Category Archives: Marketing Strategy

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 →

Growing Up

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As many Americans prove daily, it is easier to grow wider than it is taller. Silicon Strategies Marketing is currently consulting with a company that has a fairly wide reach in their market, which is the foundational side of their industry. They serve companies at the middleman and retail level, and on a regional basis are fairly dominant, though they have both room for improvement and the option of growing geographically. Their other option is to go vertical, to begin competing with their existing customers and earn money they otherwise help their customers earn. The trade-off for companies in such positions is complex. To grow, a company needs to provide new value and by doing so attract new customers. Or they need to gather more customers of the type they currently serve, which typically involves taking them from competitors. The last option is to find ways of making money by … Continue reading →

Ill-Lumina

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Launching a late-comer product into a maturing market is like pushing a salmon up Niagara Falls. Some folks (with perhaps a bit too much time on their hands) have estimated that about $450 has been spent marketing each Nokia Lumina sold … which currently retails for $49 (with the ubiquitous two-year contract). You don’t need an MBA to see that this is not an entirely profitable go-to-market plan. The Lumina was the first serious attempt to lift Microsoft’s mobile market share, and managed push fewer than two million of them into users hands (though it is uncertain if this includes the number of devices Nokia gave to AT&T employees in an attempt to evangelize in-store sales staff). There are about as many Android activations each day as Luminas now in use. The marketing puzzle that Microsoft failed to solve was getting consumers to believe that WinPhones were better gizmos than … Continue reading →

Psycho Marketing

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When it comes to marketing, is your company a guru, sportsman or warrior? This may not be an exhaustive list of psychologies, but these three traits cover most go-to-market plans and mentalities I have encountered in B2B marketing. They can be as individual as the CMO or corporate-wide traits. Each has its own operational MO and they apply well to different markets. Pitted against one another, any can win depending on the market they seek to exploit. With some overlap, market dominating mutts can be whelped. Gurus: Passive marketing, which these days is largely typified by social media marketing, is nearly spiritual. It seeks to affectionately coax buyers to come forward — encouraging, not pushing. Gurus play the long game and seek actual relationships with customers, and are willing to take time, invest effort and wait for returns. Sportsmen: These are people who keep score. Market share, quarterly revenues, and … Continue reading →

Social Shortcomings

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Social marketing isn’t it. With humans living on the net, and with obvious advantages to social media manipulations as a marketing tactic, many people have happily abandoned other forms of promotions in favor of social. Later they unhappily abandon their jobs to fill slots in unemployment lines. Humans, being the quirky bunch they are, need a number of things to occur before a purchase. Most of all they need to perceive value in a product and believe the value will actually be delivered. Good marketers can create a brand (the basic value proposition) and awareness of the brand, then discover this is not enough. Alone, knowing a brand and that it makes a promise is weak soup that omits essential ingredients in the marketer’s cookbook. No wonder social marketing often tastes bland. To believe in a brand requires some form of “proof.” This may be fanciful or it may be … Continue reading →

Driving on the RIM

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When was the last time you heard somebody use the word “crackberry”? I recall a Southwest Airlines flight attendant uttering that abstraction when comically ordering passengers to turn off electronic gizmos. It was a period in history with Research In Motion (RIM) was, well, flying high. Their email push technology was new, hot, addictive for road warriors and earned a share price that startled even Silicon Valley investors. RIM stock has fallen 94% since then. RIM was a one-trick technology. It certainly filled a need, but offered something that was cloanable, and eventually obsoleted by mass adoption of wireless data plans. Today a cheap feature phone can make IMAP connections to any email server and deliver the same degree of digital addiction that once made RIM famous. Some analysts claim RIM is now worth nothing except the value of their patent portfolio. Success often breeds failure. Incessant laurel sniffing leads … Continue reading →

Biasing Buyers

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The oddest request I ever received from the head of a sales organization was “Can you stop promoting the product for a couple of months?” It was an old company with a new product that had gone nowhere before I took the reigns of their marketing department. I established a strategy that relied on precise market segmentation, focusing on the top two segments, then making buyers and strategic partners believe we were the only serious product in the market. Sales jumped 26% in the first year, we chased two competitors completely out of our target segments, and had a sales close rate above 80%. The poor sales folks couldn’t keep up with incoming calls. The strategy was to bias the opinions of buyers. This required them believing that we not only cured the generic problem (which our competitors did too) but we also cured the buyers personal job-related problem (in … Continue reading →