WVU Marketing Communications Today

In the marketing profession, we have depended on the Four Ps as foundational to business success. But is that still relevant today? Tune in and learn why Rick Spear says ignoring the Four Ps is like ignoring the alphabet. In this episode, we discuss how pricing, above other strategies, has become the secret weapon for marketers in managing through these uncertain waters of inflation, recession, and constant change. But to wing it or make guesses benefits no one. Pricing is the top strategy to gain—or regain—value. Find out why Rick says that the critical question we need to keep asking is: “What will it take to earn 1 point of market share?” HINT: A few key insights can trump terabytes of data.

About our Guest:

Rick Spear is a senior executive in the capital markets industry who has spent 50% of his career helping to run firms and 50% as a strategic advisor/consultant to CEOs, boards and heads of businesses. As head of strategy, he has helped to architect and manages multi-year growth plans, targeting and growing revenue and profit by sizing markets and performing competitive analysis He has worked with every functional head across multiple companies, including the CEO, COO, CFO, Chief Product Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Head of Middle/Back Office, General Counsel and Chief Risk Officer. His education includes Stanford University and Harvard. He is currently, Senior Advisor at Simon-Kucher & Partners, a global strategy consulting firm focused on growth strategy, marketing, pricing, and sales.

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master’s degree programs in Marketing Communications.

Purpose is an important new way for brands to differentiate themselves in a competitive market.  Our guest Diane Primo, CEO of the agency PurposeBrand, explained that a brand’s purpose must be authentic, and be established with the buy-in of all stakeholders. Only then can it be successfully presented externally for marketing benefit. Join us for a lively discussion about why consumers' growing interest in a brand’s purpose matters, and how to quantify the impact of purpose on your investment. Hint: Take the long view.

About our Guest:

Diane Primo is the CEO of Purpose Brand Agency, an award-winning, Chicago-based public relations, branding and digital marketing firm. She is the only African American female CEO of a purpose-driven communications agency. Diane’s focus on impact marketing stems from the belief that brands must be relevant, purpose-driven and committed to consumers to be successful today. Consumers’ demand for meaning, transparency and authenticity has changed the nature and raised the stakes in all communications.

As founder of Purpose Brand, Diane builds on a groundbreaking 30-year career leading some of the top marketing organizations in the country. She served as general manager at Quaker Oats, president of product management at Ameritech and SBC (currently AT&T), chief marketing officer of CDW and CEO of a Kleiner Perkins-backed e-commerce startup in the home services sector. A communications innovator, Diane was recognized as such with Ragan Communications’ 2020 Top Women in Communications Trailblazer Award. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a BA from Smith College, and is the author of the forthcoming book ADAPT: Scaling Purpose in a Divisive World.

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master’s degree programs in Marketing Communications.

With the rising demand for marketing accountability, and the emphasis being placed on data-driven decision-making, is the intuitive marketer under threat of extinction? Our guest, Susan K. Jones, says that AI and science will allow the intuitive marketer of the future not only to survive but to thrive. Listen in as we discuss how smarter AI and tech will lead to smarter “informed intuition” for marketers everywhere.

Susan is the author, co-author, or editor of more than 30 books. Academically, she is a tenured full professor of marketing at Ferris State University in Big Rapids MI, and she is also a marketing practitioner with a background in banking, collectibles, insurance, and business-to-business.

About our Guest:

Susan K. Jones is a full, tenured Professor of Marketing at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, MI, where she is entering her 33rd year of teaching. Susan's practitioner background includes work at agencies and companies in fields including banking, collectibles, insurance, and business-to-business. Originally a specialist in creative direct marketing, she has broadened her work, research, and teaching into digital marketing and social media. The author, co-author or editor of more than 30 books, Susan is an active volunteer focusing on education and child advocacy. She serves as a trustee of The Ferris Foundation. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in advertising from Northwestern University. Married to her husband Bill, Susan has two married sons and five grandchildren. She lives in Ada, MI.

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master’s degree programs in Marketing Communications.

Is marketing’s focus on the customer misplaced, even harmful? We discussed this radical idea with Tim Parkin, a global consultant and coach to marketing executives at many world-renowned brands.

While marketers have been focusing on the customer, Tim contends that we have neglected our internal teams. They find themselves without the processes, collaboration, and alignment needed to make marketing to customers work.

Join us as Tim explains why he rates most large corporate marketing teams only a 3 out of 10 and gives us an action plan to make this right. HINT: It is tied to a clever combination of skill-based retention and a disciplined process.

About our Guest:

Tim Parkin is a global consultant, advisor, and coach to marketing executives of many world-renowned brands. He specializes in helping marketing teams optimize performance, accelerate growth, and maximize their results.

By applying more than 20 years of experience merging behavioral psychology and technology seamlessly, Tim has unlocked rapid and dramatic growth for global brands and award-winning agencies alike.

Tim is a speaker, author, and thought leader who has contributed to AdWeek, Forbes, MarTech, TechCrunch, and dozens of other marketing outlets. He is also a member of the American Marketing Association, the Society for the Advancement of Consulting, and was inducted into the Million Dollar Consulting Hall of Fame.

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master’s degree programs in Marketing Communications.

"Small business owners are not marketers,” says our guest Stephanie Schwab, CEO of Crackerjack Marketing. But she can help them become proficient, and successful, if they follow a distinct process that she shares during this episode. As the world enters a time of business uncertainty, Stephanie recommends that owners reassess their marketing, to understand the nature of their unique offering and to take stock of their customers. Listen in, as we explore the details around her process, and her marketing must-dos—including the surprising Top Tip she gives to business owners.

About our Guest:

As CEO of Crackerjack Marketing, Stephanie Schwab creates engaging digital marketing programs for exuberant lifestyle, tech, and education brands. Over the last 20+ years, Stephanie has focused on social media, content marketing, and influence marketing, blending management consulting best practices with agency creativity.

She is the Director of the Digital Marketing Programme at Harbour. Space, a high-tech university in Barcelona, Spain and Bangkok, Thailand, where she teaches courses on fundamentals of digital marketing, social media and content marketing, and starting and running an agency.

Stephanie also works with coaches, consultants, and service providers to create profitable and sustainable marketing through her Business Marketing Blueprint program.

Stephanie received her MBA in marketing and strategic planning from the University of Illinois at Chicago. When not working or teaching, Stephanie travels, plays board games with her husband and teenager, knits, and cooks gluten-free meals.

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master’s degree programs in Marketing Communications.

Seth Marrs, the Forrester analyst who follows sales technology, painted an exhilarating picture of the future of SalesTech, saying it will combine with MarTech into an entirely new way of going to market — along with a new organizational function called Revenue Teams. Primarily focused on the B2B ecosystem, but with consumer applications — especially for call centers — this developing technology is enabling an end-to-end customer experience driven by conversational intelligence, NLP (natural language processing), AI, and real-time data capture and analysis. In fact, Seth believes the future will be about opportunities and not leads, and this tech gives us a brand new container for our engagement experience, resulting in more powerful roles for marketing, higher revenues, and customer satisfaction overall. Sounds great. Give a listen!

About our Guest:

Seth Marrs brings more than 20 years of experience leading sales operations, service operations, and marketing organizations. He excels at leveraging data, process, and technology to drive growth in organizations of all sizes and in all industries.

Before joining Forrester, Seth spent the last five years as a consultant and senior vice president leading sales operations and marketing organizations for multiple private equity-backed companies ranging in size from $200 million to $1 billion, where he was responsible for customer acquisition, sales execution, and compensation.

Before going into private equity, Seth led sales operations for Carl Zeiss Meditec in the United States and held multiple executive sales and service roles at GE Healthcare, including leading sales operations for GE Life Sciences EMEA, building and running a global lean organization for the $3 billion life sciences division of GE Healthcare, and leading sales enablement for the US region (which represented $7 billion of GE Healthcare’s revenue).

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master’s degree programs in Marketing Communications.

Recorded live from the Innovation Center at WVU Reed College of Media, Ruth Stevens and Cyndi Greenglass look at the fascinating marketing trends shared on their podcast over the first half of 2022. Included in the discussion are insights on the complex evolution of the customer experience (CX), the emerging power of Gen X as an audience, the importance of your digital first impression, the future of events, humanizing measurement, and connected TV (CTV). Don’t miss this opportunity to catch the highlights of the first half of 2022 and the marketing waves Cyndi and Ruth are riding over the horizon.

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master’s degree programs in Marketing Communications.

As marketers, we spend a lot of time talking about Millennials. We target them as consumers, employees, and donors, to the point of obsession, as the next cohort after the Boomers. But wait! We are overlooking Generation X, not surprisingly called the “Forgotten Generation.” This is the 65 million people in their 40s and 50s sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials. They represent a $2.4 trillion market. Ignoring them could prove a costly mistake for both businesses and nonprofits.

In this episode, we speak with Alicia Lifrak, who is a Gen X member herself, and has spent the past 25 years leading strategy in the nonprofit and higher education worlds. She explains why marketers ignore Gen X at our own peril, and what we should be doing about it.

Pop Quiz: Can you name at least 3 Gen X leaders of major transformational companies today? Listen to this episode for the answer.

About our Guest:

With more than three decades of experience in the philanthropic sector, Alicia M Lifrak is a marketing executive and board advisor, based out of California. He was the first head of marketing for Sirius Decisions, a sales and marketing advisory firm now part of Forrester Research. Previously he has served as marketing executive at companies like Eloqua, inRiver, TOA Technologies and previously created the online marketing function for Nuance, now part of Microsoft. He co-founded DemandCon, the first demand generation conference after creating the Eloqua Experience and Markies awards program that Oracle has continued even after acquiring Eloqua. An in-demand speaker at events like Dreamforce, DMA, AMA and Campus Party, Steve stays active in the industry, serving as a marketing mentor to young professionals.

She currently serves as Executive Vice President for the Gabriel Group, an OSG Company, leading the nonprofit division in offering full-service fundraising, marketing and strategy consultation to clients. Prior to joining Gabriel Group, Alicia spent 25 years leading teams to achieve exceptional results in nonprofit and higher education.

Alicia also serves in several key leadership roles as a volunteer and active member in organizations including The Nonprofit Alliance, NonProfit Pro, Rotary International, the Meridian Society and the Washington University Women’s Society. After moving around the U.S. for most of her life, Alicia now lives in Illinois with her four kids, a cat and a dog. She travels frequently, for work and for fun, is an avid reader and loves to see live music.

To connect with her directly or learn more, contact her at [email protected]

WVU Marketing Communications Today: Horizons is presented by the West Virginia University Reed College of Media, which offers renowned online master’s degree programs in Marketing Communications.