By Francis Moran
Whenever I present to groups or prospects on my Four Steps on the Road to Revenue™ marketing methodology, the first sentence out of my mouth is always, “It all begins with the customer.” My point is that marketing must start with identifying a customer requirement that your product or service can fulfill. Too many companies, and especially technology companies, start with building a product and then go looking for someone willing to buy it. It is far more effective to first find that burning pain or unmet need that you — and, preferably, you alone — can address in a unique manner that creates high value on both sides of the transaction.
I will admit that it is getting easier all the time to persuade folks of the sense of this approach. Every time we have rigorously applied this methodology, the client ends up with a clearly defined market need, a well-described customer, a sharply articulated value proposition, a product-development strategy that compells alignment with that market need, and an effective and measurable tactical plan to bring the product to market. In every case, the process is anchored by a detailed understanding of the customer, whether that comes from the client’s own reliable knowledge of customer requirements or from independent executive-interview-based or third-party research.
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By Francis Moran
Imagine you want to go to New York. And New York is a five-hour drive away. You start out on a certain route but after two hours, you haven’t reached New York yet. So you conclude that the route you’re on isn’t the right one and you change routes. An hour later, you’re still not in New York, so you change routes again. After yet another hour, you’re still not in New York, so you change routes again. And then you run out of gas. So you abandon your trip to New York; indeed, you begin to wonder whether New York ever really existed or whether there was any way at all that you could get there from where you were.
Nobody in their right minds would try to get to New York this way. Or come to those conclusions about getting to New York if their efforts failed.
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By Francis Moran
An article in The Verge this week posited the not uncommon suggestion that as goes RIM, so go the fortunes of its home town, Waterloo. Now, I’ve been travelling down to Waterloo every couple of months for the past four or five years, and we’ve written a heck of a lot here about what’s going on in the tech scene there. And I just don’t see any circumstance wherein that town needs to throw itself on any RIM funeral pyre. (And, for the record, I’m a long way from believing that RIM’s demise is in any way yet predestined.)
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By Francis Moran
To hear many of the speakers at last week’s International Startup Festival in Montréal tell it, there has rarely been as good a time as the present to start a new business. “Now is awesome,” said technology industry watcher Chris Shipley. “Resources for startups are raining down.” Dave McLure of 500 Startups agreed; resources are cheap and plentiful, he said.
This is not to say that either of these speakers believed that launching a startup would be a walk in the park. The tension and worry associated with doing so means that “Tums become a snack food,” Shipley said, while McLure, in trademark fashion, opened his remarks by saying to anyone present who wanted to be an entrepreneur, “You fucking idiots.”
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By Francis Moran
Many years ago, our PR agency had a client for which we did media and analyst relations across North America and in Europe. This matched the market footprint of this rather successful company that was in the document-management space. One day, they sent us the latest version of their new marketing brochure. Internal discussions on it had apparently been going around and around in circles, and they wanted our opinion.
I took one look at the brochure and emailed back, asking, “Where’s the creative brief?”
“The creative what?” was the response.
Thinking maybe they used different terminology, I explained that I was looking for some sort of strategic document written at the outset of the brochure-development project that set out its objectives, the target audience and its level of understanding of the situation, intent, key messaging, tone and style, intended action and whatever else would help ensure that the result was both creatively arresting and strategically relevant.
We have no such thing, they told me.
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By Francis Moran
