Jul 3, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Sales
Price is always a sticky subject.
In most cases, sales people have been trained to slide over answering the inevitable, and often first question about price, until the value of the sales proposition has been established with the potential buyer.
That is the way it was.
Now, we all seek information on specification, availability, options and list price using the net, all information that in an earlier time, the salesperson could dole out as the sales process evolved. Therefore the decision is often almost made before a salesman has the opportunity to become engaged in the process.
When your sales prospect types “Widget prices” into Google, because that is their last question, the top 10 results, which is all most of us look at, are the ones that have “widgets from $100” or “Worlds cheapest widgets” in the headline.
You have just lost control of the conversation if you are not there.
Web sites are different to face to face, the emotion, the human interaction and the potential that humanity brings to the process has been removed, and you need to replace it with something that creates the opportunity for a conversation.
If you are on the web to sell, and the product is such that potential customers will ask the price early in the game, don’t be afraid, be proud, and put your pricing up front, along with your value proposition, so at least you might get a chance to talk about it.
Jun 29, 2013 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Small business
We have a Department of Innovation in Canberra, and similar departments or at least functions in every state jurisdiction, and piles of industry bodies and associations, all mouthing clichés about Innovation being the savior of the economy, and the way of the future. “Innovation leads to new industries, and more jobs” type of windbaggery. Whilst it is absolutely true as a headline, without the substance of an answer to the question: “How” it remains just a press release, and worse, a consumer of public resources with little real potential to add value, and ther promised jobs.
If innovation is step one, and jobs is step three, there must be something in the middle, a step two that enables the creation, growth and commercial sustainability of the enterprises that create the jobs.
This video of Steve Blank, one of the motivators of the Lean Start-up movement likens the efforts of government to innovate to the South Park episode where gnomes are collecting underpants in the expectation of profit.
I see this so often, a leap of faith which is really a failure of logic. To get to phase three, and profitability takes more than a good idea, available resources, and fast talking, you also have to have a process to deliver value to customers superior to their existing service or product.
Jun 26, 2013 | Change, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
Across all my activities, I hear management talking about the “next big thing”, the importance of innovation, of being different, creating new product platforms, and striving to be disruptive, but settling for a change of colour, flavour or pack size.
After a long time at this, it seems there are a small number of very consistent reasons that show up, usually in multiples.
1. Incremental is easy. It is easy to be incremental, but true innovation is really, really hard. Not only do you have to come up with the ideas, but you have to sell them internally before you get a chance to take ideas to the market. Taking yourself, and the enterprise outside its comfort zone is a major exercise in leadership, and there simply is not enough of it. On top of that, it is hard to get a budget for stuff you have little idea about, the discounted cash flow analyses, even if they are at the push of a spreadsheet button, carry way more corporate weight.
2. Human beings are risk averse. We like the stable, familiar, and predictable, and shy away risk. Daniel Kahneman co-authored a 1979 article which won him the Nobel prize, that put numbers around the notion of risk reward. When offered the choice of $1000, or a 50% chance of $2,500, a majority take the money and run.
3. It really is so easy to say No. Finding reasons not to take a punt is really easy, there are usually many on offer. By contrast, it is difficult, risky, potentially personally expensive, to say yes, and you have to keep on saying it, confirming and reconfirming the project in the face of the naysayers. Corporations of any size larger than 7 people are hierarchies, and consequences of decision making are social as well as commercial. Few people are prepared to be seen to make a mistake, and most will avoid the possibility like the plague.
Every organization needs some sort of balance, a discipline of culture that regulates the manner in which they behave. It is in the way the balance is struck, and the behavior that is favored where the innovative enterprises have the edge. Everybody has the same(or similar) access to the market for ideas, good people, technology, and all the other inputs necessary apart from the fundamentally important one that is internal, the culture of the place.
Safe nowadays is the new risky, so get off the fence!
Jun 25, 2013 | Change, Governance, Management, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
Governments and their regulation centric thought processes always lag the digital developments that are accelerating in our world. Typically, they are regulating to close the barn door well after the horse is across the paddock, and failing to consult those who understand the processes, so do a lousy job. Just look at the failed supermarket and petrol price “initiatives”, web site filtering, and utter failure to communicate the case supporting the NBN in anything other than clichés, amongst other failures.
Well, there is another revolution on our doorsteps, one that governments must be salivating about, if they recognise the opportunity to rope us in, as the Prism revelations in the US have demonstrated.
It is pretty obvious that recognition software is about to be a general reality, as it gets rolled out in various forms on mobile platforms. Voice, face, and biometric recognition are all technologies that are in existence, and when Apple, or Samsung stick it on a mobile platform, whooppee, off it will go, and with it, the opportunity to collect huge amounts of personal data beyond that which is collectable now. Facial recognition and digital trickery combined will enable every face (just double click anywhere in the linked photo) in a photo to be identified, by simply tying to a social media database.
Bingo!
What will be done with this capability?
The old “I have nothing to hide” argument is looking limp in the face of such absolute ability to identify the where, who, who with and when capabilities being delivered to just about anyone with a camera and computer. Where are the new barriers of “personal information”?
Clearly commercial uses abound, as do those for the administrative and legal tracking of individuals, but it is the nefarious uses this degree of identification can be put to that are scary.
Jun 21, 2013 | Branding, Marketing, Small business
We pay a fortune for lobster, it is a delicacy, but it is not long ago that lobster was poor peoples food. If you had nothing else to eat in New England in the 18th or 19th centuries, you would go to the beach and scrounge some lobster, and rules were in place to limit the amount of lobster masters could feed their indentured servants.
I remember as a kid that chicken was a delicacy, an occasional festive meal, Mum fed the Roberts tribe rabbit in a variety of ways as a cheap staple, bought from a bloke who went door to door down the street selling the previous nights haul.
How things have changed. Chicken is a commodity, flogged in supermarket specials, and rabbit is on the menus of the top end of town restaurants, attracting very high prices.
Marketing is all about managing the context and expectations a customer has of the value that can be delivered by your product offering. Preparing and consuming rabbit at home is now uncommon, but change the context to a restaurant, and suddenly the expectation changes, and rabbit is a sexy, modern dish that has attracted the chefs attention and skill, so is something very different to the skinned offering at the backdoor of my childhood.
Setting out to change expectations, often by changing the context as well, is at the core of the marketing challenge. Changing nothing, and competing on the existing commercial battlefield is just flogging stuff, and becomes a contest of price, not value.
Update: March 2015. This article from Entrepreneur magazine tells a similar story about lobster, and the way context and time changes perception, plus a very useful infographic.
Jun 19, 2013 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy
Marketers have a whole range of new tools to use to tap the opportunities emerging from the digital age, but most appear to approach the challenge in an ad hoc manner.
It seems to me that there are 4 trends that are driving marketing behavior:
- The shift from offline marketing to digital. Whilst this is generally seems as a “catch all trend” it is really just a part of the marketing strategy mix that needs to be considered on its own merits. In this situation, how should I use TV Vs YouTube or facebook, what is the best mix of media to achieve a outcome?.
- The shift from paid to earned media. This can easily be seen as a subset of the first point, and from a marketing resource perspective it is, but from a consumer perspective, it is entirely different. The sudden availability of a digital version of word of mouth endorsement has changed the dynamics, consumers put far more faith in earned than purchased messages. It is also a bit more complex than that, as consumers no longer consume advertising, in any medium, they watch what interests them. If an ad is interesting, irrespective of the medium, it will get watched, and you have only a moment to gain the interest before you get deleted.
- The increasing importance of data in marketing. In the “old days” the best that you could do was measure theoretical impacts on an audience, about as inexact as throwing a stone at a bird flying past. That has changed, we can now measure with great accuracy a host of data that reveals preferences and behavior that have nothing to do with the generalities of the past.
- Fragmentation of just about everything, and because there is just so much data, it tends to be siloed, or ignored. Therein lies the huge marketing opportunity of the future, those who can cut across the silos, and extract the actionable insights will own the markets. Automation is taking over (perhaps has taken over) with the integration of CRM with social media and automated marketing programming that is occurring online.
It is in the fourth trend that lies the secret sauce. Finding ways to increase the productivity of the marketing investment you make, not just in the expenditure to reach the marketplace, and achieve an outcome, but in the overhead costs of running an effective marketing function.
