time. Foreclosures are at all time high, banks were (and still are) on the brink of disaster, we elected a African American President for the first time in our country’s history, while the Hispanic population is growing at a rate that will make this group a minority in the not so distant future. We have seen a consumption lifestyle morph by necessity and design to one of caution and temperance. Americans are saving more, spending less and volunteering more. This impacts what and how we do what we do.

We, as marketers, first and foremost must be aware of the shift and be sensitive to the fact that there are new paradigms in the relationship between consumers and brands. That is the upside. Change brings opportunity. New rules bring innovations and ingenuity. That is our challenge, and we again, as marketers, based upon our vast experience can be successful.

Measurement, measurement, measurement

With an evolving consumer the need to understand and measure change becomes increasingly more important. In fact it is critical. What do we measure? How do we measure? Why do we measure? What does it mean? Everyone is measured everyday. Students are measured by their grades. Social institutions are measured by their impact on society. Politicians by successful agendas, and brands by sales. It is the core of why we are in business and the importance of this deliverable cannot be short changed. We need to be astute, proactive and accurate.

Convoluted media messages

We are all part of the Media landscape. Where does experiential fit in among social media, out of home, on air, in-store, promotions, shopper marketing, sponsorships, lifestyle, niche marketing, home parties, television, radio, mobile? Is there really a concept of integrated marketing, or interconnected marketing? If so, what does that mean and how do we achieve this integration?. Can the disciplines work together? Will we play well in the sand box? Whose sand box is it anyway? All these questions and thoughts are important as we, experiential marketers , make a difference in the lives of our ultimate target audience.

There is a lot of conversation that we need to share

By starting this blog I hope that we are committed to sharing our collective thoughts, learning’s and insights on what we see and what we don’t. On what works and what doesn’t. With this intelligence we can address the questions that we face daily. What? Where? How? And most importantly Why?

Do I have all the answers? Not by any means. Challenge me when you disagree, add thoughts when I don’t go far enough. Raise topics I miss that you believe to be important. This is collaboration, a group dynamic where we can help each other.  We may not have all the answers but we do know our industry and we have a tremendous amount of experience and knowledge in our reservoir.

Next steps

Look for my first topic blog shortly. I truly ask an open mind and a contributory nature. Together we can create a conversation that will advance the world of marketing in which we live , and  in the process make the world safer for brands.

–Gary Kleinman
CEO
Yardstick Marketing Partners
sister company of Centra Marketing & Communications, LLC.

Very cool resource for marketers.  From the site itself:

This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights. These have been collected from a number of third party sources covering a range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time.

Check out the Google Internet Stat Center here.

Hat tip to Dave Knox for the heads-up.

We’re happy to report that PMA members ranked extremely well in the 2009 PROMO100 awards, which were announced earlier this week, with Catapult Action-Based Marketing taking the award for Agency of the Year.

Other highlights:

50% of the Top 10: #1 DraftFCB, #2 Digitas, #5 G2 Worldwide,  #9 The Integer Group, and #10 Momentum

Those numbers hold up well over the entire list:

• Top 20:  13 PMA Members – 65%
• Top 50:  28 PMA Members – 56%
• Top 100: 45 PMA Members – 45%

Congrats to all of our members!

You can download the entire list here.  Even though the Webinar has passed, login and look for a button on the right that says “download PDF”.

Fellow blogger Chris Kenton–former CMO of the CMO Council–pointed me to a great article by Jonathan Knowles that tackles the subject of brand equity and what marketers need to understand in order to increase our credibility with finance, a particularly prescient subejct given the current economic conditions.  Knowles’s background includes more that 10 year in finance and management consulting and another 10 in brand consulting, so his is a rich take on a topic that is “frustratingly elusive” to define.  The article begins by providing an historical perspective on brand equity and then gets into how the various camps–marketing, finance, and accounting–understand the concept, and ends with some suggestions as to how marketers can close the gap.

As marketers, our perspective is informed by the belief that a strong brand enriches and deepens a product or service.  Consumers will tend to prefer a product or service associated with a strong brand.  However, as Knowles quotes a finance friend, “preference, in and of itself, doesn’t put money in the bank.”

From a finance perspective, in order to clear the hurdle of accountability

brand equity has to be defined in terms of behavior that will create current and future cash flow.

Accounting tends not to like the concept of “brand” because they see the world in terms of assets, tangible (physical property) or intangible (intellectual property), that can be sold.

In fact, they do not recognize the term “brand” at all. What they do recognize is the intellectual property on which the brand is based (the trademark), because this represents a legally enforceable right to do business under a certain name. To the extent that it can be proven that the trademark could be licensed to a third party in exchange for a royalty payment, accountants will have no difficulty with the concept of brand equity (although they would use the term “trademark and associated goodwill”).

So, who’s right?

Actually, Knowles suggests that all three POVs are valid, and it’s ultimately more useful to define the context in which each is appropriate and to look for the commonalities between them.  Of course, the burden of integrating these perspective falls on marketing because, given the other two definitions, ours is the broadest.

The rest of the article looks at four (4) arguments that we should use in order establish our concept of brand equity:

• The three definitions of brand equity lie on a single continuum that describes how marketing creates, captures, and reports value.
• Brand valuation is not the “silver bullet” of marketing accountability.
• Marketing accountability requires an explicit model for how marketing adds value to the business.
• Once the model is agreed upon, marketers should focus on customer metrics rather than financial metrics.

There are a lot more useful ideas in this article, so check out Chris’ commentary here, where you’ll find a link to Jonathan’s article.