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?
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?
What is the Headline?
One of the best questions a VC asked me when looking to invest was, “What is the headline for the next release?” I cannot remember my answer and they ended up investing, so I guess it was good enough. What I do remember is what I thought: (1) Cleaning up some technology mess we did not get right last few releases, (2) Some features that probably should already be in, (3) some new capabilities that would actually create value for the customers. Well 1/3 was value add…
So how we get in such places and how to avoid this? Here are the guidelines I give product managers and the rest of the stakeholders:
(1) Before scoping and requirements, declare the business objectives of the release. These may include opening new geographies, new segments, it may be simply something that demos well. Internal requirements like technology updates or cutting implementation hours are also important, but should be justified just like any other investment.
(2) Separate features that help sell versus actually help create value for the customer. Many times the features that help sell and are most memorable in the sales cycle are not the ones that get used day-in and day-out.
(3) Create a positioning document before the release development really gets going. This helps frame the context for the rest of the organization. From this you can drive messaging, sales training, press release, etc.
I realize the above can be “101”, but since I was asked the question, I have posed it many times and found an equally cautious answer.
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…
Great Messaging – Hard and Simple
Recently I was reviewing some messaging with a group of executives, and of course everyone has an opinion. When you develop messaging, it can be difficult to be objective when reviewing it. A recent Rocket Launcher post by provides excellent reasons and actions for lousy messaging. The best messaging may be difficult to create but in my experience, once you “get it” it becomes obvious, at which point you often wonder what took so long.
So why is messaging hard? Here are the reasons and what you can do about it
1) Everyone has their own context. Put another way everyone has a different perspective from which they frame the messaging.
What to do: Make sure you frame the context: who is the message targeted at? For example is it an IT person, business person, executive or individual contributor? What is the delivery vehicle? Are people seeing walking past a trade show booth? On an web site banner? As part of a face-to-face meeting? In today’s world a message map is pretty basic, however, incorporating different delivery vehicles is usually “left to the student.”
2) Every market has its own language. The mix of industry jargon can help or hurt your position. Too much jargon and it comes across as gobbledygook, however, if you do not have enough you will be perceived as not having enough “domain knowledge”. Also technology companies are famous for coming up with their own terms while trying to “create a market”
What to do: Test run your marketing mumbojumbo. This can be done in a few minutes with Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Also you can review your competitions’ web site. Finally, test with real customers and your sales force. The best sales people on your team will tell you are is hard hitting versus ivory tower.
3) People do not have time to learn. Trying to tell your whole story, while tempting is a mistake. It is simply too hard to tell the complete story, keeping people interested with the right context, and language, in a brief time slice.
What to do: Look at your broader campaigns as a series of micro-campaigns. Each one specifically targeted at a role, and based on a specific context. Use drip marketing to move the prospects along the learning curve. They must get hooked initially, but then they will educate themselves. At some point there is an inflection point when they start pulling information, and it is the signal they will end up in the pipeline. Be patient.
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.
Defining and Winning a New Market
It is always impressive when an innovative company can carve out a new market segment and dominate it with double or even triple digit growth. Many more companies fail trying to evangelize “new emerging markets” that never have enough compelling value.
When it comes to marketing, my absolute favorite technology company is Salesforce.com. We use it, and the other day I went to log in and came across the following banner.
Forgive me for not knowing before, but although I had not heard of “the social enterprise”, I got it right away. Not only that a couple of days later I saw Gartner’s magic quadrant for Social CRM. Here is a market that in theory didn’t exist a couple of years ago and it is now projected to be a $1B market. Now that is great marketing.
So what separates the market makers from the market fakers? Here are my top factors
- It has to make sense, keep it simple
- Most likely it evolved from an earlier market, for the biggest winners there a game changer that cripples the older market.
- It should be differentiated but meaningful
- There has to be competition; no competition, no market
More often than not the big winner is not an incumbent. For example look at the CRM market. Siebel essentially defined the market by taking what companies like Goldmine did and “going enterprise.” Salesforce.com came along and went “On Demand”. Much less common is the incumbent reinventing themselves. However, Salesforce.com is now promoting Social Enterprise along with numerous smaller entrepreneurial firms. Apple is another obvious incredible incumbent. Microsoft and Yahoo are examples of companies that cannot seem to innovate “the next big thing.” What will happen to other one time market makers: Nokia, Motorola, RIM, etc.?
One Hundred Qualified Leads Please
Marketing and sales alignment…sales is our customer…closed loop….lead scoring…..visibility…campaign ROI….
Last night I got 3 orders for leads: Would you like budgets of $10K or $100K? Do you want them in the eastern region or western? Mid-market or Fortune 500?
Everyone agrees that “sales is our customer” but do we do a good enough job with our own “market strategy” for our “customer”? Do we know the set of “products” we should have available for sales? They should include
- Market strategy
- Target prospect profile
- Go to market plan
- Value proposition and messaging map
- Sales kit (collateral, presentation, pricing, etc.)
- Leads
So what does sales “owe” marketing? Instead of a vendor-customer relationship, best practice is a balanced relationship, since sales has responsibility back to marketing. These commitments consist of:
- Focus their prospecting and sales efforts on target market and prospects
- Intense and timely follow up to leads
- Objective feedback on quality of all marketing deliverables
- Collaboration on sharing win/loss information
- Provide early insight into significant opportunities that may impact product requirements
- Not bring small deals “that only need..” to close
Sales and marketing collaboration is a two way street.
Segmentation Versus Fragmentation
I was recently at the Gartner Supply Chain conference and was discussing market strategy with some analysts and colleagues. The topic of markets and market segmentation came up, and I realized that many marketers (and others) get confused or are too rigid in how they segment markets.
Market segmentation should be fundamental skill of every marketer, although there are many lenses at which one needs to view their customers. The first question to ask is “are you segmenting one market or are there multiple markets?” Even this has degrees of gray. I characterize a market as a group of people/companies that have the following traits in common:
1) Pains points to be solved. These need to be relevant and specific. They not “aspirations” such as “save costs or “improve customer service”
2) Processes that run their business: this could be the way the market, distribute, buy goods, etc. Obviously they also need to be relevant to your offering.
3) Roles that use your solution and gain benefit. Examples would include common titles, departments, etc.
4) Competitive landscape. If in each “segment” you have different competitors changes are you are in different markets.
5) Do the customers talk and collaborate with each other? Read common trade journals, go to common events, are there industry associations, etc.
Once the market is defined, there is a multitude of ways to segment it. Some are traditional such as company size, geography, vertical, some are more subtle:
1) Innovative versus laggards
2) IT focused versus business focused, who has power when buying technology
3) Home grown versus off the shelf
Segmentation is as much art as science, since one company’s market could be a segment to someone else. The most important element of segmentation is to relate the above factors to your solution and the problems it solves.
Over-egg the Pudding
Two weeks ago on I was a call with my colleagues from the United Kingdom and I heard the expression, they have “over egged the pudding.” One of the enjoyments of international business is the exposure and learning to different cultures and colloquialisms. After the call I looked up the definition and found
If you over-egg the pudding, you spoil something
by trying to improve it excessively.
It is also used nowadays with the meaning of making something
look bigger or more important than it really is
Is your marketing team a culprit of “over egging the pudding?” In today’s world high tech buyers are typically pretty savvy. Gone are the days of buying on hype and getting on the next rocket ship.
Here are some signs that show your messaging is aligned with customer value and their perception of your company:
1) Your sales team uses the tools your produce for them throughout the sales cycle. They ask for more content, not simply more leads
2) Do your programs pull above industry average
3) You inbound programs are your best vehicles for leads and deals
4) Your website is a focus point for industry education and you can show growth through increasing traffic and lead capture
Of course the other end of the spectrum of “over egging the pudding” is also poor marketing.
