Author Archive for Francis Moran

Marketing: Steady as she goes

Vourekas Captain on his ship LC G39 5673 007... painting artwork print 212x300 Marketing: Steady as she goesBy Francis Moran

If there’s one thing more difficult than persuading technology company executives they need a well-researched, well-funded, coherent and integrated marketing strategy, it’s persuading them to stick to that strategy.

Now, I’m not saying that course corrections aren’t in order as market winds buffet and blow. But in the main, once a strategy has been properly developed, persistent and steady adherence to the objectives, messaging and tactics it sets out is essential if the company is to arrive at its desired destination — more leads, higher sales and improved revenue and profit.

When I first came to Ottawa more than 20 years ago, the best part of my practice was researching and developing comprehensive integrated communications strategies for large national federal-government programs. I relished the intellectual and professional challenge of coming to grips with the audiences, issues and messages, and then solving what was often a millions-of-dollars puzzle crafting the right mix of communications programming within an established budget that would support the government’s objectives on a major public policy initiative. Then, the program would go into implementation and all hell would break loose. I did not work on a single program where the strategy was faithfully followed. A multi-million-dollar government communications program could be thrown entirely off course by a single afternoon’s Question Period, or by a minister or powerful political aide simply saying, “I think we should do this.” All the research, objective rationale and programming could go flying out the window on little more than a whim. No wonder I don’t toil in those fields any longer.

Even without the political and public-policy vicissitudes of government communications, however, technology company executives are still prone to what my wife and fellow marketing strategist calls “shiny object syndrome,” that tendency of attention-challenged individuals to be frequently distracted by the latest new thing they’ve read or heard about. The tendency also expresses itself in their inability to resist recommending random changes to campaign ideas and copy. And it is typified by those early-morning conversations we’ve all had with clients and bosses that start with that dreaded phrase, “I had an idea last night…”

So how do marketing executives, who are the navigators on these ships of commerce and venture, keep their captains steering the wise and sensible course that was mapped out before we ever left port? It ain’t easy, but here are a few key pointers.

Make sure the map is a good one from the outset

This sounds obvious, but it often isn’t so. If your client or CEO can’t see how the strategy you have developed is actually going to accomplish the sales and revenue objectives that have been set for the company, she or he is going to be reluctant to sail where you want the ship to go. A good map makes it clear that you understand where the company needs to go and how your marketing objectives support the broader corporate objectives. Most critically, it makes it clear, through objective business-case rational and not with mushy marketing doublespeak, that what you propose is going to accomplish what you say it will.

Make sure there are clear signposts along the way

It takes a long time to sail across an ocean and it takes a long time to charter a company from product development through to customers and revenue. Just as sailors will lose all hope and stage a mutiny if they can’t be certain they are going to make landfall before provisions run out, so, too, will your client lose faith if there aren’t clear indications that you’re sailing in the right direction and making good progress in exchange for the resources you’ve been given. While leads and revenue are the ultimate yardsticks of progress, your strategy needs to incorporate intermediate milestones that will demonstrate to your captain that everything is still on the right track. At the outset, these yardsticks measure nothing more than activity levels, which at least reassures executives that the right level of effort is being expended. At some early point, however, progress needs to be measured in other areas. Is web traffic up? Are we meeting with greater numbers of prospects at trade shows and events? Are the media paying attention to our story? Is our social media community growing and are we engaging with it? Keep hitting the intermediate milestones your strategy established and your captain and crew will continue to have faith in your navigational skills.

Stick to the plan, certainly, but maintain some flexibility

What happens if market forces blow you off course or an economic downturn leaves you marooned in the doldrums? How are you going to get back on course and regain momentum? A good navigator can read the signs and course correct as necessary, and the same holds true for marketing strategists. The early-warning systems I talked about in the previous point will tell you, before anyone else cops on, that things are or are not working out as you expected them to. You need to be incredibly well-tuned to such signs as well as to intelligence coming in from your salesforce and from other sources of good market information, and be able to suggest refinements and new tactics that will keep your program on course.

Don’t hesitate to monger a little fear

Sailing into previously uncharted waters is something we ask our clients and CEOs to do all the time when we propose new ways of doing things that the company hasn’t tried before. Before we propose such a course, though, we still need to have a persuasive case that it’s the right thing to do. That’s a whole lot different from making a random tack in an unknown direction, which is effectively what we’re being asked to consider when executives who lack marketing savvy suggest, “Let’s try this.” In such an instance, if there is no rational for such a move, or if it defies and works against the strategy that has been developed and agreed upon, don’t hesitate to ring an alarm bell. Redraw the map for everyone. Remind them where we’re trying to go and how this map will get us there. And warn them that going elsewhere on a whim or a fancy is dangerous. In the words of mapmakers of old, “There be demons.”

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Posted by: Francis Moran on November 3, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Technology marketing — Leave a comment

When a product fails miserably, why is the customer blamed?

By Francis MoranBlame When a product fails miserably, why is the customer blamed?

When a product fails miserably in the marketplace, why is the customer blamed for not wanting to buy it?

Hang on, you say; that doesn’t happen, does it? Well, it did, and in spades, just last week.

Three well-established brands competed openly for the custom of a large pool of potential buyers. Their marketing campaigns used every media format available — television, radio, billboards and other outdoor, print, social media, telemarketing, direct mail, media relations, events and much, much more. Key spokespersons and local brand representatives travelled constantly throughout the marketplace bringing brand messaging directly to potential buyers. There has never been, perhaps, a more intensive, expensive and well-coordinated an effort to woo customers than was exhibited by these three brands.

And yet, not one of these brands was able to command more than a parsimonious 18 percent total market share. The majority of the customers who were targeted declined to buy from any of them at all. And many of those who did buy did so only with the greatest of reluctance. In fact, it was the least successful campaign ever in the history of this particular industry.

Now, you’d think that any rational analysis of this situation would lay the blame entirely at the door of the brands who failed to build and market a product that appealed to their target customers.

You’d be wrong.

It was astonishing how much of the criticism in the wake of this extraordinary marketing failure was targeted at the customer, with editorial analysts, radio talkshow hosts and my own Twitter stream filled with comments that suggested customers were somehow to blame for not buying what was on offer.

I am talking, of course, about last week’s Ontario general election, where voter turnout dipped below the 50 percent mark for the first time in history and Premier Dalton McGuinty was returned to office, albeit with a minority, having persuaded barely 18 percent of eligible voters to buy his product.

I am a committed democrat who has voted in every election — federal, provincial and municipal — available to me since I first gained the right to do so more than 30 years ago. I do believe citizens have a duty to involve themselves in the democratic process and to exercise a franchise that has been extraordinarily hard won over the span of history and that is not freely available to most of our fellow inhabitants on this planet. As such, I understand the sentiment that most people expressed the following morning: That Ontario voters were to blame for what was characterised in my Twitter stream as a “shameful” and “abysmal” turnout.

As a marketer, though, I cannot lay the blame for such a diminished voter turnout on the voters any more than I would blame a customer for failing to buy a product that was insipid and uninspiring to begin with and that was marketed largely through a mix of patently unsupported claims about its own merits and vicious and largely irrelevant attacks on the merits of the competitors’ products.

Peter Hanschke, our associate who specializes in product management and the development of minimum viable products, would have a field day dismantling the product that any of the three major parties in Ontario put before the electorate and the processes they used to do so. In building their platforms, they violated practically every tenet of good product development.

Then they took their woefully inadequate products and attempted to sell them to a sceptical and weary marketplace by masking over product deficiencies, substituting the personality of the brand pitch men and women for the product itself, and excoriating the competitors for their similarly lousy products.

The outcome was inevitable. Ontario’s election campaign was not a failure of democracy. It was a failure of the three political parties to grasp even the most basic fundamentals of building and bringing a product to market.

Image: Weighty Matters

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Posted by: Francis Moran on October 13, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Product marketing, Random thoughts — 1 Comment

Achieving marketing escape velocity

launch 300x223 Achieving marketing escape velocityBy Francis Moran

It was with a mixture of delight and trepidation that I learned a few months back of technology visionary Geoffrey Moore’s new book, Escape Velocity. You see, I’ve been using the phrase for years to describe what I think is a critical requirement in the marketing of new technology — the harnessing of sufficient resources to escape the pull of existing conditions and catapult a product or company into new revenue territory. So my delight lay in having someone like Moore use the same metaphor; my trepidation was that maybe he was using it in the same way. No cause for worry; Moore applies the metaphor in a far more comprehensive, considered and well researched analysis of what companies must do to escape the pull of their past activities so they can better address the challenges of finding new opportunities.

I may use the metaphor in a far narrower context but it remains valid nonetheless. Let me explain.

Far too often, I have seen technology executives resist making the kind of intensive investment that marketing really requires. They tell me they prefer to go slow, to gradually ramp up marketing activities. Or, even worse, as I’ve written about before, they tell me they’ll increase their spend on marketing just as soon as they have revenue-paying customers, an approach I liken to a driver ridiculously thinking he can fill his gas tank after he arrives at his destination. They can’t afford the programs I tell them they need to implement, they say, so they dribble out marketing dollars in a way that’s doomed to fail.

Here’s the thing. Most technology companies face two daunting requirements when bringing a new product to market. The first is that to succeed, they probably have to persuade their target users to change the way they do things. And, as I wrote in my very first post when we re-launched this blog earlier this year, changing human behaviour is devilishly difficult. The second is that they probably have a very narrow and rapidly closing window of market opportunity that will slam shut as soon as the next innovation leapfrogs over them. These two factors put a huge premium on marshalling the right marketing resources at a sufficient level of intensity to get the job done. I call it achieving marketing escape velocity.

Escape velocity is an engineering term for the speed that an object in flight must achieve to overcome the gravitational pull of a larger object. In its most common usage, it’s the speed a rocket headed into earth orbit or beyond must achieve to overcome the pull of earth’s own gravity. In my admittedly tortured use of the metaphor, products are developed down here on earth while customers and revenue live in orbit. And, just like a space ship requires massive booster rockets to escape the gravitational pull of earth, so, too, a company needs to make a sharp, intensive investment in marketing to get its products in front of customers.

Companies fear making that investment. What if it doesn’t work, they ask? I understand that fear. There is no guarantee that even if they do what seems to be required they will achieve marketing success. Rocket ships have been known to explode on the launch pad or to otherwise fail to achieve orbit despite having a properly engineered launch strategy. What I do know is that the alternative, dribbling out marketing dollars in a way that makes no impact on the marketplace and builds no momentum, is doomed to fail. The tragedy is that in the end, many companies end up spending the same amount of money; they just never achieve marketing escape velocity.

And the kicker? Just as a spaceship requires far less energy to maintain orbit, a company requires far less effort to sustain a market’s attention having once engaged it.

What have you done to achieve marketing escape velocity, to get your product off the launch pad into orbit around your customers?

Image: Netpaths

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Posted by: Francis Moran on October 6, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Startups, Technology marketing — 1 Comment

Is public relations in the public interest?

audience 300x182 Is public relations in the public interest?By Francis Moran

My valued colleague, and an associate here at Francis Moran and Associates, Caroline Kealey, drew my attention yesterday morning to a Twitter disagreement she is having with McMaster University’s Dr. Terry Flynn, an assistant professor and interim director of the Master of Communications degree program in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia. Flynn and a colleague have developed what they say is the first Canadian definition of Public relations. According to them:

Strategic public relations is the strategic management of relationships between an organization and its diverse publics, through the use of communication, to achieve mutual understanding, realize organizational goals, and serve the public interest.

Caroline doesn’t quibble with much of this but does question the last bit that says public relations is supposed to serve the public interest.

“I can’t believe it makes any sense to state that PR is by definition in the public interest,” she wrote in an email to me yesterday morning. (It was Caroline herself who suggested I had the makings of a blog post here so I am quoting her with permission.) For example, she said, how can PR efforts on behalf of the tobacco lobby or a gun manufacturer be in the public interest?

“My view is that certainly, the mandate of public relations should be in the public interest,” Caroline wrote. “My quibble is with the notion of public interest being intrinsic to the core definition of the function.” In fact, Caroline was of the view that “the effort to inject ‘public interest’ in the definition of PR itself smells of doing PR on the PR function which I think does more to muddy than to clarify the nature of the discipline, which is already subject to significant confusion.”

I’ve worked with Caroline on a number of projects and a big part of our interest in working together is that we agree on many things when it comes to the practice of communications and public relations. But I think I part ways with her on this.

My view has always been that public relations practitioners are advocates in the court of public opinion. And so, even when our clients are undesirable, they still deserve vigorous representation. Insofar as the advocate is not conflated as the client — which, I concede, is not usually the case — and insofar as the advocate herself or himself operates ethically — which, again, does not always happen — then the representation even of the tobacco industry serves the public interest.

By way of comparison, consider a local lawyer I know, a paragon of the Ottawa defence bar. He clearly relishes the rare experience when he has an innocent client to defend, and often goes to considerable and creative lengths to satisfy himself that his client is, indeed, innocent and truthful. The diligence of his efforts, however, are diminished not one whit when he believes his client to be guilty, and the guilty client gets the same rigorous defence as the innocent one. My lawyer friend could never be accused of acting in anything but the public interest so long as his personal behaviour is ethical and above reproach.

I believe the same ought to apply to PR practitioners. I believe that if we were seen as offering the same public interest service as lawyers do, even when our clients are “guilty,” so to speak, our profession would be held in higher esteem. To that degree, I don’t mind if the “public interest” bit of Dr. Flynn’s definition is “PR for the PR function.” Quite frankly, the PR function can use all the PR it can get. As can the legal profession.

What do you think?

Photo: JH5

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Posted by: Francis Moran on September 30, 2011

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Posted in: Public and media relations — 6 Comments

Are trade shows the zombies of marketing?

By Francis Moran

zombie 199x300 Are trade shows the zombies of marketing?Following so soon after a recent post that declared, “Your customers aren’t werewolves; stop looking for a marketing silver bullet,” today’s title might suggest that I am stranded in a double feature at the marketing equivalent of a b-movie drive-in. Not exactly, but I was at a trade show last week that had me wondering whether trade shows aren’t marketing’s undead, soulless ghouls that suck the life out of budgets and contaminate sales funnels with lousy leads.

It was the third trade show I attended on behalf of various clients this year. The first one, in January, was that orgy of geeks and gadgets called the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was followed closely by the National Retail Federation’s very serious Big Show in New York. These two shows may well be chalk and cheese compared one to the other, but if either is a zombie, someone forgot to tell them how to behave. Both were packed with industry experts, thousands of exhibitors, huge international delegations and masses of clearly alive and lively attendees. No George A. Romero production here.

I wish that it were so at the Oil Sands Trade Show in Fort Mcmurray, Alberta last week. Notwithstanding that this is one of the largest Canadian industry events for what is one of the few genuinely burgeoning sectors of our economy today, there were lengthy periods when large-bore artillery could have been fired down the trade show aisles with little danger of hitting anything that even remotely resembled a likely prospect. Attendees were as badly outnumbered by exhibitors as that plucky band of survivors is by the undead horde in the third act of every good zombie flick.

Like every good zombie flick, though, we had a few good weapons that, in the end, saved the day for us and allowed us to escape into the credits, ready to do battle another day. Whether the shows you find yourself at are living, breathing heros that consistently deliver the goods, or half-dead corpses unable to put themselves out of their own misery, here is a selection of bludgeons, axes and cudgels that will serve you well.

1. Arm yourself beforehand: Know what to expect and what you want to achieve

My client knew going in that this show was not going to be thick with prospects, and nor did it have to be. We need to close only a handful of deals over the next 12 months and, at this stage, gaining five or six new leads from a show like this would be a good thing. We also thought the show would be a good orientation for the three out of the four of us who had never even been to Fort Mcmurray before. We came home with 12 good leads and we three oil-sands newbies had the chance to get a much better handle on the ecosystem into which this client sells its products.

2. Consider leaving the collateral at home

I know it’s a trade show staple and for some, what I am suggesting is just crazy talk. But consider not having anything more elaborate than your business card to hand out. Let’s be honest: Most trade show collateral ends up being collected by the hotel maids as they clean out delegates’ rooms in the wake of the show, making it all about as useful as a popgun against the zombie horde. It’s a prime example of what I call “lazy marketing” that sees us focus more on activities than results. And if we can’t lean on that crutch, we just might have to start doing something far more useful, like actually engaging prospects and exploring with them whether there is any actual basis for us to do business together. In short, we just might have to talk to them.

In the case of the show last week, we had no collateral. Well, that’s not strictly true. My client drove up with his SUV trunk stuffed with brochures, CDs and other standard material. However, we were kind of re-launching this company at this show; new positioning and messaging have been worked out over the past three months since I was engaged as virtual CMO. Timelines have not allowed us to produce any new material yet and the stuff my client had with him was all old messaging and old logo, stuff he had already determined did a poor job of positioning our real value proposition. So although his instinct to bring the stuff was automatic, it didn’t take much to persuade him that it would slow us down worse than the blonde ingenue who gets bitten in the opening act; better to dispatch it with mercy now than to drag it through another scene or two until its inevitable and horrible demise.

And here’s the thing: Nobody noticed it was missing. The tyre-kickers came and went without the comforting sop of being handed a brochure they were never going to read or a CD they were never going to watch. The real prospects stopped and talked, and we learned all we needed to about whether they actually have the sorts of pain our product relieves. Okay, there weren’t very many of them. Which brings me to my next point.

3. Don’t wait for the hordes to descend. Go hunting

We all know that if you’re trying to survive the zombie apocalypse, the last thing you want to do is hunker down in that old farmhouse. It might look like safe shelter but before you know it, the undead are breaking through the walls and it’s game over for your little band of humans.

Same with a zombie trade show. Don’t wait for prospects to come and find you; go and find them. Just as the hero of our flick ventures went bravely out to find and rescue his family, love interest, dog or all three, so, too, you must go in search of every living, breathing real prospect that might be at the show.

In our case last week, we knew going in that many of the exhibitors would be potential customers. Rather than wait for them to find us, we sought them out. We had lots of interesting, informative and educational conversations, and enough useful ones to more than double our target for new leads.

4. Wear comfortable shoes and drink lots of water

Okay, these two are lessons that apply to most things in life. But they’re also good counsel in case of zombie attack and in case you find yourself at a trade show that’s only mimicking real human behaviour.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on September 22, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Technology marketing — Leave a comment

‘My PR agency can’t write’

This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from October, 2008. We welcome your feedback.

Fotolia 27389812 XS 300x2001 My PR agency cant writeBy Francis Moran

“I’ve just come to expect that my (public relations) agency can’t write,” was the astonishing admission I heard a few weeks back from a vice president at one of Ottawa’s larger technology companies who called us to see if we’d be interested in participating in an agency review process.

(I’ve promised not to name him (or her) for reasons that will be obvious as you read the rest of this post.)

I could hardly believe my ears. But yes, he said, it had long been his experience that the PR practitioners he had been dealing with from a range of different agencies and across a number of companies just weren’t very good writers, and so it fell to him to write most of the materials used in his campaigns. One of the key reasons he was approaching inmedia, he told me, was our very strong reputation in the marketplace as superb writers, a reputation he said was confirmed when he read our blog and web site.

I chalked this one up to what I assumed was just an unfortunate experience on the part of one technology marketing executive until I relayed the story to a colleague last week, a CEO at another technology company here in Ottawa and an insightful marketer in his own right. I was again utterly gobsmacked when he said he didn’t view writing as a core requirement in the PR function, that the ability to pitch the story was far more important.

“And what do you do,” I asked him, “When the pitch is initially well received and the next words out of the reporter or editor’s mouth are, ‘Sounds good, send me something about it.’?”

Here’s the thing. To work at inmedia and, I believe, to be an effective media relations practitioner anywhere, you must be able to write at an expert level and you must be able to effectively pitch what you’ve written. There is no hierarchy between these two fundamental skills. Lack one, and you’re out of the game.

And here’s why.

To believe, as these two otherwise successful technology marketers clearly do, that writing is either not terribly important or that your PR function, whether internal or an agency, can be permitted to be lousy writers, is to completely beggar the entire communications process.

In the first instance, despite all the wonderful new communications tools at our disposal, most journalists still want to see something in cold, hard black and white, even if it is delivered electronically. And even if they don’t ask for it, it’s just gotta be in your best interests to give them well-written material so they have the complete story, with all the relevant facts and accurate spellings of company, product and people’s names to which they can refer. This is just so basic I’m staggered it needs stating.

Second, how in the heck does a PR practitioner demonstrate her or his understanding of the story without writing about it? Yes, a properly written document proves the communicator can — gasp! — communicate. That is, the words run together in some sort of comprehensible order, everything is spelled correctly and the commas and periods are in the right places. But it still won’t be any good unless the person writing it actually has a thorough grasp of the subject matter.

Effective writing is not a case of cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other documents to make a different document and it needs to be more than a merely technically accurate use of words, grammar and punctuation. Effective writing is the process of distilling what has been learned — from other documents, certainly, but also, and critically, from interviews with a range of subject-matter experts — into a new piece of work. It not only communicates the story to all who read it, it also demonstrates understanding.

Bottom line: If your agency can’t write about it well, they almost certainly can’t pitch it well. And even worse, they probably don’t even understand it well.

So, did we get the business? Well, that’s another story that I cover here: The Ottawa inferiority complex theorem strikes again.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on September 16, 2011

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Posted in: Public and media relations — 3 Comments

Fiction: PR can’t be measured – Take 3

This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from February 2008. We welcome your feedback.

Fotolia 27389812 XS 300x200 Fiction: PR can’t be measured – Take 3By Francis Moran

As part of my continuing series of Francis’s favourite PR fictions, subtitled “Everything I know that’s wrong about PR I learned from technology company executives,” I have written a couple of posts on PR measurement addressing the common myth that straight lines can’t be drawn between a company’s PR efforts and any kind of real evaluative yardstick. I return to the topic today because I am getting some interesting comments on the subject. Clearly, it’s something that people are keen to explore.

Our approach here at inmedia is to measure outputs, outcomes and impact. In my first post, I described what we mean by outputs, which are little more than the critical path, or a list of how much PR stuff the client is buying. While most PR agencies and practitioners will set clear parameters for their outputs, too few are prepared to go any further than that.

We insist that every program go at least one step beyond this minimal evaluation to set, and measure performance against objectives for outcomes, or the amount, nature and content of the media and analyst coverage our efforts are expected to generate. In my more than 20 years as a communications practitioner, I have found distressingly few others who will commit to being held accountable for the actual results of their programs in clear, unambiguous terms that allow the client to make a rational ROI analysis about whether the promised level of media and analyst engagement is worth the cost of the program.

Fortunately, there is a growing and increasingly sophisticated audience of both practitioners and clients insisting on this. Many are deploying simple yardsticks that go well beyond what I call “thud value,” or the noise the clippings book makes when you drop it on the boardroom table in the hopes the client will be impressed by the sheer number of column inches. These yardsticks, which we commonly use, include determining which media outlets and analyst firms are the most influential — we designate them Tier 1 — and then telling the client exactly how well the program is expected to do in terms of percentage of Tier 1 targets engaged, types of stories, the nature of the messaging, numbers of analyst briefings, speaking engagements, and so on.

Many practitioners go well beyond this to provide granular analysis of the actual content of the media coverage. Although few of our B2B technology clients generate the volumes of media coverage that make such a statistical exercise either practical or meaningful, I am a huge advocate of media content analysis as both a strategic research and a program evaluation tool. I will write more about this topic in a future post on PR measurement because it deserves fuller treatment.

My second post described how even measuring outcomes often falls short of meaningful evaluation, especially in cases, admittedly rare but real nonetheless, where there is masses of coverage but no persistent impact on the client’s business objectives.

Which brings me to the final, most critical, hardest to implement and most elusive category of objectives we strive to track, impact. I will present case studies over my next several posts to illustrate how many of these have been used to help our clients calculate a reliable and meaningful ROI on their PR spend, but here is a range of common metrics that can be used to measure the impact a program has on everyday business objectives:

  • Web traffic, measured in hits to a company site, Google mentions, search engine rankings, and so on.
  • Demand creation, or what used to be known as lead generation. I like the newer term because it distinguishes between mere enquiries and actual demand for the product or service.
  • Sales cycle acceleration.
  • Customer interest in the media coverage.
  • Investment secured.
  • Increased sales, revenues and profit. (Now THAT is what we’re really talkin’ about!)

I’d be intrigued to hear from others as to what they think of these metrics, and also to hear about other yardsticks that are used. Subsequent posts will deal with how the data required to deploy these metrics can be gathered, as well as presenting, as mentioned, specific case study examples.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on September 1, 2011

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Posted in: Francis's Favourite Fictions, Public and media relations, inmedia Public Relations — Leave a comment

Getting university IP to market: Levering youthful ambition

This is the 29th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.

FM Series banner headART 1 300x145 Getting university IP to market: Levering youthful ambitionBy Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette

Over the past two weeks, we’ve talked about how Canada falls short when it comes to commercializing university IP and the leadership from the business community that is needed to address the gap. We’ve talked to entrepreneurs and technology transfer officers who straddle the line between the university lab and the marketplace.

But what about the students? How do we inspire and lever our next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs to drive commercialization from the university setting?

“They know the science and technology, they will need a job and so are more likely to be heavily involved in a spin-out company than a tenured faculty member, and are happy and willing to learn the ropes on how something they helped developed in a laboratory can help solve a market or social need,” Scott McAuley wrote in response to our previous posts.

McAuley is the founder of Lunanos Inc., an outreach and entrepreneurship associate at the Institute for Optical Sciences, and a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto.

“Placing highly qualified graduate or undergraduate students into a network of industry professionals creates a powerful combination of market experience, technological expertise, and innovative drive, that can create new opportunities for universities two greatest products: IP and graduates,” he added.

The Institute for Optical Sciences (IOS), under the leadership of director Cynthia Goh, has taken this to heart. Originally a program funded by the Ontario government and part of what is known today as the province’s Centre for Excellence in Photonics, IOS has been operating as part U of T since 2004.

Over the years, IOS has expanded its mandate. In addition to its pure research activities, it also serves as a bridge for technology transfer and commercialization, connecting faculty members and researchers with industry partners and entrepreneurs.

The emphasis is not on trying to turn researchers into entrepreneurs, but instead on seeing their knowledge disseminated to the grad and PhD students with whom they work and providing these students with the opportunity to consider entrepreneurship as a career option in addition to academia or working as an employee in industry.

To help make the leap between student and entrepreneur, U of T’s engineering students can now take a minor in entrepreneurship from the Rotman School of Management. IOS has also partnered with Mitacs on a new Commercialization Post-Doctoral Fellowship, a one-year fellowship that provides funding for recent grads to work with a U of T professor to commercialize a new technology.

But perhaps the most significant initiative IOS has undertaken is Techno, which completed its second program in July.

Techno has the general look and feel of a startup incubator/accelerator program, though it doesn’t take any equity in participating companies. It’s a month-long intensive workshop for aspiring “technopreneurs.” Up to 15 teams, made up of science and engineering graduates and post-docs, current students and faculty supervisors, get a crash course in product development, financial and human resource management, corporate governance, marketing and business development, with plenty of insight along the way from seasoned entrepreneurs who volunteer their time.

The thrust of this post isn’t to plug the IOS and Techno, but instead emphasize the crucial role which any initiative such as this plays in providing students with the perspective, access and encouragement to take the plunge and become an entrepreneur.

Fuelling the spark

For Mallika Das, an IOS-Mitacs commercialization fellow, it was all about getting the encouragement she needed to act. Her venture, Ecoatra Inc., is developing a range of economical and environmental treatments and coatings for the wood protection and agricultural industries.

“I graduated with my PhD three years ago and I guess I was always entrepreneurial but I didn’t really know when I might start my own thing,” she said.

That changed after taking Techno2010. The access it provided to partners, mentors and even government seed financing inspired her to take the leap.

“If you have that spark, programs like Techno fuel it further,” she said.

Calvin Cheng, a graduate of Techno2011, agreed. His venture, Biostring, is developing an integrated and automated device that allows E. Coli testing of public beaches and other water sources to be performed on site within two hours instead of days.

Throughout his undergrad, Cheng assumed he would either be an academic researcher or be employed in private industry. His perspective changed after seeing the experiences of his peers who were part of Techno’s first intake.

“I saw what it means to be an entrepreneur,” he said. “That it’s about solving real world problems. I got interested and realized I could be good at it.”

Being able to take their respective technologies out of the lab and develop a strategy for commercialization provided both Cheng and Das with a deep appreciation for how market need must drive product development for there to be a viable business opportunity.

“It helped me understand the dynamics of making that initial sale,” Cheng said. “To know the difference between the end user who needs the product versus the manager who makes the buying decision.”

“One thing that came through is not to be afraid of failing,” Das said. “I think that risk averse mindset has to change.” For young grads who do not yet have family obligations, she added, “what is the risk really, in not taking a leap to create anything of value? What is the most you can lose?”

How to bridge the gap?

So what are the key ingredients for helping enterprising students become bona fide entrepreneurs?

“It takes a team, it takes a nurturing environment,” said Das. “That is critical … it takes people, like the (team at IOS) who put this on … they have a passion which impacts everyone else.”

McAuley agreed.

“All the conclusions seem to be support networks of people,” he said. “Infrastructure is fantastic, but you need to have that variety of people with different expertise and new ideas.”

Once again, it comes back to the idea of champions – individuals who just get on and get things done. In this context, this obviously requires a meeting of minds between faculty, students and those in industry who know how to build a business, mentors who are willing to share their insight and experience. But as we have discussed before, the typical university culture still has an aversion to anything that smacks of capitalism and profit as a motive.

While Das asserts that universities must continue to serve as hubs of pure research and avoid “becoming servile to industry” there must also be continued collaboration between universities and industry, and “more large scale acceptance of entrepreneurial activities.”

For McAuley, addressing that resistance among both faculty and students comes down to emphasizing the societal benefit rather potential financial gain. There is, after all, an obvious parallel between researchers and entrepreneurs – both are trying to solve problems.

“If you tell people in the sciences their work could impact someone within their lifetime, that what they are creating has the potential to help someone … that is very powerful,” he said.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on August 15, 2011

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Posted in: Commercialization ecosystem, Marketing strategy, Startups, Technology marketing — Leave a comment

Fiction: PR can’t be measured – Take 2

This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from February 2008. We welcome your feedback.

Fotolia 27389812 XS 300x200 Fiction: PR can’t be measured – Take 2By Francis Moran

About a month ago, as part of my continuing series of Francis’s favourite fictions, I tackled the too-widely held myth that public relations can’t be measured. I described how, at inmedia, we establish a critical path, or set of outputs, for every project and ongoing program that allows our clients to certify that we’re exerting the amount of effort we said we would. This, I said, was a good starting point for program measurement, but a woefully inadequate one.

I went on to describe what we call outcomes, a set of clear and unambiguous objectives we set that tell our clients what they should expect by way of actual coverage by our target media and analysts, with more granular objectives established for specific program elements such as news releases, product launches, contributed articles, speaking programs, trade show support and so on. Applying such an approach turns the whole PR value proposition on its ear; instead of a cost centre that should be managed down to its minimum, a client can now view the PR function as an investment centre, and can answer the question, “Are these results, or outcomes, a sufficient return on the investment my PR agency or department is asking me to make?”

In my earlier post, I promised to go even further than this, to approach the holy grail of ROI measurement. What does it matter, I asked, if we achieve the outcomes we projected but the media and analyst coverage hasn’t advanced our clients’ business objectives? Or, maybe even worse since decisions then can’t be made about whether or not to continue the program, what if we can’t tell whether our clients’ business objectives are being advanced by our PR efforts?

In my practice, it is simply unacceptable that we not be able to measure the impact our PR program has on specific business objectives such as demand creation, web traffic, sales-cycle acceleration, human resources recruitment and retention, share price and, yes, even sales, revenues and profits. Let me share with you a really good case study.

We used to have a client whose managed service allowed large enterprises to inventory all their IT assets; not just desktops, laptops and servers but all peripherals, operating systems and applications, including versions and licenses. As a managed service, our client had a massive database that, in aggregate, yielded highly reliable insight into certain IT-related issues within corporate America. The company’s budget with us was very small, so our program consisted of identifying the occasional high-profile IT issue, commissioning a report that demonstrated how pervasive that issue was, and generating media coverage around it.

Big buzz, but no bang for the buck

One of our first efforts was in the wake of the Recording Industry Association of America’s announcement that it would sue not just individuals but also companies whose employees were using peer-to-peer applications to download copyrighted material. Our client’s data suggested that the use of such applications within corporate America was quite widespread, and our news release announced our client was making available a free subset of its managed service that would tell IT managers how pervasive P2P applications were within their environments.

The story went global and the market’s response was nearly overwhelming as our client had to babysit its servers to manage the demand for its little report. Huge impact on our client’s business, right?

Not so much.

While initially overjoyed, our client soon realized that very few of those who downloaded the free application were signing up as paying customers. Here was a textbook example of our level of effort, or outputs, being exactly right; the coverage results, or outcomes, being unbelievably massive; but the ultimate return for the client, or impact on its real business objectives, being negligible.

Now let me tell you about the same client, different story, fundamentally different result.

A big impression where it counted

When Microsoft announced it was withdrawing support for its Windows 95 operating system, we went to work again. Our client’s database told us that Win95 was still installed on a hefty percentage of computers and that migrating to Windows XP, which is what Microsoft wanted its customers to do, might not be straightforward since there were a lot of applications deployed in the environment, many of them home-grown, that would function only on a Win95 OS. Again, our client made available a free download that would tell IT managers something about the pervasiveness of Win95 and its dependencies in their environments, the point being that they could then subscribe to the full service that would help them map a migration path to XP.

Well, as Victor Kiam used to say, Microsoft loved the product so much it bought the company! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Once again, the media coverage of our client’s announcement was truly global. Once again, the demand for its free application was considerable, although less than half what was seen for the P2P app. And once again, very few of the freebies converted to revenue. But one did, and that one was the world’s largest software company, which bought thousands of licenses and gave them away to large Win95 customers specifically so they could use it to map their migration strategy to XP. And, as already mentioned, a year or so later, Microsoft, which previously had been unaware of our client, bought the entire company in a tidy exit for our client’s founders and investors.

Sadly, we lost a client, but we gained a persuasive case study illustrating that outcomes, while a potent indicator of the ROI of a PR program, can be misleading; that only by measuring the impact can the real ROI be authoritatively calculated.

Since not every case produces the kind of clear and dramatic impact discussed here, I’ll come back to this subject in future posts and show many other ways, some quite prosaic but no less legitimate, in which the impact of PR activities can be effectively measured.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on August 12, 2011

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Posted in: Francis's Favourite Fictions, Public and media relations, Startups, inmedia Public Relations — Leave a comment

Your customers aren’t werewolves; stop looking for a marketing silver bullet

agile vs werewolf 288x300 Your customers arent werewolves; stop looking for a marketing silver bulletBy Francis Moran

Very often when we’re pitching a new piece of business, the prospect starts to wonder out loud about whether everything that could be done for them on the marketing front is being done. It’s not an unreasonable line of inquiry.

Far too often, however, that line of inquiry leads to a terribly silly question being asked: “What’s the one thing we could be doing that we’re not doing that’s going to turn everything around?”

Marketing professionals working inside companies tell me they regularly hear the same thing from their executives.

In short, these people are wondering if there’s a marketing silver bullet.

While there may well be intelligent and high-value marketing options that are not being pursued, I have never found an instance where some single initiative would magically turn things around. Marketing simply doesn’t work that way.

Entire forests have been cleared and pulped into paper to print all the studies that establish that customers need to hear the same message several times and across several different channels before they are moved to take action on it. This means that effective marketing must be a strategically planned and coherently integrated campaign of multiple tactics designed to engage your prospects in as many different places as possible or affordable with mutually reinforcing messages whose impact accumulates over time.

When I hear the silver bullet question, I know what’s gone wrong, and it ain’t that some single high-impact initiative is being left undone. What’s gone wrong is the strategy. Specifically, there isn’t one, or it’s inadequate, or it’s not being adhered to.

Here’s what I mean.

A properly developed marketing strategy engenders high-level confidence that all appropriate marketing tactics and campaigns were thoroughly considered and that the proper mix is being implemented. A properly developed marketing strategy builds in evaluative mechanisms that reassure clients and corporate executives that they are on the right track, even if the end point is still far out of sight. A properly developed marketing strategy does not leave people wondering if there is something more they could be doing.

Your customers aren’t werewolves. Stop looking for a silver bullet and start planning your marketing strategically.

Image: Architech solutions

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Posted by: Francis Moran on August 11, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy — 1 Comment