Category Archives: General

General thoughts on the marketing of technology

Tidal Waves

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Death of the caterpillar is the birth of a butterfly. Someone should mention this to the publishers of every major magazine. Pew Research, the busy bodies constantly reporting on what we people are doing, recently noted that magazine advertising rates are sinking faster than congressional approval ratings. Advertising pages in the top magazines have dropped an average of 18% in the last year, repeating an annual trend that began in 2008, two years before the original iPad was introduced. At this rate magazines will soon pay you to read them in the distant hope that advertisers will care. Every market changes, but some change very fast (the iron ore industry moves a bit more slowly than high tech and publishing). Established franchises can disappear when their markets rapidly change if they fail to see, accept and respond to the change. Microsoft has publicly confessed that they were slow to respond … Continue reading →

Evil Email

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The worst thing you can do to a good bar is to make it popular. Once everyone goes there, it isn’t worth going there anymore. Email advertising and online surveys used to be good bars. When email first commercialized, it was a great and inexpensive tool for lead generation, prospect follow-up and brand reinforcement. But as emails popularity exploded, so did the number of marketers who abused the process. Today people dread reading their morning email – it has become a disappointment filled chore. Email open rates have been dropping. This has caused some marketers to get smarter and create better and more targeted emails. Lousy marketers just find bigger lists and thus annoy more people, which will continue to drive down open rates. Something related is occurring to surveys. Once online survey tools became cheap and easy to use, every man, woman and hermaphrodite with an email account started … Continue reading →

Questionable Surveys

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Asking the right question is as important as asking the right people. We do a lot of primary research work at Silicon Strategies Marketing, and that means we do quite a bit of surveying (so much that we run our own software suite for online surveys). Surveying remains the cornerstone of quantitative investigation even in this age of constant polling where nominal surveys receive less than 0.1% response rates. Which makes the oversupply of sloppy surveying mythologies downright depressing. There is both science and art in survey design. It begins with knowing what critical information is to be acquired – what business decision you are making. Non-specific problem definitions lead to non-specific questions which produce non-specific answers (to be specific). Surprisingly many folks do not precisely understand the business decision they face, and we spend a lot of time in business coaching to improve their focus before assembling their surveys. … Continue reading →

Outsourcing Savvy

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Happily, outsourcing marketing strategy works for everyone. Last year I got a call from a global conglomerate that rakes in over $20 billion each year. They were launching a new product from within one of their divisions. Savvy as they were, they needed help in new product go-to-market messaging.  In the division of that giant corporation, the native knowledge was unavailable. Sadly, this doesn’t happen all the time. Nobody is universally competent. In large companies, even specialists with necessary knowledge are not portable between organization boundaries. Smart marketing executives inventory their talent and outsource as needed to assure everything that needs to be done is done, and is done well. Companies that don’t fail. Early in my consulting career I was hired to help with the pivot of all pivots, changing an entire post-IPO enterprise from a hardware company into a software vendor. The company was successful at what they … Continue reading →

Relo Ready

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A quick note to Silicon Strategies customers and fans of Marketing Memos. We have nearly completed our relocation away from San Francisco, landing squarely in San Jose – the eastern anchor of Silicon Valley. I personally look forward to seeing fellow Valley tech company execs at the various regional functions in the near future.

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November Talks

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I’ll be speaking at two different Silicon Valley events in November, covering some of the details in my new book the Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual. The first event is this Saturday, November 3rd. It is an “un-conference” called Marketing Camp. The chat will be in room 8 at the civilized hour of 10AM. This show will be highly interactive and great gobs of free advice will be made available. Later in the month, November 12 to be exact, I’ll present the full-length version of my diatribe at the SV Forum marketing SIG.  It has been a decade since I last spoke to the SIG, back when the organization itself was called “SD Forum” (SD stood for “software developer”, which gives you an idea of how the organization has matured and expanded over time). All Silicon Valley founders, co-founders, CEOs and victims of epic failures should roll out to both events. Well, at … Continue reading →

Interviews and Lectures

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A busy month is ahead for me and my new book Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual, with the fun kicking off this morning. Sandhill.com, the web site for Silicon Valley venture capital, has published their interview with me about the book. I have to admit to being flattered when they said I was a Silicon Valley legend, though given how legends typically die this may be more of an omen than advertisement. Aside from brightly spooky intros, the interview covers the groundwork for the book, relates some of the sadder aspects of start-up leadership, and sets the stage for November’s to-do. On the 12th I’ll speak to the Silicon Valley Forum’s Marketing SIG on the topic Start-up CEO’s Marketing Myopia – How to lead marketing without being a guru. Drawn from the book and mumble-mumble-mumble years of leading CEOs by the nose, this part-lecture, part-discussion, part-comedy act will help start-up CEOs and their marketing … Continue reading →