By Leo Valiquette
There is no shortage of counsel that an economic rough patch is the time to ramp up, not reduce, a company’s investment in marketing and public relations. When potential customers are reconsidering or holding off on purchasing decisions, you need to be out there giving them a reason why they need to buy, and buy from you, now.
In the current environment, companies that are nimble and can adapt quickly will not only be the ones that survive, but will also be the ones that prosper as they take advantage of the confusion, fear and indecision of competitors standing on the sidelines wringing their hands as the same old way of doing things fails to yield the results it once did.
What needs to change is the message you are putting out. Everyone is feeling the pain of a recessionary economy. Our motto at inmedia has always been that it’s not about the technology, but about the business case for the technology. We always emphasize to our clients that their messaging must articulate how their product or service is the drill the customer needs to make that hole in the wall. (Or as the case may be, the patching compound that will make the hole go away.) Marketing and PR are crucial tools to convey how your product or service can address the most acute and top-of-mind pain points of your customers. They are also key to reaching and cultivating new markets.
Entrepreneur Magazine recently published a good article on where to avoid the temptation to drop the axe to cut costs. It featured a great perspective from Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs. She emphasized the importance of marketing in a slump to maintain the volume of sales leads, and to adjust your messaging to reflect the current realities facing potential customers.
“If you sell washing machines, for example, and people don’t want to buy new models, you can stress how much they’ll save on maintenance and electricity with a more energy-efficient model,” she said.
Of course, adjusting your messaging and targeting new markets must make sense and hold the potential of a return greater than the investment. My catalyst for writing this post came from a radio ad I heard the other day from a company that is obviously thinking outside the box to reach a broader demographic of potential customers.
The ad came from retail pharmacy chain Jean Coutu and featured a fellow talking to his buddy about how busy he is taking care of the baby on paternity leave. His comment was along the lines of, “My wife does her part, but thank goodness for Jean Coutu.”
OK. Creative thinking on Jean Coutu’s part? Yes. An untapped market? Maybe. A big market worthy of the effort? Not so sure on that one, though I will concede it may catch the attention of a broader male demographic than just dads on pat leave. What’s important is that it demonstrates the kind of creative thinking that companies need to succeed in the current environment and the value of maintaining the marketing investment. (Consider this free plug I just gave Jean Coutu because I heard that ad and it resonated because I’m a father with a four-year-old.)
By Leo Valiquette
“Venture capital is dead. It’s gone.”
Sir Terry Matthews didn’t mince words Thursday morning as the keynote speaker at OCRI’s Technology Executive Breakfast. Not that he ever does. And while some might argue that statement about the status of Canada’s venture capital industry, or at least its level of activity in the nation’s capital, may be a bit premature, that’s not the point.
The point is, who cares?
Matthews and partner Michael Cowpland began the first incarnation of Mitel in 1972 with persistence, sweat and a $4,000 bank loan. That was enough to get their first product to market in nine months. This was followed by Mitel’s breakthrough product: a PBX phone system with a software switch. Mitel beat out about 40 larger competitors to win a watershed contract with AT&T, the first time, Matthews said, that the telecommunications giant contracted out. That deal, and a $250,000 grant through Canada’s IRAP program, took Mitel from zero to a 20-per-cent global market share in five years and made millionaires out of penny investors.
And while sheer persistence and hard work were part of the secret sauce for Mitel’s success, and for every success Matthews has had since then as the man behind the creation of more than 80 high-tech ventures, he cited an even more important ingredient: the core competency of partnerships.
Partnerships build technology clusters. Partnerships allow a company to capitalize on another’s strengths without having to carry the overhead of developing a particular area of expertise in house. Partnerships take advantage of another’s time and money invested in R&D to compliment your own.
Matthews holds Nortel’s utter aversion to partnerships to blame in no small degree for the company’s misfortunes.
And while there undoubtedly are challenges in the marketplace at present, Matthews insisted there is a resurgence at hand as ambitious and nimble entrepreneurs of the next generation make their mark. They just need a commitment of time and mentorship from those with experience and money to invest. Venture capital is irrelevant. Time is what’s important.
Matthews’ approach is to find the key contact in a post-secondary institution passionate about commercializing ideas into start-up companies to help him cherry pick the cream of the crop from among new grads. He wants to work with the handful who have the drive, ambition and adaptability critical to surviving and thriving in tough times. He puts these teams together, puts his resources behind them, and sets out to identify and develop a viable product and market niche. By engaging with the market, he will guide this team through the process of honing, refining and focusing the idea until there is a viable business ready to be formally launched.
In return for this intensive mentoring and a high-pressure work schedule that pays little attention to weekends and holidays, each team member is paid the lofty salary of $25,000. However, what they should be paid but are not is parlayed into ownership stakes in the new company.
Matthews believes there is no more effective way to quickly bring a product to market. And being first to market is the only way for North America and Europe to compete in a global economy that is now flat with few if any true trade barriers. With Asia pumping out engineering talent that works for a 10th of what ours does, trying to compete on cost is a death sentence.
So the next time you hear someone pining for the return of the good ol’ days of the telecom boom, or whining about the demise of the venture-capital industry, do as Matthews does and take a chapter from Darwin: it is not the strongest or the most intelligent that survive, but the ones most capable of adapting.
By Leo Valiquette
There is no question that we PR types are often taken to task for blitzing the world with news of little relevance or importance or, at least, for failing to ensure that the news is relevant and important to the hapless targets in range of our scatter guns.
In an ongoing series of posts chronicling his study of the pitches that flood his inbox, research analyst Josh Bernoff has been examining why three quarters of the PR email he receives is irrelevant. He makes the point of saying, “I really like working with PR people, I just don’t like all of their tactics.” After working for 14 years as an analyst and being barraged by tens of thousands of emails during that time, he believes his exercise in navel-gazing is well justified.
Among the points he makes is that far too much of the email he receives is related to research areas he covered years before, but is not relevant to what he is doing now. Obviously, too little research is done to ensure information in a contact database is up to date.
The simple fact is, things change. Publications fold and people move on to new jobs or assume new responsibilities. When it comes to those media contact and editorial calendar databases to which many of us subscribe, their accuracy and timeliness is often dependent on media outlets voluntarily responding to requests to update their information. I can say from previous experience as a business journal editor bombarded by irrelevant pitches that such requests often go unanswered.
In the end, the most effective way to verify if a particular journalist or editor is an appropriate target for the news you have to pitch is to visit their publication’s website.
Case in point. We recently re-engaged with a client after a two-year hiatus to put out some news for them. It had been a long time since we created their target media list and we emphasized the value of budgeting into the project the time and cost necessary to go through the list one name at a time to verify and update the information.
They saw our point, and thankfully so. Forty to 50 per cent of the contacts we had were no longer accurate for reasons that included staff turnover, defunct publications, and changes to the email addresses and phone numbers of those contacts who were still appropriate targets for this particular client’s news. If we hadn’t undertaken this process, up to half our outreach on this client’s behalf would have been a misfire.
Not all media outlets are forthcoming on their “Contact Us” or “About Us” pages with individual staff bios, beats covered and contact information, but most are. It can be tedious to visit dozens of websites to dig up and verify this kind of information, but without a doubt, it is the only assured way to get your client’s story where it needs to go.
By Leo Valiquette
A recent example of how not to manage the hack-flack relationship provided some entertainment value for the Twitter crowd and profound embarrassment for the National Post earlier this week.
The war of words between marketing consultant April Dunford and Post writer David George-Cosh in such a public venue (though as you can see for yourself, most of the venom was flowing one way) demonstrates the importance of keeping one’s rants private. That’s what e-mail is for.
This whole stink seems to have been sparked by the perception that a phone call was not returned quickly enough. Well, striking while the iron is hot are words any PR practitioner should live by when opportunity comes knocking. Be that as it may, tact, courtesy and professionalism should rule any interaction between those with stories to write and those with stories to pitch.
Thanks to social media, any one of us can easily find ourselves in the public eye. We will be judged by how we act and conduct ourselves toward others. It’s your image, your personal brand, that’s on the line.
By Leo Valiquette
“Even if there’s blood on the street there’s always somebody making money. You just have to make sure you’re on the right side of it.”
The son of poor Croatian immigrants, he sold his first company for $100 million in 2000. His second company, launched in 2003, is now the largest privately held IT solutions provider and integrator in Canada. When not residing in one of his posh homes, he holds court in CBC’s Dragon’s Den.
Robert Herjavec is a living example of what hard work and vision can achieve. He took the stage to close out this week’s 2009 Ottawa Business Summit and treated his audience to his insights on what it takes to achieve business and personal success.
I scribbled furiously the entire time he spoke and have distilled his pearls of wisdom to the following:
1. There is no stereotypical external factor for success. Fame and fortune is not reserved for the beautiful people in the world, nor can a successful person be judged by appearances. One of his neighbours has a company with 12,000 staff, an original Monet on his wall and a 15-year-old car in the driveway. And, bad people do succeed. “There are people who beat their dog and run a great business.”
2. However, he has never met a successful person who didn’t have a purpose, and that purpose must be more than the accumulation of wealth. If all one pursues is money, they will hit a wall. Herjavec’s goal was to build the best company in its industry. The money followed.
3. Achieving that success requires vision. When he started his second company, the problem was too much available money and not enough vision about what it should be. Money keeps you in the game. It doesn’t make a good company.
(Geez, have we learned that lesson in Ottawa after the VC excesses of the tech boom?)
4. And on that note, with particular relevance to Ottawa: If you build a better mousetrap, the world will not beat a path to your door. There is no such thing as a good idea. It’s all about execution. Sales and marketing. And while he would hire the fellow who can sell ice to Eskimos, Herjavec would much rather have the fellow with the foresight to sell water in the desert beside a broken-down bus.
5. “Discipline is the art of doing what is necessary even when you don’t want to.” Inaction is easy. Citing his own recent experience running a marathon for the first time and the amputee with a prosthetic leg who passed him, Herjavec put it plain: “Winners find a way, losers find an excuse.” Which invariably means, “For you to win, somebody has to lose.”
6. The importance of leadership, which he defined as the ability to get people to do something they wouldn’t otherwise be able to achieve–lift them from their comfort zone.
7. It’s all about sales. “Nothing matters until you sell something.” Which also speaks to the value of branding and marketing to drive those sales. But after sales comes service – sales may sell the first night in a hotel room, but service will keep the guest coming back.
8. Business is a sprint. “You’ve got to go now.” It’s better to take action than sit around planning the next five days. Once you secure an opportunity, then it becomes a marathon.
9. Feed the whales, not the minnows. Especially in a tough economy, devote your time and effort to those prospects, those core customers, who will support your business in tough times. He didn’t cite the 80-20 rule, but it obviously applies. For example, Herjavec’s business positions itself around high value, high touch service. When faced with a customer who likes to shop around and bargain hunt just to keep his suppliers on their toes, his preference is to dump them in favour of more loyal customers who appreciate the value of what they are getting for their money.
10. And when it comes to suppliers for your business, it’s a love/hate relationship. At the end of the day, your business is your business and they’re looking out for their business, not yours.
11. Learn to focus, which he defined as the ability to make the most of the 24 hours in a day and “distinguish the truly important from the urgent that happens every day.”
12. Your business is not your family, it’s just business. Avoid emotional attachments.
13. Make it fun and be resilient. Nobody likes a negative person. What’s important is not what you say, but how you make people feel. There may be really bad days when you just want to walk away, but that just proves you care. What’s vital is having the resilience to believe that tomorrow will be a better day.
14. It’s not who you know, but how brutally honest you are with yourself. “The worst lies you tell in business are the ones you tell yourself.”
15. And lastly, business is like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Keep swinging until you hit something.
