Laurence N. Gold
Using Research To Guide The Xerox Brand To The Next Generation
Among all the business-to-business brands in the world, Xerox stands out as one of a handful in the rarified space at the top. The company has developed its brand so effectively over the last fifty years that it has become a household name among consumers, even though it does not offer consumer products.
The chief steward of the Xerox brand is Christa Carone, who has been with the company for the last 15 years. She was appointed vice president of the corporation in May 2008 and has served as its chief marketing officer since September 2008.
In our interview, I asked Carone to tell me the story of the Xerox brand and to describe the contribution of market research to the branding process of B2B companies in general, and Xerox in particular. It’s a tale you don’t hear very often.
What is your role at Xerox and what challenges do you face?
I take a great deal of pride in the fact that I work for such a fabulous brand. As CMO, I have responsibility for many elements of our marketing strategies and the marketing mix, including what we do with brands management, advertising, public relations, experiential marketing, interactive marketing and internal communications, as well as looking at the various opportunities we have to deliver integrated messages to the marketplace. I am responsible for marketing both the brand and the corporation, and I work very closely with all of my colleagues around the world to ensure that we are bettering the awareness for the Xerox brand, and driving consideration for our breadth of offerings.
One of the biggest challenges we face right now is that we have a brand which is more than 50 years old. Xerox is incredibly well respected and we have very high brand awareness, but perception of the Xerox brand is still very heavily weighted towards the legacy product for which we are best known, the copying and the printing business. In fact, half of our revenue now comes from services, such as process services, IT, outsourcing services, and some document management. We are starting to help people shift their perceptions of the Xerox brand, a huge challenge and focus of our organisation right now.
Would you describe Xerox’s marketing philosophy, your strategy and the story that you try to communicate?
Our marketing philosophy and strategy are relatively simple. We try not to over-process what we are trying to do in the marketplace. We use our marketing initiatives to look at everything through the lens of truly generating awareness for the Xerox brand in our offerings. Are we shifting perceptions of the Xerox brand? Are we starting to build and drive consideration for the Xerox brand? Are we generating actual leads? If I am following that path and doing it effectively, I feel comfortable that our marketing investments are well aligned.
Our story is pretty clear, and also practical and simple: we talk to the marketplace about the breadth of Xerox’s technology and services, very firmly wedded to the B2B marketplace. We are not a consumer brand. Even though we have consumer brand awareness, our business is firmly in the B2B base. We are very well known in office environments, we are very well known in businesses, small to large, and our message to the marketplace is that when you have Xerox at your side, either through our technology or the breadth of our outsourcing services, it gives you, as a company, more freedom to focus on what matters most – your core competencies, your core business. Therefore, we are able to help customers free up time, free up resources so that they have more flexibility to focus on their real business.
Our focus today is on market research. Specifically, what role does market research play in contributing to the bottom line of B2B companies such as Xerox, but not exclusively Xerox, and what are some examples of that contribution?
To be sure, research plays a very important role in helping to inform the investments that B2B companies are making, not just along the lines of what customers may be seeking or need to improve their productivity, but also the messaging that can resonate most with customers and prospects.
We lean heavily on market research to understand the voice of the customer, and an important element of research is to understand where we sit from the competitor’s perspective. So research tends to be closely aligned with what we’re doing to generate more leads in the marketplace through our different offerings. On a higher level, we do a good amount of market research to understand the effectiveness of our creative executions and to determine whether we are moving the needle on brand perception. We do rely on brand equity tracking that we measure on a regular basis, in order to get a sense of whether or not our marketing investments are making a difference in the marketplace.
Where do you see market research succeeding in the B2B sector, and where is it failing or in need of improvement?
I do think research is helpful for us when we are looking at it through the lens of the competitor’s perspective. We really like to understand where we fit in terms of competitive positioning; if there are any gaps, obviously we adjust to fill.
I’m not sure about where it’s failing, but I do have concerns about the cost of doing market research. In my view, we should not rely too much on market research to be a guiding principle for everything on which we base investment decisions. I do think that it’s important that we do “gut” checks as well. As I’m always telling my team, not everything can be counted and sometimes you need to just have really strong, good, solid business judgment and a good check of your gut to see if some of the elements of your marketing are appropriate. I’m not sure I would say it’s a fault of market research per se, but it’s sometimes easy to depend more on the research than on your own judgment.
At Xerox, what marketing activities does market research get involved in?
It’s involved in just about everything. I can cite a recent experience: we had market research very much involved in the brand campaign that Xerox launched in 2010, the most significant brand advertising campaign in our history. We did a great deal of research leading up to the launch of the campaign, and it absolutely informed the creative execution. Now that we’re in markets, we’re depending on research to give us a good sense of how the creative is being interpreted in the marketplace.
We’re doing a tremendous amount of brand equity tracking and using other components of our research to give us the confidence that our investments are generating return and moving the needle on our brand.
Can you give us some examples of where market research is particularly effective for you in your marketing efforts and programmes?
I would say that the global brand equity tracking that we do is very effective for us. It’s unaided research, so it gives us basically the temperature of how our particular target audience is perceiving the brand and is perceiving Xerox’s influence in certain areas of the market, especially compared to our competitors. It’s getting that barometer check on perception of the Xerox brand, which is influenced by a number of different elements, including earned media, paid media and owned media, so that we can start to influence the brand’s perception. Brand equity tracking is something that we pay a lot of attention to and is an incredibly important aspect of our market research.
Are there some areas of Xerox marketing that market research doesn’t really contribute to, or has a difficult time contributing to?
There’s nothing in particular that I would point out right now. I do think that there are times that when we go with our gut, we are going to miss on those decisions. But other times it’s going to be a big win, so we like to have a good balance of both using that firm data generated via market research, and being willing to trust in our own judgment as well.
Moving specifically to social media and social network activities, how does Xerox take advantage of these new tools?
As is the case for a lot of other people, this is just a way of life now. It’s become business as usual for us, and social media is an essential part of our marketing mix. It’s included in every single component of our programme planning. We are very actively involved in promoting the brand and trying to meet our key objectives, and we use social media to do that. So I am often telling people – and we’ve been talking about this for a couple years – it’s changing every single day so there is always something new. But it shouldn’t be new for marketers to be saying, “Oh, what should we be doing about social media?” For us, there isn’t anything that comes to me right now that doesn’t have a social media angle to it, and there isn’t anything that we are doing outbound or inbound that isn’t related to social media.
Do you have a market research programme that monitors and measures the results of your social media efforts?
We do. Listening is one of the big, important first steps in any type of research component of social media. We put formal listening in place and we’re understanding conversations that people are having about the brand and about our particular offerings. We have real time listening feeds that we are assessing literally on an hourly basis – if not even faster. That type of programme monitoring is a very important aspect of how we play in the social media.
Christa Carone is CMO at Xerox and Laurence N. Gold is the editor and publisher of Inside Research
