By Leo Valiquette
For those of you who may have missed it, London has been a battlefield between police and tens of thousands of hostile student protesters over the past week as Britain’s coalition government targets higher education with its austerity measures intended to help with economic recovery.
Now, I don’t claim any deep knowledge of British politics, or more than a layman’s understanding of economics, but I couldn’t look at this powder keg situation without thinking that it is a sterling example of focusing too much on a short-term fix at the expense of long-term gain, a trap that can snare the management team of a company as easily as a government in power.
Despite campaign promises to the contrary, both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in Britain’s coalition government are voting through legislation that will allow university tuition to be as much as tripled and other support programs, such as teaching grants, to be canceled.
While this may put money in government coffers in the near term, I find it difficult to understand how making it more difficult to obtain an education serves the best long-term interests of the British economy, or any industrialized economy. I tend to agree with the general sentiments that Ian Parkinson, president of the Bolton branch of Britain’s National Union of Teachers, expressed in an article last week. Talented youth will be priced out of higher education, making it that much more difficult to find gainful employment in a tight job market, he said. And if the next generation of workers cannot secure well-paying jobs and are saddled with huge student debts, what impact will this have on overall consumer spending?
While the immediate economic pressures cannot be ignored, what happens five, 10 and 15 years from now, as baby boomers retire and shortages of skilled labour in key sectors of the economy become more acute? How can a nation innovate and be competitive on the global stage if its young people can’t afford the education that will prepare them to take up the torch?
It is an approach that attempts to fix an immediate problem without giving sufficient consideration to the future. Janice Calnan, a specialist in organizational change with whom I have worked, asserts that any organization in need of change, regardless of whether it is a government, a publicly traded company, or a startup trying to bring technology to market, must focus on a vision of where it wants to be, rather than on the immediate problems it faces. Focusing on the problems, she says, only begets more problems.
My interpretation of this is that focusing too much on your immediate challenges and how to resolve them will cause you to lose sight of the big picture. It is tactics in the absence, and at the expense, of strategy.
At inmedia, we have seen numerous companies fall into the same trap. When times are tough and key stakeholders, such as shareholders and investors, want to see results to improve fiscal performance, out comes the axe. Unfortunately, PR and marketing activities are often viewed as areas of business that don’t have enough impact on the bottom line and take the first hit.
But when the volume of leads filling your pipeline is in decline, the marketing machine must become that much more aggressive. We have consistently advocated that companies that maintain — or even increase — their marketing presence during a downturn emerge from the downturn stronger than their competitors since they are in a position to springboard into the new opportunities as they arise.
One way to prime the pump and differentiate your brand from competitors is to employ a highly consultative approach, rather than market yourself based on cost and features. In this way, you develop a thorough understanding of the prospect’s pain and the willingness of the prospect to address that pain. They will come to see you as a trusted partner who is eager to serve their best interests. Having established this kind of relationship, where do you think they will turn when they are ready to spend again?
While reducing cash burn and improving cash flow are, of course, paramount when times are tough, austerity measures must be implemented as part of a long-term strategy. Don’t axe those activities that are vital to your ability to act when opportunity comes knocking. Without such vision, your organization may find itself too weak and forgotten by the market to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.
Picture: The executioner’s, or “heading,” axe on display at the Tower of London.
By Linda Forrest
If there’s one sure way to turn prospects off, it’s to oversell. This is true in sales and in marketing. If you overhype something, you’re sure to disappoint. Case in point, last week’s iTunes announcement from Apple.
When Apple told the market that November 16 would be “a day you’ll never forget,” hopes were high. Would Apple announce that it had finally convinced the major record labels to play nice with one another and introduce a subscription-based approach to music downloads along the lines of what Netflix offers for movies? What could it be that would warrant such a bombastic statement? Surely, the announcement would have to change the face of music downloading forever in order to live up to the hype?
As everyone who is not living under a rock now knows, the announcement was the addition of the full Beatles catalogue to iTunes. As the surviving band members and their Apple Records label had resisted digital downloads for a long time, with a lawsuit or two along the way, this was big news for Apple. But “a day you’ll never forget”? Hardly. Actually, scratch that – it is a day I’ll never forget because I was heartily disappointed when the news didn’t live up to the hyperbole Apple had used to preview this announcement and a perfect example of the old adage “don’t believe the hype.”
While Apple is crowing about the 2 million songs downloaded in the first week, this seemingly impressive figure is modest when compared with the still-held U.S. sales record set by N’Sync in 2000 for albums sold, which was 2.42 million. In modern terms, country phenomenon Taylor Swift sold 279,000 digital copies of her full length album in the first week.
Not only was the addition of the Beatles catalogue to iTunes not a day that will enter the history books, but it hasn’t even performed that well. Sure it was a personal triumph for Steve Jobs, a huge Beatles fan who fought long and hard to get rights to offer the catalog, but it was the latest in a series of PR missteps for the company.
What can we as B2B tech marketers learn from Apple’s folly?
This is in fact a topic we’ve visited before. Way back in 2008, Leo called out Rogers for its hyperbolic ways and at the dawn of this blog, I wrote about how inmedia gets the best results for its clients when it presents information to the media in a definitive, easily understood way that doesn’t include spin or hyperbole. The same holds true today. Traditional media won’t tolerate it and social media definitely is suspicious of it, so you’ll be doing yourself and your clients a disservice by employing it.
B2B tech is famous for using egregious hyperbole in its marketing efforts. A recent howler from CIO documented the 10 most exaggerated tech terms, a list that included “leading vendor,” which is a battle we’ve fought more than once with clients. Leading how? If your news is indeed first, or better, or leading the market in some way, define your terms.
Ask any journalist and they’ll tell you that their garbage cans, virtual and otherwise, are filled with hyperbolic marketing material, which they didn’t read past the headline that overhyped the subject matter that followed unread. Don’t let your materials end up on the trash heap because you needlessly overdid it.
By Francis Moran
The news last week that major international news agencies, including Reuters and Agence France-Presse, were going to boycott the news conference launching this year’s Cannes film festival in a dispute over restricted access to the festival’s fabled red carpet is an uncomfortable but not wholly unexpected consequence of both the blurring lines between the editorial and commercial departments of large media conglomerates and of the recognition that there is still a lot of money to be made from news content — at least, from certain kinds of news content.
Here’s the back story. The fabled film festival, which is the world’s largest and this year runs from May 12 to 23, signed a sponsorship deal with French broadcaster Canal Plus and with European pay-TV company Orange, a subsidiary of France Telecom. The deal, part of a growing trend by media properties to extract more than just exposure from their sponsorship of events, gives the two sponsors a level of exclusivity over video footage from the red carpet, where the world’s stars and starlets preen for the attention of paparazzi as they arrive for screenings, and from news conferences, where the stars and directors of the movies meet the world’s journalists covering the festival. The festival has said that other news organizations would have restricted access to these venues for video-shooting purposes. The world’s largest wire services, which are well paid to serve up this video to their clients around the globe, have cried foul.
I’m not sure they should be.
I realise that media outlets, especially reputable media outlets, have always maintained opaque Chinese walls between their editorial and advertising departments but many of them in this modern era have been tearing down those walls themselves. The trend is most advanced in broadcast, where, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars are paid every two years for exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics. An unchallenged outcome of this is that while non-sponsoring broadcasting companies can certainly cover the games, they accept that they will face restrictions on camera placement and access to athletes, and quite severe limits on how much they can actually broadcast.
Not all that much different from what the Cannes festival has imposed.
I suspect the news agencies are crying foul less out of wounded journalistic ethic and more out of a hit to their bottom lines. You see, event organizers like the Olympics and, now, Cannes have figured out that the pictures media companies acquire at such events are worth a lot of money. And they want a piece of this action. I believe we will increasingly see event organizers charge the media for access to this valuable content.
In a way, this has long been established practice on election campaigns, where journalists who want to travel on the leader’s plane or bus must cough up substantial amounts of money to cover the costs. While nobody would ever suggest this is any sort of cheque-book journalism, it does lock out the less-wealthy media organisations and, thereby, make more valuable the stories and pictures that those with access publish and broadcast.
As I said, I’m not sure I object to this trend. While the purist in me is concerned about a world where media have to pay for access to events and the implications that holds for media freedom and other vaunted values, the realist (cynic?) in me is obliged to concede that most media today are indistinguishable from any other commercial enterprise, producing and packaging the product they know will sell while leaving aside the stuff they know won’t.
Why shouldn’t they have to pay for the raw material?
Cannes, Olympics, journalism, cheque-book journalism, media ethics [\tags]
By Linda Forrest
Finally, Amazon has announced that its e-book reader, the Kindle, is available to Canadians. While much of the rest of the world has been happily e-reading for quite some time, we’re just now being graced with Kindle’s presence, something I wrote about last month.
While I’m an avid reader, I can’t quite imagine reading a novel on an e-reader, though the fact that the Kindle would alleviate the constant challenge we face in our household to find bookshelf space for the masses of reading material we own, is rather appealing. Still, we’ve already placed our order for a new bookshelf from Santa rather than a Kindle. Perhaps next year.
