Corporate branding and what's wrong with Nickelback...

There was as a youth I dreamt of becoming a rock star.  In fact some of my friends from that period never gave up that dream.  I got a very exciting message earlier this week that one of those friends was nominated for a Juno this year for Metal album of the year. For any international readers out there the Juno’s are a Canadian version of the Grammies.

I sent over a message of congratulations mentioning that “it must be exciting to soon be sharing the stage with perennial Juno nominee – Nickelback”.

This seemingly innocuous comment got me thinking about NIckelback.  More specifically why many people find them so irritating AND how this might actually be a lesson for marketers.

Nickelback is Generic music, like much of pop music, but I suppose they take more abuse because they step outside the world of bubblegum pop into the world of rock or in some cases heavy metal.  Nickelback seems to step outside that pop world by having all their guitar effects pedals set to the “Power Rock” setting at full blast, all the time. 

On the surface it sounds great.  They have high production value and great hooks.  But therein lies the problem.  For music fans with more discerning taste they want to hear more.  Generic power rock doesn’t provoke deep thoughts, there isn’t really much substance.  The engineered sound of power rock also all sounds very bland.  There is a reason why every Nickelback song sounds like a song you’ve heard before.  It blends into the background and doesn’t make a statement about anything.  I think their latest single is actually about drinking beer as an example.

Corporate brands and corporate marketers might be well served to take a lesson from this.  We are facing a similar challenge - How to not be like Nickelback.

Consumers have more choice than ever before, so brands really need the old unique selling propositions.  More and more from a brand perspective people want to know what exactly you stand for.  What is the story your brand is trying to tell me?  And please, please, please say something meaningful… without your effects boxes set to “power rock”.  We’ve been there, done that, and it’s no longer good enough…

I watch NASCAR for the crashes... revisited

The following is my most read blog post.  This was written 2 years ago - almost to the day - and to date has had over 2500 views.  A lot had happened since then.  Novell was acquired by Attachmate and I've since moved on to a new opportunity at Empathica.

As I read it I reflect back on how daunting a task something that sounds as simple as re-branding is.  I recently saw an article about HP having had an opportunity to update their logo for which they passed on. This sparked much uproar online about the opportunity they missed.  Well, if my experience tells me anything it's that re-branding and changing the world's perception about you takes much more than a new logo.  Or even a new vision statement as with what Novell tried to do.  It takes a full company effort, and the new brand you want to create needs to be compelling enough to have widespread adoption in the market at large.   Very few companies have been able to do this successfully, particularly large ones.

In fact in 2012 we can all watch in real time how this same exercise will unfold at RIM.  Once having defined the smartphone, they now struggle to change the world's perception of what they do and why they do it.  I'm sure some will suggest a logo change, or a new vision or mission statement, but the reality is it will take much more.

Maybe they can even pick up a lesson or two from NASCAR...

............................................

I watch NASCAR for the crashes...

I have been reflecting on Intelligent Workload Management and Novell these past few weeks. I won’t go in to details on the strategy, as there is plenty of material on that from much better sources than myself.

My brain instead tends to work in tangents. Intelligent Workload Management has gotten me thinking about NASCAR. Yes, stock car racing. Not long ago, NASCAR was a niche sport, relegated to popularity in the south, and frankly having very negative stereotypes associated with it everywhere else.

Then a guy by the name of Brett Yormark came along to run NASCAR sales and marketing. Yormark had a sole focus: to change the most important thing he saw about NASCAR… PERCEPTION. By bringing in a major sponsor Nextel, to replace RJ Reynolds, along with other changes to the brand. Yormark took NASCAR to a new audience, up market, with a new public perception.

NASCAR has now become the second most profitable professional sport in North America just short of the NFL. Not bad for a bunch of guys crashing in to each other.

Here at Novell, we are in the process of a similar evolution. Our products have always been loved by our customers and our engineers have consistently delivered market leading technology. Our biggest challenge is perception. Intelligent Workload Management is a fresh way of looking at how our products and solutions fit together for a powerful vision. Both the engineer and salesperson in me are extremely excited by the possibilities this market holds, and the ways that IWM can change the role of IT in helping business run.

We have the products, and more importantly the people here to deliver on this vision. Intelligent Workload Management can do for Novell what Brett Yormark did for NASCAR.
Lucky for us, we can do it, without all the car crashes…

A lesson in marketing from Steve Jobs

This might be the single best marketing lesson I've ever gotten.  I'd write more but that would take away from this simple 6 minutes.  Enjoy.

Steve Jobs, and Kurt Cobain changed my life...

The world changed on January 11, 1992.  On that day, the album Nevermind by Nirvana replaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous as the number 1 album on the Billboard album chart.

Symbolically this was the end of the era of manufactured pop music, which MJ came to represent.  A new age of real music began, some even called it the coming of age for American punk.  Kids started buying guitars again, and a new generation fell in love with the glory of punk rock.  I was one of them. 

Hit songs were once again written in garages and basements, rather than being engineered in clinical Hollywood hit factories.  Thanks Kurt…

That’s the same context in which I see the legacy Steve Jobs leaves behind.  He was the greatest storyteller of his generation.  He also happened to be businessman.  His success also in many way marks the emergence of a new era; perhaps a new era of business.

Before Apple became the most valuable company in the world, the model of success that everyone agreed on was different. 

Sam Walton turned a local variety store in to the world’s biggest retailer by taking a clinical view of his supply chain, and with laser focus squeezing out as much efficiency as he could find.  The relationships people used to have with their local store owner were forgotten, but it worked.  And it worked very, very well. 

Jack Welch took a scalpel to the cost structure at GE and turned around one of the world’s oldest companies, by making them profitable again.  Sadly this came at the price of massive layoffs, and a huge hit to the corporate culture at GE.  Employees were just cogs in an assembly line, and a job was never guaranteed.

Steve took a different approach.  He believed that you could think differently.  His focus wasn’t on a spreadsheet, it was on his customers.  He created a passion at Apple for elegant design, and a perfect customer experience.  From the packaging, through the retail experience, to the products themselves; the customer experience of Apple was and still remains different than every other brand.  Apple cares about its customers; that superior experience, has made them not just a computer company, but for some almost a religion.

Perhaps with his passing, this will mark an era in business where Apple isn’t the outlier, rather the model of success for others.  Take a customer focus, invest rather than cut, and innovate rather than stand still.  You might end up being the biggest company in the world.  Thanks Steve…

Who runs product marketing at RIM?

As a Canadian working in technology one issue that I'm quite passionate about is the innovation gap that is happening between Canada an our peers.

I watch with an almost personal fascination with the challenges being faced by Research in Motion. Being Canada's biggest global success story, their struggles act both as an interesting learning experience and a local soap opera.

As a marketer I can't help but feel there is a profound lesson to be learned by product managers and product marketers by watching what hopefully will be the rebuilding of a Canadian icon.

Now that RIM can no longer rely on the capabilities of their products to sell themselves, they seem to have fundamental issues around the marketing 4 Ps (Product, Price, Promotion, Place). The market no longer knows what differentiates them, most assume it’s enterprise capability of some sort, but their own messaging does not reinforce even this, their legacy killer feature, Their pricing, due to their carrier strategy is all over the map, again because of the carrier strategy also no promotion consistency, and most importantly they no longer know where to position themselves. Are they still a premium phone, an entry level, mid range? Too many questions.

The breadth of devices they carry on their price list is too big, which exacerbates all the core marketing issues just mentioned. One aspect of Apple strategy that I've always greatly admired is the strict discipline they show in maintaining a very small and focused product portfolio.

They can be fixed, but it remains to be seen whether or not time is still on their side...

Dear RIM you forgot one of the Ps of marketing…

I recently upgraded my phone to the new Blackberry Bold 9900.  So far I find it to be a fantastic device which really performs well for my usage requirements.  But reading news and reviews of this device online, and the lukewarm reaction RIM is getting, has me thinking back to the basic principles of marketing.   I fear the commercial success of my new toy might be getting sabotaged by the ‘Four Ps’ of marketing.

When I started in marketing the first task I was given was to familiarize myself with how to build strategy around the four Ps (Product, Place, Promotion, and Price).   Taking this approach to building out messaging and strategy was a simple and proven framework to get me started.  Having a formal process to build out a strategy really helped me to mature beyond a marketer who made decisions on gut instinct, to becoming a marketer who can build out much more thoughtful research driven strategy.

Today, in RIM’s case it seems that with the launch of their new flagship device there appears to be a glaring loss control over what some might argue is the most important of those Ps… Price.  More often than not, even if the Product, Place and Promotion are in line, Price acts as the final deciding factor between purchase or not.

An exceptionally concerning trend I’ve noticed with the Blackberry Bold 9900 is terrible inconsistency in the pricing offered by RIM’s carrier partners.  The published pricing for the device seems to range from as low as $149 on contract, to as high as $349 on contract.  That’s a 230%+ swing in pricing from carrier to carrier.  This creates tremendous confusion in the mind of the consumer, and in the identity of the product itself -  Is this blackberry a premium superphone?  Is this blackberry a mid-market smartphone?  Is this aimed at teenagers?  Is this aimed at business people?  The more questions something seemingly as simple as the pricing for a product raises, the less successful the product ultimately will be.

While I understand the street pricing is not set directly by RIM themselves, and is in the hands of the carrier partners, something tells me that this should be one of the top priorities for change in Waterloo.  After all, having centralized control over both Pricing as well as the other Ps of marketing seems to have served that fruit company in Cupertino very, very, very well.

So there you have it, my one (or at least my first) piece of advice for Jim, and Mike.  As a longtime fan of your products, please update your partner strategy to have a more consistent pricing model for your devices across all carriers, and work on that most important of all the marketing Ps.

And in case you’re wondering.  A quick review of the phone itself:

-           -  The dimensions are perfect for me.  I hate baggy pants, so the thin profile fits in my pockets perfectly

-           -    The touch screen makes the UI much more intuitive and easier to use

-           -    The web browser works very well and renders all the websites I need perfectly

-           -    The new processors make the UI a lag free experience

-           -    Unfortunately the battery life appears worse than my previous blackberries but it still gets me through more than a day before needing a charge.

Whhaatt! I learned about marketing from Lil John

This morning I was going through my old music collection to find some tunes to listen to.  Having something playing in the background really helps me get going on days when I need some extra motivation.

Since the summer weather has come in full force I decided I was in the mood to add some old hip hop tracks to my playlist.  A few songs in I have come to a realization.  I realized that marketing plays a similar role to that of one of the most unsung players in music.  The hip hop hype man.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, this is what I quickly pulled from Wikipedia:

A hype man in hip hop music and rapping is a “backup rapper/singer who is also responsible for increasing an audience's excitement with call-and-response chants” according to author Grant Barrett.

Music writer Mickey Hess expands the term as follows: "a hype man is a figure who plays a central but supporting role within a group, making his or her own interventions, generally aimed at hyping up the crowd while also drawing attention to the words of the MC".

Ultimately hyping the crowd is what good marketing and effective content can help to do in priming a customer’s understanding and urgency to buy your solutions. 

When Sen Dog drops the line “How could I just kill a man?” or Lil John asks “Whhhaaaaaattt?” he isn’t just selling more energy drink, those simple lines serve to pump the crowd up and prep them for the MC to drop in to a main verse.  Hype men also help to give MC’s a second to take a breather in between verses as well

Effective marketing can serve both purposes also.  Hyping the crowd is widely understood.  TV shows like Mad Men talk about this, heck I talk about this too. 

Marketing can also help organizations take a breather.  There’s a great saying in product management “Just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should”, products can always be better, but good messaging helps to highlight the existing benefits, effectively giving engineering a bit of a breather in their race to catch up with Moore’s law.

Now I’m off to drink some crunk juice and market some software…

RIM Ramblings...

I remember when I got my first blackberry. It was one of the early colour screen versions with a scroll wheel on the side for navigation. I thought it was an amazing product. That blackberry gave me a sense of workplace mobility that up until then I had not experienced. In fact, I often referred to that device as my mobile office. Sure, I had a laptop computer, but having access to all my email in a device that fit into my pocket really gave me the feeling of being untethered from the office.

I wasn’t the only one who felt the same way. The Blackberry was a disruptive device that allowed professionals with jobs that were communication heavy unheard of flexibility. Email from the office? No problem. Email at home? Sure, but that’s not new. What about sending and receiving email from the train, or the airport, or even the bathroom? You mean I can do that? Wow!

What happened?

The definition of the office itself changed. Today, the tools that people use for productivity and the ways that they communicate with each other have changed. In the early days of the Blackberry, access to email was the only piece of the working experience customers needed, on the go, to be productive. After all this is what untethered them from their desks.

The tools people use in the office today, and how they communicate has changed. As the 24h workday replaces the 8h shift of the past, the line between home and office continues to blur. Email and the ubiquitous phone are still important. More and more, social has become a critical channel to collaborate and communicate. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and use of media sharing services such as Youtube and Instragram are the new ways people share thoughts and ideas. Workers today need access to other things as well. The World Wide Web is a necessity for both research and leisure. People need access to cloud based storage services like Dropbox to be able to access, author and edit files as well. Plus with all of the newfound stress of a 24h workday a little leisure can’t hurt either. Angry Birds anyone?

Much like how the American car companies were caught off guard with a rapidly changing car market from rising gas prices, RIM seems to have been caught off guard by the changing nature of the office it helped to change. RIM today finds itself trying to sell efficient messaging devices in a world where work is defined by so much more. Blackberries are essentially technology SUVs caught up in a world demanding the fuel efficiency and innovation of a hybrid engine.

What’s the lesson here?

Maintaining a pulse on your market around you and the customers you have and hope to get is critical. Even if it is a market you almost single handedly created, market needs can change quickly, after all, your own success is a testament to that.

As a proud Canadian, I believe RIM still can emerge from this a bigger better company. The kids today might just be changing what the office of tomorrow looks like again. The only problem is they may not have the patience to wait for you to catch up to them…

Can’t we just get along… sales and marketing alignment

"Teamwork is essential - it allows you to blame someone else." Author Unknown

I came across an interesting discussion on Linkedin, over the weekend about the difference between sales and marketing that got me thinking. Upon further research I discovered that a Google search for "sales and marketing alignment" yields over 2 MILLION hits!

I've always found it interesting that one of the accepted truths of business is conflict between the sales and marketing. Having spent time on both sides of that coin I've seen this conflict first hand, but I still don't quite understand it. Sales and marketing are the two organizations that bring products to market and drive revenue. Poor communication and a lack of coordination between the two could surely prove disastrous, but many companies accept this as the norm. Imagine if the engineering and product management organizations didn't see eye to eye. Surely that would drive innovation to a halt.

One of the biggest sources of frustration I find in any role is a lack of understanding of what value you bring and how it impacts others. Better understanding of roles and responsibilities can help both to motivate and resolve conflicts. In my world, sales and marketing both have the same goal – connecting with customers to increase company profits and revenue. What is implied is that both organizations are connecting with the world outside the company walls. The only difference I see between the two is the audience each is trying to reach.

In the marketing organization our goal is to sell to the entire world (or rather the specific market segment we are trying to capture, otherwise sales would have a right to be mad at us). The sales organization and individual sales people generally connect more directly to a particular account or set of accounts.  As such, sales tend to get much more granular in terms of customer conversation, whereas marketing stays more strategic. Marketing educates the world about the broader problems affecting a market to build a funnel of educated prospects. Salespeople connect the market problems directly to the individual pains of a customer to bring in revenue.

Ultimately both organizations should be telling the same story, only tuned to different audiences.

I sell bad breath

I have a bad habit of accumulating seemingly random information. My wife believes that my lifelong dream must be appearing on a game show someday to take advantage of this valuable knowledge.

One story that I've picked up that I particularly like is the story behind Listerine. Listerine has a fascinating history that not only helps bring me one step closer to game show supremacy but also serves as a nice little marketing lesson.

Listerine was originally formulated in 1879 as a surgical antiseptic. Apparently some folks even used it as a treatment for gonorrhea… It wasn't until the 1920s that sales of Listerine really took off. No there wasn't an epidemic of gonorrhea (well at least I hope there wasn't, I wasn't around back then) sales took off once the product began being marketed as a cure for 'chronic halitosis' or bad breath. That strategy brought with it a new challenge though. Every day folks had no idea their breath was even a problem.

That's where marketing stepped in to help educate the masses. Ad campaigns for Listerine began to focus on the scourge of bad breath and how bad breath was in fact ruining the lives of every day Americans without their knowledge. If you think about it, this marketing strategy was brilliant. Rather than marketing the product itself, they were in fact educating their audience about a problem that most didn't have much knowledge of. The folks behind Listerine ended up selling bad breath, not mouth wash. The end result of this however was a whole lot of mouthwash sales by people who no longer wanted to have their lives ruined by bad breath.

The hottest trend in marketing today is content marketing or inbound marketing. It's a strategy built around creating and making available a wealth of content for your audience with the goal of educating them. Building trust with your audience by helping them learn more about the various challenges that they face, before trying to sell them any products. As it turns out this isn't a new idea.

After all, I woke up this morning and rinsed my mouth out with Listerine…

Why a Superbowl ad is not a good idea

I'm a big fan of interdepartmental collaboration; I am never the smartest guy in the room, so whenever possible I try to solicit ideas from my peers. Marketing, sales, development, technical support; everyone involved in my company has a valuable perspective on the greater goals of the organization. I've also come to learn is that unless people are asked all too often great ideas simply go unheard.

Marketing is often the most visible organizations in any company. At least the results of marketing work tend to be quite visible. So at various time I do solicit ideas from non-marketers around what we could do to improve our efforts. Usually, this leads to great constructive discussions of what is going well, what is not working and even what our grander vision should look like. BUT there is one suggestion that comes up that I do hate - the mythical "Superbowl ad"…

Most people have a preconception of what marketing does. Sadly these ideas are usually based on what marketing used to do.

People hate what marketing used to do. I hate what marketing used to do. Traditional marketing was interruption driven - Interrupt people's lives with broadly targeted advertising, jingles or nonsensical catchphrases. It was all very loud and colourful, and frankly all very annoying. Presumably the theory went like this - the loudest marketers capture the largest audiences, with little regard for what that audience actually looked like.

I work in the world of B2B, where that type of approach is particularly ineffective. Businesses, in my experience, appreciate being yelled at even less than individual consumers. Not only that but the products my company makes are also quite specialized within the business market, so interruption based marketing becomes even less effective for me.

Superbowl ads are all about casting a wide net, and hoping to hit very few targets. It's about screaming "WAZZZZAAAAAPPPP!!!" at the whole world and hoping that at least one person decides to buy a beer.

One of the most important parts of my job as a marketer is to make sure I don't do this. Identifying and defining very clearly the target market I want to capture, is always step one. Smarter folks than me actually have a term for this – segmentation.

Effective segmentation allows me as a marketer to define who the buyer is that I'm targeting, and craft a message for them that is delivered and made available through the channels they naturally gather information from. That way instead of casting a very wide net hoping to catch one very rare fish, I can go hunting with a sniper rifle in a confined woodland area that has a large population of whatever specific furry creature I'm looking for.

And that is why a Superbowl ad might very well be the absolute worst marketing investment that I could possibly make…

Bowling – the great marketing metaphor

I hate flying. I find airplanes the stale air gives me headaches. As part of my job occasional business travel is a reality though.

Lately there is one part of flying that I do look forward to. My airline of choice has done a good with their entertainment options to make my time on planes a bit more enjoyable. On a recent flight home from a series of meetings on the west coast, I got settled in and browsed through their latest movie selection. I was excited to see The Social Network as one of the options. As a new parent, my wife and I don't get many opportunities to go to the movies so the backlog of movies I keep meaning to see is quite large. A little downtime in the air is a perfect chance to catch up on that list.

I'd read a lot of good reviews of the film and as a regular Facebook user I was quite intrigued as well.

The movie was great, my favourite part was probably the score done by Trent Reznor. In retrospect something else in the film stands out as well. The Social Network also showed as a great case study for one of the tenants from "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore.

The book has become one of the must reads for technology entrepreneurs. In it Moore describes how to grow your customer base from early adopters through to mainstream success with a great bowling analogy. Segmenting different niche markets or bowling pins and knocking them down one by one using adjacent markets as the catalyst to move on to new ones.

This process is described brilliantly in The Social Network and shows how Facebook went from early adopter success through to the $50B valuation company it is today.

The early adopters were Harvard students; they were both a local user base as well as a user base with the cachet of being members of Harvard's exclusive community. Exclusivity was their value proposition. The next bowling pin was Boston University, that market was both local (quite literally an adjacent market) and to move the plot forward also allowed Mark Zuckerberg to satisfy some personal spite J

From there the expansion was more strategic, Stanford had visionaries who could build a presence in the always connected world of Silicon Valley, and later Cambridge and other exclusive international schools became their early majority. Mission accomplished – 1 million users, chasm crossed. Brilliant selection of bowling pins knocked over with a defined strategy.

In the real world Facebook has over 500 million unique users and last I checked had a valuation of over $50B. I guess in bowling lingo they've really hit on a string of turkeys. (full disclosure, I don't really understand bowling lingo, but last time I went bowling I got a turkey for a string of strikes which I am very proud of)

Ultimately great products still need great market strategies, so maybe it's time to dust off the two tone shoes and start bowling…