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...

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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…

I love, therefore I buy...

I have a friend who happens to own and run the largest privately owned hardware store back where I’m from.  Granted it’s a family business that was started by his father.  But by most accounts he’s managed to not only maintain the business but grow it as well.  He’s done all this in the face of the Home Depot, Loews and a world of competition that his dad never had to deal with.

He also happens to be the first person in his family to ever graduate from university.  He’ll tell you that all the book smarts he picked up about business and management strategies combined with all the hard work put in by the family is the secret to the success.  No doubt those are huge factors, but I think there’s something else at play.

For some bizarre reason his favourite artist has always been Madonna.  Always has been always will be.   In our younger years, when out on the town.  When Madonna came over the sound system.  Watch out!  My buddy would spread his arms as though he had wings and would spin around like a helicopter on the dance floor.  If only more camera phones existed back then...

This gregariousness and larger than life personality carries over to all aspects of life.  He’s the guy that nobody has anything bad to say about.  In fact, he’s the face of the hardware store which markets itself as a place where the staff will remember you and where you’ll get a level of customer service that you simply can’t put a price on.

Contrast that with who he competes against, big boxes.  Faceless corporations, the type of businesses that Michael Moore makes documentaries about.

That disparity between the culture of small business and the culture of big business is something that as marketers I think we can all help to improve.

Social media and a renewed focus on the experience provided to customers across all channels at its core are humanizing the world of business.  Consumers don’t want to be looked at as sources of revenue on a pie chart.  Consumers want to be a part of a community, and they want to know the people behind the businesses and be a part of an active dialog on how to improve them.  This is grounded in not only psychology but biology.  We’re a tribal species, and I think that business is really on the cusp of an era of understanding this again.

That’s why as long as Madonna still sells albums; my friend will be ok…

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…

Marketing and the lost art of storytelling

My commute home is a great time for my mind wander to wander.  There isn’t much else to do while stuck in the sea of cars headed home.  Last night while my mind was wandering one of my favourite songs came on the radio - Hurt by Nine Inch Nails.  The song is a bit of a downer, but it gave me a chance to reflect on my younger days, and made me realize there may be a lesson in marketing hidden inside those memories.

One of my favourite albums ever is the one that the song comes from - The Downward Spiral.  I enjoy it immensely both for the music itself, but also for what it taught me about the art of storytelling.  There was a time when as a young music listener, I’d simply take the individual songs that I enjoyed the most and put them on repeat.  The Downward Spiral forced me to break that habit.  All 14 songs created a story arc, within which Trent Reznor took a listener through a multi-layered journey of a person trying to uncover all the layers of emotions that affect him and his mental well-being.

Very deep stuff; But it taught me that an album could be more than just a collection of individual songs.  The songs themselves can be written to speak to a common theme, and be structured in a way to take a listener through a much longer story arc, with defined acts that touch on various emotions at different points in the plot.

Without question content marketing and inbound marketing are the hottest topics in marketing circles today.  Armies of professionals seem to be pumping out great content components each and every day - Infographics, videos, blogs, eBooks, you name it.  In this community however, the lesson on storytelling that Trent taught me years ago is relevant again.

Every piece of content should tie back to a common theme.  Every piece of content is an opportunity to reinforce your core value proposition and positioning.  For products that require longer sales cycles this is particularly important.  In those cases, each piece of content should map to a particular stage in a longer customer education process.

Content and storytelling both need a defined arc, and plot. 

Without that, you’re just picking your favourite part and putting it on repeat…

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...

Get off my lawn – The new rules of marketing

I am old.  It’s official, I don’t understand music today.  When I turn on the music video channel or listen to the radio, I hear myself saying the same things my father used to say.  Then I saw this.

“There’s nothing quite like the feeling, when you’re listening to a song, written by someone you don’t know, who you’ve never met, who somehow manages to describe exactly how you felt at a particular moment in your life…”

What a wonderful introduction to a modern hit that I actually like.  I was thinking about this quote in the context of what I do for a living.  I’m a marketer.  As a marketer perhaps I should aspire to something greater.

Traditional marketing was about interruption.  Interrupting your favorite TV shows, interrupting the newspaper articles, interrupting the landscape you see on your commute to work.  Surveys will say that people hate marketing.  Marketing interrupts your day and yells at you.  Marketing tries to sell you things that you don’t need.

As long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated with technology, and fascinated by what it can do.  I believe that innovation in technology can make people’s lives better.  Even something as frivolous as social media has proven this year, that it can transcend simply being just a medium to distribute lolcatz images.  That new channel for communication showed that it could be a catalyst for revolution and real change.  That’s pretty amazing if you think about it. 

I think perhaps the new marketing can be about that.  It can be about teaching the world the value of new innovation.  Teaching the world about how tomorrow will be a better place and the role technology can play in paving that road.  Maybe the new marketing can be like this song by Adele and deliver messages that resonate with people beyond a catchphrase and help them understand how something simple might just make the world a bit better…