Two Peoples Divided by a Common Language
No… not Britain and the US; IT and Business. How long have we been talking about the need for Business and IT alignment? Certainly since the day I joined Burroughs in 1984, when the then state of the art 4th Generation Languages used by a breed of business analysts and programmers, offered the potential to bridge the understanding gap between Business and IT.
Somewhere along the line however, we kept tripping up. Now a combination of Enterprise Architecture and IT Service Management tools seems to be laying claim to the Business and IT alignment crown.
Spend some time getting under the bonnet and there seems to be some genuine grounds for optimism about the capabilities of the tools. But there is a problem; most CEOs and CFOs would lose the will to live before they got beyond the first paragraph of most of the marketing blurb. Those that make it to the second paragraph will then get bogged down with words they thought they understood but which now seem to take on a different meaning in an increasingly IT centric taxonomy. Their suspicion will be that these are just rather expensive tools for fixing IT processes, and business benefit, if they can see it all, seems a long way off.
Until we in the IT industry can learn to link what we do back to the issues that are top of mind round the Boardroom table and articulate it engagingly and consistently, words like process, service, enterprise and architecture…simple words to be sure…will mean different things to the two sides.
How can we make marketing more relevant?
“If we believed the marketing spin we would be market leaders by now…It’s just marketing b#!!#£ks really…I don’t know what you mean by proposition.”
Three different comments from three different companies brought it home to me this week how little marketing is understood or valued these days.
As Dave Packard, one of the co-founders of HP said, “Marketing is too important to be left only to the marketing department.” If we are going to get marketing the influence and recognition it deserves we need to demonstrate its crucial value to the companies we serve or work in.
The key is in making marketing the essential connection between the customer and three important parts of any business; products, customer service and finance. Marketing is and should be the owner of the ‘outside-in’ view of the organisation.
- If you can acquire and demonstrate knowledge and skills that help R&D develop new products based on customer input, marketing’s value to the organisation will grow.
- If you can acquire and demonstrate knowledge and skills that show how the design and execution of customer service functions drive improved customer satisfaction, marketing’s value to the organisation will grow.
- If you can acquire and demonstrate knowledge and skills to show the CFO the relationship between the customer and financial outcomes, marketing’s value to the organisation will grow.
If you wait for R&D or product management to deliver you the latest greatest gadget produced behind closed doors; if you let service delivery reduce operational costs without thinking about the impact on customer satisfaction; if you allow finance to see you as simply a cost, marketing WILL be reduced to a bunch of spin merchants pumping out more of that marketing b#!!#£ks, and the organisation will not be as successful as it could be.
Come to think about, maybe HP could have taken more notice of what their co-founder said when they tried to launch their WebOS Tablet last year. ’nuff said!
Have a great weekend.
It’s Friday and I am compelled…to do nothing!
Let’s face it, we do tend to put off making decisions until it is absolutely necessary. In a business sense this often translates into only making a decision when the implications of doing nothing are so painful that something has to be done to ease the pain.
Marketeers know that they have to identify the compelling reasons to buy at all, and from you specifically. Yet over and over again I see propositions that everyone accepts are valid and valuable, but where there seems to be no traction beyond the early sales meetings.
Sometimes the compelling reason to buy has simply not been articulated, but on other occasions it has been done at too high a level. I blame the marketing gurus for talking about gaining competitive advantage or improving productivity. In reality the compelling reasons to buy are
- More specific
- More personal
A merger between 2 banks with different systems creates a compelling need to create a single view of the customer. The outbreak of ‘mad-cow’ disease created a compelling need to be able to track the movement of cattle.
A new sales director faced with continuous periods of below target performance has a compelling need to increase sales and protect his job. An IT director whose department has failed a statutory data privacy investigation has a critical need to get his or her information governance procedures under control.
So, when building your go-to-market propositions, don’t forget that “do nothing” is your biggest competitor, and spend some time understanding the specific and personal compelling reasons to buy.
After a hard week’s work I have a compelling need for a drink.
Enjoy the weekend.
Company Websites – The Triumph of Hope over Experience
A number of surveys like this one from TechTarget http://www.techtarget.com/assets/UK_ResearchProjectReport.pdf show that IT buyers get a lot of the information they are looking for in the early part of the buying cycle direct from vendors websites.
All I can say is…”Good luck”. Vendors, aware of the statistics are putting more and more effort into their websites but in many cases all we see is a variation of Owen Ashby’s comments on the work of many creative marketing agencies http://owenashby.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/lipstick-on-your-pig-sir/
The gap between the words on the website and the actual deliverable for the customer can be huge. This isn’t necessarily conscious deception, simply a profound lack of understanding about what constitutes the “whole product” (or service, or solution , or offer…don’t start me!!) that the customer needs.
All I can say is that there an awful lot of serene looking vendor swans out there.
Happy paddling.
What I learned in 2011…We need 4 new “P’s” of Marketing.
How will history view 2011? An important pivotal moment in time?…Quite possibly. Close in, the business and technology world certainly seemed to be at a cross roads, but I have no intention of revisiting the issues here; plenty of others have done that. For me, two years out of corporate life trying to make my own way in the deepest recession since the 1930s, 2011 has provided me with more new learnings than the previous 10 years put together.
I’ve seen at first hand companies, mostly in the IT space, winning and losing, and I’ve seen my own business position improve dramatically. The shock of new technologies, new business models and new ideas, wrapped up in a savage recession have somewhat blinded us to the fact that “old truths” are just that …true!
Look more closely at the success of both the new and the established and you will spot old truths being applied brilliantly. I have seen enough failures of old established companies and new brilliant ideas to know that those truths weren’t being applied. So in the spirit of taking some old truths and putting them in a new light here is my take on the traditional 4Ps of Marketing for 2012.
Pinpoint the ideal customers for your product/service/proposition. Trust me; just because there seems to be a big market for something doesn’t mean you can dominate it. Don’t kid yourself that everyone can, or needs to, take your offering. This is a course that will surely drive you onto the rocks of unwieldy, unprofitable propositions that ultimately fail to sell in any significant numbers.
Pull your customers to you with valuable content, actionable insights and great relationships. They will come, and they will stay. If you are still pushing product messages and spamming your customers you will fail.
Positive thoughts, a positive demeanour and positive actions will drive success. If you act like Marvin the Paranoid Android be sure the things you fear will happen. There is enough doom and gloom out there. People react so much better to positivism. Who wants to buy from the eternal pessimist?
Patience, or maybe Perseverance, is a virtue. In our desire for instant gratification, rapid results, overnight success etc.we generally kid ourselves that world domination for our offering is but a month or a quarter away. The reality is different. In IT there is a saying that all new technologies take twice as long to reach the mainstream as people thought, but then their impact is twice as great. Gartner talked about Consumerisation of IT in 2005. I was getting roundly abused for my views on Consumerisation in the company I worked for in 2007. In 2012 those people who had the patience to stick with Consumerisation offerings look like they will have a great year. This applies far more widely. I thought I would be successful in my first year out of corporate life; it took me two.
Do the first 3 Ps well, then be patient and persevere. Success will come.
Have a great 2012!!
One of marketing’s key roles is to make it easy for the customer to buy from you, which is why I was amused at the story my wife told me this morning about her experience in Tesco. Now you may not be very interested in fabric conditioner, but try getting your head around this:
You are faced with 3 sizes of fabric conditioner, all of which are on some sort of offer. You have to work out which one represents the best value …
1) Lenor 750ml, Normally £1.79 now on offer for £1…
2) Lenor 1.5ltr… £3.37 …. Buy 2 for £5 …
3) Lenor half price offer…was £6 now £3 for 2 litres….
Which to buy?
So, now you have done the maths you can see what is the best value…Lenor 1 =£1.34/litre……..Lenor 2= £1.66/litre……Lenor 3=£1.50/litre. How many of you would automatically have assumed that the biggest size with the half price deal was the cheapest?
Question is…how many shoppers can work this out…probably not important to many on a mad trolley dash …but how often are these offers displayed throughout supermarkets, confusing the life out of ordinary shoppers on everything from toilet roll to bread to cat food? And don’t even start me on gas and electricity tariffs!
Never mind the current mantra…”get a degree and earn more”…teach the basics in school and you’ll save a small fortune over the years by beating the “giants” at their own game. Marketing will then have to get back to one of their core, but long forgotten tasks…developing genuinely compelling and differentiated propositions rather than trying to confuse and stitch up their customers
Forgot to mention…it was even cheaper as she had a 50p off coupon…..but we wont go there!
