Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Old School Social

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My dentist does social marketing. This should surprise nobody because social marketing has existed since the first two cavemen competed by selling left-over mastodon meat (“My mastodon steaks come with 30% fewer fatal microbes!”). Businesses have always used the power of social networking, long before social media became a reality. Social media changes nothing and thinking about primitive social marketing helps to clarify your social outreach. Social marketing is, in essence, assuring that people talk about you in positive terms. As an example, when you move to a new city, odds are you ask everyone about their recommendation for a good dentist. Some will warn you about bad jaw crackers, and others will wax poetic about how gentle and through is their dental doc. This is social promotions in its most basic form. The product (dental services) is referenced by customers based on the positioning criteria they most vale (money, … Continue reading →

What is Expected

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I don’t expect much, and I usually get it. Expected outcomes are what buyers pay money for. Businesses and consumers lob lucre at vendors in order to achieve something, be it optimizing general ledger processes or smelling better. Expected outcomes, or expectations, are the foundation of all commercial relationships. I give you money and you make me smell good. If the cologne you sold me knocks buzzards off cesspool fencing, then my expectations have not been met. Microsoft and Hotels.com recently brought all this to light by failing to meet basic expected outcomes. When rudimentary requirements are not provided, customers become ornery. The soured relationship creates new friction to selling them more products and removes all incentive to recommend products to other customers (which in the long run is the cheapest and most effective promotional tool available). Knowing and delivering customer necessaries is so basic I find Microsoft’s and Hotels.com … Continue reading →

Marketing Band-aid

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Performing in a band might be fun if one didn’t have to work with musicians. Bands provide a serviceable metaphor for marketing, which is all too often viewed as one or another marketing function and not the tightly coordinated combination of each function/instrument and performer. Take any piece out of a band or marketing department, and you no longer have a professional outfit. I was recently reminded of a time long ago when I was young (during the Taft administration) and the bass player in my garage band quit, yet our front man wanted to do a signed gig without any bass. The audience was not impressed. Let’s stretch this metaphor some more and match aspects of running a marketing department with assembling a group of musicians into a working band. Start by depriving the members of each group of alcohol, then begin. Mapping: A band has several instruments, and … Continue reading →

The HP (Hard) Way

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The only organization better than HP at losing customers was Heaven’s Gate. I have fond memories of Bill and Dave’s HP, which in no way resembles the current Palo Alto pack. When I wrangled HP manufactured big iron mumble-mumble-mumble years ago, they were reasonably good about customer support though their byzantine processes for achieving such was an exotic form of auto-masochism. Even eating lunch at the HP cafeteria was a rough slog. It has gone down hill since. Let’s keep in mind that service is a product, and like all products must meet the criteria of the customer. This includes price, quality and — most important — availability. The on-site service agreement for my laptop recently expired, and I went to HP’s web site to renew it. This was my first mistake since HP’s various business divisions and poorly integrated web sites are slightly more complex than the federal tax … Continue reading →

Romancing the Market

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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 … Continue reading →

Break Down

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I spent last Friday coaching a well funded start-up on the fundamentals of market segmentation. Yes, in Silicon Valley you can still romance venture capitalists without a complete go-to-market strategy. Segmentation is the second most fundamental marketing strategy activity, and one that founders rarely contemplate while running headlong into a market. Granted, between technology vision and early adopter myopia, there is little reason to segment market in the earliest phases of corporate life. But go beyond the early days and quick sales to innovators and early adopters and you will see a company flounder as sales slow and individuals attempt selling to anyone. Since new products don’t fill anybody’s whole product definition, selling to everyone means selling to almost no one. Next comes an entry in the dead pool. Founders tend not to segment for several reasons, none of which are rational: Ignorance: Some founders don’t know what market segmentation … Continue reading →

Emotion Promotion

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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 … Continue reading →