Marketing Memos

I will be presenting at the 2008 SLAM (Sales, Licensing, Alliances and Marketing) Conference in April.

My topic this year is on Technology Marketing in Troubled Times. With recession looming an IT budgets wither growing very slowly or shrinking, tech marketeers have to start shifting gears. Come hear me on April 4th at the coffee sipping time of 8:40AM.

Bookmark to:

I feel a lecture coming on!

I’m a bit anal retentive when it comes to marketing communications. This trait is constantly reinforced when I work with technology companies. As a species, they are the worst marcom machines on the face of Gawd’s gray world.

So today I deviate from discussions of markets and strategy to communicate about communications. Specifically I’m going to give away some expertise about how to compose marketing prose.

Rule #1 - don’t alliterate: It is really annoying.

Rule #2 - know your audience: It is one thing to understand your audience, but another thing entirely to know them. “Knowing” means you are in their shoes, doing their job, and feeling their pain. It involves a deep connection that reveals their true motivations.

For example, an IT executive might say he wants to reduce application development costs, but his true motivation is to spend that money on other things. This difference between what they say they want, and what they really want can make the difference between a win and a loss.

Rule #3 - use their language, not yours: Technologists are introspective out of necessity. They often must look at problems from positions that allow them to conceive of solutions. This leads to them talking about the solution from the same angle, which is typically not the angle from which customers view the problem.

One example is Aspera and their fasp file transfer solution. It is a cool technology, and an approach to speeding file transfers that I dreamed up years ago but for which I never created a product. Their engineers are top notch, but their product information is told from the network guru’s perspective. FTP and other technologies cannot take advantage of all the bandwidth they have to move a file, and thus the time to transfer the file goes long. This is the way Aspera tells their story, which is backwards from the way an average buyer thinks which is “my file transfers need to go faster.” Aspera’s mistakes go right to their graphics which at first glance make their product look bad.

Rules 2&3 together are violated by Aspera. But they are not alone … most young tech firms make these communication mistakes. Always inventory your early adopters and discover what language they use to describe their problems and their expected outcomes. These are the terms and perspectives that drive your messaging.

Rule #4 - write like a reporter: We live in a 30 … err … 15 … err … 5 second sound bite world. Communicate quickly. Write in short blocks that make direct statements. If any buyer has to wade through useless words, spin, and buzz, they may drift and never discover your value propositions. Good reporters (which excludes anyone working at the New York Times) write this way, and can communicate complex stories by breaking them down into a series of bite-sized bits.

Rule #5 - High to low you go: Start with high-level abstractions of value and benefits before slowly drilling deeper into details. Take our new client, Mobile Complete. On the Mobile Complete home page are headlines that read “transform Your Mobile Product into the Ultimate User Experience” and “end-to-end solutions for the entire mobile product lifecycle.”

What do those headlines tell you about the product and the value it delivers? Nothing. In fact nothing on the homepage communicates what their products do (provide a remote workbench to test and monitor applications on real mobile handsets) and the value it delivers (making sure your mobile applications work right on all kinds of handsets in regions all around the world).

Marcom should start with high-level statements and abstractions that give the reader a reason to investigate further by appealing to their needs, wants, desires, and your solution. Once you have their attention and have created a belief that you may be able to achieve their desired outcomes, then pull them into a deeper conversation.

Rule #6 - illustrate and illuminate: Pictures communicate a ton of information in a small space, and thus are very valuable in marcom. But this requires creating illustrations that actually communicate and opposed to merely decorate.

Take the home page for Axure, who makes application prototyping solutions. The illustrations on the home page communicate nothing about the customer problem, expected outcomes, or how Axure might solve these worries. The graphics are there to add color but not content. Even decorative graphics at very least need to shape a brand (like the top images at Rubric, which communicate their market and an emotional feeling about the company). It is not surprising then that Axure breaks rules 2-5 as well as six (at least I did not see any alliteration on their web site, so they avoided violating rule #1).

Rule infinity - focus! Too many marketing people get lax and don’t checklist their work against goals. Keep focused on the customer and how to own their hearts as well as their minds, and your marcom work will multiply your revenues.

Bookmark to:

An alleged friend of mine reminded me of the TRS-80, the first computer I ever owned outright. He mentioned that old machine while I was talking to him on my cell phone. So I decided to look-up the specifications of the TRS-80 and my cell phone, and show how much computing technology has changed in 30 years.

Now imagine where we will be in 2038.

Bookmark to:

“Sometimes you have to get their attention first,” said the old farmer, who had just whacked his mule in the forehead with a two-by-four. The mule, a little stunned, nonetheless quit being ornery and started pulling the plow.

Perhaps Dell has some mule blood in it.

Dell is discovering what green marketeers discover in about their forth year of their careers — namely that service is a product. Like all products, quality and suitability to the needs of the customers determines success. Given that technology is complex and that no technology user can last long without support, it becomes a critical differentiator for long-term financial success.

(A snide aside: If you want a glaringly good example of lousy customer service, just talk to anyone that uses web hosting from 1and1.com, a company that routinely explores the depths of customer disregard. The horror stories about 1and1.com technical support would make Steven King flinch.)

Your customers are at their most vulnerable state, and often suffering from some degree of frustration, when they call for support. Support then becomes as important (if not more important) than the core product itself.

Dell discovered this the hard way.

Once lauded for the customer care, Dell slid down the slippery slope of cutting customer service in order to cut cost. All they really cut was their own throat, as the Internet all but exploded with tales of Dell’s horrific support services.

Then Michael Dell came back, allegedly kicked some corporate butts, and things are turning around throughout their services groups.

Most interesting in recent news was Dell’s attempt to be flexible in their services offering. Like most vendors, Dell offered “boxes of services” — predefined and rigid sets of tiered services. Often customers found themselves with too few options, either buying less service than they needed but which they could afford, or paying for services they did not need in order to get the few they did. This is the norm in the industry, but not optimal for customers. It is however simple to conceive, model, price, explain and sell.

In other words, it is the product of lazy marketing staffs.

Dell is breaking that model, and this will likely put them ahead of competitors by engendering more profitable service contracts and much happier customers.

Within their new system (which is for SMBs and Enterprises — not consumers), customers will be able to buy specific support modules instead of the typical gold/silver/bronze medal style of support packages. Since every organization differs in terms of the complexity of their IT infrastructure and the scope of their in-house IT talent, their need for services becomes highly individual as well. Some companies may need to get Linux support while others may have kernel hackers on staff. Others may have exotic storage requirements while others do quote nicely with simple NAS.

Dell is making sure everyone gets what they need, and not buying what they don’t.

Marketing has two stakes in this game. First, creating products that people want is key to getting customers in the door to begin with. Service is part of the whole product definition. Define the right service offering and you make the whole product easier to buy.

Perhaps more importantly is that service is central to customer satisfaction. It is well documented that high customer satisfaction leads to repeat sales (more money), positive word-of-mouth (more sales) which brings in even more customers (more money). Failing to provide the right services, and provide them well, has the opposite effect.

Welcome back Michael. You get it.

Bookmark to:

In the all business, and especially in technology, there are three ways to grow: you can innovate product, you can change the rules of the game (marketing), or you can buy your way up (cash).

When I see a hyper-competitive company like Microsoft making a multi-billion dollar plays to buy their way up a market, then I know they failed to innovate or market. And that is the condition in which we find Balmer and Company with their mega bid for Yahoo.

We’ll call the merged company-to-be Micro-hoo?

Microsoft — despite making the Internet a consumer product by bolting a TCP/IP stack into Windows long ago — was slow to see that former Sun CEO Scott McNealy was right when he said “The network is the computer.” The Internet is the only infrastructure bigger than what Microsoft had already created. As such it is a glorious place to make some money. But Microsoft was late to the dance, made many of the same mistakes that predecessors made, and never earned the top tier.

Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo for a hefty premium shows they still don’t get it.

Let’s stipulate a few things about the Internet before continuing.

• It’s big. “Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is,” as the late Doug Adams said about a different universe.
• It is changing faster than any company can create, map, or contain it.
• The real money comes not from trying to create content, but by selling advertising on and around it.

Which brings me to Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Each has in turn tried to be both an Internet search engine and a content aggregation portal, centralizing a set of content and features with the goal of making their portal the first stop and home page for users.

And the users have largely ignored them.

But they have not ignored Google because Google understands the situation. Instead of trying to corral ever-growing content, Google simply helps users navigate it, and make a buck as a byproduct of that basic service. When content is exploding beyond anybody’s control, there is money to be made merely bring some semblance of order from chaos.

Thus, Microsoft’s move is understandable, confounding, and I believe ultimately regrettable.

It is understandable because when you have vaults full of cash, have struggled to achieve a meager third-place in the search business, and risk having the world’s largest money generator (the Internet) default to someone else’s domain, buying your way out of the mess is quick and relatively painless … at least in the sort term. But it is confounding because Yahoo, for all the nifty things they do, are not innovating the basic function of search — and thus the core source of revenue within the Internet as we know it. Google has maintained this focus, and thus has a 57% share of all searches, while Microsoft has a paltry 14% (which is still a damn sight better than Ask, who had to fire their butler after scrapping up a meager 2% of the market).

Google has added non-search entities to their empire, but not with the goal of becoming a content provider, a strategic mistake made by AOL … and we see where that got them. Even in buying YouTube for a seemingly ridiculous price, Google sought not to centralize it within a walled garden of content, but to make its separately branded content searchable and to drive advertising through-and-around it.

Which brings us back to Micro-hoo? and their goals, which are poorly articulated in public. In their press release, Microsoft was clear that advertising dollars were driving the decision, along with the typical mega-merger drivel about economies of scale (that sure worked well for Carly Fiorina right after the Compaq merger, eh?). Microsoft’s purchases last year of advertising exchange and distribution technology companies (AdECN, aQuantive, ScreenTonic) indicates they have a slightly more thought-out scheme than merely merging MSN and Yahoo, and firing redundant staff.

Yet even if we assume that Micro-hoo? loses none of their respective search traffic in the post-merge melee, their total reach would be around 31% of all searches. This will undoubtedly decline as Micro-hoo? attempts to sew together their Frankenstein monster using left over body parts from Yahoo, MSN, and all the recently purchased trafficking and analytics appendages. The merger will disrupt existing services, annoy users who will be told to vacate one of the other mail/IM/portal services, and yet create nothing new. In short, Micro-hoo? adds zero, and all for a mere $41 billion bucks.

Quite a price to pay in order to be the Avis of the Internet.

What will be more interesting perhaps is merger mania among the bottom feeders. AOL and Ask, both struggling to maintain relevance, may just merge in a last-gasp at life (though combined they currently don’t rack-up even 7% of searches). If they do it will be as ugly as a NASCAR pile-up or a presidential election. Hmmmm, maybe we should put all the presidential candidates into high-powered race cars and ….

Is their a marketing lesson in all this? Of course, and that is that you must have product in order to market something thinker than air. Google has product (search) which they constantly enhance and improve, and reap huge stacks of lucre for their efforts. Micro-hoo? won’t have innovation or a superior product, and thus will have nothing exceptional to sell. If your products are weak, then your first strategic marketing task is to determine what better product needs to be created, and then how to get engineering to build it.

Of course, the company that brought us Vista cannot comprehend a lesson this basic.

Bookmark to: