March, 2014 |

Marketing Fail

Posted on 2014/03/26 by admin2014/03/21

Marketing jobs have the shelf life of milk. In the tech industry, marketing people move around a lot. Unlike code cutters, their skills can be well used up to the limits of their experience, then they see little incremental improvement from their activities. Seeing the end of a good run, they look for other companies – smaller in size, with new products, or just something exciting. Other times they get fired. Marketing can fail. What confounds many in management is which part of marketing failed and why. Marketing is both strategy and execution, and are typically carried-out by different people or teams. When sales are slow, management wants to know why and occasionally even marketing cannot (or will not) clearly identify what is not working. Obfuscating marketing malfunctions has become more difficult in the digital age because we can measure what is and is not succeeding, at least at the … Continue reading →

Disruption Risk

Posted on 2014/03/16 by admin2014/03/16

Disrupting risk is a key element to disrupting markets, the national pastime here in Silicon Valley. Attend any VC pitch event, and the word “disruption” is tossed about as lightly as conjunctions, though few people truly understand what disruption is. Classically defined, disruption means “to destroy the normal continuance or unity.” Not cause a bump, waver or undulation, but to completely alter what has been. One good entrepreneurial practice is to look for stagnant industries, ones that have not materially changed for ages, and then figure out what customers what to change. Circuit City started that way, by examining what people hated about the consumer electronics industry and then engineering it out of their stores (an advantage management wizzed away out of competitive fear). Risk is an often overlooked element in creating disruption. Humans are risk managers. Perceived risk motivates action (and inaction). This is why politicians use the Lie … Continue reading →