New Venture Marketing

Red Herring's CMO 2006 Conference

I just came back from Red Herring's CMO 2006,its elite conference for Chief Marketing Officers, and I was blown away by the quality of the program and attendees.  DASAR, Red Herring magazine's holding company, a former client, hosted the event.  But I attended for myself.  I wanted to learn what other senior marketing people were thinking about, how they were addressing the challenges of their markets and their increasingly complex roles.  And I also wanted to meet Larry Weber, one of the conference keynote speakers, a personal hero, the man who built Weber Shandwick (the world's largest technology PR firm) and a real visionary in how the Internet is changing the way we communicate. (I will do a separate post on him shortly.) What an amazing experience.

Lead by Alex Vieux the visionary founder and head of DASAR, I listened to an All Star line up of who's who in the marketing world and thoroughly enjoyed the interviews, presentations and panels and discussions in and around the event.

Wisdom of Regis McKenna

I've just picked up a copy of Regis Mckenna's book, Real Time:  Preparing for the Age of the Never Satisfied Customer , which was published in 1997, and I am struck, not for the first time, how prescient this long time marketing hero is and how his insight continues to be so applicable.

The crux of the book is that bombarded with more and more messages, more and more products, customers get overwhelmed.  But that the same technology which helped contribute to the problem can now be used to help correct it.

"Technology facilitated conversations and service will allow companies to cut through the market chaos and established strong relationships with customers," says McKenna.  And can enable a company to build customer loyalty.

To do this, says McKenna, companies must replace their broadcast mentality with a willingness to dialog.  This dialog includes giving customers access and by responding to their feedback with a willingness to listen.  And to do that we as marketers must learn to think about the role of marketing in very different ways.

"If companies continue to treat the Internet like an 800 number," observes McKenna, "they will fail to recognize the power and importance of the medium."  To which I might add, if they treat business blogging as just another tool in the marketing arsenal, they will totally miss the point.  While a broadcast mentality is tied to the concept of markets as large homogeneous segments of mass produced goods, dialog refers to learning to connect with customers to elicit, listen to and respond to their feedback -- in whole new ways.

Up until now, says McKenna, companies have tended to treat customers as a target, a giant bull's eye to be hit.  But listening to customers and incorporating their suggestions is going to require a very different mind set and marketing approach.  Boy, I sure do agree.

Towards a New Communications Model (3)

The following post also appears on the IAOC blog site where it is part of a week long discussion lead by Elizabeth Albrycht, entitled "Towards a New Communications Model."  Let me know if you agree -- or have some other ideas.

When I first started to explore how the Internet and new communications technologies had impacted our own profession, I was really doing so with the idea of catching up with the industry. I had been too busy with clients to spend much time researching technology for my own business needs.  But the economic downturn in
Silicon Valley, gave me both the time and the opportunity to invest in my own knowledge base.  As I began to understand the true scope of the technological changes that came out of the dotcom boom (and bust), I was amazed.  I felt like the legendary Rip Van Winkle who after going to sleep one night, awoke 20 years later to find that his world had changed.  

The Long Tail

There is a very provocative piece in the October issue of Wired, entitled "The Long Tail".  If you haven’t already read it, I would highly recommend doing so.

The thesis of the piece is that in the digital entertainment industry there   is a lot of money to be made in selling to the “long tail” of the demand curve, “those millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.”

If the entertainment industry in the 20th century was about selling "hits" or best sellers, says author Chris Anderson, the 21st will be equally about selling those items that only a few people want.

Convergence Marketing

I’ve been rereading Convergence Marketing, and thinking about the impact of the Internet on business and our clients. The premise of the book is that while the Internet doesn’t change everything, it does create a major shift in how customers behave and in turn how business must operate. The Dot.com era, the authors say, taught us that successful companies don’t simply throw out the old technologies and practices in favor of new ones, but rather integrate them into their total mix.

The same applies to marketing tools and practices. Traditional techniques, such as advertising, PR, and direct mail, have not been replaced, but they sure have been impacted by a witches brew of new tools from blogs and wikis to RSS and news aggregators.

The difference time makes

I had dinner tonight with John Bierbauer, one of the best marketing managers I have run into and a client when he worked for Bell Labs.

We caught up and reminisced about old times.  And I am struck by what a difference even a few years can make.  When we last worked together it was on the launch on an exciting new verification product used in EDA.  We did many things to build to the launch:  intense PR, advertising, direct mail, newsletter inserts into the industry's lead magazine, product demos, an analyst panel at DAC, and a customer party at the Exploratorium. 

Today we would still do these things but the medium would have changed.  The newsletters would have morphed to e-zines, the direct mail to RSS feeds and email, the ads to Google Ad Words, the product demos into webnars.  The PR would be posted to the media room on the division's website. John would use a blog to announce and get feedback on the product. And we would all monitor the statistics and fine tune our program accordingly.

But somethings don't change, and it was a pleasure to catch up.  All the best John, it was nice to see you.

PR versus Blogs

I often get asked whether a company needs to do both PR (public relations) and blogging. My answer is a resounding “yes”. In the transition from mass marketing to micro marketing,see Vanishing Mass Market] you need them both along with other tools to reach more finely tuned segments. It is very important to understand what each tool can do.

Public Relations
PR is a communications tool set that specializes in media relations – working with editors and influencers who analyze and write about technology. It is official voice of the corporation as developed by the PR department and reviewed and edited up the chain of command. Its intent is to inform, influence and promote. In the high tech markets, its primary audience is the technical, trade, national business media and analysts. There are well prescribed means of reaching these segments.

The Vanishing Mass Market

I’ve been thinking about an excellent cover story in BusinessWeek a few months back examining the “Vanishing Mass Market", July 12, 2004.

While the focus of the piece is the impact of new digital technology on mass media, it offers insight into the resulting transition from mass marketing to micro marketing. This transition is being hastened across a proliferation of newer, narrowcast communications from specialized cable programming to cell-phones and PDAs.

These new tools must be integrated and applied within a more conventional framework of more conventional marketing tools, print advertising, PR, direct mail, and telemarketing to newer more focused Internet-technologies, including search engine optimization, adwords, email, and web logs or “blogs”.

These new digital media suggests the BusinessWeek are blessed with several advantages. The first is that they are fine tuned to allow ever more targeted media, extending the concept of one-to-one marketing over one-to-many or one size fits all. In this new age of micro marketing, it is not size of the audience that matters but the ability to reach and respond to very specific segments of customers. 

The New Competitive Advantage

These past weeks I have been spending a great deal of time looking at a wealth of new tools whose genesis dates, in most instances, from the Internet.  As communications become both more personal and immediate, the scope of the tools available from corporate blogs to social networking is tremendously exciting.  Their potential impact on business, in particular on marketing, is profound, not simply impacting how we communicate but changing how we connect.

At the same time I am struck by how we tend to look at the world as either/or, especially as it relates to new techniques and technology. None of the exceptional companies whose wiki, blogging or RSS tools I have reviewed or whose leaders I have met with has utilized traditional marketing tools (advertising, PR, direct mail, etc.) to promote their products relying instead on the power of the Internet.  Leveraging the  of the Internet is very important, fundamental to building relationships and customer success.  However, to develop a new market, companies, even early stage companies, must build a market presence, and it’s a massive educational task.   

PR should not be the first or second thing a start up considers in building its marketing arsenal, but it has an important place.  We simply can not attend enough meetings, make enough presentations, reach enough desktops to promote our products or companies without the help of the all of the tools in the marketing mix.

Good PR can make the task so much easier, create awareness and credibility, educate customers and drive people to our sites.  Done well, it can help a company differentiate itself from its competitors, create a larger market, and build momentum faster than the company can do on its own.

The new competitive advantage is not about replacing one set of tools with another but using them all, fine tuned to a company's business objectives, market, and channel.

Choosing the Right Tool

The marketing mix questions facing companies today are legion:  Given that customers, analysts and the press have access to more and more information, how must companies transform their communications strategies and marketing mix?  What tools do they offer? How can they educate and contribute value?  How can companies help customers to make better, more informed decisions?  Should they create a business blog in addition to the company site?  A newsletter versus blog?  How to implement a webnar?  How much advertising versus PR, on line or off?  How to drive customers to their site – and hold them.

This blog will look at these issues, based on the hands-on experience of our clients and others.