To upgrade or not to upgrade... the question for RIM

Reading the avalanche of bad news coming out of Waterloo these past few weeks, there seems to be one small positive that most pundits agree on.  When RIM releases their new Blackberry 10 devices later this year, it will be a make or break moment for what was once Canada’s most valuable company.

I actually think there is a subtle nuance in that sentiment that some are overlooking.  RIM needs to actually get most if not all of their current 75 million users to actually upgrade to the new devices and platform as soon as possible.

That’s the precariously same situation that every technology company finds themselves in every few years.  In the case of Microsoft, usually every 3 years, Apple every year, and RIM will face later this year.  How can you ensure the smoothest and fastest possible upgrade cycle?

Existing customers on one hand love familiarity.  In my own day to day, I’ve been a loyal RIM user for many years, so the quirks that come with their devices are something that I’ve grown accustomed to.  You could almost say that are quirks that I’ve come to expect and as such have accepted as part of my daily routine.  On the other hand, those same quirks are what make me consider competing devices as a replacement.  In fact on some days those quirks even have me contemplating paying for my OWN better device, in lieu of my “free” company provided blackberry.

As with most technologies, I have no doubt that Blackberry 10 will be an improvement on their current operating system. 

So how can they get those better, faster RIM devices in the hands of their most loyal users as soon as possible?

As with many things in life I suspect the secret lies in going back to the basics.  For RIM that means focusing on the five Ps of marketing, and tuning them for their core audience.  The 75 million people globally who they’ve already captured as customers.  Products, Price, Placement, Promotion and Packaging that will appeal to all those people that at some point already bought into the RIM value proposition.

How easy that will be remains to be seen however, not to mention how soon they need to begin executing on this…

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…

How to put me to sleep in 3 easy steps

Over the course of the past few weeks I have had to sit through several presentations for one reason or another. Some live, some via webcast, but all about "enterprise IT management". Sounds exciting I know <note sarcasm>. Ultimately I didn't really learn all that much about enterprise IT management, but I did learn a lot about how to structure an incredibly boring presentation.

Here is the typical presentation I saw:

• The first 1/3 dedicated to about us content. You know slides where people talk about how long they've been in business, how many employees they have, where they are headquartered and other such trivia. Personally I am not a fan of about us slides and frankly never use them. As far as I'm concerned if someone is going to take the time to watch me speak, I'll assume they've at least done a first level Google search to find that information out beforehand.
   
• The next 1/3 of these presentations was clearly supposed to be the meat, and it was also the turning point of where these presenters typically lost me. This was the architecture section. This is the part where people seem to feel the need to include 'build' animations, or Visio diagrams. This is also where you'll often hear the dreaded phrase "I'm sorry this slide is a bit of an eye chart"… Sigh… A whole lot of talking, but they still never manage to tell me anything about the problem they solve.
   
• Finally the last 1/3 is where they talk about the product details. And boy do people ever love to get in to details. Apparently enterprise IT is all about a race to have the most features. Sadly after sitting through these presentations I still had no idea what the point was for any of these things. I definitely did not feel very educational nor was I compelled to buy anything or research further.
  

I have a bit of a different view of presentations. I fully admit that Steve Jobs I am not. But I've been told that people enjoy my presentation style and for me that makes me feel as though I'm winning, if not yet bi-winning.

I have two motivators whenever I present. First and foremost I value my audience's time, and secondly I have a deep seeded fear of not sounding like a used car salesman.

So I focus my presentations around education rather than simply a traditional sales pitch.

The time allocation I try to follow is

• 1/3 discussion of the high level problem (i.e. how does this issue affect your business as a whole)
   
• 1/3 why current solutions may be lacking (i.e. how this problem affects YOU, the user or person I'm trying to relate to)
   
• Finally 1/3 a better way to solve the problem, again as objectively as possible, what new approaches, or technologies allow new solutions today, and my conclusion is (check out my company we understand the depth of this problem and are one of the new solution options you have)
  

I also try to frame each section of my presentation with a story as well. As my father used to tell me growing up, "you should always be grounded in reality". So what better way to engage my audience than with real world stories? Customer stories, stories from my life, and stories from my own experience either dealing with these problesm or helping other people like the audience understand these problems.

No about us, no build animations, no eye charts, and hopefully a few laughs and some education.

Bring up the problems up front, try to relate on a personal level, and hopefully no tired eyes by the end of my sessions. That's my goal.

So what exactly do you do?

I get asked all the time by family co-workers and friends - "what do you do?" Naturally I created a PowerPoint presentation ;)Jason Dea - Turning ideas into revenue

View more presentations from Jason Dea

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…

Dear Marketing you are NOT smarter than your audience

A friend of mine recently took up just about the most interesting hobby I've come across. He has spent the past few months taking workshops in standup comedy. I'd imagine that standing up on stage and actually trying to make people laugh ON PURPOSE must be one of the most intimidating tasks out there. For that I commend him.

In talking to him about the experience and what it's like he shared something thing that I believe should be a lesson that should be given to folks like me that work in marketing. During one of his early comedy lessons the instructor shared with them one of the golden rules of comedy: "Never talk down to your audience… assume they are smart enough to get the joke."

How profound. In the context of a joke, adding unnecessary explanation and clutter to your deliver simply renders the punch line UN-funny. In marketing the same type of behavior can render whatever message you're trying to convey overly confusing. To my dismay, I've been guilty of this. I've been guilty of failing to give my audience enough credit.

I can't help but think this simply boils down to having a better understanding of your audience. Understand their background; understand their expectations. In short know what matters most to them.

I work in the B2B space selling software that manages datacenters. Something that I've found myself guilty of is over-explaining the things that my products did. Sometimes even down to describing basic concepts. In retrospect I've now realize that keeping those slides a part of my presentations, not only made my presentations too long, but they also rendered my message overly complex, or worse, condescending. IT professionals don't need to be told what a computer is or what a storage array is. Heck, most of the time they just want to get to the point, they simply want to know what the result of using my products will be, and if those results align to whatever needs they have. Simple right? Turns out not so much if you spend some time reading enterprise datacenter management software brochures.

I've now begun my journey down the road of trusting that my audience will get the joke….

Everything on the Food network looks easy…

I have found that one of the most difficult things to do is to take something complex and explain it in a simple way to teach someone. Perhaps I'm biased because my wife is a teacher. But my experience has been that it also takes a real subject matter expert to be able to take a complex concept and whittle it down to only the most important parts and make it sound simple and easy at the same time.

The Food network is a great example of this. Cooking may not be the hardest task but it does take some practice and it can be quite intimidating to a novice. Even the most difficult dishes however are made to look very easy to prepare if you ever watch the Food network. I suppose that when you're an Iron Chef you can make anything look as easy as making a grilled cheese sandwich.

Often times I get asked by both coworkers and friends "what exactly do you do?" I tell them that I am a product marketing manager, which inevitably leads to more questions about what product marketing is exactly. So a personal challenge I've undertaken is an attempt to create a simple explanation for what it is that product marketing does. By doing so perhaps I've taken a few baby steps towards becoming an Iron Chef of marketing if you will. I needed the explanation to be more than a job description and also more interesting than a list of the deliverables I get from my boss.

So I've come up with a simple analogy - I write the story that helps to fill the sales funnel. It's the story that, if written well, serves to both find prospects as well as helps those prospects convert to opportunities and sales.



When I was in elementary school I learned in English class that a good story goes through 3 phases: Introduction, Plot, and Conclusion.

In the marketing story I write I think of theses stages in terms of the desired outcomes for the content I create to support my narrative. So I have 3 outcomes or phases for my story as well: Eyeballs, Education, and Urgency.

• Eyeballs: The key to the beginning of the story is customer segmentation. The messaging and value of the solution needs to resonate with the "Tribe" (to borrow a term from Seth Godin) that best fits the user and buyer profile of my product. By fine tuning the story from the beginning to appeal to a particular audience that helps both to get eyeballs reading the story, while also ensuring I target the audience that is most likely to be converted through to opportunities.
  
   
• Education: This is the easiest part of the story to write. It can consist of product brochures and flyers, product websites, demos, and other types of collateral that educate the eyeballs I've captured as to what it is exactly that the product does, and the value or outcomes that will result. Again if done well more conversion and more movement down the sales funnel.
  
   
• Urgency: I find this the most difficult part of the story to write, as it requires the most depth of knowledge. Customer success stories, tools to help determine ROI or tools to quantify risk, vendor neutral educational content along with the expertise that I've enable my colleagues in sales with can be the key chapters of the story that drive real opportunities. This is when the story helps a reader understand how their world could be a better place. It tells them how others have benefitted from my solution and whenever possible ties this back to an economic impact. Put another way, this is when the story can really help close the gap between awareness and engagement.
  

Finally there is one last piece. If I've told my story correctly then this is when sales professionals take it to the finish line. I've tried to help them up to this point by writing a marketing story to help convert targets in to opportunities. They should now have a funnel of potential customers who are well educated on what we do, how we can help them and have a sense of urgency that now is a good time to make an investment.

So that's the explanation I'm going with the next time I get asked "what do you do?"

I'm going to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich now…

Who needs product marketing…

I came across this post on Gigaom proposing that startup culture is becoming a fetish. The story references the churn being seen in the number of startups vying for exposure at SXSW. Lots of new ideas and new apps with no potential customers identified. The behavior seems to be driven by developers creating startups, and getting caught up with the glamour of turning an idea in to an app without a business plan in place.

The hole I see is the role that product marketing fills. At its heart product marketing helps determine whether an idea is worth bothering with. Perhaps I should rephrase that. I believe there is tremendous value in simply going through the exercise of turning an idea in to something. But one key piece is ensuring that something can actually be a viable business. Product marketing helps to fill the gaps between technology and a market need. An idea or technology only has as much value as the problem it solves and it's difficult to measure the size of a problem until you can identify who experiences it. In short you need to know what customers you're going after along with how you will help them.

Here's a very simple example of a world without product marketing.

This makes no sense to most people…

• 2L Storage shelf on door
  
• Adjustable Door Bin
  
• Adjustable Rollers
  
• Auto defrost
  
• 329 kWh/Year Energuide rating
  
• Reversible door swing
  
• Slide-out shelf design
  

This does make sense…

• A small refrigerator to keep your beer cold.
  

The impression I got from the article was that lots of these startups are simply trying to sell 329 kWh boxes without figuring out if there is a demand for cold beer first.

And that's why you need product marketing. Or that's why I have a job anyway…