Red Zen Marketing

Listening to NPR yesterday driving to Youngstown had me recognizing just how much the current recession has affected the country: auto makers, dealers, financial institutions, as well as service businesses, small manufacturers, large manufacturers --all seem to be wrestling with a downturn that has pushed unemployment to record levels.

It's time for some levity in the midst of it all.

I ran across the following cartoon a few months ago in the wake of my own layoff from my employer of 15 months. It was accompanies by scores of contributed captions, some of the best of which I've shown below.

I guess all our web surfing will be from home from now on, eh?

I'm going to start a business with my severance. What do you think, real estate broker or car dealership?

Well, since we have Facebook pages, we can always hang out a shingle as social media experts, right?

I'm going to need a box to take home all my Employee of the Month awards...

I was recruited away from Microsoft for this job; I kinda hoped it would last longer than three months.

And more layoff musings:
Companies' leaders sometimes begin to act very strangely when they are taking actions--like letting employees go--that make them feel uncomfortable. No one likes to shatter lives, stall future dreams, be responsible for ending a child's dance or piano lessons, or be the one that precipitated the loss of a family home. Sometimes, memo writers put their foot in their mouth and just make things worse.

Consider this over 1000-word treatise from the eBay PR boss, simultaneously announcing the layoff of 14 members of his "world-class communications team" to allow for hiring of 8 new members (!). Dude, calling your forced churn "simplification" just makes you sound like an insincere oaf. How many previous conference calls had you extolling the virtues of your "world-class communications team" that you are now so ready to dump like soggy corn flakes?  Lesson to leaders: If you use inflated language in meetings/communiques with your team, pumping them up consistently from quarter to quarter thinking you're inspiring, crowing on and on about the great results they're producing, don't be surprised if they consider you to be little more than a stuffed shirt and unfriend you on Facebook. Dude, you had it coming. You know, what the Cluetrain Manifesto has to say about Authenticity applies internally as well.

They did WHAT?
It's amusing the kind of things employees will do when acting under the cover of an inauthentic company umbrella. Stories abound on the Internet of companies asking departing employees to do incredible things:

• "...come in on Saturday to show [supervisor] how you keep things filed, the aid position consistency."
• "...confirming your willingness to meet with your replacement, {name] next Wednesday for 6 hours to perform the required training you received upon accepting the position."
• "...shall be required to refer all client calls received to {sales manager], regardless if they are of a business or personal nature."
• "...pick up your pan from the recent company picnic after hours, so as not to affect office morale..."
• "...return all company shirts (must be dry cleaned) and name tags, as well as all company-identified trophies or awards..."

Do you have an incredible or outrageous layoff story? Share it in the comments.

Wasn't it just yesterday that the Cluetrain Manifesto was published and the Internet was abuzz with an entirely new vernacular? Truth, it's actually been a full decade since that very seminal--and even controversial--online manifesto/book hit the 'Net. In order to commemorate the anniversary, Keith McArthur began the “Cluetrain Plus 10” discussion project with 95 distinct and intelligent bloggers covering each of the 95 Theses that make up the original tome.

When I first encountered Cluetrain, about 9 months after it was released, it put into words for me the perspective I had long held regarding company and customer interplay and interactions. Of course, as the Internet came of age this attitude in Cluetrain was even more relevant than it was in the Ladder business--where I was serving as head of new product development at the time. Recall that there was a rash of other brand and e-commerce focused books discussing the uniqueness of Amazon and other early Internet firms about this time as well.

Ten years of still needing to get a clue

Although one can argue that Cluetrain overstated many points in order to press their arguments, I want to address one of these that I think is still very salient in today's world. Perhaps moreso than 10 years ago:  CLUETRAIN said: Companies attempting to “position” themselves need to take a position. Optimally, it should relate to something their market actually cares about. This is 'cause' marketing, but is not about being transparently mercenary. Read on.

When a firm discovers an opportunity to develop a new product, one of the first and most natural--one might say even necessary--tasks that either emanates from the need for the product, or is a required task for the development project is for the existence of a market position. This is the Ries and Trout verstion of Positioning from the classic marketing text.

I've watched many midsize AND large firms make the mistake of positioning a product or service solution basd solely on internal factors (how will this product align to our other offerings) rather than how the product will make best sense to the target customers. Worse, are when large firms cater their focus to shareholder concerns exclusive to customers, and communications woefully miss the mark--failing miserably to speak to the pain points, competitive pressures, and needs of the very users they hope to create purchase orders or open check books to purchase the product! 

Step into that Persona to get a clue

No, the focus needs to be directed on the customer, and the positioning needs to keep in mind the persona of that customer that is the primary purchase decision maker and/or user that will make decisions. What needs and dissatisfactions with the current offerings are they enduring? What opportunities exist to show them a better way to solve their issues? What holes in the market exist that your solution can step into--hopefully in a manner that will even create a barrier to other competitors by allowing you to 'own' that piece of the customer's mind as you step into solving the problem.

Unfortunately all too often I've found products' positioning messaging lacking any concerted effort to answer the most basic requirements or failing to address competitive pressures, effectively creating a positioning 'map' telling customers to go away. These firms' common mistakes include:

Addressing the 'market' rather than defining personas, thus making their language so broad as to be useless

Talking about features of the product and forgetting that it is what that feature does to benefit the user that matters to them--what's the benefit? What's in it for me?

What separates your product or service from the rest? Most forget that they are in a competition and fail to address why a choice for their product will benefit the customer in some 1-2 tangible ways. It seems obvious, but is SO frequently missed.

So, what can be done about this?

There's a question. One answer is to use the development of your personas to create a messaging and positioning framework document (Microsoft has a reasonable template document here and description for use, here) to help guide a structured means of thinking about and forming the positioning for the product. It's enormously helpful and will fend off the loose manner in which most positioning is conducted. Small wonder Microsoft has perfected this tool.

Do you have a Story to tell?

One thing to consider:What you do and what your company stands for matter too. Seth Godin likes to say these days that marketing is about telling stories. One of his primary points is that the story must ring true and have some authenticity if it is to be retold to others. (Hear that reference to word-of-mouth? That's what we're all searching for!) Particularly as the world becomes more and more connected through email and social media 24/7. Postitive WOM moves fast -- trouble is negative WOM moves too. Just watch do a twitter search on #failwhale to see. 

 

We know that people make every purchase for an emotional reason at the core. Yet, we all still make purchases from firms we don’t really “connect” with (whether a product, a service, or even making donations), but we all do this somewhat grudgingly. Because of this, we are all open to other, more emotionally fulfilling, purchase options. If we encounter an option from a firm that we learn is committed to a goal that is important to THEM as people, and that WE SHARE, whatever that goal may be, they will WIN. It may be fighting global warming, or saving baby seals, or fighting the ash borer beatle, or honey bees, or breast cancer, or -- you get the idea. It may also be something as simple as 'fighting boredom one phone at a time' or 'creating beautiful backyards'. It's about forging an emotional connection.

Get all Emo  (-tional)

If you are really trying to reach customers who are interested in your product or service, would you want to be a company people understand & sympathize with at an emotional level, or a firm that’s just a choice of last resort?

The beauty of the Internet is it's ability to provide a vehicle for customers to search, find, try (do you offer this?) and buy a solution that they believe represents their best 'fit' to their needs. When your solution matches their needs at an emotional level, you have risen above their simple needs and matched your story at a deeper level--beyond rational--possibly at their heart. That's power. That's marketing at it's best. Positioning for the heart, and not just the head is what great marketers strive for.

How can you accomplish that with your next product introduction, or, with a product you already need to revitalize?

(Sure, I can help...)

If there's been one common thread running through all of my business experience since first working at Aspen Research in St. Paul, MN in the nineties, it's that there are some things you can't figure out just sitting in your office and staring at a screen. As one coworker used to so colorfully say, "@#$% the theory, do the experiment". Now Rod was an extremely accomplished chemist, not a marketer--by his own admission, but the same idea holds in product development. Better products come from truly understanding your customers and you'll never get that understanding from a set of quantitative cross-tabs, reading a Forrester report, or keeping up with what some journalist and her editor thinks will sell magazines aimed at your market. Sometimes you have to leave the office and spend time--quality time--with your customers.

Now before you start thinking that I'm imagining some grandiose and costly IDEO-like process for observational information gathering, chill. I'm not there. That's certainly valuable, and sometimes it's precisely what's needed. But it's expensive and normally a tool only the largest firms can afford. No, far too many mid-size firms and even entrepreneurs lose touch with their primary customer base and what matters to those customers most. Maintaining the dialog with these customers--well, the conversation, in the Cluetrain lingo--goes a long way to keeping you atuned to their daily struggles, their challenges, their frustrations, their pain points that your product has the opportunity to address.

At the low end of the cost spectrum, just getting out into the environment where you customers congregate is helpful. When leading new product development at Werner Ladder, I used to head down to a local Sherwin Williams, Home Depot or Lowes early in the morning some days to bump into and talk with contractors picking up their supplies for the day. At Andersen Windows, it meant driving out to construction sites and chatting with framers, contractors and GCs about how the construction market was doing and hearing their gripes. At Quickoffice, it meant spending time at Palm User Group meetings and talking to users about how they used the software--learning how some of my assumptions were very, very off the mark. Sometimes the smallest alteration to a product makes a big impact on a customer: a change to packaging makes it easier to access on a job site, a unified installation for an application makes it easier for a customer to get up and running with your software, the inclusion of a few sample files helps users to know how the app really works, etc.

This kind of customer insight and understanding is not expensive. It does take some time, but it's time that pays back dividends far in excess of the time spent. Sure, it helps to have some idea of what you are seeking input on; creating a list of things to watch for, or questions to ask will help you keep your time valuable. But also be open to listening to what your customers have to say when just given a chance to talk to you--let them ramble on a bit and listen. Ask some probing questions: why is that? when does that seem to happen most? and listen carefully to the answers. You'll likely find some invaluable nuggets that your competitors are not hearing, and you'll have the opportunity to keep that conversation going with development and sales of products that just keep on improving.