Intrinsic Strategy

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.

Washington’s Innovation Summit 2009 hosted a Who’s Who of leaders across various industries and government discussing the importance of innovation — and how to spur, nurture and maintain it.

Now, videos of the plenary sessions are available online, from “intrapreneur” coiner Gifford Pinchot’s fascinating discourse to McKinstry CEO Dean Allen’s conversation with Puget Sound Business Journal’s George Erb. And many sessions in between, including my own brief interview with Rogers Weed (former Microsoft VP and new director of the State of Washington Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development) and Mike Schwenk (VP and director of technology deployment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory).

Find the program and video links here (look for the phrase “watch video”), or directly go to the Weed/Schwenk “Reflections on Innovation” video here.

Incidentally, all the lame moderator jokes have survived the transition to video. Unfortunately.

Interested in what Amazon.com, Google and Rochester Institute of Technology’s Open Publishing Lab think about the future of learning platforms for students and teachers? The Association of Educational Publishers has posted a podcast (or an “audiocast,” since there’s no subscription) to the AEP Summit general session I moderated in June, “Learning Platforms for the 21st Century and Beyond.”

In it, Jeff Keltner of Google (responsible for Google Apps in the education market), Laura Porco of Amazon.com (director of Kindle Books), and Michael Riordin of the Rochester Institute of Technology (co-director of the Open Publishing Lab) discuss and debate what technologies and platforms education companies need to consider now.

After all, anyone who is 32 years old or younger — student, teacher, or administrator — has never known life without the relatively inexpensive, mass-produced personal computer.  The Apple II was released in 1977, and the original IBM PC in 1981. Even the Web browser is Sweet Sixteen.

This panel was PowerPoint-free, so it’s 1:16 of pure discussion. Download the audiocast as an MP3 file, and check out a session description and bios of the panelists. An official summary was added later at the AEP blog. You’ll also find audiocasts and presentation files for other sessions of interest at what was, overall, a great AEP Summit. A once-live Twitter stream @FrankCatalano (#AEP09 or #AEP) is here.

The Software and Information Industry Association has posted a summary of the Ed Tech Industry Summit session on embedded assessment in digital learning products. You can find it, as a PDF, here.

The panelists kindly put up with my PowerPoint-free moderating approach and turned in a lively and frequently illuminating discussion. Thanks to Bob Ginn, Century Consultants; Sue Koch, AutoSkill; and Mike Patterson, Curriculum Advantage.

Those interested in notes from other ETIS sessions can find them posted on the SIIA ETIS Web site. A Twitter stream @FrankCatalano (#ETIS or #SIIA) is here.

Pop quiz: Blogs. Kindles. Smartphones. Hardbound paper textbooks. Pick the one traditional educational publishers fear the least.

At next month’s Association of Educational Publishers Summit in Washington, D.C., I’ll be calling on my tech background to moderate the closing keynote session, “Learning Platforms for the 21st Century and Beyond.” This PowerPoint-free 90 minutes will include Laura Porco of Amazon’s Kindle book division, Jeff Keltner of Google’s application division and Michael Riordan of the Open Publishing Lab at Rochester Institute of Technology.

The panelists will address, at the outset, why learners need new platforms, and there will likely also be brief demos. The objective? Helping education publishers understand the landscape of technology-based learning platforms and how to successfully make the transition in terms of tools, content, business models and even the approach to how what they create is used.

Should be a fun June 12th, town-hall style discussion. I plan a no-nonsense, no-more-tears approach.

It’s a curious side effect of the combination of digital learning products and No Child Left Behind accountability demands: It seems nearly every new or revised digital K-12 education product has embedded assessment.

Whether that’s a good thing — for students, teachers, parents or the industry — is the subject of a panel session I’m moderating next week at the Software and Information Industry Ed Tech Industry Summit in San Francisco. Panelists Bob Ginn of Century Consultants/ASM Research, Sue Koch of AutoSkill International and Mike Patterson of Curriculum Advantage will tackle the issue in a PowerPoint-free zone. And we’ll start right off focusing on the benefits and risks of an “assessment everywhere” approach.

If you’ve never been, SIIA’s Ed Tech Industry Summit is the primary annual event for companies and executives who work in education technology. This year’s theme is “Building Toward the Vision K-20.” Perhaps the most fun? The CODiE Awards bash Tuesday night, when the ed tech professionals mix with their peers in the software and digital content industries. Look for the tall guy with dark hair, glasses, and tux.