By Francis Moran
At the peak of the dot-com and telecom bubble at the beginning of this decade, my wife, who is also a technology marketing strategist, and I often amused ourselves by imagining the response we might get if we created an entirely fictitious company and put up a website that employed all the utterly meaningless buzz words that were being bandied about at that time. I forget what we going to call the company — the name certainly had the word “solutions” in it — but I remember that we invented an incredibly persuasive mission statement that actually said nothing at all.
We didn’t think we’d get any customers, but we were pretty sure we could get some VC funding.
That little inside joke of ours came to mind this morning as a I watched a lovely little video by Made to Stick co-author Dan Heath on “Writing a mission statement that doesn’t suck.” Using a pizza parlour as example, Heath shows how an initially-quite-effective mission statement is turned into mushy pablum by the use of words that sound aspirational but that really don’t mean anything at all. Actually, it’s not that these words don’t mean anything at all; it’s that they could mean anything to anyone.
I do a lot of work helping technology companies figure out their differentiated positioning in the marketplace. This work is usually done in the same sort of group-think environment that turned “serve the tastiest damn pizza in Wade County” in Heath’s example into the mushy and meaningless “present with integrity the highest quality entertainment solutions to families.” Every time the word “solution” is suggested — and it is suggested almost every time — I implore the workshop participants to imagine the word doesn’t exist. “Now,” I ask them,” What is it that you actually do?” The answers immediately get much sharper and focused and far more meaningful.
The little joke my wife and I still wish we had managed to play on a gullible marketplace was predicated on this tendency to avoid specificity in favour of being all things to all people. In marketing, though, the joke will be on you because in trying to be all things to all people, you will succeed only in being nothing to anyone.
By Francis Moran
An excellent, if low-key, presentation at last week’s OCRI Zone5ive shed some interesting new light on a pervasive issue we on this blog and many other technology-company watchers have commented on before. Canadian tech ventures take a distant back to seat to their American competitors when it comes to marketing their products and services. And, I can tell you from working on both the transmitting and receiving ends of the marketing efforts of a number of British and European outfits, those guys also regularly best the Canadians at engaging with, and reaching out to, their markets.
Conventional wisdom says the Yanks, and maybe the Brits, are simply more brash than we are; natural-born salespeople, they are simply louder, more confident and more aggressive. Perhaps there’s some truth to that; certainly, I have never come across anything more doggedly relentless than a British ad-sales guy trying to get me to buy space in his publication. But putting poor Canadian performance down to our supposed more docile domestic character prevents us from recognizing a more systemic issue that Peter Hanschke, the product-management specialist who presented at Zone5ive last Thursday, brought to light in his examination of agile product development and how it encourages — even demands — a very tight fit with marketing and early customer engagement. (You can see Peter’s slides here.)
Agile product development is not a new process; it’s been around for nearly a generation. But it is particularly well suited for this era that increasingly embraces concepts like minimal viable product — swiftly develop the bare bones of a product and get it out in front of customers who will equally swiftly tell you whether they like it or not so you can decide whether to enhance or kill it. Agile product development allows for such iterative and ever-evolving product-development cycles that are highly responsive to equally dynamic market forces.
But here’s where Peter’s presentation got really interesting for this marketing strategist.
In order for the process to be effective, agile product development must embrace marketing at every stage. How can you decide what the market wants and will value if you haven’t engaged your potential customers at the very outset? How do you know if you’re meeting customer specifications and requirements if you don’t show them your still-in-development stuff and get their feedback and input? Under an agile regime, product releases are based on having created value for a customer, and how do you parse that without talking to the customer?
More interestingly, it’s not just a case of marketing contributing to the process; we marketers also gain massively. Imagine, Peter told us in a scenario that got the attention of every one of us more accustomed to last-minute demands to go market the hell out of a finished product scant weeks or days from launch, if we were able to build the entire marketing piece alongside, and in lock step with, the product itself? And because customers are inherently and intimately involved along the way, agile product development kicks out early customer references for use in media and analyst relations programs.
All music to my ears until one attendee threw a large bucket of freezing cold Canadian ice water on the whole thing.
How many people here, he asked, have ever actually worked in or for a company that used such a process? Asking for a show of hands, he found his one of the very few hands in the air.
And that’s the real issue that can’t merely be chalked up to our alleged more-demur national character. It is my consistent observation that too many Canadian technology companies are engineering-centric, rather than customer- or market-centric. Engineers love to build what they love. Regrettably, this is, far too often, a great distance from what the market would love to buy.
Peter protested that engineers hate to build things that people don’t use, and I’m sure that’s true. But he himself sharply identified a tendency whereby products are developed according to an internally produced specifications sheet and then, fully finished, are tossed over the transom to sales and marketing to go flog. He called it the old way of doing things; I’d call it far-too-persistent, even today.
This is not to say every Canadian technology venture is a solution in search of a problem. With a colleague, I have just finished a strategic marketing plan for an Ottawa company that was sharply market- and customer-focused from the outset. Consisting of a cadre of brilliant ex-Nortel optical engineers, this gang did not look at its collective capabilities and ask, as so many do, “What could we build?” Instead, they researched a number of sharp and immediate pain points within optical networking and selected a few around which huge value could be created if the right solution was developed.
Working with them was a novel experience. Unlike with most of my clients, I was not handed a finished product and told to develop the marketing plan for it. Rather, in what was sometimes a difficult process with which to keep pace, the product and its feature set were constantly in flux; every time we got together with these folks, we needed an updated briefing. Indeed, by the time we finished the plan, it was exclusively in support of a new product that didn’t even exist when we first engaged with them just a few months prior. The first product they had showed us no longer needed immediate marketing support because it had been completed and OEM’d into a major optical equipment manufacturer — the customer! — where it was perfectly meeting that customer’s requirements. (And, not incidentally, generating real revenue that was underpinning the company’s growth and its development of the next products.)
It sounds a bit chaotic but it really wasn’t. At every stage, we could evolve our thinking to make sure our analysis and market research, to say nothing of the go-to-market strategy, continued to synchronize with the product under development and the customers for which it was intended. The product closes a painful network-management gap between the optical layer and application-level IT management tools and so, for example, it posed a critical channel question: Should it be sold on a per-node basis by equipment vendors or on a per-seat license basis by the IT tools vendor? Or both? With eager channel partners in both camps, only an openly collaborative culture that embraced the feedback and input of those channels and of the end customer allowed the client to conclude which approach would best serve the market, and them.
If Peter is right and engineers want to build products that people actually use, then even the most engineering-centric technology company should embrace agile product development methodologies and the close knit with marketing that is stitched in with them. In his experience, he told me after the presentation, it is never a case of engineering resisting marketing once it has embraced agile. If so, marketers should become agile’s most overt evangelists.
By Francis Moran
For many years here in Ottawa, I was associated with a large marketing communications agency, many of whose account executives knew they could get a rise out of me by describing media relations as “free advertising.”
“It ain’t free, and it ain’t advertising,” I would consistently reply, with not a little vehemence.
My colleagues were, in the main, just poking fun; I believe they knew better. But for far too many people and for far too long, using advertising rates and data to measure the success of a media relations campaign was a broadly accepted practice. Called “advertising equivalent value,” or AVE, the practice consisted of measuring the column inches and seconds of air time of media coverage generated as a result of a media relations campaign and then assigning a value to that coverage based on what it would have cost to buy the same space as an advertising campaign. And, because everyone knows editorial coverage is more authoritative than advertising, many users of this methodology then compounded their malpractice by adding a multiplier. With no coherent rationale or science to support them, many would say editorial coverage was worth twice as much, or five times or 10 times as much, as advertising.
The allure of AVEs is easy to understand. There is undisputed value in getting your message disseminated through the media, and the implied endorsement of editorial coverage is far more influential than the naked sales pitch of an ad. AVEs deliver a single, easy-to-understand dollar figure that purports to calculate an ROI for a media relations campaign and allows straightforward and often compelling comparisons with advertising. In a fight for budget, AVEs were a potent tool that said the a dollar spent on PR would deliver a higher ROI than the same dollar spent on advertising.
Problem is, it’s an utterly bankrupt practice that delivers no meaningful insight whatsoever. It fails at both a strategic and a tactical level, and if its practitioners can’t understand that, they should at least reject it for purely practical reasons.
Here’s what I mean.
Strategically, advertising and media relations are deployed for fundamentally different reasons. Although in an integrated marketing-communications campaign both serve the same objectives, they do so in very different ways. For example, media coverage will rarely convey the call to action that is at the very heart of most effective advertising. On the other hand, it can usually communicate more nuanced, sophisticated and detailed messaging than can an ad.
Tactically, advertising enjoys the advantage of pinpoint targeting; you have absolute control over what is said, where it is said and how often it is said. Further, your advertising messaging will stand alone, unpolluted by opposing points of view. Media relations offers no such control. Although media relations messaging can be focused and efforts most certainly can be targeted at selected media and journalists, you surrender control over what is done with that messaging. Journalists might bite on your pitch or they might not. Even if they do, they will decide which bits of your messaging they will transmit for you. Where and when that happens is entirely outside your control. And reporters will often go to extraordinary lengths to source opposing or, at least, alternative messaging to create the editorial balance they were taught in journalism school must be integral to every story.
This strategic and tactical analysis is beyond the ability of many non-marketing executives to grasp, and I forgive them for it. (Any marketing executive who fails to grasp this, however, ought to be relieved of her or his responsibilities.) But even if they can’t wrap their heads around the strategic rationale against AVEs, executives ought to reject them on purely practical grounds. It ought to be obvious to everyone that an ROI calculation based solely on AVEs should be rejected if only because all media coverage is not favourable, all media coverage does not deliver a positive ROI, all media coverage does not support — indeed, much of it opposes — the achievement of organisational objectives.
What was the value to Nortel (Enron, Worldcom, Bernie Madoff — I could go on forever) of all its recent high-profile media coverage? Point taken, I trust.
Regrettably, even PR measurement specialists could be lured into this easy and utterly faulty approach. In the mid-1990s, I spent six months on a consulting contract with the Canadian branch of what was at that time one of the two largest media relations measurement outfits in the world. Pioneers in the field of computer-aided media content analysis, this company had a well-tested and fairly rigourous methodology for evaluating the results of a media relations campaign. When a client we were pitching asked that AVEs be included in the report we were proposing, the account executive selling to that client acquiesced.
I went ballistic. How could you choose to beggar a potent, effective and scientifically rigourous PR evaluation methodology by hiving on a discredited and scientifically unsupported approach like AVEs, I asked? The best answer the account executive could provide was that the client was demanding it. “If I sell shoes and a customer demands yellow shoes, I’m going to sell him yellow shoes,” this guy told me in an exchange I’ll never forget.
My contract was not renewed and I went on to refine my own media content analysis methodology that continues to inform both my strategic development of a campaign and my post-campaign evaluation. And yellow shoes are never on offer, no matter how much a customer might demand them.
In grudging defence of that misguided account executive, though, it is true that our clients and employers have long demanded we give them AVEs. This is one of the reasons this discredited practice has persisted. But practitioners who know better have an increasing arsenal of resources they can deploy to help sway even the most literal-minded boss.
Chief among these is the Institute for Public Relations, a respected research body, whose Commission on Public Relations Measurement and Evaluation recently voted 19 to 2 to reject AVEs. A consistent advocate of the uselessness of AVEs is Katie Paine, who presented at last month’s Third Tuesday Ottawa, and who greeted the IPR declaration as the industry’s “Emancipation Day.” Here in Canada, the Canadian PR Society instituted its Media Relations Media Rating Points System several years ago. It falls well short of being proper content analysis but it is a considerable improvement on AVEs.
I hope I’ve heard for the last time that media relations is free advertising. Even in jest.
By Francis Moran
Most of this blog post ran on DangleTech last week, a general technology and management blog to which I make the occasional contribution. I am running it here on our own blog not just to get extra mileage out of it but because it continues the conversation I started a month or so back when I told you that I and the rest of the crew at inmedia were looking at where else we could apply our tech market knowledge and skills. In the process of doing so, I have been giving a lot of thought to the nature of professional specialisation.
My introspection on this subject stems from this recent decision of ours to move beyond the highly specialised public relations services that have been the core of our professional services offering for the past more than 10 years. That move has been prompted by a realisation that public relations has become an over-competitive, highly commodified proposition where a small agency such as ours faces relentless competition from both large agencies trying to keep their infrastructure funded through the current downturn and one-person shops of often-quite-well-qualified practitioners who used to work at agencies or on the client side. Add to this a widespread lack of any kind of objective framework within which agency searches are conducted – they often amount to little more than glorified beauty contests or are managed by very junior staff simply unqualified to make such a judgement – and you have the very epitome of what statisticians and management consultants W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne have characterised as “a bloody ‘red ocean’ of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.” They argue that “tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating ‘blue oceans’ of uncontested market space ripe for growth.”
For an individual or a consulting firm, such an approach means offering the marketplace a unique set of capabilities that, for a given situation, are not to be found elsewhere. My search over the past four or five months for my own personal blue-ocean strategy has dovetailed nicely with a growing understanding that the age of the specialist may well be behind us. Consider the following quote, taken from a recent edition of the CBC’s excellent series examining the nature of work:
“You have this long list of professional trades, and they’re all speaking different languages and they all have some sort of compartmentalized knowledge and that’s the challenge. That’s where the future is, in having a knowledge. The separation of design and build, the Ford model of assembly-line production – we are through that and we’ve entered into almost an older evaluation of skill where people have a sense of the general picture, the big picture and be able to bring together all the different specializations required. And that’s a new way of looking at problems. But it’s also a very old way of looking at problems.”
You might think the person who said the above words was a management consultant, maybe a systems analyst. But although he likes to use that latter term to describe himself, Jonas Spring is, in fact, a rooftop gardener, who needs to pull together many different and heretofore disparate and unconnected specialised professions and trades in order to plan, plant and maintain a rooftop garden.
Although our specialty at inmedia for the past dozen years or so has been very narrow – we did media and analyst relations and little else, and we did it for B2B technology ventures and no-one else – our skill set is far more diverse than might be immediately apparent, even to me.
For example, a recent assignment that came to me from well beyond the normal ambit of my PR agency was to help a Montréal systems integration company bid to be the Canadian value-added reseller for a U.S. software vendor. What the heck, you might well ask, does a PR guy know about any of that?
Well, as I broke down the requirements with the help of the certified management consultant who brought me in on the assignment, it became quite clear that what I might have seen as quite specialised capabilities could be far more generally applied.
In the first instance, we had to determine if there was a market in Canada for the software company’s product. That’s the sort of straightforward market-sizing research that needs nothing more than an objective definition of the target customer – size, sector and so on – and a good database that can be used to identify which and how many companies meet the criteria.
Then we had to make the case that our client, the systems integrator, was the right fit for the software company’s requirements. Well, that’s the sort of thing we do in PR all the time – develop, pitch and defend the story that says our clients are the right fit for a certain requirement.
The next step was to demonstrate how, should they get the nod, the systems integration company would go about pursuing the market opportunity and bringing in sales and revenue. Well, that’s a sales and marketing strategy, the sort of thing I had been doing before starting the PR agency and continued to do even while running the agency.
Finally, the whole thing had to be wrapped up in a well-written, persuasively argued proposal to the software company. And if I am not a writer, I am nothing.
I have gone on to other assignments over the past few months where I might have got my foot in the door thanks to a particular specialisation but where the client has swiftly seen that, in the right situation, I possess the exact mix of skills that are required. Presto – I have a blue-ocean opportunity with that client and face no competition, no qualification round and no pricing pressure. In almost every case, my value has not been a narrow specialisation but, rather, the requirement to apply generalised skills across a broad area. In today’s increasingly complex world where formerly disparate systems and processes must come to work together, this is the future of work.
Our thinking in these two areas – the rise of the generalist and building a personal blue-ocean strategy – has progressed to the point where we are about to formalise a market-facing entity to build a business around it. As these plans are unveiled, I will, of course, keep our readers up to speed on what’s happening.
By Francis Moran
Although only one team, Cambrian Mobile Content Delivery Network that wants to improve the experience of viewing video content on a mobile network by caching the most popular content at individual cell sites, came away with the $5,000 first prize at this past weekend’s Startup Boot Camp organised by The Ottawa Network, all six of the ventures that were presented to a review panel late Sunday afternoon were viable business concepts that could be made into real companies. And each of them progressed over the weekend from mere concept in the head of the entrepreneur who originally pitched the idea Friday night to unexpectedly polished and, under the circumstance, rather sophisticated business plans by Sunday evening.
This was the real intent of the camp, a weekend-long intensive competition in business-plan development and company creation. Organisers Rick O’Connor and Bob Morais told the more than 50 participants several times that they wanted to see a handful of new ventures emerge from the weekend, something they said would help revitalise a local technology sector ecosystem that Morais said has been knocked back to where it was in the early 1990s by a combination of the global economic meltdown, the flight of venture capital and other funding sources from Ottawa and the uncertainty created by the breakup of Nortel Networks. which had long been the region’s biggest research centre and a regular source of new companies and ideas.
Following are quick summaries of each of the six teams.
Feather Payment Systems
Described by its originator as “what Paypal should have been,” Feather Payments seeks to create a new, more secure and completely private way of making payments both online and in bricks-and-mortar retailers by using a form of public key infrastructure to sign every transaction. The review panel thought it was a good proposition, but one that would be immediately undone “if the credit card companies and banks ever got jiggy with PKI.”
Broadband Networks Corp. wants to bring telecom optical technology to big television players and productions. By building a new optical interconnect module, the company will allow TV production shops to replace bulky and short-haul coaxial cable with higher-capacity, lighter and longer-haul fiber-optic cables. Although I expressed some skepticism based on the fact that fiber is already well deployed in TV studios, entrepreneur Jean-Guy Chauvin insisted his module fills a considerable gap as the industry moves towards adoption of second-generation optical technology.
I’ve already mentioned that Cambrian Mobile CDN was the winner and I agreed with the panel. I thought Cambrian presented the most compelling business case and the clearest vision of how it might be executed. The concept is to develop half-terabyte flash-based caches that would be installed by mobile network operators in their base stations. These carriers would charge high-volume video-content providers such as YouTube to cache their content, a process that would improve the user experience while vastly reducing the traffic load on the carriers’ backhaul networks.
PostKicker was probably the easiest of the concepts from an implementation perspective, and one that, unlike the others, could be on the market in very short order and without much capital. The concept is to eliminate some of the sharpest pain associated with moving by taking over the tedious process of advising everyone of your change of address. The company would develop a web portal through which you could enter your change-of-address details, with PostKicker taking care of actually letting all your various contacts, especially your commercial contacts, know you had moved. Initially, the company intends to do this fairly manually but anticipates that as its subscriber base grows, companies will be persuaded to accept its notifications electronically.
CasaControl has a vision to convert digital picture frames into remote control devices that manage the growing number of automated processes within homes. While I thought it was an interesting idea and the team’s presentation was comprehensive, I agreed with the panel that more ubiquitous devices, such as smart phones, constitute a far more compelling platform for such a function.
A clear crowd favourite all weekend was Carewave. Not only did it attract the largest number of team members, it had a feel-good quality to it that was irresistible. Carewave wants to build an RFID and wireless pager system that transmits a basic safety code to healthcare workers that alerts them about a range of dangers posed by patients in their care. Although Carewave’s presentation was easily the most elegant — industrial designer Mike McGuire even managed to produce plastic prototypes overnight using his 3D printer — the panel pointed out that penetrating the healthcare market is a protracted process.
I will be keeping tabs on each of the concepts and will be sure to let you know if any of them move to then next stage of incorporating a bona fide startup. All the energy and output of the weekend notwithstanding, that will be the real measure of the success of the boot camp. The Ottawa Network plans a second installment in the spring.
