Author Archives: admin

Tripping Customers

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My father was too fond of the old joke about a farmer and his mule. The punch line of the joke was that the farmer would whack the mule in its forehead with a two-by-four, saying “First you have to get his attention.” Customers are like that, though I don’t advocate felonious assault as a promotional tactic. Modern life is complicated to the point that we can only be distracted. Thus, distraction is the first act of promotion. If you cannot pry your prospects’ attention away from their work, smartphones, Facebook and on-demand videos, then you cannot possibly move them toward buying. Long gone are the sad old days of advertising when spokesmodels pointing to refrigerators with a disembodied droning voice pitching platitudes about the appliance. Customers are mules and have to be coaxed with similar bluntness. This is not new, though the chain of advertising practice is oddly convoluted … Continue reading →

Marketing Manual

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You would be surprised at the risks founders take, though they have fewer risks starting today. I have canned and condensed twenty years of marketing strategy knowledge, insight, tactics and war stories into a new book titled the Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual. This book has one goal — to make sure you have the broad perspective on everything that goes into marketing strategy development. If that doesn’t scare you, nothing will. In my years working for and consulting to companies about marketing strategy, one thing has become painfully clear — very few people know it all. One classic example was an early client of mine (who remains nameless), a post-IPO company doing a very late pivot. During a kick-off meeting I asked them “What is your segmentation model?” They said it was industry verticals, which seemed odd to me. When I asked them why they chose that model they replied … Continue reading →

Play Real Good

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The violin’s heavy vibrato found my ear through the chaos of the subway. Being a music junkie, the stuff tends to get my attention. Hearing a well-played violin in a crowded underground tunnel filled with thousands of rush-hour commuters was a miracle. That it held me for a brief moment was regrettably common. We learned in Communications 101 that there are three factors in passing along info – the transmitter, the receiver and the noise in between. Transmitters, be they buskers or marketers, have to confront noise in order for their product to even be perceived. Like the subway scene in which an aspiring violinist struggled to be heard, marketers have only the tiniest moments of relative quiet to connect. But noise is growing. The ability of people to tune out is positively Darwinian. With promotional messages now coming via radio, TV, billboards, browsers, embedded in apps and on nearly … Continue reading →

Selling Vapor

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Ideas are tough to sell because people don’t adopt ideas easily. I knew a sci-fi writing couple who claimed to have popularized the concept of “ecology” in the 1960s as part of a language adoption experiment. Their observation (which may be sci-fi itself) was back then it took about seven years for a new concept to become culturally ubiquitous. We can assume that in our Internet age that it takes about seven minutes. The problem with marketing an idea of any type (including intangible services) is that ideas may or may not be facts. Facts, data, features, benefits – these are elements that people can wrap their minds around. They are manifestations of already adopted concepts, and thus easy to accept. When anthropogenic global warming theory was first released, nobody aside from a few alleged scientists had conceptualized the theory, and it took time (about seven years) for the notion … Continue reading →

Messaging Messes

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“Blah blah bla blah blah blah!” That pretty much reflects most B2B marketing messages. Precision is lacking, from headlines all the way down to often absent calls-to-action. The penalties for imprecise market messaging include high landing page bounce rates, no actions taken by prospects and leaking sales funnels. The pay-offs from precise market messaging include short sales cycles, brand biasing and rapid word-of-mouth market awareness. So why does your web site say blah? Why is your collateral blah? The goal of messaging is to move a prospect down the path of discovery, terminating in a sale. At each step in this path of discovery, they need to learn about your product in a way that makes sense in that specific moment of discovery, and to be led toward the next phase of discovery. All this requires knowing the phases of discovery then composing very succinct messages such that they achieve … Continue reading →

Don’t Ask

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Don’t talk to your customers and prospects. Well, actually you should. But occasionally you will need someone else to talk to them on your behalf. Being very close to your product, your early adopters and your own hype, your company will be incapable of hearing everything people say. In this political season we see the usual raft of riffraff running for office (who did you just picture in your mind?). Largely preprogrammed in our beliefs, what a candidate says and what we hear are completely different things. Founders, marketing executives and especially sales people perform the same filtering based on their perceptions and experiences. If you don’t believe you do the same filtering, ask why you envisioned a particular candidate when you encounter the word ‘riffraff.’ This is where outsourcing qualitative research enters your strategy. Qualitative research is geared toward discovery, learning what people think and why. It concerns itself … Continue reading →

B2B Emotive Marketing

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Emotions are valuable, and value is emotional. Value is what you advertise. Ignore features, benefits, functions, the color of the paint on the server chassis or even ROI. These may help create value or close deals, but they are not value itself, and people buy value. Your boss doesn’t value your protoplasm, and if he does there may be a sexual harassment suit in his future. He values what you can help him achieve, which in turn should be what your company needs to achieve. The marketing question is what is valued? Rarely is it a functional process or a technical specification. Outcome is the center of value. Take AwayFind, a company that alerts you when you have an important email waiting. They have many features which are not valuable. The outcome however – to not be enslaved by needing to constantly check email – is very valuable. It is … Continue reading →