April, 2014 |

Vaguely Blunt

Posted on 2014/04/23 by admin2014/04/23

Bluntness in outbound marketing can be taken too far

Some marketing messages are delivered like a 2×4 head shot. Others come and go like whispered gibberish. Blunt market messages cannot be mistaken, but lack emotional connections. The more vaporous varieties tend to say nothing, but say it prettily leaving customers delightfully confused. In B2B tech marketing you see attempts at both extremes and failures either way. They bomb because attaching to functional and emotional drivers delivers the best total cognitive attraction possible and short selling either part leads to incomplete customer connections. Where confusion enters the minds of marketers comes from not understanding their target audience. I had a client once who sold IT infrastructure software, yet decided they wanted an “irreverent” brand. The result was their messaging lacked the requisite blunt force trauma of traditional B2B communications aimed at executives making strategic technology decisions. This client’s failure to understand the typical no nonsense CxO led them to induce … Continue reading →

Operational Marketing

Posted on 2014/04/17 by admin2017/12/13

Lying on the floor while talking to my insurance company shows why marketing must be involved with operations. In the past week I did business with a bedding retailer, which indirectly led to filing an insurance claim on my car. The bedding company’s operations were a disaster – they got precisely 0% of our order correct, causing my wife and I to camp on surplus mattresses placed on the bedroom floor, checking The Sleep Guide’s mattress protectors tips. Their late-arriving truck hogged the street, causing a passing vehicle to clip my side-view mirror. Unlike the bedding retailer, the insurance company (Geico) executed perfectly, from a well-designed web claims form to nearly instant claims analysis, body shop appointments rental car reservations and more. The contrast is stark. The bedding company experience after the sale (and to a lesser degree, during the sale) was a study in manufacturing customer frustration. The salesmen … Continue reading →

Complex Customers

Posted on 2014/04/10 by admin2014/04/08

Executive assistants have veto power over multi-million dollar software sales. Complex selling involves a lot of complexity, none more complex than having to deal with many different stakeholders with very different motivations. Once two or more people collaborate on a purchase decision, they raise questions, voice objections, derail progress and drag-out your sales cycle until the Second Coming. Sometimes the lowest caste can kill a sales single handedly. IT techies are the worst in many respects – having been one in a former career, I can attest to their ultimate veto power. Tell an avid Windows admin that you want to install a Linux infrastructure and you’ll meet a wall that howitzers couldn’t knock over. Techies know nothing happens without their expert participation, and they gladly use their veto power to guard their empires. Marketing and sales need to manage the sales cycle, engaging stakeholders at points in time when … Continue reading →

Visualizing Innovation, Value and Brand

Posted on 2014/04/01 by admin2014/04/01

When innovating a market, there are three specific intersections that define your products, your value propositions and your brand. Visualizing these intersections leads to a very clear understanding where to focus your outbound marketing. Our new Silicon Strategies Marketing white paper – – creates the visualization framework you need to communicate within your organization so everyone is clear on how to communicate to the market. Download now and see how intersections between the possible, desirable, needs, differentiations, thoughts and feelings define your brand.

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