My sincere thanks to Olivier Blanchard, who's done a terrific job in his first week as new co-editor of the marketing hub blog. He's done such a great job, many of the cats are herded already! But there are some other posts that have been made by Corante Network contributors this week that you won't want to miss:

Mary Schmidt at Mary's Blog wrote about how top-down strategic planning often fails in the bottom-up real world because of "key disconnect[s]...between the strategy and resource allocation." She describes three warning signs of this, of which the third is:

Forgetting the field. By the time the plan makes it out into the field (if it ever does), it’ll likely be unrecognizable anyway. So, the overwhelmed/under-equipped salesperson will take the path of least resistance. This can look like closing five $2,000 deals versus working on a $10,000 one (which takes longer). But, the $10K customer would be a better long-term revenue generator and the $10K service has a higher profit margin.

Bruce Fryer at Fryer's Blog in the Mountains discussed a difficulty marketers of complicated new technology products often have:

Try as we may, we just cannot simplify the explanation of the product or service. Just cannot put a handle on it. So instead we describe the shape and contents of the entire suitcase of features and benefits. And during the presentation our audience elects to read their email instead of listening to us.

Tom Asacker at A Clear Eye wrote a thoughtful post on the value of what he calls "little 'm' marketing," or marketing tactics. I agree with Tom that we're all guilty of spending much more time talking about the value of big 'M' marketing, or strategy -- especially those of us who are writing about marketing!

"Instead of thinking of "little m" marketing as a means to an end (engaging and persuading - or brainwashing - someone to do something, like visit a website, call a company, purchase an item, etc.), perhaps we should think of it as an end in and of itself? Perhaps we should be asking this question: how can I provide value to my audience through my marketing tactics such that they can engage and persuade themselves?"

Tom's post has some stories of companies that don't quite seem to get this. I actually have a different story. When I worked at Whole Foods Market, our marketing strategy was focused almost solely on teaching people about what exactly we had in our stores and how to shop there. I worked in the tactical trenches on this. I've given dozens of Whole Foods store tours -- that has been a favorite Whole Foods tactic. The point of the tour, which you could only really find out about if you visited a store and signed up for one, since we didn't do any advetising, was never to convince people to try us. The point was always simply to teach, to say, "This is why and how we're different from your Safeway store. Here's how you approach shopping at a Whole Foods."

And yes, it's worked. It's true that Whole Foods is riding a huge wave of interest in natural and organic foods, but one thing the company has done right was to focus on making sure their little 'm' marketing had value to customers.

Have a great weekend!