This is the first in a continuing series of articles that examine 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
“Companies that can’t clearly articulate their customer and market are not real serious companies, they are research projects … Engineering and marketing need to work together from the get go.”
So said Ronald Weissman in a recent interview. And Weissman should know. He is chair of the Software Special Industry Group at Band of Angels, Silicon Valley’s oldest angel investment organization. The Band has seeded over 200 companies in the past 16 years, yielding more than 40 profitable exits via acquisition and nine via initial public offerings on Nasdaq.
Read More
By Francis Moran
For too long now, I have been painfully aware of just how dimly acquainted technology is with marketing.
I’ve heard all the usual reasons; hell, I’ve even subscribed to most of them myself at one time or another. But these excuses simply don’t hold up to scrutiny.
Technology companies tend to be engineering-driven and gears just don’t get marketing, goes perhaps the most common refrain. It’s true that most technology ventures are engineering ventures but I think marketers are letting themselves too easily off the hook by bleating that the engineers don’t understand what we do and that’s why they won’t support it. We’re supposed to be in the explanation and persuasion business; if we can’t explain ourselves to our own bosses and clients and persuade them why they should invest heavily in what we do, then we deserve the dim respect marketing so often seems to attract.
Read More
By Leo Valiquette
The Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) is one of Canada’s leading marketing organizations, tasked with making the most of the fact that, when it comes to having a globally recognized brand in the international tourism industry, Canada ranks number one.
CTC president and CEO Michele McKenzie spoke at the Ottawa Chamber’s monthly Eggs n’ Icons breakfast this morning about how the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver served as a platform for promoting that brand to the world and how, in the Olympics’ “afterglow,” the challenge remains on how to capitalize on all that positive press.
International tourism is a huge and growing market. According to McKenzie, emerging economies are firing shots across the bow of traditional, more established tourism destinations that must scramble to maintain market share, redefine their messaging and ensure their brand remains visible in markets such as Brazil, China and Korea. These emerging markets are experiencing dramatic growth in the volume of outbound travellers versus “traditional” sources of foreign tourists, such as France, Germany and Great Britain.
While Canada has experienced steady growth in the volume of foreign visitors, 80 per cent of our tourism industry remains driven by domestic tourists. While this is a rich and valued customer base, McKenzie acknowledged, and rightly so, that it is limited, especially compared to a market such as China, which expects to have 100 million (yes, that number is correct) outbound tourists heading to international destinations by 2020.
As a big brand with a premium product to sell, we need to put ourselves on the radar of these huge new customer segments. As with any business, we can’t afford to keep most of our eggs in one basket. Market diversification is crucial to long-term sustainability.
Read More
By Francis Moran
I heard the saddest story the other day.
A few years ago, we worked on the launch of a new personal finance website developed by a veteran personal financial advisor. The site was detailed, secure, incredibly useful and solved a sharp, expensive and disruptive pain that the advisor had been running up against his entire professional life.
Our media launch went well. We got some decent coverage, both in mass media and, more valuably, in the trade media reaching financial advisors. Although the site was designed for individual subscriptions, advisors were identified as its most important channel to market since they were expected to counsel their clients to use it.
We were a little confused when the campaign was not continued past that initial launch, especially since some of the best opportunities we generated for the client were over the long term, including, for example, an agreement to have the site’s creator contribute a regular column to one of the key trade publications in the space. From the other folks working on the launch we heard encouraging news about the possibility that the site would be white-labelled by one of the largest firms of financial advisors on the continent, and other early signs of traction. So we were at a bit of a loss when everything went unexpectedly quiet.
Still, it wasn’t the first time that a client had invested in a launch only to tell us they would be unable to continue funding the program so we moved on, occasionally curious about what had become of the endeavour.
Then, last week, I heard the full sad story.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Yesterday’s Zone5ive was a hot ticket. In fact, the near-capacity crowd Tweeted about it so much it trended on Twitter. The event’s success can be owed to the fact that co-presenters, our own Francis Moran and Kathryn Schwab of Cyan Solutions, demonstrated what they were talking about by producing a content-rich presentation that they – and attendees and event organizers from OCRI – promoted aggressively, predominantly through social media.
In their presentation, Moran and Schwab laid out the necessary ingredients that companies need to garner media coverage in both traditional and new media. According to Moran and Schwab, the two key elements are strategy and content. Companies must have their PR resources – either internal or external – research and then target relevant media and provide them with irresistibly rich content in order to ensure their stories get told. Blasting news releases out in hopes of getting covered simply don’t work. The media landscape is shrinking, budgets are being slashed, and the pressure on journalists to produce unique and brilliant stories is weighing down more than ever before. Don’t make them do any more work than they have to. Plan out your story and package it for them. By providing the right journalist with the right story at the right time, you can vastly increase your chances of getting your clients’ story told. New media channels are no different. By providing the right audience in the right forum with the right story at the right time, you can help ensure your content gets shared through reposts, retweets, comments and mentions, which can also boost the relevance of your content in the eyes of journalists.
Read More
“Companies that can’t clearly articulate their customer and market are not real serious companies, they are research projects … Engineering and marketing need to work together from the get go.”
