Intrinsic Strategy

Last weekend, I had the honor of speaking at the biennial conference of the Northwest Independent Editors Guild, Red Pencil in the Woods. Honored in that I’m not an editor. I’m a marketer. I’m a writer. I’m a speaker and broadcaster.

However, I’ve always maintained that every good writer needs an editor. Writers can get distance from work they’ve drafted by putting it aside overnight, or for a few days, and then doing something completely different before going back to edit. But even that distance in time doesn’t provide distance from self. Granting that outside-of-self perspective is why I value good editors, including mine at GeekWire, and encourage them to push back if something doesn’t communicate what I had intended to the audience for which I’m writing.

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Fair warning: This advice is going to piss off a lot of advertising sales reps.

A question I get fairly often is, “Where should I spend my marketing budget?” The hidden question in the question is that there are magical tactics, unknown to mere mortals, that will propel market awareness and sales to Olympian heights.

There aren’t, of course. But there are tactics for any new tech-related product in the new decade which are definite musts. And a lot more are “it depends.” Or even “hell no.”

Now for the Olympus-sized caveat. This advice works best for a digital product or service launched by a start-up with a limited budget. It was originally developed for education technology products, a market which has characteristics of both business-to-business/government sales (administrators) and business-to-consumer sales (teachers). I originally delivered it at the 2010 Software and Information Industry Association Ed Tech Business Forum in New York City. But there are nuggets in here for everyone, especially in the “musts.” (more…)

If you just visit my blog, you’re only seeing one-third of me.

That is, you’re only seeing a third of my professional online presence. In the old days of new media a company’s entire public online presence could be summed up in a website. But with the proliferation of time-sensitive web communications tools over the past decade (including the broadly defined “social media”), that thinking has changed.

A true web presence is now an integrated whole of parts that account for public persistence, information depth and audience reach. If you’re only using one tool and you’re a business, it’s like expecting a nutritious meal from only the milk food group (and no, there is no web version of Ensure).

The best way to explain the new integration is to start with an Intrinsic Strategy example — though the underlying concepts scale to any size business: (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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: (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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.

Over at TechFlash, I’ve contributed a commentary on the potential value – even for pure Internet companies which produce only digital products – in having a physical world presence.

For more than 15 years, brick-and-mortar businesses have been creating Internet presences for both marketing and e-commerce. But there seems to have been an unspoken hesitancy to promote moves in the other direction, from Web-only to Web-plus-cinder block.

Underlying the hesitancy may be a false assumption that the Internet is the ultimate destination for all business, and that a physical presence is a sign of the past. No company, it’s implied, should go out of its way to create a real-world presence if the business was spawned and is doing fine on the Web.

Yet it does pay off.  (more…)

You might also title this, “How bad customer service kills good newspapers.” For while newspapers across the country are in the fight of their lives to attract advertisers and subscribers, they have frequently been their own worst enemies when it comes to keeping the very customers they’ve worked hard to obtain.

Admittedly, I’m a focus group of one. But I also am predisposed to like newspapers (as a former alternative weekly newspaper columnist), which apparently puts me in the minority. Yet, despite my high newsprint-stupidity threshold, these customer prevention policies stun even me:

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The downside of book contracts comes when you lose control of your self. And that’s the case now that my name is attached to two “new” Dummies books that I had no direct involvement in writing … and didn’t even know existed until I read about them in a blog.

Let me say upfront this doesn’t mean they’re not good books. But my advice and image — state of the art nearly a decade ago — have been repackaged and represented as current. It’s marketing at its most automatic.

Background: In 2000, Bud Smith and I wrote Internet Marketing for Dummies, a successor to 1998′s Marketing Online for Dummies. The contract I signed allowed for non-U.S. editions, a good idea. IMFD was translated into languages and alphabets I don’t read, or in some cases, recognize. All in all, IMFD was in print for seven years, a good run.

But last year,  I noticed blog posts referencing Frank Catalano’s book, Digital Marketing for Dummies. (more…)

I have just wrapped up my reponsibilities as a first-round judge in one of the longest-running, most prestigious award competitions in technology and education. And what entered companies go through in their efforts to avoid winning amaze me.

In the interests of protecting the clueless (or perhaps in this economy, resourceless), I won’t name the companies. Or even the competition. But if you’d like to waste your award entry money, you do so can very efficiently by following these three easy steps: (more…)

(The following first appeared in the Just Enough Strategy series of technology marketing essays in 2003 that can be downloaded here. It seems eerily appropriate today.)

The panic doesn’t usually creep into their voices until we’re nearly done with the coffee.

“I know strategy is important,” the colleague will say to me as we wrap up. “But I can’t spend a lot of time or effort on marketing strategy. I need to do stuff that will generate sales today.”

I’ll nod sagely. And hope he doesn’t waste too much money on misdirected marketing tactics, confusing any motion with forward motion. (more…)

(This essay originated in early 2004 on an earlier Frank Catalano blog. But, unfortunately, still is timely.)

As someone who loves words and language (and indeed is a writer when he’s not a marketer), I’m amazed at how some marketers abuse their biggest tool for communication. Now that 2003 is becoming a memory, there are words and phrases that should be banished from marketers’ and PR practitioners’ lexicons. Not just in technology marketing, but in all marketing.

Why? Because they’re overused, meaningless or lazy. Indeed, I suspect when most prospects or customers see these words and phrases, they reflexively treat them as one treats long names in a classic Russian novel: their brains glaze over and they skip to the next word or phrase.

Allow me to suggest five words or phrases for banishment: (more…)

Ever go to a charity auction and think, “Hey, this is a lot like eBay — why don’t they just put it all online?”

Because odds are it wouldn’t work nearly as well or raise as much money for the cause. It’s a matter of individual and group psychology.

This past spring, as a favor to a colleague, I dipped back into the world of charity auction emceeing for a night at Villa Academy in Seattle. In 2003 and 2004 I regularly emceed charity auctions as a feel-good sideline through Stokes Auction Group (which provides auctioneers and auction services exclusively for charities). This gave me insight into auctions for organizations including the American Heart Association, YouthCare, Boys and Girls Clubs, Young Life, Skiforall, several private schools, and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which does the delightfully named “Tennis Ball.” I gave it up when my travel schedule and new position made committing to an auction schedule impossible.

There’s a lot of planning and psychology that goes into a charity auction, from the smallest private school to the largest non-profit. (more…)

For a dozen years, I was a marketing consultant and tech industry analyst. I worked with a variety of clients. Sometimes, a short-term project would extend into a long-term interim executive assignment … and with that, would come a business card for a year or so. This is the third of three parts (including media and tech) of how business cards and contact info evolved over 30 years, this one covering the consulting years 1992 to 2004. (more…)