Posted by: Jena McGregor on September 04
It may be hot in August, but it was apparently a little cooler in corporate boardrooms this year than in years past. According to Liberum Research, which tracks executive turnover for investors among all publicly traded companies, the number of C-suiters who departed their posts this August was much slower than July and far below the numbers from the same time frame in 2007. Overall CEO turnover in August, wrote senior vice president Richard Jacovitz in an email, declined a "huge" 37% from August 2007. CFO turnover declined 21% and overall C-level turnover (board of directors down to corporate vice presidents) declined 34%.
And the 2008 numbers--1,543 total management changes were made in August--aren't just down from a 2007 blip, when the credit crunch may have added to the 2,345 management changes that were made. They're also down 25% from 2006. "The most obvious explanation for the lower level of executive turnover," writes Jacovitz, "is that management appears to be doing whatever it can to save its own positions while continuing to cut the overall number of employees as [a] way to slash budgets and remain lean in tough economic times."
While it's true this year has seen a huge jumps in layoffs, and executives surely are doing all they can to save their jobs, I'm not sure I completely buy that rationale. My guess is the economy lets many CEOs--and the boards who hire them--blame the macro. CEOs who perform poorly in a boom time stick out like a paisley suit in a Wall Street boardroom. Those who don't do well when everyone around them is stumbling, too, can hide more easily behind the broader economic picture.
Posted by: Nanette Byrnes on September 03
Coke has begun the process of measuring the return on its Beijing Olympic sponsorship and as befits a country of 1.3 billion, the numbers are BIG.
The immediate results -- like how much of a sales bump it produced -- are being tallied but the company says it's an investment in long-term business growth in China anyway. What they have already calculated is the number of "customer connections" they made in the run up to the games and the games themselves: more than half a billion.
That's the sum of a pretty wide variety of Olympic-connected promotions. It includes the people who stopped by the 20-odd centers set up across the country serving Coke and screening the games on TV, votes cast to help choose torchbearers (310 million), photos submitted for an Olympic photo mosaic (26 million), artists who submitted ideas for a special edition bottle (30,000), and those who voted on the best bottle design (nearly 12 million). More than 260 million consumers downloaded the Coca-Cola Olympic song. And 26 million got a free Coke while watching the torch cross the country, part of the biggest sampling program the company says it's ever done.
Coke spokesman Petro Kacur says the goal was to build Coke's brand, but not just with the buying public. Entertained at Coke's Beijing Olympic "zone" were local partners and government officials too, "any number of people important to the growth of our business in China."
Posted by: Nanette Byrnes on September 03
There are many ways to measure the return on an Olympic sponsorship: incremental sales, increased brand awareness, perhaps new retail relationships. But when Coca-Cola announced its planned purchase of giant China Huiyuan Juice Group Limited for $2.4 billion just 10 days after the Beijing closing ceremonies, it's reasonable to wonder whether the cola makers high profile backing of the games may have given it a business edge.
China is famously relationship-driven, and Coke's early support of the games certainly has helped the company's image. Coke's estimated to have paid approximately $70 million for its spot as one of the International Olympic Committee’s top-tier sponsors of Beijing and the preceding winter Olympics in Turin. Most sponsors invest 3-4 times the cost of sponsorship in marketing that asset, says Greg Paull, principal of R3, a marketing consulting firm based in Asia which has done work for Coke. "Coke did very well – they started early, stayed focused and leveraged the right assets," according to Paull. His firm's research found that shortly before the games started 50% of Chinese surveyed could spontaneously name Coke as a sponsor of the games. 86% could do so when prompted.
But in the case of the Beijing Games, marketers also tapped into the great deal of nationalist pride they brought to China.
The benefits of that may be going far beyond the consumer market. "The goodwill Coke got itself not only permeates the consumer level but the government relation levels as well, and you’ve got to have that to do business in China," says Terrence Burns, president of Helios Partners, a sports marketing firm, that does extensive business with host cities and sponsors.” You know they were selling more cans of coke, but from a brand play it was such a tsunami in every sense of the word, national pride and everything came together. The international partners benefit from that if they were out there and early." To Burns, who set up this year's Olympic sponsorship for mining giant BHP Billington, the Chinese games were as much about impressing the Chinese government as the man on the street. Mining isn't exactly a standard category for the Olympics, but for BHP, which sells iron ore to every major steel plant in China, its $20 million investment was well returned in governmental good will.
Coke should hope for the same. To get the Huiyuan deal done, it still has to jump through several governmental hoops, including passing a new anti-monopoly law. For China, this would be the fifth largest foreign investment in its history according to Thompson Reuters. The four ahead of it were all commercial bank deals, so this would break some new ground. (By comparison, the largest Chinese investment in the US was the $5 billion piece of Morgan Stanley China Investment Corp. lat December. The largest US deal ever was back in 1999 when the UK's Vodafone bought AirTouch for $65.8 billion, according to Thompson Reuters.)
A spokesman for Coke, which has been in China since 1979, says the consumer was the primary focus of the company's Beijing sponsorship. But if it got them some governmental goodwill, that couldn't be bad.
Posted by: Jena McGregor on September 02
For anyone who hasn't yet read my colleague Stephen Baker's fascinating book excerpt this week, Managing by the Numbers, check it out. Baker's new book, The Numerati, looks at the growing number of mathematical wizards who are digging into the data about our spending, our health, our shopping, and of course, our work.
Baker's excerpt looks at a literal interpretation of the popular phrase "Managing by the Numbers," which many CEOs like to say they do. This is math at work, and whether it sounds intriguing or terrifying to you, it is becoming a very real possibility. IBM's researchers are currently studying 50,000 of its tech consultants--everything from their calendars to their cell phone use to their emails. Who's available at the right price with the right experience at the right time? In this new science of management, IBM knows.
Posted by: Jena McGregor on August 29
Talk about frightening workplace technology: This story in the Economist highlights new research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which researchers strapped high-tech "identity badges" to workers to study their moves and interactions. What they found: People with rhythmic movements were more productive, as were those who were the most socially connected in the office.
The experiment was performed on workers at a U.S. technology company and a German bank, and luckily, does not yet seem practical enough to have become something more than an experiment. Obviously, the concept of having some kind of sensor track your every move at work would be unnerving, if not terribly invasive, to many people. The author of the Economist piece writes that the researchers have a suggestion for allaying such concerns: "It will also help, they believe, if everyone is treated equally, so that the boss’s actions, foibles and shortcomings are as transparent as those of his minions. Now that really would be a revolution in management science."
