Intrinsic Strategy

It’s inevitable that, during the slow crawl up through economic recovery, companies will have good patches and bad patches. What they shouldn’t do is succumb to the natural corporate temptation to share only good news.

This might seem counter intuitive to traditionalists: Share bad news with customers? But that will hurt our image, our customers’ trust in us and maybe our business. But what these traditionalists forget is we live in a century with customers who both distrust typical marketing messages … and aren’t afraid to use Twitter.

I think of this as my fifth and final myth of marketing coming out of a downturn: Communicate only good news. And it’s one I discussed with The Bellevue Collection Merchants last month.

Let’s be realistic, for two reasons. First: As firms get back on their feet there will be missteps. Customers know this, and expect more transparency. People expect to hear bad news when coming out of bad times, especially if they know an individual industry sector has been troubled. If all they hear instead is happy-fluffy-bunny marketing speak, they will either be suspicious and wonder what you’re hiding, or they may wonder if you’re clueless about the true state of affairs. That’s not a good either-or to be in the middle of. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at TechFlash, I’ve shared some decade-ending experiences I had trying to find a new home for technology from the end of the last decade. And the futility nicely illustrates just how far we’ve come in personal tech in a mere ten years.

The guest commentary: “Perfect, perfectly useless tech.”

Sometimes, I get a blank look when I explain to people that I do marketing “strategy.” It’s the blank look usually reserved for people who say they do what the voices tell them. Or the one seen while others figure out how to politely ask if you do anything productive.

Finally, they’ll sometimes say, “But we’re in a downturn. I just care about sales.”

The last time I wrote about the role of strategy was during the last downturn, seven years ago. And there’s nothing like being in a downturn, even if it’s supposedly in the rear-view mirror, that illustrates why strategy — a clear, well-thought out strategy — is important. In short, strategy means knowing where your business wants to be after the downturn. I suspect some of the best moves being made right now are from companies thinking long-term, so they can take advantage of short-term opportunities.

I took some time to explain why earlier this year at a Bellevue Chamber of Commerce talk on the myths of marketing. Having a marketing strategy — which is a core component of any business strategy — can be as simple as taking the time and thought to understand four C’s: Read the rest of this entry »

Beware the familiar-sounding name.

Over the years I’ve been involved in a number of projects to name products, services and companies. And these projects can go pear-shaped in ways almost too numerous to contemplate, from endless free-for-all brainstorming to unilateral executive decisions  — only to discover later the exec subconsciously found a choice comfortingly appropriate because it was the name of a largely forgotten competitive product.

So I’ve developed a series of steps to avoid the most egregious mistakes while still coming up with a solid name. And note that I don’t say the perfect name. No name is perfect out of the gate; it has to be used consistently for a product, service or company that actually delivers what is promised.

How do you get started? Here’s the short four-part version. Read the rest of this entry »

A downturn is no time to stop managing your brand. If a strong brand allows you to charge a premium in good times, that perception of value in bad times will help you recover when good times return.

But only if the brand itself is maintained throughout.

Going into my talk on the myths of marketing at the Bellevue Chamber, I’d just come off of several anecdotal exchanges about whether a company should even bother to think about brand now, and instead focus only on price and sales. “Who cares whether it properly carries our brand,” one paraphrased back-and-forth went with a high-level executive. “The customer will figure it out.”

Setting aside the hubris inherent in forcing the customer – the paying customer – to do your corporate identification work for you, this illustrates clearly my third myth of marketing in a downturn: The brand makes no difference; only sales do. Or, put another way, leave branding and brand maintenance to better times.

Certainly the financial benefits of having a strong brand aren’t in dispute. Read the rest of this entry »

A few thoughts about customer service and its role during a downturn. In short, customer service becomes marketing. Or rather, its absence becomes an opening for your competitors’ marketing.

Customer service seems like an obvious area to cut when times are hard. But that’s a myth (and the second one I explored in my Bellevue Chamber talk). What companies should do, if they’re cutting marketing aimed at customer acquisition – and as I noted earlier, they should re-balance before they reduce – is protect the money spent on customer service.

Why? Because customers with money in a downturn expect to be treated better.

An excellent piece in BusinessWeek earlier this year cited the cautionary tale of Hertz. In January, Hertz  laid off 4,000 people, many of them front-line workers. The result? Customers in Hertz’ loyalty program didn’t have cars waiting for them as arranged, or couldn’t quickly return cars before catching flights. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t usually post events where I’m attending and not speaking (since that would create a lot of clutter). But FiReGlobal: West Coast is an unusual event in that all the attendees are participants.

FiReGlobal — or Future in Review Global, a Seattle-based one-day version of the multi-day Future in Review Conference I’ve attended in the past — is the brainchild of Mark Anderson, a noted technology industry industry analyst with whom I’ve collaborated, competed and disagreed with over the  years (in a kind and gentle way apparently unheard of in most contemporary discourse). Yet there is no better thinker on global tech issues than Mark, and I’m delighted to attend this inaugural event in Seattle and to serve on the event’s Steering Committee. FiRe truly has been a cross-disciplinary tech event that has no peer.

If you’re free on Thursday, October 15, I encourage you to join me at FiReGlobal. Or better still — make yourself free to attend. I suspect you won’t regret it.

In a down economy, myths proliferate.  And one is to immediately reduce marketing spending to conserve cash. Because, the myth goes, in a down economy customers know you’ll market less.

Now, you might expect someone who designs marketing strategies to call this a “myth” (as, I suspect, did the audience at the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch). But no business should automatically reduce — not unless it thinks about re-balancing, first.

The reality is businesses have to keep on marketing. During a downturn, if customers stop hearing from you they start to wonder if you’re in trouble financially … or if you still exist. Your company or product name needs to remain visible.

Re-balancing your marketing portfolio is the first step. By that, I mean review all of your spending and determine which of your marketing expenditures reach your target audience the most cost effectively. Then focus on stuff that’s either extremely targeted. Or extremely cheap. Read the rest of this entry »

The strategy consultancy known as Intrinsic Strategy is, as of this month, a healthy one year old. (If you include its continuous Catalano Consulting predecessor, it cannot quite yet raise a toast to itself as they are now a consecutive, combined 17 years old. But it can attend a film with strong language.)

The year’s been busy for me. Kindly invited to speak or moderate at events of the Washington Technology Industry Association, Washington Technology Center, Software and Information Industry Association, Association of Educational Publishers and Bellevue Chamber of Commerce. Dove back into commentary and analysis as a guest contributor to TechFlash. And, of course, solidly doing marketing and business strategy consulting for technology-related companies in education, consumer and other markets.

I’ll shortly be taking my “Marketing Myths in a Down Economy” talk delivered to the Bellevue Chamber last week and reworking its advice as blog posts over the next several weeks. So the fun — and, I hope, useful information — is just beginning.

I’m doing something I don’t normally do — giving a talk about marketing strategy. Specifically, about marketing myths in a down economy. I’ve seen a number of companies do things in a downturn that might make sense on the short-term surface, but which can undermine their long-term prospects.

I’ll outline five of these myths, highlight reality and offer some practical tips in a talk at the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce Business Lunch on Wednesday, August 19. If you’re in the area of Puget Sound’s Eastside, you can find out more in the events section of the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce site.