Update From Member Value Committee 1/15/08

The broad charge of the Member Value Committee is to focus on improving the perceived value of membership in AMA, specifically in areas such as e-services and programs and efforts beyond the other committees.

A number of opportunities for improvements were identified in the E-Services report distributed at the Winter 2007 meeting. At the Summer meeting, the Committee agreed to focus on several specific issues:

  • Review and customize promotional materials to emphasize member value for academics (e.g., more targeted renewal and acquisition materials)
  • Develop Talking Points to emphasize value of AMA to valued services. These would be used in an “annual report” and acquisition/retention materials as well as in speeches/communications with groups such as AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium and The Ph.D. Project.
  • Develop proposal for repurposing practitioner resources (e.g., webcasts, white papers) for classroom use

Progress:

A new Academic Communication Task Force(ACTF) was established to review and customize the acquisition and retention materials targeted to academics and to identify the benefits (i.e., “Talking Points”)delivered to individual members as well as the profession through AMA membership. Kathleen Seiders volunteered to serve as the chair of the academic volunteers and worked with Nancy Costopoulous and the marketing staff at AMA to establish the ACTF. She recruited three other members: Gerri Henderson, Chris White and Kathy Waters, who have agreed to serve for an extended period as consultants to the AMA staff. Kathleen’s recap was distributed in November.

To address concern about membership erosion, the Board has established a Member Research Initiative. Led by the Marketing Research Council, the group will develop a survey to be conducted among important constituency groups. Beth Walker is serving as the Academic Council representative for this project and updated us in the Fall.

To better serve the teaching constituency, Terri Barr and I have been working on a proposal to re-institute The Marketing Educator in an online format (tentatively named MarketingEducator@AMA). We have an editor – Elnora Stuart, co-author of Solomon, Marshall, Stuart. Marketing: Real People, Real Choices and currently professor at AmericanUniversity in Cairo. The proposed quarterly publication addresses the goals of 1) engaging more teaching professionals, and 2) highlighting the value of existing online AMA resources (e.g., ARC, white papers, webcasts). Progress on this initiative has been slowed because the AMA IH staff are heavily involved in the launch of Marketing On Demand.

The launch of the new Marketing on Demand web platformwas delayed (initial date was December). The new target date is February 18. We expect to have an update at our Winter meeting. Charlie Hofacker serves on the Board oversight committee.

The E-Services report presented at Winter 2007 highlightedsome opportunities to improve the interface with AMA through the website. We’ve made progress on a number of those issues and hope the launch of the Marketing on Demand platform will address the remaining concerns. Most recently, we’ve finalized a planned redesign of the Events pages for academic events. Currently, official academic events pages on MarketingPower reflect the previous year’s conference until the final program is ready for the next conference (i.e., a few months prior). Until that time, the most current information is posted on ARC. In the redesign, the Event page will be updated on a rolling schedule to match academics need information.

  • On the last day of each event, all available information for the following year will be posted on the new pagep, including:
  • Dates/location/hotel information for following year
  • Call for papers
  • Call for pre-conference event proposals for following year
  • Exhibit/sponsorship information for following year
  • When papers are accepted, approximately seven months before the event, the following should be posted:
  • Full hotel information including pricing, etc.
  • Event registration form
  • All travel related information
  • All location related information (city)
  • When program is complete, at approximately five months before the event, it will be posted
  • When appropriate host schools (for Public Policy) and/or sponsors will be acknowledged on the AMA site with a link to their websites

AMA will also create MarketingPower sites for both the AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium and Thought Leadership events to promote these events as AMA events. These sites will then link to the university sites.

We’ve also created an online conference call for papers (CFP), replacing the 10-15 page paper or pdf version that was distributed. The Summer 2008 version at

▪Conference chairs will change only selected information relevant to their conference but not the processes and procedures (e.g., submission requirements).

▪Corrections, if needed,are made in one place.

▪Content is organized by tasks.

▪We’d replace the full print versions in conference packets with one-page flyers, highlighting the conference and track chairs, and pointing them to the URL.

Finally, Rajesh Chandy has agreed to look at Academic Placement services to determine what, if any, opportunities there are to improving this important member benefit. He will report more on that.