Disambiguation.

Flext - 97% of users can't help recommending it to others.

That's what it said on the side of the bus. But what does it mean?

Did they actually recommend it to others? Did they do so in some helpless Tourette's manner? Is this a statistic that's been extrapolated from some concocted research question and did people act on the recommendation?

In a time when potential customers are increasingly cynical about advertising messages, it seems to me that it's increasingly crucial to make those messages unambiguous.

ADDENDUM: And to have a product about which you can be unambiguous.

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Blackosphere.

John Grant reminds us that it's Earth Hour tonight 8pm local time and suggests that we join him in getting the blogosphere to flip to a black background, taking our lead from Google who went black screen today.

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Thinking Inside The Box.

A combination self-help and business book, Michael Port's Beyond Booked Solid focusses on scalability issues and how to expand a small enterprise.

It is filled with pragmatic tools and techniques designed to grow a business via innovation and leveraged income, but the key message is that of developing a mind-set that works on your rather than in your business.

To some extent that's just a reframing of the old adage of keeping one's eye on the big picture, but it's something that can't be repeated too often. Constantly reminding yourself and your colleagues of why you're in business (and specifically what customer needs you meet by doing something better than anyone else) is crucial to evaluating everything that you do day to day.

If your marketing tactic du jour, your latest product development or your inter-departmental meeting isn't centred on that, they're not worth your time and resources.

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They Really Don't Get It.

At the risk (i.e. certainty) of attracting some snarky comments, I have to admit that I sometimes feel like I'm sending out the same few ideas here - over and over again. But, then I notice another example of corporate idiocy and realise how far there is to go.

Today's two examples:

1) A television advertisement breathlessly announcing the details of a business conference. It managed to register the name of the event in my head but not the contact details - there wasn't enough time. No matter, the internet is a wonderful thing. I google that name. And what do I get? Not the event site, but a couple of local listing sites that mention the event yet have no link to it. The reason? The official website - where valued customers can book tickets - turns out to have a slightly different name from that of the conference. Go figure.

2) I try to contact the local council to report a collapsed manhole cover in a nearby street. My phonecall is answered with a message telling me that, if I don't want to wait on hold, I can make a report online by "typing the following name into the search engine of the council's website." Not only do they not realise that I'm more likely to use the search engine of my choice rather than jump through their hoops, they then go the effort of spelling out the url of the county site rather than that of the sub-site they know I'm seeking.

I've heard similar stories this week from across the corporate globe - colleagues and friends frustrated by encountering walls of ignorance, inertia and incomprehension. Within agencies, within giant organisations, within whole countries even. The amazing reality is this. They really don't get it.

But there is a silver lining. Although many of the "players" haven't noticed that the environment has changed, at best, are trying to adapt their old models to the new reality, a significant proportion of individual people (aka customers) have done so. They know what's possible. They'll increasingly demand it. If your organisation is one of those that does "get it", you are so far ahead of the game, it should be hard for you to fail to clean up.

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Ken Dodd - Marketing Guru.

"There are two ways to do a show. You can do it at the audience or you can do it with the audience. The best way is to do it with the audience."

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Predictive Marketing.

As you can see, it snowed this weekend. I saw evidence of it on the news (where families were seen sledging down green hills) and briefly outside the window. However, this was not the serious weather event promised by the media meteorologists. A few weeks ago, there were winds gusting to 70 mph and some houses were damaged, but this too was not the threatened re-run of the 1987 hurricane.

It seems to me that weather forecasters have strayed beyond using their training to present forecasts and have been moving towards predicting weather as event, hypeing the weather into headline news whenever the abnormal is deemed likely to occur. They've blurred the line between their expertise which consists of the technical skills and knowledge that go into creating their product/service, and interpretation of the impact of this product/service on its users.

The former (objective information) is what people want and expect from meteorologists, the latter is messaging (subjective information) that is less than helpful because your reaction to serious weather warnings may be different from mine, which may be different from a farmers. In other words, it's situation specific. The pertinent knowledge that differentiates our reactions is known only to us and not to the meteorologist.

Marketers fall into this trap all the time. Rather than communicate the expertise which is embodied in their product/service, they engage in predictive marketing and tell their potential users how they're going to feel about and use that product/service. So, just as I now have far less faith in meteorologists' warnings, users who subsequently discover a gap between the marketer's prediction and the reality, become similarly sceptical and prone to ignoring them.

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2008 Outlook for Tech. Mktg. Investment

Well, we've just completed our 6th annual technology marketing barometer study, and I have some good news and bad news to share with you. Let's get the bad news over with first. As marketers, we have our challenges cut out for us in 2008:

1. Challenging economic environment in 2008: An unsteady marketplace is introducing significant aversion to risk by tech executives.
2. Drive for overall marketing efficiency and effectiveness will continue with mounting budget pressure and market competitiveness.
3. Market and marketing channels will continue to proliferate, creating challenges and opportunities.
4. Tech marketing budgets will increase by 4% for the full year 2008. Although this is an increase, it is the lowest that IDC has forecast in the past four years and portends further pressure on the marketing function for cost control and productivity increases.

Now a bit of good news. For the companies that have been diligent in improving their marketing operations and effectiveness during the past five years, you are best positioned to "weather the storm", and may even have an opportunity to take share.

Here are some top level insights and guidance:

• Be prepared to withstand a budget reduction while still being able to keep the core elements of the marketing business model in place and productive. The best marketing leaders are always in a position to shift marketing investment as needed in a calculated manner to reduce any potential short or long-term implications on marketing's strategy.
• Don't just talk about aligning marketing and sales; but take clear steps towards improving this problem. For example, integrate marketing and sales operations either directly or indirectly and focus on improving key processes such as lead management; increase field marketing’s strategic role, moving beyond a pure support function to contribute to marketing and sales' local go to market strategy; and better enable sales, such as improving the value of marketing assets, enabling greater accessibility to those assets and improving channels of communication.
• Continue transforming your marketing organization to prepare for the next 12 to 18 months, and communicate this strategy to your executive peers: reduce the silos within corporate marketing and between corporate marketing, business unit marketing and the regions; better understand and engage the customer, both internally and externally; and increase your speed of measurement and action as a team.

Feel free to contact me at mgerard@idc.com for a copy of my recent telebriefing which offers more details to help guide your strategy and execution in 2008.

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