By Francis Moran
At the time my PR agency, inmedia Public Relations, was founded, I worked out of a large integrated agency in the city and some of the account executives there loved to push my buttons by declaring that media relations was free advertising. They especially liked to do this in client meetings because they knew it would prompt me to mount a fevered defence of the merits of PR and all the ways in which it differed from advertising.
I knew they were only kidding. I knew they really knew better. I knew it was all a bit of harmless fun.
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By Francis Moran
Marketers are well familiar with the concept of segmenting their marketplace. Segmentation is the process of dividing a broad and undifferentiated set of consumers into ever-smaller segments until you have identified that group of potential customers that is the best match possible for your product or service. My wife is also afflicted with this contagion we call marketing and that gives rise to some strange conversations in our household. One such conversation a few years back resulted in our developing an easy-to-understand explanation of market segmentation we refer to as finding your gay Acadian dog lover. The key to segmenting the marketplace is to identify those traits — some demographic, some taste-based, many certainly geographic — that define the customers most likely to be interested in your product or service. Not only does the process tell you a lot about who you’re trying to sell to, it also gives you a lot of insight into how you might reach them.
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By Francis Moran
It has been a common lament of technology companies in Canada that this country lacks high-quality sales and marketing talent, driving CEOs to source their c-level executives from south of the border. The most common refrain is that they are looking for someone who has “been there, done that,” and such folks are simply not lying thick on the ground in these parts.
I’m pretty sure I don’t buy into the underlying proposition but let’s assume for the moment that it has merit. I certainly wouldn’t argue that you would want to de-risk your go-to-market and sales strategies by hiring folks who can demonstrate they have the ability to build and drive world-class sales and marketing organizations playing in your target market. While I do think such folks can be found up here in the frozen north, the bigger criticism I have with CEOs who go head-hunting for talent down south is that they perpetuate a chicken-and-egg situation that ultimately plays against them.
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By Francis Moran
The morning after the election that wouldn’t change anything, the political landscape in Canada has been radically, perhaps permanently, altered.
The Conservative Party of Canada, led by prime minister Stephen Harper on his fifth stab at power, finally grabbed the brass ring, winning 167 seats and a decisive majority. That he did it with just a handful of seats in Québec defied all conventional wisdom that said Canada can’t be won without Quebec. Certainly, no Tory predecessor has managed to take the country with so few seats in Québec.
The Liberal Party of Canada, long nicknamed the Natural Governing Party for its historic hold on the broad political centre of the country, went down to its greatest defeat in history. First-time campaigner Michael Ignatieff, better known in Washington and London as a globe-trotting journalist and intellectual before returning to Canada several years ago, did what no Liberal Party leader, not even John Turner with his epic 1984 loss that yielded a scant 44 seats, has managed to do before — reduce the once-dominant Liberals to third-party status for the first time since Canada was born.
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By Francis Moran
There may be few products more reduced to commodity status than mass-produced beer. (As Monty Python almost said, “Why is mass-produced beer like making love in a canoe? They’re both fucking close to water.” The Python troupe, in the wonderful Hollywood Bowl rendition of their famous “Australian Philosophers Drinking Song,” were actually lampooning American beer, but I think the line holds up.) Still, this doesn’t prevent the big beer companies from constantly trying to introduce new elements they hope will boost their brand’s share of market by a percentage point or two. Who can blame them? Gain even one-tenth of a percentage point in new market share in Canada and you’ve boosted your revenues by some $90 million.
And so we have seen refinements of almost every sort imaginable. Ice beer, dry beer, lime-infused beer, beer in tall cans, cans that tell you when the beer is cold — countless such iterations have come and gone. You know one brewery has tripped onto something that’s working when all the rest pile on.
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By Francis Moran
