April 17, 2012
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There is a reason that blind dates were never very popular.
Marketing and dating are both incremental dances with well understood steps in forming a relationship. Amazingly many companies, and most technology companies, lack even a fundamental notion of incremental intimacy, which many also explain why many techie founders remain bachelors. Anyone who suffered the dating process understands the phases of location, attraction, value and risk assessment. Yet your average technology web site avoids all these steps.
 First off is findability. In dating this may involve joining activity groups or hanging out in the right bar on a Saturday night. In marketing it has always been about advertising, and in the modern extension of that, search optimization. Being found is a requirement to being desired. Failure to promote or to be locatable on the web makes the odds of obtaining prospects nil. But just today I ran across a web site for an application platform vendor whose primary landing pages lacked meaningful search optimization. This is akin to longing for love and staying home playing video games every night.
Only after eligible prospects find you can attraction take place. My first boss used to snicker and say “It must be Friday.” When I asked him what brought that up, he pointed to some young lass and said “The single girls always dress-up on Friday.” His point, as it relates to marketing and the entire cosmetics industry, is that you should be attractive at the first meeting. It is not enough to be at the popular meat market or on the web – you have to create a compelling appeal. Show prospects a text-dense web page that offers a tough slog to understanding, and they will turn instead to a more comely contender. Branding sets the mood and encourages the next step in the ritual.
A pretty face is a start, but a potential mate or customer next needs to perceive some value in the relationship. In cocktail lounges potential value propositions are communicated non-verbally – a smile that engenders romantic thoughts, a wink that suggests more base activities, and occasionally even more salacious gestures that should encourage running away. Tech companies by and large are lousy at articulating value propositions, and these value props rarely appear on landing pages. Once your product has been found and shows prospects a reason to be attracted, to then avoid displaying potential value halts the interest of your suitor.
The most critical step in dating or vending is risk abatement. Initial conversations with the gal you met at a club quickly exposes obvious risk factors. Is she dumb, does she have emotional baggage, are the voices in her head the cause of her involuntarily twitching? Once you have made your product findable, attractive and shown some value, your customer’s next step is to look for flaws. The common risk factors are things like a lack of features, few customers, no funding, poorly stated product details or general lack of clarity. Circuit City and their CarMax subsidiary became famous for engineering-out negative aspects of their market – reducing common risks. Itemize warning flags for which your prospects look, then remove/improve to push prospects to ask for a first date (a.k.a. a sales call).
Here is your challenge. For the next five companies that you randomly hear of, look at the stages of finding, attraction, value and risk and see is they have engineered their marketing to get that first date with prospects. After reviewing five previously unknown companies, then evaluate yours. If after self-assessment you feel like it is Saturday night and you are watching old movies on TV, then you have your next marketing projects defined.
April 3, 2012
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Even heartless people have emotions.
Well, perhaps not politicians, but people to who you sell products do. Even battle-hardened CTOs have emotions that can be leveraged to market your wares. Identifying and correctly touching those emotions is a tricky process and one that can backfire fatally if you choose wrong. It is the difference between smiling at the pretty girl at the end of the bar and stalking her … two different emotional responses producing either romance or incarceration.
 Silicon Strategies Marketing’s most popular white paper is “Selling Empathy – the power of positioning and branding.” In it we discuss how emotions work in marketing technology products to IT people, and how emotional drivers should become part of your brand. Every human brain, aside from those in drug addicts and congressmen, has left and right hemispheres that process all we know about the world around us. Emotions swirling in the right side of the skull exist to enhance survival by either instilling fear or attachment and trust. These emotions bias opinions out of instinctive response.
Biasing purchasing decisions is greatly enhanced by toying with understanding people’s emotions.
This is not speculation. Practitioners of neuromarking (the science of monitoring brain activity to see how different marketing activities affect buyers) have discovered that purely emotional campaigns are nearly twice as effective as completely rational ones. Think about this as you scan advertising for servers and software, and see if any of those promotions appeal to emotions concerning the life and work of your average IT slave or executive. The utter lack of connection to buyer emotions fails to create unfair advantages via biasing.
It’s enough to make you cry.
The case study in “Selling Empathy” was about a company that sold software to make tech support pagers (remember those) go off whenever help desk or network monitoring utilities identified a problem requiring inhumane intervention. It was soulless software intended to awaken sleeping support personnel, which was a tough sell until we identified the uniting emotional driver between help desk staffs and tech support people: that they all had high stress jobs. Using a “peace of mind” branding base, we recast the product as a necessity that was designed so well it reduced job-related stress. We A/B tested advertising and discovered the emotion-based ad outscored the rational ad by 20%. All our campaigns quickly switched to the emotion-tugging branding.
Within a year the head of sales asked that we suspend promotions because his staff could not keep up with inbound calls (which, incidentally, had an 80% win rate).
If you are selling to multiple people or across multiple segments, seek common emotional drivers among key genotypes and shamelessly message/massage them. Side with positive emotions if available, but don’t shun creative ways of using negative ones. Bias your buyers by appealing to their feelings.
March 20, 2012
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We’re all biased, even those who allegedly are not.
We come by it innocently enough because our biases were taught to us. Some we picked up listening to our parents. Weaker minds are warped by politicians and pundits. Instincts are actionable biases learned through Darwinian selection. Brand marketing’s primary job is to teach bias to buyers and cause customers to favor one brand over others.
But then again, I’m a little biased on the subject.
Stripped of fluffy pseudo-psych speech, biasing is a Maslow tool, designed primarily to avoid risk and in more rare cases obtain self actualization or esteem. Marketing’s job is to determine which direction (safety or self) will motivate buyers and then teach customers their newfound bias. Apple is masterful at instilling self-esteem bias in gadget buyers. IBM remains very good at selling safety bias to CIOs. Donald Trump is biased about his ego, and that manages to ooze out onto unwitting bystanders.
In complex B2B and technology sales, time is a factor in establishing bias. Since many business and technology products are abstract, people must have functional understanding of the product. As they get to know the product, they perform what I call “mental integration.” They visualize how a product can work in their environment, seeing the relationship between other products, administrators and end users.
They also have time to develop a relationship with salesmen and support people who, if they don’t flat screw-up, will amplify mental integration by demonstrating how your company’s support integrates into their environment.
 Mental integration biasing becomes nearly unconquerable to competitors. Once a buyer develops any product or brand bias, the odds of reversing that become difficult or impossible. Getting to a customer first and rapidly teaching them what they need to know in order to develop mental integration creates a buy bias and a competitor block. Getting in first is an advantage, but is not enough. Sales enablement tools must teach the bias on a functional level, but also illustrate how integrations occur. Even a simple diagram of the relationship between components (machines, software, humans, bosses) can create mental integration. Take as a quick example the “patient centered circle” we devised for Public Social Networks. Reports from trade events showed that people immediately understood how PSN’s product established relationships between everyone involved in patient care at hospitals.
Well directed short videos do even better.
You have to teach bias, and when successful you speed and ease sales because buyers are predisposed to your brand. This will bias your sales people to buy you drinks at the next trade show.
March 13, 2012
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Trust me, I’m in marketing.
If that line made your skin crawl, then you experienced an important aspect of marketing, namely a lack of trust (even Seth Godin noted an inherent instinct to distrust marketers). Where trust is lacking, so are sales. Mistrust prevents people from taking promotions, products and sales people seriously.
It is an ancient survival mechanism adapted for modern ages.
 (Mis)trust involves balancing risk and rewards. For example, locales where gun ownership is low tend to have higher burglary rates, which demonstrates that even the dumbest of criminals weigh risk and rewards. If risk is low, humans will accept nearly any reward. Where there is any risk, escalating degrees of mistrust develop. You may hesitate a second before spending a dollar on a soda brand you have never tasted, but you’ll hesitate forever when encountering a pushy car salesman who guides you directly toward $70,000 Escalade when you came to look at Chevy Cruze.
Some industries require overcoming congenital mistrust. Lawyers, financial advisors, telemarketers and mechanics start engagements with zero credibility and have to earn the trust of clients. Other industries, such as B2B software, require overcoming trust deficits for multiple buyer genotypes (a.k.a. personae) and bureaucracies designed to prevent mistakes (e.g. institutional mistrust). One of marketing’s jobs is to understand and mitigate mistrust before buyers are ever approached.
This slows the natural account executive process of destroying trust.
Mitigating mistrust in advance is non-trivial. People mistrust marketing, and are immune to standard claims of value. Tell a consumer that your desktop software package comes with technical support, and they’ll ask if the support center is in Bangalore or Hyderabad. Marketing has to go beyond simple claims to erode mistrust. They must understand the source of the mistrust and then deploy means for indirectly removing mistrust. The most common example is putting customer testimonials on top landing pages to assure prospect that they are not entering unblazed forests.
Where many marketers err is not understanding the source of mistrust or applying the wrong persuasion. Oracle was famous for benchmarking in the old DBMS wars (which they won). Benchmarking erased fears concerning scalability, which in the proprietary UNIX days was critical. Oracle understood the mistrust of CTOs concerning claims of scalability, and relentlessly promoted industry reports where Oracle outperformed everything (even when it didn’t). The CTO mistrust of software vendor claims was mitigated with industry-neutral testing.
Negative trusting works as well. A security software vendor once ran ads on television news networks because they knew CEOs tended to watch those channels. The ads were designed to scare CEOs into believing their data was endangered by hackers, and that the vendor could prevent this. CEOs created data security initiatives and forced this software vendor to be on the short list in part due to a higher level of trust for having been “warned” about pending danger.
This is how politicians work.
If reducing the risk of mistrust is not practical, you may have to raise the value delivered. Remember, people balance risk and reward. A big payoff can counter perceived risk, but only when the risk is measureable, non-fatal and the rewards are significant. People refuse to take long surveys for the “chance” to win an iPad because the risk is known and high (e.g. a waste of time) and the reward is itself risky (the mere chance to win). So either study and reduce risk, or be prepared to create stunning new value.
What do your customers distrust and what is the true source of that distrust? Odds are their wariness is slowing or preventing sales, and it is your job to decrease that mistrust before your sales staff arrives and increases it again.
January 16, 2012
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Have you had an overload of content yet? Don’t worry … you will.
For all the great things our Internet enabled interconnections have given us, we pay by receiving gobs of completely useless content, most of which is apparently generated by green marketers and my Facebook friends. The number of bytes per second received by today’s average wired human now exceeds the number of bytes per second sent by all the world’s mainframes in the 1960s. Marketing content – especially HTML layered ads – is devolving into poorly targeted noise that is more aggravating than accepted.
People are tuning out in the same way they learned how not to watch TV commercials by 1958.
 Advertising noise has always been problematic for marketers, and the Internet in some ways is making it worse. Since marketers are responsible for much of this noise, they are creating their own problem. For any message to be heard, it has to get past the noise in exactly the same way as a whisper has to be close and personal to be heard in a noisy bar. As the Internet noise level rises, savvy marketers will narrow and target their outreach. To do so, they will need to focuses on three things that make messages viable:
Precision: Messages have to be precise, which means they must succinctly communicate value. Vague targeting, abstract language, and even too many words keep people from hearing what you have to say (which is why most people can’t stay awake during a politician’s stump speech).
Value: Value propositions have to be compelling to well-targeted audiences. Failure to communicate value provides motivation to quit paying attention. One clear statement about why your product is valuable will cut through 1,000 glitzy and wordy pitches from your competitors.
Incremental: Using your landing page to tell every buyer genotype everything about your product creates both confusion and frustration. Like dating, the processes is one of incremental familiarity. Giving the right message, to the right person at the right time in their buying decision process eliminates noise fatigue.
Content flooding provides little aside from keyword litter and generally poor leads. Precise, succinct, highly targeted and step-wise messages creates paying customers.
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