New Blog Posts - Paolo Provinciali

Delivering Better Brand Experiences: Why It’s So Hard and What to Do About It

By Paolo - Wednesday 18th July, 2018

Great marketing is about making consumers enjoy the experience they have with your brand. Every consumer touchpoint should be a delightful brand experience, even when carrying a commercial message. This is how you positively impact everyday customer behavior and purchasing decisions. If we want people to change how they behave, we have to change their experiences. In spite of this knowledge, brand marketing is often tied to vanity metrics that don’t drive any real behavior change, and performance marketing is not much better than the cheesy infomercial you see on late-night TV.

But marketers want to do better: no one sets out to do a mediocre job. The industry is continuously innovating to deliver better brand experiences and drive impact, but the results are often inconsistent, making it difficult to know what new practices to adopt.

This post explores some of the current efforts made to provide a better brand experience. Through this careful exploration, we’ll discuss why it’s so hard to raise the bar and look to the future to see how to break out of stale marketing cycles.

The Hidden Threat for CPG Companies

By Paolo - Thursday 28th June, 2018

Last week I was invited to a roundtable with other CPG industry experts, and we were asked if we thought the competition for CPG companies was going to intensify or decrease over the next 12 to 24 months. My answer was similar to the other experts’, but I gave different reasons than many of them. After a few days pondering about the answer I gave, I realized that I was way off base. While other experts reasonably argued that competition would increase due to the pressure retailers create by promoting private label brands, I justified my answer saying that the raise of eCommerce would force CPG companies to develop skills and knowledge not currently in their repertoire, forcing them to compete in a field mostly foreign to them. Now I realize I was completely off. Let me explain why.

Why you shouldn’t use CLTV/CAC

By Paolo - Tuesday 26th June, 2018

Long-Term Business Sustainability Depends on the Right Measures

A metric commonly used to measure the performance of high-growth businesses is Customer Lifetime Value over Customer Acquisition Cost, or more simply CLTV/CAC. It is a much better metric to provide an objective to marketing teams than many others we have seen in the past, but it has also some tremendous flaws associated with it, and if not used correctly and in the right context, it can jeopardize the business using it.

The Advertising value-exchange

By Paolo - Tuesday 4th April, 2017

When talking about the advertising value-exchange, people often think about the commercial relationship between the advertisers, publishers, vendors, and the many players in the marketing and media space. But what often gets overlooked in this equation is the most critical player of all: the consumer.

The most significant exchange in the advertising world happens between the advertiser that promotes an ad and the user that consumes that content.The most significant exchange in the advertising world happens between the advertiser that promotes an ad and the user that consumes that content. I’ve already written about ways to get the right message, in front of the right consumers, at the right time, but in this post, I want to discuss the reason why the consumer should pay attention to the message in the first place.

Surviving Innovation

By Paolo - Friday 23rd September, 2016

Throughout my professional career, innovation has always been the focus of the environment around me. Although it can often be an abused term, this proximity to groups aspiring to be innovative taught me a lot about this elusive concept. Recently, I started reflecting on some commonalities that I encountered when dealing with innovative companies, products, and teams, and I thought it could be interesting sharing them in a post.