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Journal Archive

Select A Category BrandingBusiness StrategiesConsumer Behavior / MarketsCreating New MarketsEmerging Business ModelsEntrepreneurship & Game of BusinessGo-to-Market StrategiesHigh-Tech Case StudiesInnovationLearningMarketingRandom IdeasStrategy as a ProcessTweetsValues and All things Good

Marketing

CMOs: Align Yourself to the C-suite

Is Marketing considered a a Corporate Performance Contributor? From conversations I’m having around the Valley, I’ve come to realize that marketing and its relevancy to the C-Suite is (in cleaned up language) not-so-good. Marketing is no longer considered contributing to…
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RIM’s Blackberry Campaign Commentary

Blackberry’s been running a great campaign. It started with a banner ad. The banner asked you to share with Blackberry “why you loved it”. From there, you could read other stories of why people loved their blackberry. There are lots…
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Affinity!

Affinity! That illusive icon in the distance that every company wants to attain. When you have it, you’re golden. When you don’t, everything’s a struggle. It’s that tight grouping and bond a customer has with a company, a brand. And…
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We think we know… but we don’t

Product Managers and Marketing people often think we know our customers and what they want from us. But let me challenge that thinking. If we knew more about our customers or even our prospects, we might change what we product…
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What did you think I meant?

A couple blog entries ago, I suggested that while most companies think of the “home page” as their entry to their web experience, most people googled their way into a website doing a deep dive to perform a surgical strike…
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The guides

I met last week with this incredibly zany guy named Nick Hayes of Influencer 50. His firm understands influencer marketing at a very deep level and he’s now in the Bay Area establishing a presence here. In doing so, he’s…
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Google is your UI

Let me paint a picture of the world today as a company sees it and then again as a customer experiences it. Company View: A company, say yours, has a “home page” where they organize the user experience so users…
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Spotlight on HP’s Campaign

Great marketing is about demand creation. It’s about filling an unfulfilled need, or creating a need and then filling it. When done right, it’s magical to experience. Marketing has many elements, of course. There’s: - inbound marketing which helps define…
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Branding 301: The Advanced Level

Branding. Is only as meaningful as it is consistent. That means colors and type fonts. But it also means experience vs. marketing. So the questions: How consistent is yours? What will you do to make it consistent? What has to…
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4 levels of belief; 5 ways to market

Promise Phelon, CEO of the Phelon Group recently spoke at the fall WITI Conference in Santa Clara during a session called “the Changing Customer Conversation”, and introduced these 4 levels of belief. People are most likely to believe, in this…
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Value of Customers, Real Time @ Web 2.0

I’m amazed at how much people love to listen to real customers. At Web 2.0, the longest line for the microphone wasn’t to ask a question to Ray Ozzie, Jeff Bezos, Bruce Chizen (who, notably, had no questions asked of…
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Consumer technology matters but only to a few…

Consumer technology matters, sure. But remember that most of consumer technology stuff is something people made up and then found someone willing to buy. I profess to have done this with web authoring software, and countless other tools. Consumer marketing…
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Metrics: Getting rid of Voodoo in Marketing

It’s time for marketing to get out of the realm of voodoo and spin, to create a more defensible position for budget dollars and develop a more secure “seat at the table” by demonstrating the business champion skills they…
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Give me that thing called [customer] Love

Just got published on MarketingProfs for what will be a six-part series or “Summer Bootcamp for Business”. For those of you that aren’t familiar yet with MarketingProfs.com, it’s a great source for content and real-know from people in the field….
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Solutions Drive Sales

Check out this video. It was made using a Logitech webcam, and uses visual effects that come with the camera. Supposedly, it has triggered a big run on Logitech cameras. It shows that the solution (even if it’s silly —…
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Basic Marketing 101: Don’t make the customer mad

I couldn’t believe this story ; I thought for sure it had to be a hoax. After all, Microsoft has the economics, savvy, and operating experience to do marketing right. But apparently not. Here’s what happened: Microsoft wanted to raise…
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Metrics: The Long and the Short View

In business, metrics matter. It’s key to make sure you’re looking at things that indicate truth or at least a pattern of truth. I’ve been working for the last few weeks on a client Optimization project where we’re drawing…
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Strategic Defense Moves: Get Closer to your Customer

You know the best way to build a competitive position? By knowing your customer face-to-face, voice-to-voice. Not some abstract idea of who your customer is, but being able to interchange ideas with them. In a career that seems a lifetime…
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Hype vs. Real Emerging Models for High-Tech Industry

I’ve been home sick a lot lately. First a cold that needed steroids to knock out, later a stomach flu which the whole family bonded over, and now a fever my son and I are sharing. (Let that explain…
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Creativity: build or buy?

Apple is known for creativity, HP is not. Is that random, or a series of choices that accumulates to one direction or the other? Asking what makes an organization or leader ‘creative’ is bound to get some soft answers….
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It’s a Hit!

Ever conceive an idea and then find someone else takes it to market? I had this feeling when reading today’s release of Sandhill’s publication. Mike Mace forwarded it to me and said ‘it’s your song’. Even better, is that the…
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HP redefines their value proposition for PCs!

Do you know what you are selling to the user? Is it a thing (a unit, a box, a software package) or does that thing get associated with a solution, or feeling or a belief? In this day and age…
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Small Business Marketing: Clarity on Customer is Key

While I work with many mid to large size software firms in my day job, my other hat is being CEO of a small company. A small company with many, many competitors. Because consulting has no standard definition, anyone can…
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The Customer Experience: The Design Moment of Truth

Business 2.0 ran an article this month on their ‘2nd annual bottom line design awards’. The article promised to “go beyond surface beauty to single out objects that look good not just in pictures, but also on their makers’ income…
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Sales model is critical go-to-market piece

Getting caught up on reading as I nurse a cold today. An article worth highlighting. On page B10 of this (3/28/06) Tuesday’s WSJ, there was an article on marketing strategy that made loads of sense. Two audiences might want to…
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How is consulting different than therapy?

A client asked me this question during what was our consultation meeting: “How is consulting different than therapy?”. Great question, isn’t it? So while I came up with some rational response at the time that seemed to be plausible, I…
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Great Product Management starts with…

One of the more common questions I hear from product management teams is based on figuring out why company A is successful and company B is not. Perhaps it’s that company A somehow does a better job of listening to…
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Why company blogging really makes sense

In these days where execs get so far removed from consumers that the only time they see them is when they are behind the glass walls of a focus group forum, I think blogging really makes sense. With it,…
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Ways benchmarking makes strategies better

I do benchmarking all the time, but I never think that the application of all that data is a 1-size-fits-all model. Benchmarking can be useful to learn what other companies do well to optimize their business model. The key is…
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Sweat the small stuff, sweat it all

Last week, I attended a roundtable of CEOs. And one CEO of a well-known and privately held firm provided a showcase of his upcoming rebranding effort. Interestingly, the consumer company had done focus groups and figured out what they needed…
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Make mine the most expensive way to expand

A colleague and friend got $30M in VC funding recently. Good times. It was more than he asked for, because the VC wanted to see fast market penetration into several verticals. Market expansion can be done in multiple ways —…
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Finding the Core Value Proposition is Key

I recently got introduced to an up-n-coming PLM (product lifecycle management) software vendor who shall remain nameless. There are several notable vendors already in the PLM space including IBM, PTC, Borland, UGS (a division of EDS) , and about 40…
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B2C Marketing Has Its Nuances

Typical business sales process will involve several steps including: research, product application, and consideration. Consumers respond to simple, clear messages. Businesses are full of mavens. They are hungry for content and if a vendor produces a 20 page piece of collateral, business folks will actually search for the relevant information and plug away to understand the product. Consumers are nearly opposite; they are hungry for ease. Even the sales model is radically different. A typical sales process in business has multi-step meaning see a brochure, seek a meeting, get a demo, perform a trial and then get a proposal. Buy one and see if you need to buy more. Consumer sales process is much more about connecting to the consumer, and positioning products well to communicate the benefits; at the time the consumer is looking for that. Most electronics or technology products have a sales cycle of less than 30 days from awareness, to consideration, to purchase. So in a business marketing setting, you can afford to do multiple sets of features and solutions and take time to get the message accurately and richly across. Consumer marketing has to capture the key ideas into a simple phrase or pitch. Simple, simple, simple. Getting that pitch to be both simple and differentiated is elegance.
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Market Entry Moves by Cisco Warrant Review

So what do I think of Cisco’s latest moves? I’m game with the vertical strategy. It’ll put them in the same place as several other good vendors but competition amongst this class of firms will only lead to goodness in the market. On the consumer play, I have concerns but if I suddenly see some good consumer folks joining the Cisco team, or some way of running their new acquisition as a stand alone company, I’ll gain more confidence.
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Making a Better Widget isn’t a Competitive Strategy

During my day job, I help both start-ups and billion-dollar tech companies pick market niches and position themselves to compete successfully no matter what size. Most of them start with a competitive mindset that is something like “we make…
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