Jul 18, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Small business
As a young marketing graduate in the 70’s I was given a scholarship to attend an intensive marketing management program in Boston, run by Harvard professor Jim Hagler.
He changed my life.
One of the many things he rumbled to me (he spoke, but it came out as a rumble) was:
“Son, find out how they intend to stay in front of the curve”
Sage advice.
Marketing is all about staying in front of the curve, the challenge most businesses have is defining the curve.
Most businesses have a choice of curves, but you cannot be all things to all people, so choices are made.
The price curve
The cost curve
The innovation curve
The Value curve.
It is just this last one that really matters to customers worth keeping. They want value, however they choose to define it.
Whatever else you do, for your chosen group, niche, cohort, or however you choose to define your ideal target customers, stay in front of the value curve.
Look around you, there is no successful enterprise that is behind the curve.
Jul 16, 2014 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Prospecting, lead qualification and nurturing, prospect management and the transaction itself have all changed forever.
The salesman with a bag has been relegated, at best, to the transaction end of the prospect to transaction continuum. In the process, we have lost some of the humanity, some of the eyeball closeness that good sales people brought to the table, the insights and instinct gathered from the context and body language that underpinned all the conversations they had.
All gone, but most would agree that body language holds a significant place in the sales process, so how have we replaced it?
Is there such a thing as “Digital body language”?
Can we score metaphors of the physical reaction from digital interactions?
Logically the answer has to be ‘Yes”, as we now have access to a huge body of data that reflects the sum of behaviour of all who come into contact with whatever platform or tool we have working for us. However, access to data is a very long way from leveraging the insights that are hidden within the data, a fairly advanced level of analytic capability along with a tool with some grunt is required, although simpler tools with manual intervention can be made to work.
Consider the process:
- Somebody reads a blog post and “likes” it, better yet, shares it,
- They subscribe to the blog to make receiving it automatic,
- They respond to an offer, webinar, e-book download, surveys, or combination of these, perhaps several times, and all the while your system is recording and responding to their actions, delivering the next step to them.
- The system is constantly being improved as more data points are collected, and A/B testing provides finer grained insights
The data collected can be sliced and diced, weighted and resliced in all sorts of ways that can provide an almost visceral insight into the behaviour of groups and subgroups to various content stimuli at differing levels of engagement. The relative effectiveness of differing pieces of content at each point in the sales continuum can be calculated with good levels of accuracy.
Surely this is the equivalent of the sum of the body language cues of those in the database, if not necessarily that of any individual within it, and so is a very effective guide when well used. Data will never replace the one on one human responses, but the value of the digital picture built up is a source of enormous value, immeasurably widening the net of prospects beyond what can be achieved with boots on the ground.
Jul 15, 2014 | Leadership, Small business, Strategy
The complexity of the world these days demands an approach to strategy that is counter intuitive, perhaps even a contrarian approach to the accepted best practice.
For decades managers have sweated and planned, and set out to execute, just to see the planning go to crap at the first hurdle, as things rarely happen as planned.
In the “MBA model”, you push on regardless, because it is planned, the resources gathered, prioritised and allocated, a “push” model of strategy development and deployment.
If the opposite were to happen with strategy, as it does with agile software development, how would it differ?
A continuous process of combining strategic hypothesis generation and A/B testing, going hand in hand with incremental resource allocation from a diverse pool of experts, rather than a from pool of available bodies? Seems to be a sensible alternative, so why don’t we do it?
Generally we people like certainty, clarity, and a minimum of ambiguity, and that comes with a detailed plan. Problem is, plans are only as good as our ability to read the future, which is generally pretty ordinary. The better way is to know the end point, and if we can manage the ambiguity and uncertainty, make our own away there based on the obstacles we encounter.
In this uncertain world, we need a compass, not a roadmap.
Maps tell us to move forward a defined distance, take a left, followed by a right, and so on, whereas a compass tells us the direction, not necessarily the detail of how to navigate the immediate terrain.
This counter intuitive approach to strategy is often what SME’s do, without really recognising it as such. They react to what is in front of them, rather than what they may have planned to do, often the plans do not even exist in a formal sense. Their challenge is to apply some focus on the longer term, not just the burning bridge they are standing on.
Jul 14, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Small business
kmjantz.wordpress.com
“Content marketing ” is no more than a new buzzword to try and build interest in the stuff we marketers have always been doing, telling stories, and creating a context in which the stories we tell will be meaningful, and be a catalyst to an action we want.
It is also fundamentally important that the bag of stuff called content is understood, well organised and communicated.
Cave paintings were perhaps the first, they told stories about the lives of those living in those days, passing on messages to those that followed, next week, month, millennium.
I have argued previously that Martins Luthers church door was just facebook in beta form, but perhaps the first recognised piece of content marketing as we now know it emerged in 1895 with the first publication of the John Deere farm machinery magazine “The Furrow“, still going strong.
The Michelin brothers first published the “Guide Michelin” a motoring guide in 1900, with the objective of telling the few motorists then around where they could find petrol, accommodation, meals and repairs in France.
In what may have been the first modern cookbook, Frank Woodward saved his $350 investment in the rights to “Jello” at the last moment by publishing a recipe book, the first step in creating a dessert tradition that still exists in the US, and perhaps taking the first step towards our obsession with cookbooks, or “Cooking Content Books”.
Burns & McDonnell engineering first published their “Benchmark” magazine in 1913, and Procter & gamble did more than bring us our daily cleansing products, they gave the name “soap opera” to the daily dose of what we still call “soaps” on TV, by sponsoring radio programs in the ’30’s.
Lego has been the king, with their magazine, and now the Lego movie, how great is that, to have Hollywood make a movie about your product? Wonder where the funding came from?
The examples of so called “Content Marketing” exploded after 2000, any scan of the web will give hundreds of thousands of examples, opinions, and infographics. Curata’s list of content marketing e-books is a great assembly of information, and more evidence, if any more is needed of the interest in the area.
Point is, “Content” is not new, neither is the notion of engaging by communicating stories offering advice, and managing context, it is just that we now have some pretty potent additions to the toolbox.
PS. August 2014. This article on “The Furrow” magazine appeared on the Contently website in August, and offers added insight into this venerable, and far-sighted publication.
Jul 11, 2014 | Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, Strategy
Water will become the frontier of conflict and innovation in the C21
Few things are more important than how we feed ourselves, and get access to clean water. Without these, our species will not survive, our numbers are increasing rapidly, as the resources of the planet, particularly available water, are being consumed faster than replacement rates.
According to the UN, 6-8 million people die every year due to water related disease or disaster, 2.5 billion do not have access to sanitation, and nearly a billion do not have clean drinking water. I suspect water will be the root cause of much of the international power plays over the next 50 years.
During this last week, there was an international Peri Urban conference in Sydney. Much earnest discussion amongst the disappointingly low number of attendees went on, but there were some lessons that need to be learned beyond the gravity of the emerging crisis on water management:
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- For the message to get out beyond those in the room, the facts need to be told as stories to which the public can relate, and engage, creating pressure on decision makers to allocate some priority to the questions raised. Dry academic papers read by Professors with limited story-telling skills, accompanied by PowerPoint slides as comprehensible as the Rosetta stone will not cut the mustard. The presentations I saw reminded of Sir Ken Robinsons classic line that “the only purpose of academic bodies is to get their heads to meetings”.
- Marketing is not just useful, but required. Twitter is now routinely used by conference organisers to get their message out, and there was a handle for the conference, #periurban14, which attracted 1 tweet. Enough said.
- For Peri Urban agriculture to be a reality, it is required to be economically sustainable, as well as ecologically sustainable. Discussion of the barriers and challenges to economic sustainability would appear to me to be of vital interest to the topic, but beyond some minor consideration of the evolving organic market, little was said, the vital role of consumer demand ignored.
I presented at a workshop breakout session. A short presentation that set out to make the point that whatever happens in the growing part of the agricultural process, you still need a customer to make the whole thing commercially sustainable. There were so few people there that clearly the issue of commercial sustainability being a vital foundation of change has not yet resonated.
Conferences are a vital part of the process of creating and disseminating Intellectual capital. The presentations are just a small part of the mix, the relationships built with other conference attendees, and the opportunity to leverage the messages to wider audiences via social media are the real reasons conferences are worth the time and expense.
