This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
Rather than working earlier this week, I was looking over pictures of my last month down south in Argentina. As I was smiling over a photo of a Buenos Aires dog walker – who are well represented in that great city, can be seen everywhere and are not always so good about cleaning up after their care – I was reminded of some research I recently uncovered. It’s about dogs too. But more specifically, it’s about the potential business implications of our relationship with “man’s best friend.”
Have you ever had a dog as a pet? Did or do you consider it part of the family? If you answered yes, or even if you’ve never personally been involved with a dog, it’s not hard to see that humans and dogs have formed a symbiotic relationship that is beneficial to both species. In Argentina, proof is on the streets in the form of hoards of professional dog walkers and the need to watch your step.
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked David French, a senior Canadian patent attorney with 35 years of experience, to discuss the importance to a company of protecting its IP and how creating the position of “IP Coordinator” can facilitate the process. This is the second of David’s commentaries and we welcome your comments.
By David French
In my previous post, I addressed the importance of a company’s intellectual property and how it can contribute to the bottom line, negatively or positively. In this post, I address the issue of how intellectual property is being managed within your organization.
Who in your organization knows or is able to understand all of the issues and requirements in order to ensure that you have good IP hygiene? Frankly, many companies just assume their lawyer is going to look after these issues. Well, your lawyer may provide advice in the boardroom, or possibly even in a reporting letter, as to many of the things you should do in order to keep your intellectual property regime in order. But who will remember all of this?
This is where the concept of an Intellectual Property Coordinator becomes important.
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By Linda Forrest
Whenever the concept of influence comes up, I’m immediately confronted with a mental image of Will Farrell positing that he’s “kind of a big deal,” a memorable and oft-quoted line from the raunchy comedy Anchorman. The irony is that in the film, he is, as stated, kind of a big deal. The same is true of influencers, tastemakers, trendsetters or whatever term best describes people whose opinions and actions hold weight amongst your target market.
There is an entire discipline of marketing devoted to this concept called “influencer marketing.” Wikipedia describes it as:
a form of marketing that has emerged from a variety of recent practices and studies, in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual) rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities around these influencers.
Influencers may be potential buyers themselves, or they may be third parties. These third parties exist either in the supply chain (retailers, manufacturers, etc.) or may be so-called value-added influencers (such as journalists, academics, industry analysts, professional advisers, and so on.)
A key takeaway is that influence is most effective when it’s not overtly used to deliver a specific result. Rather, influencers affect their markets without necessarily using certain tactics or well-defined parameters to do so. This distinction is what makes the concept of influence measurement so compelling.
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This is the eighth article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“A startup is ultimately … not just about whether an idea or a product works, it is about whether or not you can create a business around it. Whether or not the ecosystem will support it, the customers will buy it, if the channels will support it, and if the manufacturers will actually create it. And because of that, we need to be able to test all these different facets of our business model, and do so quickly.”
This comes from someone Forbes calls “the most powerful woman in startups,” Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner with FLOODGATE. In October, she gave a lecture at Stanford University titled “Funding Thunder Lizard Entrepreneurs,” which is filled with so much insight we were tempted to just transcribe the whole damned thing and offer it up as a blog post of its own. However, her talk is available as a conveniently indexed webcast.
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By Francis Moran
When I launched this blog a little over six weeks ago, I said that I wanted to overturn the myths that surround the marketing of new technology products and services. I acknowledged at the time that many engineering-focused executive teams at technology ventures are leery of what they see as the black art of marketing. I also said I can forgive them for their skepticism — after all, as I wrote then, we marketers don’t do a good enough job of demonstrating just how marketing works and why they should invest in it — but I have a tougher time forgiving others who have weighed in over the past couple of weeks with simplistic and downright erroneous comments against marketing.
The worst part is, many of these insults were self-inflicted injuries inflicted on the marketing profession by some of its own.
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By Bob Bailly
