Are You True to Your Brand?
High tech companies still have a lot to learn from consumer companies when it comes to branding. A few weeks ago I was visiting Ibex who is a customer of ours. What struck me was how thoroughly their brand permeated the entire organization. The foundation of the company is producing high quality, natural wool-based outdoor clothing. As I spoke to various employees and toured their facilities, their brand was engrained through the culture. What made me feel this way? Every aspect of how they operated and worked, but to name a few: employees can bring their dogs to work, they are based in Vermont with a view of the mountains, they are moving more of their sourcing to the US to use local suppliers. They clearly know their target customer and their culture embodies their brand to support their success.
So isn’t this true for high tech companies? More often than not high tech companies try to claim “we are innovators”, “we are customer focused”, etc. While these are worthy goals, they re only worth claiming if your customers agree. I love the simplicity of killianbranding’s comparison of branding and an elevator pitch.
All companies have a brand – it is how your customers perceive you. Are you true to your brand? It should be visible throughout every dimension of your company. If you are innovative, that should not end in engineering, customer focus means every person thinks of the customer first. Are these behaviors rewarded, re-enforced?
FivePond Daily is Out – Not
Recently I have seen a lot of tweets by “industry pundits” and software providers who are publishing their “daily newspaper”. Really?
Certainly Paper.li is an interesting tool , but do we really need software vendors consolidating other news and issuing it daily? There are not enough industry blogs, eNewsletters, etc. With tools like Twitter, LinkedIn I get more information than I can actually consume. Does a software company have enough compelling news to be issuing a daily?
Am I off base, it is the next big thing or another source of SPAM?
Are You a Fox or a Hedgehog?
This week I heard a story on NPR about politicians and how their changes on position impacts the public’s perception of them. One point they made was that there are two types of politicians: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes tend to change their position, Although they are very good at adapting to changing environment, the theory is they actually are better executives, but they can be perceived as flip-floppers. Whereas hedgehogs have a grand vision and stay on message much better. If they succeed it is in a big way, similarly if they are wrong failure is complete.
In reflecting on how this relates to marketing and sales, it seems you need a mix of fox and hedgehog skills. Your branding and messaging has to be hedgehog-like. No customers like an inconsistent brand. Similarly, when your sales executives are working with customers, being hedge hog like will give them confidence. However, with markets changing so rapidly, and customers priorities shifting, you need fox skills to execute and succeed. How do you execute your marketing campaigns when half way through your budge gets cut, or the results exceed expectations and you need to find additional resources to ramp up? Similarly, once you close the customer, how do you deal with new requirements that come up?
Review your team and assess. Do you need more foxes or more hedgehogs? Just do not keep any SBFs.
Branding and First Impressions
I recently was interviewing a marketing candidate and while I went to check on their arrival I saw (who I thought was the candidate) having a smoke in the parking lot before the initial interview. I must admit that my first impression of them dropped as my misconceptions of someone who smoked did not fit with the type of person I wanted to hire.
So how do first impressions impact your brand? Very significantly! Customers first impressions can come from many sources: web site, sales person’s visit, telesales firm cold calling, a LinkedIn profile, an employee tweet, etc. As a marketing executive while you can control all these you can certainly define the tone and set the direction.
The first steps are to be honest with yourself on what your company brand represents:
- Are you edgy, cool, or conservative?
- Innovative, creative, or operationally efficient?
- Premium priced or low cost?
Once you have captured the brand character then review all the communications channels and assess their value in re-enforcing the brand.
- Does your web site reflect your corporate personality?
- Do you blog on breakthrough ideas or are you contrarian, perhaps simply educational?
- What tools does your sales team use? Do the graphics reflect the brand? Does the tone support your goals?
Branding gets built up over many years, but can get diluted without the right supporting focus and leadership. What are the best examples of consistent branding you know of?
Kindle Customer Service – Battling for Brand Loyalty
A long time ago when I was a product manager, the CEO brought into a new VP of Marketing, who on day 1 declared, “I am here to build our brand.” He subsequently, when on to hire a creative firm and spent a lot of money on a new logo. In the mean time we went and won new customers, delivered value and serviced them exceptionally well. You can guess what built the brand. Building your brand takes all departments, understanding your position, value proposition, and executing on it. Brands are built on how to deal with customers, Killian Branding has an excellent, succinct post on this. There is also an comprehensive article from Marketing Profs on spreading customer experience through a company’s “performance chain.”
Last week I had an outstanding customer experience with Amazon. My recently purchased Kindle had an issue with its screen freezing. First I checked numerous web sites, and the support pages at Amazon, trying to fix it myself. Finally I phoned the customer support line. Unfortunately, when I phoned the rep wanted me to step through some diagnostics , however, I did not have it with me. He offered to call me back later – huh? When does a call center offer to call you back? Furthermore he asked what time would be good. Sure enough later that evening I got a call, and after some tests, told me he would ship out a replacement. He took the initiative to call me back. In almost every other situation, they would tell ME to call THEM back.
It fits with Amazon’s overall value proposition – convenience, online shopping, personalized purchase suggestions…
Emotion and Engineering
When I combine the terms “Emotion” and “Engineering” with marketing people it usually starts conversations and frustration about how to get more out of engineering. Rarely do marketers look for engineering to provide the key ideas and value add for marketing. I mean that is our job! We are supposed to tell engineering what to do…
With the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a lot of discussion on the importance of design. As I look back in my career I can think of two companies where the engineering team had outstanding design and in each case I can point to multimillion dollar deals we won, where the design played a key factor. The design was part of our competitive advantage.
Creating emotion in the sales cycle is THE most important thing sales and marketing can do. Despite all the discussion around lead scoring, sales funnels, creating ROI, value-based selling; emotion still plays a huge role in customers buying. Are you using product design to win new deals?
A few thoughts on leveraging great design:
- Does your product user interface create excitement in your sales process?
- Does the ergonomics of your user experience drive frenzied loyalty in your customer base?
- Do you sales tools (PowerPoints, Collateral, etc.) reflect your brand? (I am not talking about colors)
Have you defined the emotion of your brand? Are you cool? Cutting edge? Industrial? Buttoned-Up? People buy from people, and it is expected that the basics will be covered in terms of value, ROI, etc. It is the emotion that you create that can separate you. Some of the most successful companies actually built momentum around arrogance (Oracle, Ariba, Siebel, etc.). Strange as this sounds – the emotion created was “we are going to be the winner, want to come with us?” Not surprisingly no one likes to be left behind.
Should You Strive To Be Like Apple?
A few weeks ago I was in a board meeting reviewing a strategic initiative. I am always struck by simple questions that drive constructive discussion. In this case the board member asked, “Using Michael Treacy’s Model, do you think Kewill is product oriented, customer oriented, or efficiency oriented?” The answers were relatively consistent, but there were differences based on each person’s perspective. The views also included, where we have been, where we are today, and where we are going.
Yesterday, I came across the WSJ story talking about “How to Be Like Apple”, which discussed how to create an environment that fosters creativity and innovation. Of course emotionally everyone “wants to be like apple” – the question is what does it take? More broadly going back to Michael Treacy’s work is one area of focus better for high technology?
In my opinion it comes down your people and the passion. Emotionally, my experience in high tech is successful companies are either product or customer focused. This often gets defined by the founders or subsequent senior team. Did they come out of engineering or sales & marketing? Either side can create energetic, entrepreneurial environments. “Efficient” high technology companies tend to be pretty boring, although I will admit medium and long term may be quite successful financially.
Where is your company? Are you where you need to be?
Marketing Spin or Market Value?
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting at a seminar next to an independent consultant. He was telling me about some new initiatives from Cisco around monitoring and controlling computer devices. The first example involved automatically turning all the phones & computers off in a call center when they are not in use in order to save energy. The idea being if it was a two shift operation, the devices could be automatically turned off for the idle third shift. The second scenario was putting RFID tags on newborn babies. If the baby left their room without authorization, the hospital elevators and doors would lock automatically, and the hospital would ensure the infant was not abducted.
After explaining these with much enthusiasm he said, “I do not know if there is any real value in these, but Cisco is a marketing machine, so we believe we can make some good money.”
Without debating the value of the initiatives, it made me wonder: How much success is inherent value versus pure spin marketing? Obviously on the strategic side of marketing the whole objective is to find new markets and deliver value, but fundamentally there has to be some core value. No question spin marketing can accelerate the success or even ensure it gets a strong enough foothold, but if there is not enough core value, the marketing efforts will be expensive and time consuming.
Creating Buzz – Cheap
It is always fun to see clever people in marketing, and new ideas. Google has always been innovative, first with their search technology, how they went public, the list goes on. They create a culture of innovation that permeates beyond technology but into their business, and specifically marketing. Their tradition of adjusting their logo on the search page is a good tactic that re-enforces their creativity. Today’s “moving dots” goes beyond the tradition and has create a ton of buzz and visibility in WSJ.
Getting this buzz is clever and relatively cheap.
Oxygen – Messaging That Covers Everything
In doing some market research I came across a company description that was completely void of any marketing positioning or differentiation.
XXXXXXX Corporation delivers software and services to companies of all sizes, ranging from small businesses to Global 2000 enterprises, across a number of industries. XXXXXXX’s software solutions automate business critical tasks, ranging from marketing, service and support to planning and scheduling, material requirements planning (MRP), accounting, product configuration, and business intelligence.
What do this really say? We serve all companies, a lot of industries, and we automate critical tasks. We do a lot of good stuff and we can do it for everyone. Who doesn’t need that? Something for everyone, big market. Kinda like everyone needs oxygen. Only problem is oxygen is free.
