Marketing Memos

“Silicon Valley invented the technologies that will break apart Silicon Valley,” was the opinion of one Silicon Valley start-up founder in my cabal.

Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Micro and the longest running ad lib comedy act in high-tech recently started a fresh round of discussions about the perpetually pending demise of Silicon Valley. He is heading a stealth start-up in Colorado, far from Stanford, Sand Hill Road and giant blimp hangers. This caught the attention of over seasoned Silicon Valley veterans, and apparently McNealy received a number of inquiries concerning the locale for his new technology empire.  In response he listed the “Top 10 Reasons it’s Better to do a Startup in Colorado than California.”

Jerry Brown is spinning in his grave (What?  Not yet?  You’re kidding?  He looks older than Keith Richards’ grandfather!).

Many things make Silicon Valley the incubator for new and world changing technology, but none of those elements are indelible.  There is a lot of tech-savvy venture capital here, but investors around the globe are banking on technology these days (oil and energy investors in Texas are becoming digital sugar daddies).  A cluster of tech talent is tops, but in this century we can hire anyone from any point on the globe to cut code, map schematic diagrams and even digitally collaborate on chip manufacturing plant design. About the only other variable is the Silicon Valley culture that embraces failure, but few things aside from political lies move faster than cultural biases.

And if Silicon Valley’s masterminds are ready for Colorado ski slopes, then they take inertia and vibe with them.

An informal poll of a handful of founders shows me they have no particular desire to be or stay in Silicon Valley.  Several local founders would leave tomorrow if their VC’s didn’t insist on keeping a close watch on their cash.  Those not in Silicon Valley are actively looking for capital elsewhere to avoid relocation.  Even a couple of VCs I know admit that if they had a way to keep tight reins on their portfolio companies, they could care less about the location of corporate headquarters.

In short, nobody is insisting that Silicon Valley remain the center of the technology universe … not even the people in Silicon Valley.

Yet numbers, being stubborn things, may tell a different story.  Spot checking a few Silicon Valley cities (with Cupertino stats shown below) we see that since the dot-bomb era the population is slightly larger, income (adjusted for inflation) is higher, and the number of people with sheep skins is up significantly. A single decade snapshot is insufficient to define a trend, but it seems Silicon Valley is not exactly destined for diaspora.

This does not mean it won’t happen.  After all, residential broadband is still a relatively new commodity and the world is working out novel patterns of employment.  We may well see a hybrid whereby many or most of the sharpest startups land in Silicon Valley for the lucre, maintaining tiny executive headquarters while virtually managing a mass of employees scattered yon.  Nothing guarantees Silicon Valley will be Silicon Valley in the future … the place has a habit of inventing the next new thing, which might be a new “center” of the technical universe.

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One of the best lines I’ve recently stolen is that “the Internet is a gigantic copying machine,” to which I appended “with a share button.”

Needless to note is that social networking is a driving force in consumer marketing.  Companies as diverse as Apple, Proctor and Gamble, and General Motors (gizmos, suds and duds) are active users of social media to create brands, promote products, and otherwise find cost effective means for memes.  Collectively consumer product companies are effective in targeting buyers, generating sharable content, and getting unpaid workers (you) to spread the word.

B2B companies are borderline imbecilic on the process.

Granted, the similarities between your average teenaged movie buff and all stakeholders in an earthmoving equipment purchase decision are about the same as the similarities between horses and horse fish.  With the exception of the single-decision-maker for a consumer product vs. group decision making for enterprises, the mechanics  for social media promotions are roughly the same.  Tearing down the short list of social media realities, we see some sameness and some divergence.

Targeting

With any promotion, including social media, you have to know your buyers and influencers.  Consumer goods companies are very good at documenting their target buyer.  In slightly more complex consumer sales, say breakfast cereals, they document all the purchase influencers (kids / parents) and their promotional options (colorful, noisy television ads on Saturday morning / nutritional info).  They then orchestrate social media in such ways that the themes, memes and brands are clearly communicated to each individual demographic.  This gives every buyer a reason to share what they experience or learn.

B2B marketing efforts always fall short in buyer genotype segmentation, much less social media promotions from there.  Each genotype needs specific social media content, and you cannot create that content without knowing your genotypes.  Even sophisticated technology firms often fail to pitch products to each influencer much less make that content social (i.e., sharable).

Going where they are

One problem is that B2B marketers don’t have the same social forums for business buyers.  Facebook may be a good venue for promoting a book (which by a book’s nature targets individual buyers, typically of one genotype) but is not ripe for selling a million dollar ERP system to a Fortune 500 enterprise.

Social promotions begin by going where buyer genotypes go.  However, the more genotypes in the buy decision, the more numerous and varied the social media sites may be.  LinkedIn may cover many bases, but likely not all.  Some web sites provide for discussion groups, but lack real sharing tools.  But no social media campaign can succeed unless you leverage social tools specific to one or another genotype (i.e., don’t expect a techie’s social media, like SlashDot, to sell CEOs).

Relevant content

With multiple genotypes in on buy decisions, you have multiple sets of content to create and maintain.  If you are budget tight or plain lazy, then generating enough web and collateral content is a challenge, much less a steady stream of social media stuffing.  If this is the case, it might be better to not attempt social media if you cannot keep up with the reaction to your outreach.  Alternately, performing social media on your most problematic genotype alone might reduce sales cycles and improve your top-line numbers.

Making it sharable and encouraging it

Social is about sharing.  If it can’t be easily and instantly shared, it is not social.  Yet glance about most B2B promotions and you will discover little that is instantly sharable.  Perhaps the chicken is ahead of the egg (or the other way around) — perhaps the dearth of genotype-specific or general business social networking sites makes social engineering online content wasted effort.  But some B2B sites do, going beyond mere “like” links and creating content specifically for sales-focused sharing.  Videos that cover genotype-specific value propositions in humorous ways tend to do well, and thanks to YouTube are instantly sharable (though the places where they can be shared are still not well aligned by genotype).

…

Buyers can’t share a Caterpillar earth mover or an elaborate ERP suite.  Your goal is to use what can be shared to represent your B2B products, to do so for specific genotypes that highly influence purchase decisions, and to make it sharable in the online venues that these genotypes haunt.  Wait until you can hit all those marks before starting or you’ll waste time, money and the patience of a lot of non-buyers.

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Novell knew how to murder brands.

A recent lunch with a long-term friend and SuSE Linux leader reminded me of the problems faced with messaging and branding in both commodity and fragmented markets.  Linux is a commodity, and was intended to be such.  The lack of differentiation in the core product was Linux’s primary selling point to shops that stayed stuck on one or another UNIX derivative or even proprietary operating systems.  Creating unique brands for commodities can be tough, though we did have success with SuSE’s brand before Novell diluted it.

The Linux market is becoming even trickier as advances in deployment and scalability expand.  Today’s global content start-ups are rushing to EC², RackSpace and RightScale in order to avoid growing pains while chanting hadoop and nosql.  Less data-intensive operations use traditional clustering or stand-alone servers.  Some people need real-time Linux, and a few folk want stripped-down distros for shipping their own appliances.

Tough to bridge a brand across all of the above.

Multi-segment messaging and branding is difficult, but has an elegant angle.  Marketers need to know that each segment and whole product may well need its own brand, and thus its own messaging, promotion and budget.  Yet CMOs must document the product line brand and enforce it company wide.  The secret in brand, message and value proposition alignment across all segments is to find the intersections.  For each of the aforementioned elements, there is overlap.  One or more items that are important in segment #1 are also important in segments #2, #3 and #infinity.  Your global brand, headline and homepage value proposition as well as lead message should always be where there is unity across segments (click to enlarge graphic).

Only when there are no (or very disjointed) commonalities should you break brands apart.  But that is a different topic for a different day. For now know that if you are vending into multiple segments and are not tying together the common value/message/brand elements, then you have no broad brand, which is a Bad Thing.

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