I was lucky to attend business school with some really smart folks. One is Kerry Edelstein, who founded Research Narrative a year ago today. She has a great post today about interesting questions in media research. It's worth reading particularly because of the emphasis on the business decisions made based on the research. You all know I'm a huge fan of determining the decision you're going to make before doing the research, so I couldn't agree more.
Attention to all full-service market research firms out there: don't forget the message! I always prefer you to come back with a viewpoint. If I don't like what the research said, I can dispute your interpretation with facts, but I (hopefully, if you have done good research) can't dispute the facts themselves. Now, it's up to you to present a story about the facts and help me understand what to do as a result. Then listen to me and help guide my restatement of the story in a way I can tell management.
If Kerry continues to do that for her clients, Research Narrative should go far.
Showing posts with label marketing strategy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing strategy. Show all posts
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Monday, October 15, 2012
Breaking the Sound Barrier
Felix Baumgartner recently broke the world record for the highest skydive at 128,000 feet. The Guardian had an excellent story today about the partnership between Red Bull and Baumgartner. What I love about this idea is breaking the sound barrier... for the brand.
The "sound barrier" I'm talking about is the clutter of noise in today's multi-channel, multi-media environment. I was writing about this problem back in 1994 when I interned at advertising agency Ingalls, Quinn & Johnson in Boston before Facebook was even a twinkle in Zuckerberg's eye (I think he would have been getting his first pimple around that time). Media clutter has gotten so much worse in so many ways since then.
Breaking through the clutter often requires doing something that has never been done before. For Red Bull, it means an outlandish partnership that could have landed the brand in some trouble if Felix Baumgartner had been injured or killed. But for your brand, the partnership doesn't have to be so outlandish. For example, Barack Obama in 2008 created the world's first true nationwide, cloud-based expert system for elections that targeted voters at the individual level with grass-roots (read: millions of volunteers) targeting. This effort was a huge risk although not to the brand itself. Rather, Obama risked misusing millions of campaign dollars that had traditionally been spent on TV.
I have spoken before about one of my favorite marketing books: Mark Stevens' Your Marketing Sucks. Underneath the unpleasant title are many great tales of how to create breakthrough marketing, like Red Bull's stunt, that push the limit of marketing. His premise, with which I heartily agree, is that if you're not making a spectacle of yourself for the sake of the brand, you're probably wasting your money. If nobody sees the marketing and nobody responds, you wasted the money. Period.
The "sound barrier" I'm talking about is the clutter of noise in today's multi-channel, multi-media environment. I was writing about this problem back in 1994 when I interned at advertising agency Ingalls, Quinn & Johnson in Boston before Facebook was even a twinkle in Zuckerberg's eye (I think he would have been getting his first pimple around that time). Media clutter has gotten so much worse in so many ways since then.
Breaking through the clutter often requires doing something that has never been done before. For Red Bull, it means an outlandish partnership that could have landed the brand in some trouble if Felix Baumgartner had been injured or killed. But for your brand, the partnership doesn't have to be so outlandish. For example, Barack Obama in 2008 created the world's first true nationwide, cloud-based expert system for elections that targeted voters at the individual level with grass-roots (read: millions of volunteers) targeting. This effort was a huge risk although not to the brand itself. Rather, Obama risked misusing millions of campaign dollars that had traditionally been spent on TV.
I have spoken before about one of my favorite marketing books: Mark Stevens' Your Marketing Sucks. Underneath the unpleasant title are many great tales of how to create breakthrough marketing, like Red Bull's stunt, that push the limit of marketing. His premise, with which I heartily agree, is that if you're not making a spectacle of yourself for the sake of the brand, you're probably wasting your money. If nobody sees the marketing and nobody responds, you wasted the money. Period.
Monday, July 23, 2012
The One Thing
What's the one thing that makes it as clear as day why your product or service blows away the competition? Today I discovered a great video we have at Vocollect that illustrates this idea. It's a side-by-side comparison of RF scanning versus Vocollect Voice(R). I'm planning to use this as a demonstration to an industry analyst who is not really familiar with our solution and what it can do for distribution center productivity, accuracy and labor management. Skip to the two-minute mark to get the meat.
Personally, I think we should feature this video in almost every interaction we have with prospects. It illustrates the beauty and simplicity of voice even against a proven, nearly ubiquitous technology. The video allows someone who has no experience with our technology to see immediately why we slaughter competitive technologies in most head-to-head comparisons.
I would challenge any brand, product or service to come up with a similar comparison. The best brands often do. I remember a series of great Jeep advertisements many years ago that showed a series of scenarios in which the only way to get to the location was in a Jeep (the best of which was the site of an SUV commercial in which the director wanted to get the SUV on top of a mountain, and the company was going to fly it in--following which the director drove back down the mountain in his Jeep).
If your company doesn't have a great side-by-side comparison, part of your marketing stratetgy needs to be finding the change that you can make that might illustrate the difference. We're going through such a strategy exercise right now to help us determine the next great comparison Vocollect will be able to make. Even though we own the market right now, it is never too soon to find the next great "one thing" that will destroy your competition. And we would rather find it ourselves than have our competitors do so.
Personally, I think we should feature this video in almost every interaction we have with prospects. It illustrates the beauty and simplicity of voice even against a proven, nearly ubiquitous technology. The video allows someone who has no experience with our technology to see immediately why we slaughter competitive technologies in most head-to-head comparisons.
I would challenge any brand, product or service to come up with a similar comparison. The best brands often do. I remember a series of great Jeep advertisements many years ago that showed a series of scenarios in which the only way to get to the location was in a Jeep (the best of which was the site of an SUV commercial in which the director wanted to get the SUV on top of a mountain, and the company was going to fly it in--following which the director drove back down the mountain in his Jeep).
If your company doesn't have a great side-by-side comparison, part of your marketing stratetgy needs to be finding the change that you can make that might illustrate the difference. We're going through such a strategy exercise right now to help us determine the next great comparison Vocollect will be able to make. Even though we own the market right now, it is never too soon to find the next great "one thing" that will destroy your competition. And we would rather find it ourselves than have our competitors do so.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Startup Marketing
Unfortunately, the house was perhaps one-third empty. This problem got me thinking about startup marketing. How would I have known about the terrific quality of this production except by word of mouth? This is the first summer that Opera Theater of Pittsburgh is performing a summer series, so that might explain the lack of knowledge. Their basic marketing was clearly on target; I found out about the performance by direct mail. I assume the opera company got my information from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's shared database. But what about other targets such as people who live in or near Fox Chapel where the performance took place?
These days, a lot of startups wishing to expand quickly are using social crowdsourcing deal sites such as Groupon and Living Social. If you have a business with expiring inventory, such as a theater with a limited number of seats or an event that can't make you money once the date has passed, these services can be an excellent option as long as they don't degrade the experience of higher-paying customers by making the large crowd an unpleasant experience. Startups have to take care that they are able to meet the demand, however. I had an experience with a lawn service recently that had to refund me the money because they could never make it out to mow. That's worse than no marketing at all.
A better potential approach is to rely on your existing best supporters. For Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, what about a campaign to give season ticket holders free tickets if they sign up a certain number of friends? Or for us, a discount on next weekend's performance of Candide if we bring four other friends? Or even just a simple plea to existing supporters to Facebook, blog or tweet about the summer series based on their loyalty to the brand?
Right now, we're trying to leverage these relationships at Vocollect. As the industry leader in voice-directed distribution center work, we have a lot of extremely happy customers who are willing to serve as references and/or refer us to other potential customers. It's a lot easier than finding and convincing companies who have never heard of us, and it tends to lead to more like-minded companies and therefore better sales close rates on new deals. All that's required is some database work, internal coordination and a commitment from the executive team that "share of wallet" matters.
For early-stage companies, that means getting a few great wins and wowing those customers with your service and abilities. It's not an easy task, but some of the fastest-growing companies that have survived for a long time seem to take this coddling of early customers to heart. That's an attitude even seasoned companies can use.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
De Facto Standard
What do Google, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Xerox and Vocollect have in common? At some point in their brand history, each of these companies have become the de facto standard in their industry. Achieving this goal requires having a vastly superior product and/or some major network effects.
What can you do with this market position? One excellent strategy (shown at left) is to remind your prospects that you are the industry standard. This strategy works effectively in part because any customer, especially in the B2B setting, wants to mitigate risk. Customers are risk-averse for human reasons, not just business reasons. The average individual wants to be a hero for picking the right solution rather than a goat for picking the solution that doesn't work.
In essence, reminding customers that you are the industry standard is not inwardly-focused marketing (which would be a bad idea). Rather, the idea is to remind prospective buyers that nobody ever got fired for buying Vocollect Voice(R). That's not something our competitors can say, by the way.
Sometimes, the de facto standard occurs because there were not other options to choose, but I have found more often that the de facto standard is, frankly, better.
In essence, reminding customers that you are the industry standard is not inwardly-focused marketing (which would be a bad idea). Rather, the idea is to remind prospective buyers that nobody ever got fired for buying Vocollect Voice(R). That's not something our competitors can say, by the way.
Sometimes, the de facto standard occurs because there were not other options to choose, but I have found more often that the de facto standard is, frankly, better.
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
The One P of Marketing
You remember the four P's of marketing: product, price, place, promotion. Increasingly, I believe that marketing will be about the one P of marketing: product. The increasing transparency of the Interwebs and such makes it much easier to find out, say, the top voice-directed distribution center company. And to find information about that product's benefits and downsides.
Witness my recent discovery of http://www.duckduckgo.com/, the completely private search engine that has benefited immensely from Google's questionable decision to reduce privacy protections. How hard will it be for millions of Google customers to find this option? And how many people, like me, will direct friends and colleagues to competitors when they don't like a product decision their company has made?
These observations all lead me to my product experience today with Google, a day prior to the vaunted privacy policy changes. Today, I searched for "Barack Obama" and got in my top results a post from my brother-in-law on G+ that said, "Yum." and had nothing at all to do with Barack Obama. [I clicked on it out of curiosity, probably making my future results worse since Google is tracking my responses.]
Basically, Google has begun to fail me in the exact area that caused me to abandon AltaVista in the first place so many years ago: superior product. In an instant, I lost respect for my favorite search engine and began to question whether they have, in a nutshell, begun to make their product spew chunks. I probably won't abandon Google search right away, but I'll begin looking at DuckDuckGo more often and maybe hunt around for some other options. This reaction is just the kind of adverse loyalty behavior every brand wants to avoid.
On a brighter note, I'm more excited than ever about a product Vocollect has coming out later this year. I got to try it out today, and I'm a real believer. I think it's a game changer. If it is, you will be hearing a lot more about it (especially if you're in the distribution center business) because in this day and age, customers talk. In this day and age, great products only sometimes catch on, but poor products... and great products turned bad by poor marketing decisions... almost always fail.
Witness my recent discovery of http://www.duckduckgo.com/, the completely private search engine that has benefited immensely from Google's questionable decision to reduce privacy protections. How hard will it be for millions of Google customers to find this option? And how many people, like me, will direct friends and colleagues to competitors when they don't like a product decision their company has made?
These observations all lead me to my product experience today with Google, a day prior to the vaunted privacy policy changes. Today, I searched for "Barack Obama" and got in my top results a post from my brother-in-law on G+ that said, "Yum." and had nothing at all to do with Barack Obama. [I clicked on it out of curiosity, probably making my future results worse since Google is tracking my responses.]
Basically, Google has begun to fail me in the exact area that caused me to abandon AltaVista in the first place so many years ago: superior product. In an instant, I lost respect for my favorite search engine and began to question whether they have, in a nutshell, begun to make their product spew chunks. I probably won't abandon Google search right away, but I'll begin looking at DuckDuckGo more often and maybe hunt around for some other options. This reaction is just the kind of adverse loyalty behavior every brand wants to avoid.
On a brighter note, I'm more excited than ever about a product Vocollect has coming out later this year. I got to try it out today, and I'm a real believer. I think it's a game changer. If it is, you will be hearing a lot more about it (especially if you're in the distribution center business) because in this day and age, customers talk. In this day and age, great products only sometimes catch on, but poor products... and great products turned bad by poor marketing decisions... almost always fail.
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