Listening And Learning?

Three marketing tenets and three quotes from a New York Times article.

1) The customer/user is the raison d'etre of any business.

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

2) The customer/user dislikes and avoids marketing interruptions.

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages.

3) The customer/user decides what is right for them.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

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The Web 2.0 Business Conundrum.

1) Founders have a cheap, clever idea.

2) People use the idea because it meets a need, is free and uninterrupted.

3) Founders focus on serving their growing audience better.

4) Moneymen swarm around.

5) Founders claim that business model will emerge.

6) Sales organisations flock to the idea in order to exploit it for their ends.

7) Founders decide that advertising must be the business model.

8) Users begin to resent changes and fail to provide revenue.

9) Founders realise traditional tactics don't apply in a disrupted world.

10) ?????

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Whose Bag Is It Anyway?

Last weekend, Sainsbury's supermarkets gave away the reusable bags they normally charge for in the hope of encouraging customers to reduce their use of plastic bags. Today, I noticed a woman using them to carry her shopping from one of their rivals.

I wondered how many other shoppers noticed and thought better of Sainsbury's as a result? I wondered if the rival's staff noticed and thought about doing something similarly positive? Coincidentally, (courtesy of today's passiveaggressivenotes), I wonder why anyone would think this would be an appropriate response and why it's the stance being taken in so many industries?



Addendum: To clarify - do you see a customer advertising the competition or do you see a customer?

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The Obligatory Facebook Post.

Facebook digitised college connectivity
Acquired lots of users
Collected lots and lots of data
Extended its reach
Became a media darling
Opened up its API
Overdid its applications
Knows it's at a crossroads.

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Top Ten Attributes of a World Class Tech Mktg. Org.

The archetype of the world class tech marketing organization, Top Ten characteristics:

1) The senior-most marketing leader is viewed as a being a business-person by the CEO or COO or equivalent.

2) The senior-most marketer is perceived by the other peer-level direct reports to have equal weight and reporting status in the politics and influence of overall management.

3) If it is primarily a B2B tech vendor, the senior-most marketer has an especially productive and collaborative relationship with the senior-most Sales exec.

4) The marketing organization has a good grasp of its "marketing business model"; that is, what are the ingrained programs, practices, etc. that represent the foundation to the company's marketing platform. There is an annual "rhythm" to this marketing business model so that there is a good sense, across the marketing team, of a solid operating pattern. In other words, the team does not feel as if the marketing strategy changes frequently and is the "flavor of the month".

5) In addition to the foundation of this marketing business model, there is also the room, the operating space, to try new marketing initiatives. These should be one or two (at the most) major initiatives that are tested and tried during the year, lead by the CMO.

6) There is a good balance to the art plus the science of marketing. The foundational elements of the marketing business model should be ingrained enough so that there is a steady and relevant stream of performance metrics that can be driven out of the activity. To the extent that the CMO is able to produce and manage towards these metrics for the core activities, he/she will be allowed more latitude for creating and testing new activities - which by definition will be hard to apply the science to at the beginning.


7) There is good attention to the marketing operations aspects. The marketing organization is right-sized; it is balanced appropriately for the resources and activities that are at corporate vs. elsewhere. There is good attention to budgets(marketing's managerial accounting process); a strong marketing performance measurement process; marketing's short-term and long-term technology needs; and there is enough awareness and circumspection about the marketing budget and the overall company income statement that the CMO, if requested, can with-stand a budget reduction while still being able to keep the core elements of the marketing business model in place and productive.

8) There is a strong marketing staff and constant attention to improving staff caliber and building skill sets.


9) The CMO and staff have a good grasp of the marketplace wants/needs; key industry trends that impact the work; and key competitors and trends. All this is indicative of good "outside-in" marketing and will help the marketing team to be perceived as business people that can credibly represent the voice of the customer within the organization. (for marketing, sales and product development/innovation)

10) The marketing function is perceived within the organization as a good place to work; a function where careers can be built; a function that has a high bar for job entry.

I could go on, but those are the top ten.

How long could it take? Depends on what you are starting with. If rock-bottom is the basis, it could take 2-3 years.

By Rich Vancil, VP Executive Advisory Group, IDC

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Who Judges Perfection?

Heston Blumenthal is a remarkable chef whose cooking will be sampled by some readers in the near future. Mixing physics and chemistry with a search for the absolute perfect ingredients, his is cooking that most would not bother to try at home but as one critic wrote "it's always fun to see someone do something better than anyone else in the world".

Interesting distinction there - he searches for absolute perfection but the critic perceives it in relative terms. True creative brilliance involves a search for perfection, but the consumer is more concerned with you delivering something that is markedly better than the alternatives. They don't want "good enough" but equally they (and I) probably wouldn't recognise real perfection either.

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Short-Cut, Not Short Circuit.

Continuing with my theme of facilitating short-cuts as a route to better usability and improved customer experience, it's crucial to ensure that the short-cut in question is actually a short-cut for your users.

Tinyurl.com is a very useful facility that reduces unwieldy url's to a manageable length. That is great when you're sending them in SMS form, but it doesn't facilitate comprehension as you can see here.

The predominance of emboldened tiny urls in an article about podcasts is certainly a short-cut for the techie writer in terms of printspace. However, from the reader's perspective, having one's scanning eyes drawn to indecipherable urls does nothing positive.

The only short-cut this facilitates is that of the reader to the next article.

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