Forensic marketing (March 18, 2011)

Be smart, do more with less

The objectives for Marketers have, in recent years, become more closely aligned to those of Sales and curiously IT. Get these roles together in a room and you might not experience a single-minded concordance or world-view but the underlying goals could be boiled down to:

1. Reduce the cost of sale
2. Webify and automate sales of commodity items
3. Build, measure, monitor and grow the sales pipeline i.e. be competitive, find-nurture-close
4. Do more with less
5. Win by means of energy, skill and intelligence
6. Provide world class service
7. Only spend where return on investment (ROI) will be derived

Pressure's on

The pressure for marketing to deliver is immense. Long gone are the days of website *brand experience centres*, where brand managers could luxuriate in seemingly endless web development budgets to produce beautiful but shamelessly pointless sites to support offline-centric propositions. Today, the role of brand manager may no longer exist and the CMO will likely see no need to differentiate between online and offline, above the line or below it — it all has to directly contribute to the numbers! And this is reflected across the board: it's all about getting the sale and measuring ROI. Marketing frou-frou is long dead.

An unwelcome distraction

Given the imperative to turn dimes-into-dollars, to take expense out of the business, to be more competitive, its quite natural to focus on the here and now. In terms of hierarchy of needs, when under pressure, we tend to gravitate towards the bottom of the triangle. Colliding with this characterisation of modern marketing is the arrival of social media. It's entirely possible to spend your precious marketing dollar on listening and at the end of the quarter have absolutely nothing to show for your money apart from a list of positive or negative comments "people said about stuff" and to realise that machine driven sentiment analysis *ain't that clever*. The demo looked so promising!

Forensic marketing

You have a pipeline right? Seek to answer these questions and you'll get an understanding of what to do and why you're doing it:

1. What is the social footprint of this person?
2. Who are they influenced by?
3. Who are they connected to?
4. What are their interests, values and opinions?

It is amazing how much information exists about people online. Where they live, what car they drive, where they holiday, it's all out there, it just needs piecing together.

Social marketing may have started with listening and may talk endlessly about engagement but ultimately it's about understanding wants, wishes, desires and propensities of people in ways that have not been possible till now. I have also come to realise that every type of media is, or can be, social media. Gathering the information to answer questions 1 to 4 above is possible though one could feel it's a stretch target at present. Organisations with forensic marketing skill will gain competitive advantage.

The race is on to work out how to automate this stuff and make it work for a variety of business types and contexts.

Product Sets and the role of Marketing (November 28, 2010)

The context of this discussion is software development in a software products company but I think the principles are universal. 

What is a product set?

A product set makes sense as a collection. DeWalt makes a kit (or collection) of tools called the fatboy kit — I own a set and it's proven its worth to me many times over. The batteries are interchangeable so only one charger is needed, it's cheaper than buying the individual items, it comes in a great case and DeWalt benefit because I purchased everything from them: I'm locked in! Software is similar, I suppose the ultimate product set is Microsoft Office. A collection of different but complementary products that makes sense as a group and locks you in to a way of thinking as well as a commutable file format.

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Image taken from www.transtools.co.uk

What is a marketer?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/marketing suggests that marketing is: the total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling. This is true if you're selling cut flowers, but no where near extensive enough if your organisation produces software products. Marketing cannot be a passive process; one in which the best is made of a bad lot for example. Good marketers will want to start with the basics. The organisation and its products are of course discrete entities:

— what does our organisation stand for?
— how are we distinct from our competitors?

— what are our values and opinions?
— are the above clearly understood by our audiences?

What comes first: marketing or code?

We'll assume the basics are fixed and a new product, or new version of a product is going to be built. Product Marketing must be involved at this point — at the start. New developments sometimes come in the form of entirely new products but most often they're new versions of an existing product or the integration of a collection of existing products — Product Sets. There are many challenges to building product sets, the first is to understand *why we're doing this*. The work involved in building product sets can be enormous, especially when there's different underlying technologies, different product development teams with various code development, test and release processes, APIs to build and so on. Defining who does what can be quite tough though I'd suggest not as hard or as important as defining the lower items in the list below, specifically: "market need" and "gap analysis". In other words: what problem are we trying to solve? And, what's the delta between our current offering and the one required to fulfill this need?

  • Product GA (general availability)
  • Marketing campaigns
  • Product launch
  • Beta programme
  • Improvement cycle
  • Internal release
  • Product set development
  • Product design
  • Gap analysis
  • Market need
  • Brand development: V&O etc

I'm not suggesting product marketing necessarily starts before coding begins — that could squash innovation. However, product marketing should start to build propositions soon after innovation delivered new opportunities. Marketing is accountable for its role in steering development so that the theoretically achievable, technically do-able, tech-lead thinking is given a commercial imperative. The sum of a product set must be greater than its constituent components: a collection of discrete software applications. A product set must be a development of *what can be sold* and not that of *what we could build*. I.e. build what you can sell because there's little point in trying to sell what was built opportunistically.

The challenge for product marketing

Product Marketing must clearly state what problem is being solved and clearly demonstrate how the proposed new product set meets that challenge. Or else, the product set, no matter how fully featured, is likely to fair badly. If the marketing team have to spend inordinate effort in *market building* activities — trying to persuade buying audiences why they need this x,y,z collection of software packages — it might be because the software vendor is trying to sell what it could build!

The deliverables

I have used Marketing in a generic sense in this post, there will be various marketing disciplines involved, though there does need to be an accountable senior manager wearing the marketing hat and delivering on all areas of responsibility. I see the deliverables as these:

1. Steering product development strategy by injecting market insight

2. Steering product development strategy by accurately predicting the beyond-horizon opportunities and threats

3. Developing persona's that typify user roles, activities, goals and motivations

4. Educating the channel: opportunities, new target audiences, competitive landscape

5. Scripting the product set demonstration that enables audiences to put the discrete components together to tell a coherent story; one their respective audiences will understand and buy into

6. Grouping software into a product set will likely mean audiences, roles and therefore opportunities begin to overlay. Perhaps discrete components enjoyed the attention of specialised sales forces? These too may need to merge

Ultimately marketing has to explain the product set in a *what and why* format: what it is, what it does and why you need it. Crystallizing a proposition to the elevator-pitch takes lots of insight and understanding. Sales activity cannot properly commence until this step is completed.

A note to management

Building a product set takes more time, involves more investment and certainly more involvement from the senior management team in the form of strategic planning than you might hope for. Get it right and you can end-up with a killer proposition that redefines the market and puts you in poll-position.