By Jay Innes
Marketing and communications pros – hell, even PR folks and business developers – can force a smile after reading a study examining Canada’s productivity and following that with a scan of a Branham report on the Canadian ICT industry.
Deloitte Canada recently released The Future of Productivity: A Wake Up Call for Canadian Companies, assessing the worrisome trend that sees startups flourish and then flounder because growth and productivity aren’t sustained. The slowdown and full-blown failure of many startups is, the report states, a partial result of business leaders “not investing in the activities required to sustain growth.” The authors advise firms to increase their focus on gathering competitive intelligence as part of an effort to avoid slipping behind their peers.
“Canada’s entrepreneurs may have mastered the art of creating fast-growing businesses with great potential, but they fall short when it comes to sustaining them,” states the Deloitte study.
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By Hailley Griffis
As per our usual Friday schedule, we have rounded up some of the best articles we’ve come across in the past week to share with our readers. Front and centre this time around are Startup Professionals, Financial Post and the Huffington Post.
Many entrepreneurs over-think or under-think issues
Martin Zwilling, CEO and founder of Startup Professionals, Inc. assesses the overload of information that today’s entrepreneurs are swimming in, causing them to either over-think or under-think very crucial issues. He bases his points on Daniel Patrick Forrester ‘s book and offers key areas for reflective thinking.
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By Francis Moran
Ottawa finally got its version of the C100’s terrific Accelerate conferences last week and it was a stellar event from beginning to end.
The C100 is a group — or mafia, as they like to call themselves — of mainly Silicon Valley-based Canadian entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others keen to support Canadian technology companies. Its 48 Hours in the Valley twice a year brings 20 Canadian companies to the mecca of technology for two days of networking, pitches and meetings. For several years now, The C100 has been bringing itself to Canada through Accelerate events, usually day-long conferences. I have been to several Accelerate sessions in Montreal and Toronto over the past few years and have long yammered at Atlee Clark, C100’s chief organiser, that Ottawa needed one of its own.
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By Leo Valiquette
“True trumps clever any day of the week … It’s far more important to tell a true story even if it’s not perfect in all the details than to make up a clever lie.”
Character actor and memoirist Stephen Tobolowsky spoke these words during a September 2012 interview with National Public Radio. MarketingProfs contributor Jay Pinkert quoted Tobolowsky last week in an article about the value of using honest customer stories to create truly powerful content marketing material.
I’ve written more than once about the power of endorsements willingly provided by those precious entities who validate your existence by giving you money for your product or service. I’ve also emphasized the value of truth and sincerity in advertising, where real people sharing their real stories is far more potent than some paid actor posing as a happy customer, working from a script that has been derived from a variety of customer experiences.
But that article by Pinkert and that quote from Tobolowsky got me thinking about something else, a discharge of clever verbiage that can distort, distend and otherwise bloat marketing copy until it has a poor chance of hooking its intended audience.
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By Francis Moran
The chief technology officer of a company for which I occasionally do some work dug into his archives this past week and came up with a customer survey that was administered when this company was developing its first major product about 20 years ago. I regularly express concern that this company does an inadequate job of properly figuring out what its market really needs. As a result, it frequently falls into the trap of listening to a single prospect’s requirements and building products that ultimately prove to have a market of just one. So the CTO was pretty chuffed with his survey and was keen to show it to me and gain my affirmation that they had done the right thing.
Unfortunately, I had to burst his bubble.
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