Archive for category Marketing & Branding
Playing to customer emotions in B2B
Posted by Kris Kaneta in Marketing & Branding, Random Musings on July 11, 2011
This post is in reaction to an interesting blog from @econsultancy. If you read through it, though I don’t advocate the notion of attacking a competitor, you’ll likely find it common sense. But the thing about common sense is that its often rare in practice. How often do we really consider how our customers feel emotionally about their problems or our products in the B2B environment?
It seems to me we, as marketers, spend way too much time articulating features / benefits and not necessarily about what drives customers emotionally. Some key emotions that come to mind relevant to B2B -
1) Security and peace of mind
2) Fear of complexity (and a need for simplicity)
3) Fear of obsolescence
4) Disdain for the big, evil OEM or corporation (that could even be you)
5) Need to be top dog or seen as a thought leader (not necessarily as an organization but as an individual)
6) Fear of unpredictability, inconsistency or failure (not at the product level but as a team or organization)
7) Desire to be perceived as charitable or benevolent
Obviously not every customer in your world is going to share all (or even one) of these emotional needs (that’s where the segmentation comes in). But when it’s all said and done, hard as we try, people are irrational decision makers.
How often have you tried to rationalize a purchase that in your head you knew was irrational? We see it all the time in the consumer world – products and services become emotional extensions of ourselves and we rationalize in our heads why we need something that we really don’t. I refuse to believe the same can’t be said in B2B. Buyers are still people, and people are still irrational. There are just different emotions at play.
In my current role we are commercializing a new solution playing to some extent on #s 4, 5 and 6 from above. That said, we’re still in the early phases so I won’t try and convince you of my genius…yet. In the meantime I would love to hear about what others have seen or done to tackle emotional needs in B2B. I’m all ears, so what have you got?
To be a kid again (Making Make-sense Marketing)
Posted by Kris Kaneta in Marketing & Branding on July 7, 2011
A few weeks ago I was in Chicago wandering through the water tower shopping plaza with my family. Foot traffic was light to moderate with the exception of two stores.
The Lego Store – Looking beyond the life-sized Darth Vader, the store was standing room only. At the pinnacle of co-branding from Starwars to Cars to Toy Story, there is no end in sight to Lego’s product evolution. All the while you could argue the fundamental product hasn’t changed or evolved since inception. More importantly people love it. My kid loves Starwars and he loves Legos (I know, apple…tree). Together, they’re a co-branding force (no pun intended).
The American Girl – I’ll admit I’d never heard of this brand until a few weeks ago. But just about every little girl below the age of 10 was carrying around an American Girl doll. I didn’t think much of it until my wife pointed out The American Girl’s store front. In it was a packed floor of girls and their moms. Of course the dads were all huddled to the side staring into their smartphones, no doubt reading ESPN to compensate for a general lack of testosterone… but you get the picture.
Now I’m not sure how much market research these organizations invested in (I’m sure they did enough) but clearly these two companies have their target audience hanging on every word. More importantly, whether or not they did any market research is completely irrelevant. My point is that these concepts just make sense. And sometimes that’s all it takes; finding whatever it is that excites us as a user. Case in point the movie clip below, from one of my favorite movies growing up…
Walking through through both of the stores mentioned above, I was reminded of this scene from the movie “Big”. It serves as an important reminder not to get caught up in nailing down all the facts and figures. Forget for a moment the conjoint. Forget the exact market size.
Does the idea make sense?
Clearly, the idea of a Transformers skyscraper made little sense what-so-ever. But, two of the coolest innovations of all time, Legos and Starwars make perfect sense. Dare I say like chocolate and peanut butter. And while I’m not exactly the most female savvy consumer, a customize-able doll that little girls can carry around and build as a reflection of themselves, something they can actually create – that too, makes sense.
I’ll end with this thought. We all (myself included) need to do a better job of embracing our inner child. Embrace that impulse to just run out and do something if it makes sense; to let ourselves get excited about an idea, not about a market size; to get passionate about creating something, not selling something. You just may find yourself on the verge of something big.
Marketing vs customer value
Posted by Sam Kale in Marketing & Branding, Random Musings on June 29, 2011
Many times I’ve heard marketers say something like “You have to give something to get something.” And many times, the person means “[The customer] needs to give [their personal information] to get [my content].” As a marketer I can see the logic, especially when it comes to targeting, measuring, and tracking. But as a consumer, it’s not always clear to me that what I’m getting is as valuable as what they’re giving.
There’s a great article from HBR [N.B. requires purchase and/or login] that talks about the gap between sellers’ and buyers’ perceptions. According to the article, sellers overvalue their wares by up to a factor of 3x, while buyers undervalue those same wares by up to 3x, resulting in a nearly 10x gap between what the seller thinks their thing is worth and what the buyer is willing to “pay” for it.
Put it another way: how many of us have clicked a link or gone to a website only to be immediately challenged to “log in or register to see that content”? Before you are even able to evaluate whether the information is good and valuable and credible you have to give up your personal information, sometimes including your street address and employer’s name. It might not seem like that big of a deal, but given the recent rash of security breaches around the internet (viz: Citibank, Gawker Media, Sony, et al), it should make you wonder exactly how secure your information is, what is the risk of that information being leaked to the rest of the internet, and what happens to you if it does get leaked. Only then will you start putting your information in the right context to decide whether giving it up is the right thing to do.
As a vendor, you have to ask yourself whether that White Paper is telling the customer something they can find in any first year MBA textbook, whether that blog post titled “37 Ways to Supercharge Your Marketing Plan” is really all that insightful, or whether the news you’re hiding behind a paywall is something the customer can freely find somewhere else (see also: the Disney Corporation).
Good marketing is not about targeting, or measuring, or tracking; good marketing is about getting inside the customer’s head and offering something that they really find valuable. Not something that’s inside the 10x margin, not something that’s slighly less crummy than the competition, not something that was easy for you to get done and approved, but something that helps the customer solve a problem that’s big enough to matter and let them do it without a bunch of “exciting (upsell) opportunities” standing in their way. Only then can you really become the “trusted advisor” that is the holy grail of customer-marketing relationships.
Kathy Sierra: Pixie Dust & The Mountain of Mediocrity
Posted by Sam Kale in Communications & Social Media, Marketing & Branding on June 20, 2011
Kathy Sierra: Pixie Dust & The Mountain of Mediocrity
I never understood how any of this made sense, given that very little of what I see “brands” (or their human spokestweeters) do on social media is changing the fundamental nature of how users interact with their products. “But that is not the point! It is about being human!”. Nope, I still don’t get it. Why would anyone want to compete on *that*? It felt fragile to be in essentially a marketing arms-race of who-is-the-most-engaging-social-media rock star. What does that really have to do with what users do with the product?
A nice companion read to Kris’ Going beyond the sizzle (of technology marketing).
Going beyond the sizzle (of technology marketing)
Posted by Kris Kaneta in Marketing & Branding on June 8, 2011
In case you haven’t picked it up on it, I’m in the business of marketing people. Yes, I market B2B solutions with a complex array of services and technologies, but at the end of the day those solutions are designed by, implemented by, managed by and bought by people. And one of the worst things an organization can do is sell a technology without keeping in mind the people that it takes to really maximize the value of that solution. So why then do marketers overlook the people that make their solutions attainable and tangible to clients?
As I like to say to my consultants and engineers, the technology on its own is the sizzle. Yes, the sound and the smell is what draws people in; it’s the “sexy” part of what we sell – but when the sizzle eventually dissipates, it’s the experts in front of the customer, strategically evaluating the situation, who will ultimately be held accountable for the technology’s performance.
And rest assured – the sizzle will dissipate. And unless you’re really not in to retaining customers, this should be a pretty big deal for you. No one, I repeat no one, is safe from the “so what have you done for me lately” conundrum.
So go ahead and keep marketing the crap of the technology. It is after all what brings customers in the door. But getting them in the door is only half the battle. Once they’re in the door – the technology needs to tell a story, and that story ultimately needs to be about marketable people. For without people, technology comes down to bits and bytes and eventually we all start to look the same (see PC industry).
One of the senior executives I work with and whom I have a tremendous amount of respect for has a mantra I oft hear him recite.
“People do business with people they like, trust and respect.”
We’ve reached a point where technology is a great differentiator but also our greatest challenge. In this age of rapid obsolescence, something better will eventually come along. But good people, trustworthy people, who have a vested interested in their customers can quell that fear.
If you stop and think about it, we are surrounded by companies who win because of the people they market, who are bringing products and solutions that are not only at their respective forefronts, but also backed by great people. From Apple to Xerox, these organizations win because there are people behind them that we like, trust and respect.
Seth: Are you a scientist?
Posted by Sam Kale in Marketing & Branding, Random Musings on June 7, 2011
Ask a physicist what will happen if you fire a projectile like this in that direction, and she’ll know. Ask a chemist what happens if you mix x and y, and you’ll get the right answer. Even quantum mechanics mechanics can give you probabilities that work out in the long run.
I’m not always the biggest fan of Seth Godin’s brand of “crackerjack marketing” – for my taste it generally lacks the subtlety and nuance that paints life in anything other than primary colors 1– but I do have to admit that most of his observations are sound, at least in the broad strokes.
As someone who spent the better part of his life as a scientist, I can tell you that while Seth’s observation might be technically right, it does lack the subtlety of insight. Scientists spend vast tracts of time testing and observing the world, and only after gathering, collating, and interpreting the data do they build hypotheses of how the world works.
Scientists make predictions, and predicting the future is far more valuable than explaining the past.
In reality, scientists predict the future by explaining the past. And to be fair, they don’t so much “predict the future” as tell you what would be consistent with past observations.
But buried somewhere here is a lesson, whether you’re in science, marketing, or any other knowledge worker driven field: future insights are only as good as the summation of your past observances. It is, at times, attractively expedient2 to rely on “key thought leaders in the field”3 to generate your “insights” rather than a full-fledged primary marketing research study. We can’t do large-scale marketing research studies, the argument goes, because we don’t have the budget.
But ask yourself this question: what’s more expensive – fielding and executing a good primary marketing research study, or better on a product that only a small handful of people will like?
Or as I’ve heard said before, “The plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘evidence’.”4
- I know there are a great many “Seth-heads” out there. Please understand that I’m in no way saying that being a “Seth-head” is wrong, only that he doesn’t suite my taste. It would be a shame if the only thing you took from this article was this comment about Seth, as I’m trying to address a larger point, which you’ll hopefully see below.
↩ - READ: Cheap and fast.
↩ - READ: A few good customers.
↩ - I can’t seem to find the original source of this quote, so I’ll link to where I first remember hearing it. It now graces a crude printed sign hanging on my own cubicle wall.
↩
Still on Facebook
Posted by Sam Kale in Communications & Social Media, Marketing & Branding on May 23, 2011
Before crafting a social media plan, first become a “social consumer” yourself. What would you personally welcome in your newsfeed? The experiment will shape what you create.
Last weekend, while sitting in the stylists’ chair getting my hair cut, I noticed a small decal on the mirror inviting me to “Like” the salon on Facebook. I was at the same time unsurprised, intrigued, and not just the slightest bit weary of these sorts of requests. It seems everywhere we turn these days, some product or the other as asking us to “like” them on Facebook or “follow” them on twitter.
My problem is not that these products have a presence in social media. My problem is that their presence in social media doesn’t give me anything new. More often than not, what I find on twitter amounts to little more than a RSS feed. And more often than that, what I find on Facebook can only be charitablydescribed as noise.
Fishburn is completely right1: social media should be a tactic in your larger, long-term promotional strategy, you need to understand the medium before diving head-long into it, and you should try to offer something different in each of your different channels.
- As usual.
Dan Ariely: Wait for another cookie?
Posted by Sam Kale in Marketing & Branding on May 17, 2011
There is not much place for waiting in today’s marketplace. In fact you can think about the whole capitalist system as being designed to get us to take actions and spend money now – and those businesses that are more successful in that do better and prosper (at least in the short term).
A recent study by colleagues of mine at Duke** demonstrates very convincingly the role that self control plays not only in better cognitive and social outcomes in adolescence, but also in many other factors and into adulthood … Controlling for socioeconomic status and IQ, they show that individuals with lower self-control experienced negative outcomes in [health, wealth, and public safety]…These results show that self-control can have a deep influence on a wide range of activities. And there is some good news: if we can find a way to improve self-control, maybe we could do better.
An interesting analysis. Ariely’s thesis is that over time, people who are better at resisting temptation tend to do better in life (at least with respect to health, wealth, and public safety).
What he doesn’t explore, however, is what happens to companies that are able to resist the allure of immediate gratification. Put another way, is there any material difference in “prosperity”1 between a company that focuses on quarterly profits versus a similar company that looks quarters or years down the road?
In many ways, Jim Collins’ Built to Last tried to answer this question. It profiled 18 companies and compared how they conducted themselves both internally and externally. And while Collins and co-author Jerry Porras concluded that it was better to focus on the long-term, what they couldn’t predict was that nearly half of the companies they profiled have had one trouble or the other in the decade since the book was originally published.
Ten years on, almost half of the visionary companies on the list have slipped dramatically in performance and reputation, and their vision currently seems more blurred than clairvoyant. Consider the fates of Motorola, Ford, Sony, Walt Disney, Boeing, Nordstrom, and Merck. Each has struggled in recent years, and all have faced serious questions about their leadership and strategy. Odds are, none of them today would meet BTL‘s criteria for visionary companies, which required that they be the premier player in their industry and be widely admired by people in the know.
So it seems that if we look long term and the companies that focused on the long term, not all have done well. What’s more, if we look long term at the companies that focus on the short term, some of them have done well, calling into question at very least the applicability of Collins’ conclusions.
And so the question remains: is it better to resist temptation and pursue long term profits, or is it better to give in to the temptation of short-term profits?
- However we choose to define that word, whether it be stock price, market cap, quarterly or yearly profits, or any other metric.
More than just a good idea
Posted by Kris Kaneta in Marketing & Branding on March 15, 2011
In the fall of 2009, I spent 2 days in a meeting where some of the brightest minds in my business came together to discuss the shared need of a new solution that addressed a known but unmet need in the marketplace. A new solution that we all had talked about around the water cooler so to speak, but didn’t quite know how to pull off. The exact nature of the business idea is irrelevant. The bottom line was that we knew it to be the right thing to do for our business and for our customers. After an intense dialog we left feeling good about ourselves and concluded the meeting with a commitment to follow-up with clear plan of action.
Fast forward many months later – not a single follow-up had taken place, and in darkened corners people still spoke about the opportunity we were potentially missing out on.
Fast forward again to the present day, and while not a whole has changed in the market, the new solution is now prominently featured as part of our long-term growth strategy. So what has changed? Let me say that what we did wasn’t rocket science. But in very complex organizations, it takes more than just great ideas to move the needle. It takes data, resolve and, quite frankly, a little bit of luck.
1) Quantify the opportunity. While anecdotally we all knew there was a need, it wasn’t until we quantified the opportunity and expressed it in actual dollars that ears actually perked up.
2) Validate your assumptions. After we quantified the opportunity, there was still the question of how we’d address that opportunity. We resolved that through some simple market research on our target audience. While we didn’t learn anything we didn’t already know – I believe it was the tipping point that gave us the confidence to move forward, mitigating the risk of a miss in our offering.
3) Assign a single point of operational accountability. Determine who will, post conception, be responsible for the operational mechanics of the offering, This is essential because without that, 12 months goes by and you’re still left with just an idea. And if the business potential warrants it (as it did in this case), this person should be responsible for operationalizing as a full-time role, otherwise business as usual inevitably gets in the way.
4) Timing is everything. I mentioned there’s always a little luck involved, and there’s something to be said about being at the right place at the right time. Ideas just take time to be absorbed and comprehended. In the meantime, be prepared to defend your idea should the opportunity present itself.
If you’ve got a great idea, remember that it takes time to change an organization. Don’t get discouraged. Instead, think about what you need to influence the right stakeholders. Depend on more than just passion and anecdotal evidence to make your argument. Bringing a new product or service to market should never be about taking your word for it. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, we went live with the new solution last month.
Fundamentally Flawed
Posted by Kris Kaneta in Marketing & Branding on December 21, 2010
A couple weeks ago, going through my DVR lineup, it occurred to me just how much we like our heroes and heroines flawed. The characters that we rally behind are in one way or another fundamentally flawed. From Chuck to Big Bang to Grey’s Anatomy to just about any form of reality TV – the people we love have serious issues. The question is simply whether we know it up front or are waiting intently for the other shoe to drop.
This of course isn’t surprising, we all like rooting for the underdog. No one finds constant perfection entertaining. So if we want the characters of our lives flawed, what about our brands?
I would argue that there should be no difference. Obviously I don’t want to be cruising around in a mechanically flawed automobile that puts my family and other drivers at risk – but I’d also say there’s nothing wrong with an auto brand openly tackling a challenge, problem or cause that we can all get behind. Case in point, the new Chevy Volt. I am not a GM fan and I will not be an early adopter of the EV but I do admire the way GM has more or less put all its eggs in one basket on this one. If the Volt isn’t a success, there’s no way of knowing just how far GM will fall.
And I think this new ‘pioneering’ image of GM will play out in its favor. In the case of GM, it has to. So I am, as I’m sure you are, rooting for them.
There’s also the flipside to consider – when flaws and faults are discovered, why do so many brands try to hide from them, as though ignoring the problem will make it go away. Sticking to the auto and oil theme, both BP and Toyota (anyone else find Toyota’s slogan of “Moving Forward” ironic?) have been criticized for their relatively unapologetic PR strategy – which we’d agree has not worked out well for them. People are still anxiously awaiting a heartfelt apology and/or admission of fault.
So go ahead – embrace your sub-par-ness. People will love you for it. There’s just no other logical explanation for the longevity of gratingly annoying characters like Urkel.
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