A Final Situation

You, the New Marketing Leader, run your five-year forecast simulations, and you realize that you need a 30% increase in new customers in order to meet the sales goals your Board requires of you. This will require a 60% increase in your customer acquisition budget.

You sit down with your CFO and explain what must happen. Your CFO tells you, in no uncertain terms, that you won't get one extra penny from her, period. It's your job to figure out how to make due with what you have.

Describe how you would deal with this situation ...

How About This Situation?

You are the New Marketing Leader. You analyze comp segment productivity across your merchandise categories. Merchandise Productivity is absolutely AWFUL. In fact, you can pinpoint the moment (September 2017) when the wheels came off the bus. Your Chief Merchant was hired in February 2017, and September 2017 represented her first opportunity to "impact the brand". And impact it she did!

So you sit down with your Chief Merchant, and you share your data. She tells you to get the heck out of her office and go find new customers who love her "trend right" assortment.

Describe for our audience how you, the New Marketing Leader, will deal with this situation ...

Describe What You'd Do In This Situation

You are the New Marketing Leader. You suspect your merchandise assortment is harming the company. You need help analyzing the issue. Your analytics team operates in a "silo" that you don't have control over. You need the issue analyzed tomorrow. And your silo-based analytics team says your request is "low priority".

Describe what you'd do in this situation. And answer carefully, because you are setting a precedent that will impact your tenure as a marketing leader.

What Would You Do?

You become a New Marketing Leader ... let's say it is at an Apparel company. Two things are happening.

1. Womens Merchandise has a +3% comp segment performance.
2. Mens Merchandise has a -14% comp segment performance.

What do you, as a New Marketing Leader, do to solve this problem?

Discuss.

Price per Item / Units per Order

There's a relationship, as you already know, between how much an average item costs and how many units per order you generate as a consequence.

You have the data to measure the relationship. Use data by merchandise category, measure the change in price (i.e. 5.0 is a 5% increase in chance in price) year-over-year and the change in units per order (year-over-year).

Once you have the relationship, you can determine what the "optimal" price point is, or at least determine the impact of raising (or lowering) prices.

You do this stuff, right?

You have different merchandise categories - for each, measure year-over-year change in units per order and price per item purchased. Simple! Plot the result. Fit a line. Done.

Fabulous Article

This is maybe a year old, +/-, and is worth a year of consideration if you sell apparel:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-death-of-clothing

Doing The Hard Work

Let's think about this for a moment ... pretend you are a catalog brand that has survived twenty years of "disruption" ... and you hire a New Marketing Leader. You give your New Marketing Leader the following information prior to beginning employment:

1. Average Customer Age = 63 years old.
2. Catalog Response = -3% per year, every year, for the past decade (on average).
3. Online = 80% of sales. Website looks outdated, and for good reason, because it caters to a 63 year old customer.
4. New Customer Acquisition response is -30% the past two years.
5. It's hard to acquire customers via Google, and very hard / expensive via Facebook.
6. You are very worried about what your brand looks like 5 years from now.

Describe what your expectations are for your New Marketing Leader surrounding The Great Eight.

• Audience.
• Awareness.
• Acquisition.
• Welcome Program.
• Anniversary Program.
• Optimization Program.
• New Merchandise.
• Existing Merchandise.

Your expectation of your New Marketing Leader should be VERY HIGH. Your New Marketing Leader is going to do the hard work ... no magic.

When you interview the New Marketing Leader, you use the Great Eight as the framework of your interview process. The candidate should be able to articulate a strategy, supported by tactics within each category.

Right?