Intrinsic Strategy

This week, I spent two days attending the tenth and final iteration of a tech conference I’d never before attended: Gnomedex. Not only was its emphasis on the intersection of technology, society and culture professionally appealing, the sensibilities that drove the conference overall had a personal appeal that served to reinforce Gnomedex’ mission.

Over at TechFlash, you can read my guest commentary about the event, “The Sense of a Gnomedex.”

I also had the challenge of improvising a five-minute presentation at Gnomedex — on less than 15 minutes notice. You can see the result of my addressing the audience-generated issue, “Why is my digital privacy a marketable commodity,” in glorious web video here.

I get cranky when I see lazy marketing writing. Especially when the primary purpose of marketing writing is to motivate readers.

What do I mean by lazy? Words and phrases that sound as though they’re saying something but are content placebos. Technology (and education technology) marketers are notorious for this practice. While many lazy words probably once had specific meaning, they’re now applied so indiscriminately they’ve become like over- and mis- used cooking ingredients: too many empty word calories, filling space instead of stomachs, and similarly providing no sustained energy.

My 2010 list of the top five linguistic sugar bombs that should carry warning labels:

“Leading.” The mainstay of public relations boilerplate, corporate descriptions and positioning statements, this word says nothing. I’ve been campaigning for the retirement of this hoary chestnut for a dozen years. “Leading” is a shortcut used when someone can’t articulate why a product, service or company is different — or doesn’t want to go through the work required to get to that point of differentiation. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at EdNET News Alert, I’ve summed up a fascinating conference session designed to get teachers to tell educational publishing execs exactly what they want from digital technology in the classroom. Some 300 execs at the Association of Educational Publishers’ Content in Context Conference heard 20 educators tell them directly, in videos they’d submitted, their successes, obstacles and desires for effective digital classrooms. Even if it’s anecdotal, it’s instructive.

Pulling this session together was a group effort: the teacher social network edWeb.net promoted and discussed the video submissions in their Classrooms in the Digital Age community; AEP managed the YouTube video uploads from the teachers in the Teacher Video Challenge playlist; and I had fun selecting the videos to be shown and weaving them together with a 90-minute panel and audience discussion at the conference itself.

You can read the five common themes that came out of the videos on the EdNET News Alert site.

Spring is the longest (conference) season.

That’s the reason I have for not posting for most of the vernal equinox quarter. Spring is rife with industry trade shows and conferences, as it is in pretty much any industry. I’ve been to several.

However, to share what I’ve learned, I’ve live tweeted several events as @FrankCatalano and taken detailed notes, based in part on those tweets, for two conferences at the nexus of education technology: the Ed Tech Industry Summit from the Software and Information Industry Association, and the Content in Context Conference from the Association of Educational Publishers.

You can find my SIIA Ed Tech Industry Summit notes here, and my AEP Content in Context Conference notes here as PDF files. For future reference, all notes will be archived on the Conference Notes page.

Now on to summer.

Update 7/8/10: I’ve added exhibit notes from ISTE 2010, in previous years known as the National Educational Computing Conference and now sporting the name of its sponsoring organization, the International Society for Technology in Education.

While the conference sessions at this ed tech event are generally well-documented by others, these ISTE 2010 notes focus on trends and observations about ed tech products and technologies shown in the exhibit hall.

What’s the best way to deal with marketing in a recovery?

Three times in six months I’ve had the opportunity to publicly address that question, refine my thinking and post brief essays exposing my thought process, real-world examples and recommendations. But since that was done over time, here are the myths and tips neatly bundled:

• Re-balance your marketing efforts before you reduce (“Re-balance the Marketing Portfolio” September 7, 2009)
• Customer service is marketing, especially in bad times (“Customer Service as Downturn Advantage” September 20, 2009)
• Brand maintenance helps retain perceived value (“The Good Downturn Brand Shepherd” October 14, 2009)
• Having a long-term strategy makes it easier to take advantage of short-term opportunities (“Strategy’s Downturn Role, Redux” December 27, 2009)
• Communicate honestly and often or customers will do it for you (“Why Bad News Is Good” February 9, 2010)

My thanks to the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce, the Bellevue Collection Merchants and the Mercer Island Chamber of Commerce — all in Washington State — for letting me further explore these concepts and share what I learned.

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 »