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.

Even delicious beverages need product management!

I came across this great video today.  In it Dr. Jim Anderson discusses how product managers at Coke keep track of their 450(!) Different brands of products.

I find it refreshing to learn about how companies outside my own domain (enterprise software in my case) tackle various issues.  At the end of the day there are many universal truths to running a business, no matter what markets you play in.  Seeing how an organization like Coke (who sells delicious beverages rather than enterprise software) tackle some of the universal challenges of product management helps me to spur some new thinking, and get myself unstuck from the occasional ruts I find myself in.

This behavior oddly tends to be particularly prevalent in the summer months J

Enjoy…

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…

We hate our customers...

There I said it.  Nobody would ever use that as a marketing tagline (Though maybe if I wanted in some fashion to prove how big my umm balls were I’d try it) but this is the impression a lot of vendors give off.

Take my own consumer experience.  I recently completed an arduous 7 month journey.  It was a quest I had to undertake to get a $42 credit refunded to me by one of the Canadian telco providers.  It seemed like such a simple scenario.  I was leaving the service because of moving to an area their service didn’t cover, as a result I was entitled to a small credit since I had prepaid for the next month.  The process to get that check in the mail however was not so simple.

The funny thing is they kept sending me notifications letting me know that I was entitled to the refund credit, without ever sending the check.  And so began a weekly calling routine to see if I could finally find a customer service agent who could print and send an actual refund check.  Some said I simply had to wait for their systems to kick in, some said they could find no record of said refund in the system, others tried to escalate to management, and finally one day, someone was able to confirm a check was sent along with a tracking number.  Huzzah, I got $42.

While I was actually subscribed to the service I was actually quite happy.  But the customer service experience I had when leaving has made sure I will never go back.

I have a product manager friend with whom I often to talk to about how many organizations forget that the most important part of a product is the user experience AFTER a purchase has been made.  This includes everything from the experience of using the product itself through the experience of dealing with the support when something goes wrong.  Really good sales people (but sadly not all salespeople) know this as well.  For them the most important part of the sales cycle isn’t when a customer sends in a purchase order.  Rather it’s when they send in ANOTHER purchase order.

Where can marketing fit in here?

I think marketing and content in particular can be a great way to keep in touch with customers throughout their user lifecycle. 


In my experience many customers never take full advantage of all the capabilities of software solutions.  More depth of knowledge around the capabilities of a solution and more importantly perhaps more depth of knowledge about the problems they can solve to begin with can be tremendously valuable to end users.  Not only can it better position your end users as subject matter experts (and maybe even position them for a promotion) but for vendors it can ensure your products get better ingrained into business processes.

Had that telco provider kept better in touch with me through the lifecycle of my contract maybe I could have given them feedback as to why exactly I was happy with their service.  Maybe I’d have more patience with them at that point when it came to my refund.  Or heck maybe that way they’d have more notice ahead of time that I was moving to a region they didn’t cover and thus could have had my refund ready.

Sigh…

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…

Look what I've got up my sleeve...

I probably spent about 82% of my teenage years playing the guitar; most of that time was practice, some of it playing gigs, and some of it jamming with whoever I could find to jam with.  At one point I actually got pretty good at it.  But that didn’t happen until I learned an important lesson about what being a good guitar player actually meant.

Early on my dad taught me how to play some basic chords and scales, then I bought myself few song books and I was off to the races.  Once I had some finger strength I proceeded to spend about a year and a half learning how to play every song off of Metallica – Kill Em All, and Eruption by Eddie Van Halen.

At that point I was quite proud of myself, and I thought I was pretty good.  I could play accurately, and I could play really fast – really fast.  Then one day I was jamming with some folks in the area and an older guy who was a one of the best musicians I’ve ever played with told me something quite profound.  “All those things that you do, the pinch harmonics, the finger tapping, all the effects, forget about them, those are just tricks… focus on the notes you’re playing and how they feel”. 

He was right, I was hiding the music with all the tricks I learned early on, and since I was so skilled at scattering my music with those tricks they were both obscuring the notes, and they were holding me back from really becoming a good guitarist.  So from that point on I tried to focus on how the notes felt, instead of how many I could play at a time.

Today I see a similar thing happening with social media.  Everyone seems to be creating Twitter scavenger hunts, or a social media raffles that send users on some web based goose chases.  In today’s marketing’s quest to turn every campaign viral, and get the type of groundswell buzz that folks like JJ Abrams often get they are repeating the mistake that I made as a young guitarist.  They are letting all these tricks obscure the value of the social channel.

Social at its core allows customers an unprecedented level and speed of communication with vendors.  In short social media channels such as Twitter, allow you to have a direct conversation without the gatekeepers that usually exist in a customer/vendor relationship.  Plus in the case of Twitter, the message limitations actually force both parties to get to the point much faster. 

So for the time being, why don’t we all set aside the social media tricks for a minute (unless of course you actually ARE JJ Abrams) and focus on the conversation…

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.