Author Archives: admin

Impatient Ideas

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Clarke’s Law of Great Ideas eloquently summarizes the four phases your boss passes through after you insert a novel new idea into his alleged mind: It is impossible – don’t waste my time. It is possible, but it is not worth doing. I said it was a good idea all along. Members of the board, here is my idea. But it isn’t just your boss. It is your market that goes from utter disbelief to passionate involvement over time. Marketing’s job it to short circuit the disbelief/belief gap and reduce the time to mass market acceptance. It ain’t easy. If it was, then anyone could do it. Seth Godin recently opined on the topic, and provided a graph (we prettied it up) which shows that in the short-run, ideas are not warmly met by everyone. Yes, a small set of early adopters “gets it”, but most of the market fails … Continue reading →

Startup Marketing Mistakes

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How do founders kill their companies? Most often by not understanding the basics of marketing strategy. I spent a pleasent hour at Draper University speaking to students about the top three ways Silicon Valley startup founders crash their own companies. Draper kindly provided video from the event, and you can watch the whole presentation.   For a full course on the basics of marketing strategy, get a copy of our book The Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual at Amazon.com. (if you have technical difficulties watching the embeded video above, it is available at YouTube at https://youtu.be/Fly_JceiuWY).

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Restricted Brand

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FULL DISCLOSURE: I am not a Republican, Democrat, liberal or conservative. Hence, this article is non-aligned. Are Facebook, Twitter and Google corrupting their brands by being socially underhanded? Of late, both Facebook and Twitter have been publicly accused of censoring non-left-of-center content. Now Google admits to blocking advertisements due to Google’s perception of social desirability. In each instance, these corporate goliaths, which together control the flow of most online human interaction, either admit to or are accused of filtering legal content based on their perception of what should or should not be. The new media is aping the old media, and runs the risk of the same fate. Regardless of if you agree or disagree with the filtered content, the troubling aspect is that large corporations are deciding what content their users should and should not see. Outside of endangering activities (e.g. terrorism, child porn, congress convening), the Internet has … Continue reading →

Marketing is from Mars, Sales is from Venus

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Some things are predictable. Politicians lie. The sun rises in the East. Sales and marketing don’t get along. The misalignment between sales and marketing is legendary to the point of cliché. The reasons are both obvious and not-so-obvious, yet all distill down to perspective. Neither sales nor marketing can change their perspective, nor would that be desirable. But one of the two teams can adapt. This will not end the misalignment, but it will increase profits. Perspective A definition of the word perspective is “the faculty of seeing relevant data in a meaningful relationship.” The gotcha word is “relevant”. What is relevant to a salesperson struggling to make their quarterly quota is different than what is relevant to a CMO trying to enhance a brand. People with different perspectives rarely unite. Airlift a rural bible-belt citizen into a San Francisco transgender convention, and there will be little shared perspectives at … Continue reading →

When Marketing Misfires

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Marketers are not perfect. We just have great PR. The fact is that no marketing plan is bullet proof. Even a great go-to-market strategy will eventually become useless as markets and competitors change. Yet some marketers stubbornly adhere to their plans right down to the last nickel from company coffers. But by that time, it is too late. Marketing Stall Horns My friend Ray Zinn, the longest serving CEO in Silicon Valley, talks often about CEOs needing financial stall horns. Like those in airplanes, stall horns alert dozing pilots about impending crashes. Marketing executives need stall horns as well, but not all CMOs bother. They do rely on periodic reporting, but rarely engineer triggers to alert them when a trend on a metric is sinking and not showing signs of recovery. The constant question is what metrics matters? The answer is that they all do, but for different reasons in … Continue reading →

Hierarchy Hell

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While contemplating the content for my upcoming lecture at Draper University (April 20, 2016 at 1PM for any interested Silicon Valley types) I thought long and hard about covering the entire marketing strategy hierarchy. It is essential for startups (and you can learn more about them in the Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual) but a bit too meaty for that crowd. Why hierarchies are hip The concept is simple, the application rigorous, and the outcomes always positive. This is why most startups crash. They don’t do the Tough Things First and build their marketing strategy from ground-up. They instead assemble them sideways, beginning with their native knowledge of a market, and trying to slide a foundation in under a clapboard shed of a marketing plan. There exist seven layers in the marketing strategy stack. The end goal of marketing is to

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Sopped Sales

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Apple has more to worry about than the FBI, courts and the government breaking Apple’s privacy engineering. Apple has a peaked market that appears to be limiting their growth. All markets eventually saturate. The smartphone market, in most first-world nations, is saturated, or nearly so. Thus, the number of people willing to pay a premium for Apple mobile devices is almost capped. iPhones – at least in their current incarnation – appear to have reached saturation. iPhones will not compete in second- and third-world markets against $4 Android phones. All markets are segmented. When the segment you dominate becomes saturated, you have to change something before revenue growth abates and stockholders call for your head. The question remains which action is correct. Apple has a brand built around the high-end of their market, so they are unlikely to trash their brand by dropping prices. Since this is basically a segmentation … Continue reading →