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Pretend the word “solution” doesn’t exist. Now, what do you actually do?

• Posted by Francis Moran
• November 23, 2009
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By Francis Moran

At the peak of the dot-com and telecom bubble at the beginning of this decade, my wife, who is also a technology marketing strategist, and I often amused ourselves by imagining the response we might get if we created an entirely fictitious company and put up a website that employed all the utterly meaningless buzz words that were being bandied about at that time. I forget what we going to call the company — the name certainly had the word “solutions” in it — but I remember that we invented an incredibly persuasive mission statement that actually said nothing at all.

We didn’t think we’d get any customers, but we were pretty sure we could get some VC funding.

That little inside joke of ours came to mind this morning as a I watched a lovely little video by Made to Stick co-author Dan Heath on “Writing a mission statement that doesn’t suck.” Using a pizza parlour as example, Heath shows how an initially-quite-effective mission statement is turned into mushy pablum by the use of words that sound aspirational but that really don’t mean anything at all. Actually, it’s not that these words don’t mean anything at all; it’s that they could mean anything to anyone.

I do a lot of work helping technology companies figure out their differentiated positioning in the marketplace. This work is usually done in the same sort of group-think environment that turned “serve the tastiest damn pizza in Wade County” in Heath’s example into the mushy and meaningless “present with integrity the highest quality entertainment solutions to families.” Every time the word “solution” is suggested — and it is suggested almost every time — I implore the workshop participants to imagine the word doesn’t exist. “Now,” I ask them,” What is it that you actually do?” The answers immediately get much sharper and focused and far more meaningful.

The little joke my wife and I still wish we had managed to play on a gullible marketplace was predicated on this tendency to avoid specificity in favour of being all things to all people. In marketing, though, the joke will be on you because in trying to be all things to all people, you will succeed only in being nothing to anyone.

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Marketing strategy
• Technology marketing

If reading this post cost you $1.95, would you pay?

• Posted by Linda Forrest
• November 19, 2009
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By Linda Forrest

There’s a war going on on the internet. A war between traditional content providers and consumers. Ironic, given that the battle is over a communication channel, that what we have here is a failure to communicate.

It’s been impossible for me to avoid information lately about paid content on the internet, subscription models for newspapers online, and Rupert Murdoch’s gaffes when it comes to information distribution in a connected world.

It all started with an article in a recent Vanity Fair about Murdoch’s determined stance on making readers pay for online content. The fact that he told an interviewer last week that he plans to drive readers to the paid content by blocking Google from indexing his newspapers, a move that renders their content invisible to the world at large, shows that, as Michael Woolf posits, perhaps he just doesn’t understand what’s at stake here and just how pervasive Google is.

As Valleywag suggested, perhaps Murdoch should read a recent report from Forrester that says that 80% of the 4,000 consumers polled will not pay for online newspaper content and that the remainder are divided on the payment model they’d agree to (subscription versus paying for individual articles).

The real trouble starts when you factor in that 60% of newspaper executives are working on paid-content models. Yikes.

Today’s media world is transparent for those who wish to see, Have a question for your marketplace? Then pose it in any of the many channels available to you. You’ll quickly learn what your customers want and what they don’t want. The fact that those in control of the traditional media aren’t even trying to really understand the tools available to them and devising new revenue models around this new reality is just pathetic. Perhaps the traditional media deserves to dwindle to the point of irrelevance if it’s so unaware of its environment.

The idea of including marketing in an agile product development strategy, as @FrancisMoran wrote about earlier this week, isn’t all that far removed from what newspaper execs need to do here. Listen to your market as you’re deciding what to do and involve them in the process. Rather than engineer newspaper content delivery to suit your revenue desires, find out how your readers want to access your content and build a revenue strategy around that. Seems obvious…

Linda Forrest

Posted in:

• Marketing strategy
• Public and media relations

Canadians: you can add a Kindle to your Christmas list

• Posted by Linda Forrest
• November 17, 2009
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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.

Linda Forrest

Posted in:

• Product marketing

The importance of news

• Posted by Danny Sullivan
• November 17, 2009
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By Danny Sullivan

While much of the PR industry will refer simply to “news releases” as a term to cover the whole spectrum of outbound news flow, at inmedia, we at least choose to assign some level of importance to releases before deciding on the level of effort to placed against them. Attributing a level of media value to a release at the outset will ensure that PR resources are not being wasted on outreach that is never going to yield results.

A good example to illustrate this news value is the customer-win announcement. Companies love to be able to announce new customers and often feel that this should always be a newsworthy item among the media. And so it may be, some of the time. There is a huge difference between announcing a deal where the new customer is prepared to speak about the strategic decisions behind a purchase that has a significant dollar value attributed to it, and a deal where the customer is not prepared to say anything more than the fact they are “working with” the new vendor. The news value here is vastly different; one can reasonably be expected to be pitched for real coverage, while all the other can hope for is, at best, a couple of lines pulled direct from the release.

Sometimes this value-assessment exercise can be challenging. Companies often have an inflated opinion of the importance of their news, but taking a clear stance at an early stage helps prevent awkward questions after the fact. News that is simply an FYI to your market should be exactly that – a piece of information to be noted but without anyone making a great fuss.

Conversely, news that you know has real value should be explored to its fullest extent. I’ve had a few experiences in recent months with news stories that had definite value but that took a bit more than just sending a release to media to secure coverage. Follow up is hugely important; it can be amazing how often you speak to editors who claim to have not seen your news story, then checks inbox, finds it and agrees that it’s something they should be covering! For important news, you should never assume that simply sending the email will guarantee it is seen by your targets.

Another common experience is the editor who may have seen the release but “doesn’t cover news” so thought it was irrelevant and deleted it. For this situation, you need to be aware of the deeper issues that your news story addresses. If you are releasing a new product, why does it have the new features and functionality it does? Do they address a trend in the marketplace? Can this trend be explored as part of a feature?

Establishing the importance of news is a crucial exercise for any PR person to undertake for every announcement, helping both manage expectations and ensuring that effort is expended in the most useful areas.

Danny Sullivan

Posted in:

• Marketing strategy
• Public and media relations

Are Canadian tech companies ready for agile?

• Posted by Francis Moran
• November 16, 2009
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By Francis Moran

An excellent, if low-key, presentation at last week’s OCRI Zone5ive shed some interesting new light on a pervasive issue we on this blog and many other technology-company watchers have commented on before. Canadian tech ventures take a distant back to seat to their American competitors when it comes to marketing their products and services. And, I can tell you from working on both the transmitting and receiving ends of the marketing efforts of a number of British and European outfits, those guys also regularly best the Canadians at engaging with, and reaching out to, their markets.

Conventional wisdom says the Yanks, and maybe the Brits, are simply more brash than we are; natural-born salespeople, they are simply louder, more confident and more aggressive. Perhaps there’s some truth to that; certainly, I have never come across anything more doggedly relentless than a British ad-sales guy trying to get me to buy space in his publication. But putting poor Canadian performance down to our supposed more docile domestic character prevents us from recognizing a more systemic issue that Peter Hanschke, the product-management specialist who presented at Zone5ive last Thursday, brought to light in his examination of agile product development and how it encourages — even demands — a very tight fit with marketing and early customer engagement. (You can see Peter’s slides here.)

Agile product development is not a new process; it’s been around for nearly a generation. But it is particularly well suited for this era that increasingly embraces concepts like minimal viable product — swiftly develop the bare bones of a product and get it out in front of customers who will equally swiftly tell you whether they like it or not so you can decide whether to enhance or kill it. Agile product development allows for such iterative and ever-evolving product-development cycles that are highly responsive to equally dynamic market forces.

But here’s where Peter’s presentation got really interesting for this marketing strategist.

In order for the process to be effective, agile product development must embrace marketing at every stage. How can you decide what the market wants and will value if you haven’t engaged your potential customers at the very outset? How do you know if you’re meeting customer specifications and requirements if you don’t show them your still-in-development stuff and get their feedback and input? Under an agile regime, product releases are based on having created value for a customer, and how do you parse that without talking to the customer?

More interestingly, it’s not just a case of marketing contributing to the process; we marketers also gain massively. Imagine, Peter told us in a scenario that got the attention of every one of us more accustomed to last-minute demands to go market the hell out of a finished product scant weeks or days from launch, if we were able to build the entire marketing piece alongside, and in lock step with, the product itself? And because customers are inherently and intimately involved along the way, agile product development kicks out early customer references for use in media and analyst relations programs.

All music to my ears until one attendee threw a large bucket of freezing cold Canadian ice water on the whole thing.

How many people here, he asked, have ever actually worked in or for a company that used such a process? Asking for a show of hands, he found his one of the very few hands in the air.

And that’s the real issue that can’t merely be chalked up to our alleged more-demur national character. It is my consistent observation that too many Canadian technology companies are engineering-centric, rather than customer- or market-centric. Engineers love to build what they love. Regrettably, this is, far too often, a great distance from what the market would love to buy.

Peter protested that engineers hate to build things that people don’t use, and I’m sure that’s true. But he himself sharply identified a tendency whereby products are developed according to an internally produced specifications sheet and then, fully finished, are tossed over the transom to sales and marketing to go flog. He called it the old way of doing things; I’d call it far-too-persistent, even today.

This is not to say every Canadian technology venture is a solution in search of a problem. With a colleague, I have just finished a strategic marketing plan for an Ottawa company that was sharply market- and customer-focused from the outset. Consisting of a cadre of brilliant ex-Nortel optical engineers, this gang did not look at its collective capabilities and ask, as so many do, “What could we build?” Instead, they researched a number of sharp and immediate pain points within optical networking and selected a few around which huge value could be created if the right solution was developed.

Working with them was a novel experience. Unlike with most of my clients, I was not handed a finished product and told to develop the marketing plan for it. Rather, in what was sometimes a difficult process with which to keep pace, the product and its feature set were constantly in flux; every time we got together with these folks, we needed an updated briefing. Indeed, by the time we finished the plan, it was exclusively in support of a new product that didn’t even exist when we first engaged with them just a few months prior. The first product they had showed us no longer needed immediate marketing support because it had been completed and OEM’d into a major optical equipment manufacturer — the customer! — where it was perfectly meeting that customer’s requirements. (And, not incidentally, generating real revenue that was underpinning the company’s growth and its development of the next products.)

It sounds a bit chaotic but it really wasn’t. At every stage, we could evolve our thinking to make sure our analysis and market research, to say nothing of the go-to-market strategy, continued to synchronize with the product under development and the customers for which it was intended. The product closes a painful network-management gap between the optical layer and application-level IT management tools and so, for example, it posed a critical channel question: Should it be sold on a per-node basis by equipment vendors or on a per-seat license basis by the IT tools vendor? Or both? With eager channel partners in both camps, only an openly collaborative culture that embraced the feedback and input of those channels and of the end customer allowed the client to conclude which approach would best serve the market, and them.

If Peter is right and engineers want to build products that people actually use, then even the most engineering-centric technology company should embrace agile product development methodologies and the close knit with marketing that is stitched in with them. In his experience, he told me after the presentation, it is never a case of engineering resisting marketing once it has embraced agile. If so, marketers should become agile’s most overt evangelists.

Francis Moran

Posted in:

• Marketing strategy
• Technology marketing