Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Marketing Truthiness

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Honesty is one of the better policies. While recently chatting with a legendary Silicon Valley CEO, we spoke about his company’s documented culture. The first two pillars of their shared ethics were honesty and integrity (which go hand-in-hand). In his semiconductor industry, honesty and integrity are occasionally vague terms, yet his company has thrived by dealing with employees, suppliers and customers with rather unshakable decency. More marketers should follow his example. Like politicians, some marketers have found creative ways of distorting the truth. Eschewing outright lies, they lean more heavily upon vague generalities, measured over-selling and promising support that never fully materializes. This short-sighted approach produces short-term results with long-term ruin. Marketing dishonesty can lift revenues. People will buy products on a false promise, but only once. If a marketer wants to bump this quarter’s numbers, inaccurate promotions can shift a few fence-sitting prospects into the “win” column. But the … Continue reading →

Biz Book Bunk

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The business book market is nearly as crazy as the rest of the book publishing industry. Business books are often one-off affairs by successful businessmen and women who want to share their thoughts on management and leadership with the world. There are many voracious readers of such books, mainly other people in management who constantly look to better their skills and learn from other peoples’ success (these books rarely talk about the mistakes made by the author). What makes modern book publishing peculiar are platforms. Publishers want authors to have pre-existing mass audiences to carry the book to success. If you fancy the old days when a brilliant writer lobbed a manuscript at a publisher, who then got many taste-maker reviewers to carry the book into public attention and generate vast wealth for the author … those days died decades ago. In the Internet age, authors are expected to have … Continue reading →

Maddening Messages

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Want to drive your competitors insane (assuming they are not already)? A recent thread exploded on a CMO web site asking the basic question “What do you do that drives your competitors crazy?” Most of the answers were pap, lazily resting on vague superlatives such as “listen to our customers” and “being honest”. I chimed in (of course) with my favorite “poisoning the well”, which does not imply spiking competitor water coolers with toxic substances. Marketers tend to focus on one key customer stakeholder persona. They put 80% or more of their effort into recruiting the job title they believe will cause a company to buy their product. This is not a bad strategy, but when you have two or more competitors grooming the same stakeholder, getting their attention becomes increasingly impossible. If you are coming from behind, it may be useless. The counter strategy (and a good primary strategy … Continue reading →

Cost, Effective

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What is effective may not be inexpensive. Then again it may be. I stumbled upon two marketing maven surveys, one that reported how effective some lead generation options were and another on how low cost they were. Coming from two different organizations, there were gaps in what was surveyed and reported, but there was enough connecting tissue to make an intelligent review of B2B promotional options. Before I ramble on too much about the details, what was striking is that options for lead generation in social media never scored in the top half of all options by effectiveness. This isn’t to say that social media is to be avoided, but that as a lead generation tool, it isn’t worth a lot of investment. This will shock many here in Silicon Valley because the endless local mantra is that everything is possible with social media. If it were, then social media … Continue reading →

Cultural Connections

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“Donate tonight,” said the actress at a local community theater, using a shrill and fake British accent to warm-up the audience for the evening’s production of Spamalot. “After all, it is the arts. Our culture. Just the very basis of civilization as we know it!” As uncultured as advertising often is, it connects to culture or it fails (and if uncultured advertising works, then the culture needs an upgrade). The antiseptic dictionary definition of culture is “the behaviors and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group.” It is the sum of the social fabric in which individuals wrap themselves, typically from indoctrination or attraction (the latter explaining why red-headed proto-yuppies sing gangsta rap tunes). Culture includes things that are familiar, and thus comfortable. Advertising that attaches to specific cultural beliefs is more rapidly accepted. It is little wonder that billboards for American political candidates are almost always … Continue reading →

Focused Reception

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Both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett declared that the ability to focus was key to their success. Focus is also a key to success in marketing, but it is less about your focus and more about your customer’s. Every buyer, be they consumers or business buyers, has a focus. We all filter, and with the multitude of media options and an endless stream of marketing messages flooding them, people are creating more and better filters daily. Much has been written about getting “above the noise” just so you can be heard, and it is not unsound advice. However, it misses the sweeter approach of quietly standing directly in the field of your buyer’s focus. Take your standard IT geek (please). They tend to be insanely focused, driven by technical prowess, to dig deeply into a topic for days on end. Coders can program for 24 or more hours provided there … Continue reading →

Cow Wine

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Seth Godin is a wino. Well, I don’t know this to be true, but he indirectly inspired and Oregon winery to market to Seth’s precepts. I was escaping Portland’s Silicon Forrest area, randomly driving southward. While cruising slowly through the town of Newberg – the Sonoma of Oregon – I saw a wine tasting room for Purple Cow Vineyards. Being a marketer, the Purple Cow label grabbed my attention, not for the reasons Seth Godin outlined in his book of the same title, but because I recognized the title itself. Since my wife was with me, and because she has successfully turned me into a wine snob, I had to drop in for a taste. After chatting amicably with the co-founder, I mentioned that among marketers “Purple Cow” was practically a verb. Before I could get deeper into my monologue, the owner reached up to the top shelf, and grabbed … Continue reading →