Never Stop Marketing...

Global MicroBrand Valuations…

jer979 — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:06:00 GMT

The easiest metric you can use to determine the value of your Global MicroBrand is to record how often someone says:

“there’s someone I think you should meet.”

For you quant buffs out there, you can further assess the value of that initial relationship by how many subsequent introductions follow. (i.e. how valuable is that node?)

Your network isn’t going to put their own brand on the line for you if it isn’t clear to them what you have to offer.

And the beautiful thing about this…you can’t fake it or force it.

How to Innovate: The Israeli Model

jer979 — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:41:00 GMT

If the hypothesis that I am laying down in my series of posts on “Marketing in a Billion Channel Universe” is even partially accurate, you’ll agree that the need for innovation in your marketing efforts is paramount.

Of course, this isn’t anything new and far smarter minds have long pointed this out (see Drucker “The business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.” (The Essential Drucker)]

The question for ALL of us is: How do we do innovation?

Changing the USA dramatically is outside the scope of my blog (and I’m less optimistic about that, I am afraid), but changing your company or organization?

That IS something you can control.

I’m about 80% of the way done with Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (disclosure: I am friends with the authors) and think that, if you are looking to answer this question for yourself or your company, it’s certainly worth picking up.

There is no doubt that the results for Israel are impressive

Aside from the US and Canada, Israel has more companies listed on the NASDAQ than any other country (and more than all of Western Europe combined)
On a per capita basis, it is the highest rate of innovation of any country in the world
All of this is done with a country of 7 million, in a declared state of war for every day of its existence, and blessed with basically NO natural resources

As for how it happened, there’s a lot in this book that you can take and apply to your organization.

create a culture for high fault tolerance (which I touch on in part 5 of the series)
encourage fierce debate and discussion, regardless of rank
“necessity is the mother of invention”
keep the pressure up

If you’ve ever traveled to Israel, you’ll get a kick out of it. If you haven’t, you’ll still glean a HUGE amount of insight and perhaps, it will help you instill that start-up mentality in your team, group, division, or organization.

For more information, you can visit their website or join them on Facebook.

Billion Channel Marketing, Part 5

jer979 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:06:00 GMT

Image via Wikipedia

Continuing some of the rough thoughts begun here in part 1 on how marketing planning will need to change given the fact that marketing itself has changed.

In technology (and I suppose engineering terms as well), there is a concept of high fault tolerance.

What this means is that when a part of the system breaks, the whole system doesn’t shut down. The Internet is a great example. One server can crash, but the Internet can still relay your messages for you.

When I think about “high fault tolerance” as it relates to marketing planning, preparation, and/or execution, I am thinking, however, of the need to tolerate failure at a high level.

You obviously don’t want losers or non-performers on your team.

You want innovators.

And, if you want innovators, you need to have a culture that allows them to experiment…and fail…without being punished for it.

I suspect that at the great research labs, like Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, of even, dare I say it, Microsoft Research, there’s a culture that is understanding of pursuit and failure.

At some point, you probably need to show progress, but your peers know that great research and innovation means a LOT of dead ends (read: failures).

The question (and I don’t have an answer, which is why I am pushing out this series of blog posts) is: how do you get your marketing department to behave in the same way?

Perhaps I am naive and idealizing how Research labs work, so maybe this is moot, but on the P&L side of the house..you are rewarded for the obvious, short-term victories. Those who don’t deliver within a quarter are labeled as “non-performers” or worse.

Yet, if we want to create a “dandelion” like marketing approach to start those forest fires, we’re going to have more failures than successes and those who help us fail faster to learn and succeed sooner, should be celebrated.

There may not be a simple answer here and it’s up to you to decide how to create this culture in your own organization.

If you want to get some great thoughts on how to do/not do Innovation, I suggest you read a bunch of Adam’s thoughts based on his experience.

Updated: part 6...feedback loops

Packer Nation and what we can learn about Raving Fans….

jer979 — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:17:00 GMT

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

A few weeks ago, I was in Milwaukee to speak the Wisconsin chapters of the American Marketing Association and the Young Presidents Organization.

Over breakfast, the talk turned to one of my other passions (aside from marketing): football.

And, lo and behold, (just kidding), we had a chance to investigate the idea of Raving Fanhood as it relates to one of America’s great franchises…the Green Bay Packers.

One of the interesting points is how Raving Fans “feed” off each other and that certain common experiences (like sitting through a game at 10 degrees below zero) are a badge of honor.

Furthermore, it reinforces the idea that the “social object” (in this case the Packers) are at the center, but that the connections in and among the Raving Fans (that is Reed’s law) aka ‘be the Connector) is a critical element of your cultivation activities.

What permission as an asset looks like…

jer979 — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:36:00 GMT

I know a guy named Ron who works at United Healthcare.

I also know a guy named Albert who is starting up a company that can save health insurance companies a lot of money by automating the process for scanning bills and finding errors.

I thought Ron would like talking to Albert, so I introduced them.

Ron never responded to Albert for whatever reason. That’s his call.

Then, Albert pinged me and asked for Ron’s phone number to follow up.

I told him no.

Albert, I’m sorry, but I can’t give you his number, I'm afraid, since he didn't respond and I don't have that permission.

Was Albert upset?

On the contrary:

I've never had anyone say to that me before, but I like that you respect people's confidentiality. It definitely makes you a trustworthy introducer, so thank you.

I can’t burn my permission with Ron. It’s too valuable an asset for me…and for you.

Marketing in a Billion Channel World, Part 4

jer979 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:05:00 GMT

Image by Dunechaser via Flickr

Continuing some of the rough thoughts begun here in part 1 on how marketing planning will need to change given the fact that marketing itself has changed.

We’ve started to dive down into the necessary components for planning a marketing effort in a billion channel economy.

Today, I’d like to hone in on the concept of what I will call “Rapid Marketing Development,” (RMD, since everything needs an acronym, right? Though I think we can do better than this, but that’s RMD for you!)

As I wrote in part 3 (just to set the stage here)

Most of the planning of marketing will stay in the hands of the marketers, but some (or much) of the execution of marketing will take place in the hands of non-marketers.

Why?

Because, if you want to find the exploit the opportunities that will present themselves (as I touched on in part 2) and rapidly exploit them to try and create the viral forest fires (part 1), then you will need to empower others to act rapidly on behalf of your firm.

Previously, we talked about this in terms of “look and feel” and “brand image,” but now let’s go after what it means to live in an RMD environment.

I took the idea of RMD from a programming concept known as RAD- Rapid Application Development, in which quick builds of the product are put together, tested, and then iterated. The term “RAD” itself is somewhat out of favor as programmers lean toward “agile” but the concept is the same.

It might be like building a house with a modular approach.

First, you just put a bedroom with a bathroom attached to it.

Then, you decide you want to add on a full kitchen.

Then, a living room, and so on.

The downside to this approach, of course, is that you may not foresee the need for a 2nd story and have to spend more strengthening the roof than if you had originally specified a 2nd story.

The upside is that you get to live in the house pretty much immediately for a low cost and find out if you like the neighborhood, schools, etc. before investing a ton of money in it.

As it relates to marketing efforts, the key benefit is that the iterative development of the offering/story/marketing doesn’t lag the feedback loop so severely.

You get some feedback, you iterate, and you test again…in a manner of weeks, not months or (gasp) years.

Even better, as the folks at IDEO would say, “you fail faster to succeed sooner.” We all know that we learn from mistakes and that they are going to happen (pretty much no matter what), so make them quickly, when they are small, and cheap. This forces you, as the marketer into pass/fail situations sooner, before you overcommit $ for a bad initiative and, on the flip side…so that you find the winners sooner.

Our goal as marketers is to exploit the opportunities for the “forest fires” that will create the “viral” or the “marketing as gasoline” moments and while we cannot control for ALL of these variables, if we sense that “the stars are aligned” (to mix metaphors), we want to go out and do it as soon as we can.

Some of the most creative people the world (i.e. Designers) actually favor this approach. They just call it “Prototyping.”

When you prototype something, it’s a tangible thing (even if it is something virtual like a Facebook application, for example) around which people can react, discuss, get feedback and, perhaps most importantly, IMPROVE.

So, then, the role of the marketer is to create an environment where ANYONE in the organization who has a marketing idea can quickly tap into resources to make a prototype and test it. That’s not to say that EVERY idea will get approved. Let’s face it, some of them will be really bad.

But, some of them will be really good.

And, instead of saying “we don’t have budget for that” or “that doesn’t fit with our campaign plan for the year,” we want to welcome those ideas and give them a place to flourish or at least get vetted and tested on a small scale.

So, what do we need to do?

First, I think we need to recognize that marketing’s function is not about coming up with all of the ideas and executing them on behalf of the organization.

Instead, marketing’s function is to ensure that it has listening posts and dialogue with every corner of the organization and to

make it clear that good ideas are welcome and
actually do them.

In the beginning, this will be tough, but a few brave souls will come forth.

Once the rest of the organizations sees that feedback is valued and acted upon, then they (the ones who are even closer to the customer and their problems) will see their role, opportunity, and excitement as marketers as well.

Simultaneously, take your marketing budget and carve off some percentage of it (20% for starters, maybe?) and reserve it for these ideas from your team.

The criteria which you might share (just pontificating here): if your idea can be fully prototyped in under X weeks and for less than Y dollars (will vary, of course, depending on the size of your org), WE WILL DO IT.

Then, do it and use your marketing resources (people, money, network) to help these ideas get prototyped.

Measure your marketers not just on the amount of pipeline they drive, but on the number of prototypes they’ve funded/facilitated and the impact of those prototypes into full-on marketing activities.

That’s what I am calling Rapid Marketing Development. (still in search of a better term, so bring it on!)

Next up: Creating a culture of high fault tolerance

Differentiate through experience…

jer979 — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:59:00 GMT

No matter what type of business you are in, you now have to figure out a way to differentiate yourself through experience.

If you are a restaurant, this is easy (well, it’s not easy to do, but easy to know where to start).

What about if you are a law firm?

Or a doctor’s office?

More difficult.

Same holds true for a consulting firm, since the products we deliver are information/knowledge.

But, it can be done and only recently did I realize how.

The other day, I sent a proposal to a prospective client.

She responded:

Awesome. How fun is it to have a consultant who actually sends entertaining emails?

The email covered all of the salient points of the proposal, but instead of dry, business-y language, it was just written in a fun way.

Met the “remarkable” standard, but I dare say, it gave her an “experience.”

Can we “process-ify” or “operationalize” this?

I’m not sure we can, but we can empower our teams to think in terms of “what kind of ‘experience’ do we want the person/people on the other end to have as a result of your action?”…and then turn them loose to do it.

No Plans, Just Opportunities…

jer979 — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:04:00 GMT

My mother-in-law gave me a copy of the Forbes 400 (wonder if she is trying to tell me something?)

While I don’t think it’s generally a good use of time to read the bios (they don’t tell you much about HOW they made their money, just ‘Investments” or “oil,” etc.), I did find a nice set of quotes at the end that were inspirational.

One of them jumped out at me, William Hewlett from Hewlett-Packard who said:

“We didn’t have any plans when we started. We were just opportunistic.”

Given my ongoing series of blog posts about the need to change the way that marketing planning is done (starts here) and yesterday’s piece on “Rapid Marketing Development,” which perhaps I should just call “Entrepreneurial Marketing,” it rang a bell.

What Hewlett and other entrepreneurs know is that, most of the time, your original idea is not the one with which you end up.

You see the opportunity and you can only figure out the best way to address it via prototyping, rapid testing, rapid failure, and iteration.

It just dawned on me that maybe the delineation is not between planning and not planning, rather it’s between Planning and Preparation?

When I was younger, I lived in Europe and Asia for 3 years. I backpacked/hosteled a lot.

I would know my general destination and I would have a rough idea of how I would get there, but I didn’t plan out every single element. Didn’t know where I would sleep, eat, or find some interesting attraction.

However, I was almost ALWAYS prepared. Clothes, water bottle (a trait I still have to this day), basic first aid, Swiss Army Knife, etc.

In that way, I could pursue my own “commander’s intent” (i.e. Experience Europe/Asia in a full, meaningful way) without being overly committed to a plan (take the train from Strasbourg to Paris) which could be disrupted (as it was by yet another national strike in France) and thus, was well prepared to adjust as necessary.

So, does that make sense? Marketing preparation vs. marketing planning?

Billion Channel Marketing Planning, Part 3

jer979 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:21:00 GMT

Continuing some of the thoughts begun here in part 1 and then here in part 2 on how marketing planning will need to change given the fact that marketing itself has changed.

Ultimately, I think I am headed to a position where most of the planning of marketing will stay in the hands of the marketers, but some (or much) of the execution of marketing will take place in the hands of non-marketers.

Why?

Because, if you want to find the exploit the opportunities that will present themselves (as I touched on in part 2) and rapidly exploit them to try and create the viral forest fires (part 1), then you will need to empower others to act rapidly on behalf of your firm.

This could be Raving Fans, of course, as in the case of Community Driven Marketing, but for now, let’s focus on employees of your company.

The big concern and question that people have (both as it relates to fans and employees) is: “how do I maintain a consistent look for my brand?”

The answer is: you don’t necessarily need to.

Somehow, over time, we’ve come to associate the look of a brand with the experience of the brand. These are not the same things.

The brand is an ephemeral feeling which sums up the aggregate experiences which sit behind it. The visuals evoke that feeling, but don’t determine that feeling.

Olivier Blanchard had a post a while back where he quoted Jack Spade (of Kate Spade) from a Fast Company article about brand advice. Of the five, the one I latched onto was:

3. Brand consistency is overrated.
The brand doesn’t have to look the same, but it has to feel the same. An element of newness and surprise is important for any brand.

My friend, Mike Bonifer, author of the book Game Changers (review here), reminds us that in a networked economy, brands are “improvisations.”

This is a HUGE paradigm shift, since for so long, we have been brainwashed (almost) to think of brands as images that are force-fed to us via advertising and we have a really difficult time imagining a scenario where the look of the brand isn’t consistent.

But, take it down to the micro level, the Global Micro Brand level, that is.

You have a personal brand that has many different parts.

You might be a marketer, an athlete, a bassoonist, a dancer, whatever…

You don’t always wear the same outfit, do you?

Sometimes your hair is neatly combed and sometimes, you just put on a baseball cap.

The look of your brand varies.

BUT, the feel of your brand (for the most part) is consistent. It’s you.

Your company is the same.

I’m not minimizing the massive shift in thinking and execution that is required in order to make this adjustment, but I think it’s coming. Frankly, I’m not sure what it looks like or how to fully explain it (which is part of the reason why I’m blogging it…to get your feedback.)

If, however, we can provide that vision to our employees/vendors/fans about what the "feel” of the brand should be and then empower them to experiment with various “looks” themselves, I suspect we’ll have more dandelion seeds out there…which will lead to more chances that your brand story will go viral (also in part 1).

That viral leads to breadth of customer awareness, to attention and the attention can be monetized.

Now, on to part 4.

Respond! It’s your brand….

jer979 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:31:00 GMT

You’re busy, I get that.

When I email you, it may not be a priority for you to respond in full at that moment.

No problem.

Well, yes, maybe there is a problem.

If you are in the relationship-building business (and if you manage a Global MicroBrand you are…and you do), then you have to remember that there is someone else on the other end of that email.

I’m not saying you need to respond to EVERY single email/IM/VM you get…what I am saying is that…if you want to build long-term relationships where you have people vested in your success, you need to show some empathy. Radio silence is a bad idea.

Case in point:

A few weeks ago, I was introduced to a woman who works for a non-profit in the DC area. She said to me, “I’ve heard about the WOM Slam and think it might be good for our organization. Can we chat about it?”

We chatted for 20 minutes pleasantly and she said, “follow up with me next week.”

Which I did.

Nothing.

And again, nothing.

A third time.

Nothing.

You might say, “Ah, but you are the one trying to sell here!”

And you are right, I am.

But what this woman fails to recognize is that she has a chance to strengthen her network, reputation, Global MicroBrand even if she says “No” or “I’ll get back to you in a month, things are crazy.”

By not responding, she is saying “I don’t really care about your time or what you are trying to accomplish.”

So, sure I may not get this sale which isn’t good, but she’s not building a long-term relationship, which is far worse.

Now, contrast that with this other potential client.

And Auren Hoffman says that successful people return phone calls.

(Lest you think that I only fail to make sales, feel free to check out some of the new additions to the client roster.)

Never Stop Marketing...

Global MicroBrand Valuations…

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How to Innovate: The Israeli Model

Billion Channel Marketing, Part 5

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Packer Nation and what we can learn about Raving Fans….

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What permission as an asset looks like…

Marketing in a Billion Channel World, Part 4

Differentiate through experience…

No Plans, Just Opportunities…

Billion Channel Marketing Planning, Part 3

Respond! It’s your brand….