Posts tagged marketing strategy
The end of marketing as we know it
Aug 26th
One of my strategic partners bought me one of these Cisco umi devices. It’s kind of like high-definition Skype for a big screen TV. He thought it would be useful for our long distance collaboration.
We ran into technical and service problems and it took us four months before the damn thing was operational. It was also priced too high, and then you had to subscribe to a pricey monthly service plan. I honestly didn’t know how Cisco was selling these things into a home market which is what they were obviously trying to do through their Ellen Page TV ads.
I have a friend who works for Cisco and I suggested that any Marketing 101 student could have seen the obvious technical, competitive, and pricing issues with this product. All they needed to do was a little analysis and research. “That’s the problem,” he said. “They never did that. They are not even applying any type of basic marketing plans to their new product development and sales efforts.”
Is it posible that a blue chip company like Cisco is ignoring marketing fundamentals?
I have long wondered … when will it get to the point where the product development cycle becomes so short in the tech business that marketing became obsolete? Here are further indications that we may have reached that point:
- Last week Hewlett-Packard killed its entry into the tablet computer market (TouchPad), just 48 days after it was first put on sale.
- A few months ago, Microsoft pulled the plug on its Kin mobile phones after less than two months of sales.
- Remember how the A-List bloggers gushed about Google Wave? It was buried 77 days after it was launched.
- Pure Digital, maker of the popular Flip camcorder, had planned to release the Flip-Live on April 13, but Cisco, which had just acquired Pure Digital, shut the entire division on April 12.
What the heck is going on here? How could these big, smart companies make these seemingly big, dumb moves? Don’t they have any business school grads who know how to do customer, product, and competitive research? Market testing and planning? A SWOT analysis for Pete’s sake?
I’d like your views on this but it seems that there are a few factors at play here:
- The short product development cycle and rapid rate of product obsolescence forces companies to take shortcuts on research and market planning expenditures. The product launch is now the same as the market test.
- Frequent executive changes and consolidation in the tech industry forces a tendency to “clean house.”
- When Apple is the dominant competitor, it is an expensive proposition to try to compete against them.
- If a product is not immediately perfect, it is crushed by tech bloggers and negative social media buzz.
If I am correct and this does represent a point where the speed of business has outpaced marketing’s ability to research and plan, there are some serious implications for all of us.
Significant brand damage. H-P didn’t just have a misstep, it breached consumer trust. How can you put your faith in a company and its products if it is short-sighted enough to dump a major market entry in a couple of weeks? Your most loyal early-adopters just shelled out $500 to buy your tablet and you pull the rug out from under them?
The end of brand-building? Take a look at this picture of the first iPod. When it was introduced in 2001, it wasn’t the first MP3 player or the prettiest one, or the one with the most memory, but it was the product willing to stick with a plan and innovate at a breath-taking pace. Apple didn’t build that brand over night. They did it right and gave the product a chance to grow. What is the world coming to when a company dumps a product before it ever has a chance to catch on?
What about competition? Did you see that Facebook apparently abandoned its “places” feature after just a few months? This was supposed to compete with Foursquare. Are you telling me Facebook can’t knock Foursquare around? We need competition in the tech industry. In fact these companies need competition. The main advantage of Google Plus is that it has slapped Facebook in the face and said “Compete!” We’re sure to get better products out of it. Apple seems committed to innovation but lets face it, without competition, their pace of change will slow too. Why spend heavily on R&D when nobody is even trying to unseat you?
Is this a weird and unprecedented moment in marketing history — the end of marketing as we know it — or is it simply an extended run of stupid?
Social media and the end of empathy
Jul 7th
Why am I using a picture of a large mouth bass on a blog post about social media and business? Seems a little fishy doesn’t it? Well I didn’t use this for the halibut. There is a very relevant story with a lot of marketing mussel. A story on a grand scale, you might say.
When I was a young sales guy I learned a very important lesson about customer relationships and empathy from a fishing trip.
My company was struggling through a massive quality issue that was threatening my customer to the point that it was shutting down their production lines … and THEIR customers’ production lines. In business terms, this was an apocalyptic problem and it eventually resulted in the largest quality claim in the history of my company.
Nerves were beyond frayed. I remember spending one Labor Day weekend sorting through reams of lot numbers in search of alternatives that might work. We couldn’t find any and I was forced to make an excruciating call. I had to tell a plant manager that every lot of our material in his plant, every lot in transit, and every lot in our inventory was defective. We were going to shut his plant down, maybe for weeks.
Months before, this customer and I had become good friends on a company-sponsored fishing event. Yes, businesses used to do that kind of thing. Believe me, when you spend eight hours in a bass boat with one guy, you get to know him pretty well! We had shared a lot of our life stories and created a great memory on this trip.
As I made the phone call and delivered the news, I held my breath. There was shocked silence at the other end of the phone. Finally, my customer said, “Schaefer, the next time we’re in a fishing boat together I’m going to toss you out!”
He was able to use our shared experience and friendship to break the tension and tell me in an empathetic and humorous way that he knew it wasn’t my fault and that we would get through this crisis together.
The days of conducting business based on these deep relationships is largely over I think — relationships that were built on a golf course, a boat, long dinner conversations — not text messages, online help functions, and customer service tweets.
Ten years ago, if you had a business crisis, you could probably count on those deep relationships to help pull you through, at least to a certain extent. Today, and especially after the recession, people just don’t have time for relationship-building. I can’t imagine inviting a customer to a weekend of golfing any more. Everybody is doing what used to be three jobs. Who has the time for building business friendships?
I wonder about the long-term implications for business when relationships are negotiated through spreadsheets and emails. I have an image in my mind of that United Airlines commercial where a businessman laments losing a customer because they never saw them. He proceeded to hand out airline tickets for customer locations.
Maybe there will be backlash and a re-focusing on deep relationships at some point. There was recently a story about tech start-ups scrambling for office space near Twitter because of the live networking opportunities. Kind of ironic. Seeking deeper offline relationships with people dedicated to spreading low-impact online relationships.
It worked for Zappos. It probably won’t work for you.
Jan 24th
Zappos* is a successful company with a well-publicized, aggressive employee use of social media. In fact, it may be the most famous social media model in all of blogdom. They have 13 blogs, 50,000 videos and their employees tweet like rabbits in heat. It’s worked for them and it’s a wonderful case study. I get it. But it’s probably the wrong model for most companies.
And here’s the point where the waves of Zappo-sniffing social media purists come crashing down on me. So be it. This is dangerous stuff.
It is relatively safe to blog and tweet about shoes. But in many companies, the risk of an all-employee social media free love policy will far outweigh the benefits. For many important companies all it will take is one Twitter-induced SEC violation, a leak of vital competitive information, or a national defense breach, and the hammer will come down on the use of social media forever. Policies are usually made to deal with the lowest common denominator.
Is this a leadership issue? Not necessarily. There are irresponsible people everywhere. There are disgruntled employees even in the best-managed companies. Where corruption can occur it will occur. Welcome to the human race.
So what’s the answer?
Under the following conditions, the Zappos model might be ideal:
- Company culture supports employee engagement
- Company leadership understands the model
- Customer base is active on the social web in a meaningful way
- Benefits outweigh risk of security breach
If just one of these conditions are not met, the free love policy cannot work.
That’s not to say that social media won’t work in some form with almost any company if there is appropriate training, role clarity, effective policy and boundaries. But you have to fit the tactics to the strategy — and the culture — just like any initiative.
A marketing leader has to make effective decisions based on what IS, not on what you WISH for. You can’t “will” a social media effort to work in your company just because it worked in the Zappos corporate culture.
For an excellent and thorough perspective on the need for effective and appropriate corporate social media policies, I recommend Kent Huffman’s recent post on the subject.
OK, your turn. Let ‘er rip!
*If you are unfamiliar with the Zappos social media model, Jeff Bullas has written wonderful case studies on this company:
A primer on social media “listening”
Jan 14th
I’ve spent a lot of time studying social media “listening tools” and found this site via Sidney Eve Matrix (follow!). This slide deck by Stefan Betzhold (follow!) compares both free and paid options and I found it very useful.
The idea of monitoring and measuring is crucial to social media marketing, whether for a company or your own personal brand. It is also the most dynamic and exciting area of marketing right now. If you haven’t put together a personal “listening” platform, this side deck is a good place to start! Click and enjoy!
This is also a good example of effectively using Slideshare to promote a concept and a company. Do you have slide presentations suitable to share with the world? Why not get a little extra “oomph” out of your effort by posting on Slideshare?
Welcome to {grow}
You’re in marketing for one reason: Grow.
Grow your company, reputation, customers, impact, profits. Grow yourself. This is a community that will help. It will stretch your mind, connect you to fascinating people, and provide some fun along the way. I am so glad you’re here.
-Mark SchaeferFollow Mark
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