Author Archive for Francis Moran

Embargos, yes; exclusives, no

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 January 2008. We welcome your feedback.

Fotolia 27389812 XS 300x200 Embargos, yes; exclusives, noBy Francis Moran

My colleague Danny Sullivan made the strong case earlier this week in favour of negotiating embargos with trusted journalists that gives them advance access to your announcement and executives so they can do a better job with the story. In return, they promise not to publish or broadcast anything until an agreed upon time and date, usually the point at which you release the news to the rest of the world. The benefit to the company making the announcement is that the journalist has more time and flexibility to deal with the story and, guess what, so does the company. It’s a tidy win-win situation, and something we do whenever practical.

Something Danny didn’t get into, though, is the frequent situation where clients confuse embargos and exclusives, an understandable mixup given that both usually entail giving select journalists advance access to the story. But whereas embargos still treat all media outlets equally in terms of when they can run with the story, an exclusive entails favouring one, or a small handful of, outlets, giving them advance and exclusive access to the story and permission to run with it prior your making a more general announcement.

Journalists love exclusives. Some clients swear by them. We point blank refuse to do them, and here’s why.

In my 30 grizzled years as a reporter, editor and communications practitioner, I have yet to see a single case where, outside the confused and muddy world of political reporting, an exclusive has ever been in the client’s favour. As a reporter, I might have enthusiastically embraced the proffered exclusive, assuring my source that giving me advance access would secure better treatment for the story. The reality was and is that the lineup in any publication generally is beyond the reporter’s influence, often beyond even the editor’s influence. It is, rather, determined almost entirely by what else needs to get into that issue, and space and placement are rigorously assigned according to news value.

Okay, that’s a little black and white, but, in the main, it applies.

As a tech PR practitioner interested in the long-term opportunity to tell my clients’ stories through the media outlets that genuinely influence their markets, I traffic in exclusives at my peril and at the peril of my clients. The outlets I favour with the exclusive simply are not going to give me significantly better treatment while those that I shut out are going to nurse a grievance against me and my client as only the competition-fuelled egos that populate an average newsroom are capable of nursing. It ain’t pretty.

Let me give you an example.

In the more-than-nine-year history of inmedia there has been only a single client ever that took its business away from us and gave it to another agency, and it was entirely over our refusal to acquiesce to the marketing vice president’s insistence that we play favourites with a piece of news by giving an exclusive to certain media outlets. It was in the hothouse environment just prior the telecom meltdown in the U.S. and a fiercely competitive set of trade and business media was scavenging for any and every scrap of news emanating from the rash of optical systems startups that, like our client, were working on the brave new frontier of optical communications. The announcement was minor, and we simply saw no value in pissing off most of our valued contacts in favour of getting maybe an extra column inch or two of coverage in two or three of them. In fact, we saw it as running sharply counter to our client’s long-term interests, and told him so.

He disagreed, fired us and brought in a replacement agency that carried out his wishes. The wholly predictable result was that the news received the scant line or two it deserved in the publications that were favoured with the exclusive, and I spent the morning fielding angry calls from trusted editors and reporters all across North America and Europe who were understandably peeved at having been shut out.

Bottom line: Exclusives are a betrayal of the mutual trust that needs to be nurtured between PR practitioners and their media targets, they sour relationships that take a long time to cultivate and may never be repaired, and they contribute little or no added value. Don’t fall prey to their seductive but empty charm.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on August 1, 2011

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Posted in: Public and media relations, inmedia Public Relations — Leave a comment

Fiction: It’s all about relationships

This the next 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 November 2007. We welcome your feedback.

Fotolia 27389812 XS 300x200 Fiction: It’s all about relationshipsBy Francis Moran

We heard this one again last week.

Generating effective coverage of a client’s story is not all about the relationship I have with reporters; it’s all about the value of the story I have to tell.

This has long been the top-ranked of Francis’s Favourite Fictions, and for two good reasons. First, it’s incredibly widely held, believed in by clients and actively promoted by agencies. Second, it is so demonstrably untrue that after 30 years practice as both a journalist and PR guy, I remain utterly gobsmacked that it retains such unassailable currency.

Having worked the trenches of daily, weekly and monthly journalism, for both print and broadcast outlets, on both a local and national level and for both general news media and trade publications, some of my strongest and truest professional and personal relationships are with journalists. And I couldn’t lean on the best of those relationships to get a client of mine even a column inch of coverage that the client’s story didn’t merit. More to the point, I wouldn’t risk my own credibility by even trying.

But if my client’s story deserves to be in the New York Times, or on the BBC, or in EE Times, or on National Public Radio, or on the Richard and Judy Show, or in the most narrowly focused of trade media outlets, it matters not a whit whether I have any kind of existing relationship with the reporter, editor or producer who needs to be successfully pitched in order to get that coverage. It matters only that I have a deserving story to pitch and the ability to pitch it well.

And if the story doesn’t deserve to be there, all the relationships in the world ain’t gonna make it happen.

Here at inmedia, we demolish this fiction practically every time we take on a new client since we invariably are required to add new media outlets, new contacts — indeed, entire new industry sectors — to our outreach efforts. And even where we have an established record of success with any individual journalist or outlet, we don’t lever the relationship; we lever our ability to engage that journalist on the only issue of any interest to her or him: the story.

So why does this fiction persist? I blame the PR industry. Truth is, you sell what you’ve got. And if you don’t have the necessary grasp of how newsrooms operate to effectively pitch into them, if you don’t have the deep understanding of your client’s story that allows you to get past the initial objections reporters throw in your way, if you don’t have the strategic understanding of why you’re trying to generate coverage for your client in the outlet you’re targeting, then the only thing you can rely on is your so-called relationships. So you tell the prospect that relationships with the target media are a prerequisite to getting coverage and you hope the prospect is an unsophisticated buyer who will fall for that.

And since newsrooms are the ultimate game of musical chairs, where today’s technology reporter is tomorrow’s entertainment editor, you’d also better hope that the music never stops and leaves your trusted relationship stranded.

Here’s what a PR agency should be selling: The ability to investigate and understand the client’s strategic business objectives and how, or even if, they will be served by generating media coverage. From there, determining exactly what that the story is — and at inmedia, where our mantra is, “Your whole story gets told,” we understand that the story is usually much more than today’s announcement — and where it needs to be told to achieve that strategic progress. Then, fearlessly pitching that story to the right media targets, knowing as you do so exactly why each target should be interested in covering it. If you have the ability to put all this together, then your very first words to a target reporter establishes a level of trust, confidence and professionalism that trumps relationship every time.

Does this mean that here at inmedia we have no valued relationships with journalists? Of course not. After nine years focusing exclusively on B2B technology ventures, we have forged extraordinarily effective working relationships with scores of reporters and editors across a broad swath of the international trade and business media. Where we have them, we capitalize on them to sharpen our pitch and get to the point just that much more efficiently. And where we don’t have them, our fundamental skills rapidly establish us as trusted brokers of real value.

Bottom line: The only thing that has any currency in a newsroom, the only thing any journalist cares about, is the news value of the story. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t understand the news business.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on July 28, 2011

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

Fiction: Bloggers are different from other journalists

This the first 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 September 2007. We welcome your feedback.

Fotolia 27389812 XS 300x200 Fiction: Bloggers are different from other journalistsBy Francis Moran

When I started this little tech PR agency, the world of online media outlets was still very much in its infancy. And an early fiction we had to deal with was a widely held belief that online media were some kind of a different beast from their print or broadcast brethren, and that only a PR agency that specialized in online media could reach these brave new e-journalists.

Our conviction was that these outlets might well be new but that there was nothing at all novel about a time-tested best-practices approach to pitching them, one based on pegging the natural news value of a client’s story and then pitching it only to those who would see that value. And we were right; from Day 1, our clients enjoyed the same widespread coverage online as they did in other media formats.

Our conviction that online journalists responded to same imperatives as their offline brethren actually cost us a client or two early on because our proposals didn’t specifically stipulate we were addressing them. We’d write that we’d target “all appropriate media outlets,” and assumed our clients were as canny as we were. We quickly learned to expand it to read, “all appropriate media outlets, including online outlets,” and to include key online titles in our list of examples.

Time passed and the requirement to single out these new media types passed with it as everyone learned that the same fundamental principles applied to pitching online media outlets and journalists, and that our phrase, “all appropriate media outlets” included online titles as a matter of course.

Then came blogs.

And the latest entry in a growing collection of what I call, “Francis’s favourite fictions.” Or, “Everything I know that’s wrong about public relations I learned from technology company executives.”

Here’s the latest one, tossed at me a few months back by a seasoned technology marketer who really should have known better. “Bloggers are different,” she insisted. “And only a PR agency that specialises in Web 2.0 social media can pitch them properly.”

Well, that was red-meat bait, and I rose to it. “Give me an example,” I challenged her. And she gave me two names, both of them critically influential bloggers in her company’s WiFi space with whom we couldn’t possibly develop a relationship, she said, because we weren’t a Web 2.0 agency.

I recognized one of the names immediately, and a check of our media contact database confirmed that we knew this guy very well. In fact, we first started successfully pitching to him when he was a columnist at a print trade magazine, then as a columnist for the online version of the same magazine, then as publisher of his own online newsletter, and now as a blogger. And guess what? He is just as pitchable, and he responds to the same things, now that he’s breathing the rarified air of the blogosphere as he had as an ink-stained wretch.

The second name was also in our database, and also had been for years, but we generally didn’t pitch him any more because his blog was the equivalent of what we used to call a rip-and-read outfit. That is, like small radio stations that just read wire copy for their newscasts, he didn’t do any original reporting; he just wrote about things he had read about elsewhere. A useful conduit, perhaps, but not one we’d bother pitching directly; better we get a hit in one of the media he watches and let him write about that. Which he does regularly.

Point is, in my world, the bloggers who count are either bona fide, and often dyed-in-the-wool, journalists making use of this latest communications channel, or they’re newcomers to the game who think, act, and respond to newsworthy pitches, in exactly the same way as journalists.

Problem is, too many people think like my favourite-fiction spinner. So we’re careful to once again add a phrase to our proposals, which these days read, “all appropriate media outlets, including bloggers.” This, too, shall pass.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on July 21, 2011

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

Fiction: Media relations is “free advertising”

media relations 300x251 Fiction: Media relations is free advertisingBy Francis Moran

At the time my PR agency, inmedia Public Relations, was founded, I worked out of a large integrated agency in the city and some of the account executives there loved to push my buttons by declaring that media relations was free advertising. They especially liked to do this in client meetings because they knew it would prompt me to mount a fevered defence of the merits of PR and all the ways in which it differed from advertising.

I knew they were only kidding. I knew they really knew better. I knew it was all a bit of harmless fun.

But the perception that media relations is free advertising persists, and I was reminded recently that it persists even among so-called PR professionals and others who really ought to know better. I received a promotional email this week about a media-training workshop organised by a large group that specialises in consulting, training and speaking on marketing and communications. The first paragraph of the email read, “Do you know the media can give inMedia free advertizing [sic]?!” (The bold font, underlined words, redundant double punctuation at the end of the sentence and misspelling of “advertising” are all faithful reproductions of the actual email.)

I don’t want to name and shame any one. I know the consultant who wrote the email and will be giving the workshop, and am familiar with the organization putting on the workshop and have no desire to conduct a drive-by smear of either one of them. But the fact that a group positioning itself as expert counsel on subjects like PR can suggest that media relations somehow equates to free advertising demonstrates just how poor a grasp even seasoned practitioners can have of the strategic fundamentals of public relations.

Media relations is not free advertising.

First of all, it’s not free.

The editorial space in which media relations practitioners seek to get their clients’ stories may come at no cost but the process of pursuing that space can be very costly indeed. My clients pay a lot of good money for the media coverage we get for them and they most certainly do not see it as free. The strategic pursuit of media coverage is far more than a flippant pitch for a bit of free publicity; the time and skill it takes all cost a lot of money and many organisations invest far more in media relations than they do in advertising.

(Parenthetically, the same “free” tag is being attached to social media with the same potential that doing so creates unrealistic expectations of what a social media campaign ought to cost and sharply degrades the value of the results a good campaign achieves. Because access to social media networks and tools is largely without cost, there is a wide misconception that social media is a low-cost or even free communications and marketing tactic. Doing it properly is incredibly time-consuming, though, and time, whether ours or the client’s, is expensive.)

Second — and far more critically — media relations is not advertising.

While media relations can complement advertising and both, in a properly integrated program, ought to be built from the same messaging platform and address the same objectives, media relations is very unlike advertising and those who can’t see the difference ought to get into another line of work.

Media relations is more credible

Market research has long demonstrated that editorial coverage is perceived by consumers as being more credible than advertising, and this may be where media relations has its greatest advantage. Notwithstanding the generally poor regard in which journalists are held, consumers believe they have made some effort to filter and evaluate the claims made in their stories and that journalistic standards of accuracy and balance make editorial coverage more reliable.

Media relations is harder to control

The flip side of the credibility coin is that editorial coverage cannot be controlled in the same way as advertising space. Media relations practitioners have no say over how much space their story will get, where or when it will run, or what other messages — even opposing messages — might also run in the same story. You can mitigate this lack of control and vastly increase your chances of achieving your desired outcome, however, through the effective and strategic planning of your media relations efforts along with a sharp tactical understanding of how newsrooms operate.

Media relations can deliver greater message reach

The impact of any campaign is measured in terms of reach — the number of people who will see your message — and frequency — the number of times the message will be seen. Media relations can vastly increase the reach of a campaign although it is usually difficult for it to do much for frequency.

Advertising costs increase in linear fashion — that is, it generally costs twice as much to reach twice as many people or to reach them twice as often. Media relations efforts, on the other hand, scale more efficiently. Once having completed all the work to develop the story pitch and materials necessary to reach our first journalist, the cost of reaching the second and subsequent journalists is a small increment. The reach of a media relations campaign can be extended more cost-effectively than that of an advertising campaign but it is unlikely that a media relations campaign will deliver multiple exposures like an advertising campaign can do if you pay for them.

Media relations can deliver greater message scope

Most advertising is limited to a couple of sharp selling points. Media relations, on the other hand, can produce coverage that goes well beyond a headline or two. As such, it is particularly effective when you need to explain an issue or educate an audience. For a better understanding of how this advantage of media relations fits into a marketing campaign, see my post last week on my three buckets of customer segmentation. The downside of this advantage is that any story can, of course, also include negative messaging.

Media relations is rarely transactional

Although it can happen, media coverage rarely puts bums in seats. Any good ad must have a clear and compelling call to action. No good journalist is going to allow such a thing to creep into her or his story, although a lot of coverage, especially outside the hard news and business sections, will contain information on where readers, listeners or viewers can go for more information. In a connected world, this can be done more easily — and seemingly without compromising journalistic integrity — through the use of hyperlinks in online coverage that lead readers to a company or advocacy website.

So what’s the harm?

The advertising colleagues I referenced at the outset of this post were just taking a bit of mickey, and no harm was done. But real harm is done when media relations is conflated with advertising.

In the first instance, as I have already explained, calling media relations “free” degrades its value and the effort required to do it properly. Second, it can lead to really bad strategic planning and deployment of marketing resources if media relations is expected to accomplish the transactional objectives of an advertising campaign.

Perhaps most dangerously, however, it leads to a mindset that there is no such thing as bad publicity; that any engagement with the media is to be desired and pursued. I have in the past counselled two extraordinary local organisations that deal with children in times of extreme hazard. Both organisations have amazing and heart-warming tales to tell of how they quite literally save lives every day, and they rightly pursue media coverage of those stories in the same honest, principled and good-hearted way they conduct all their affairs. But because they deal with the most at-risk of our society’s youngest and most vulnerable citizens, the outcome of their very best efforts is often a tragic one, and tragic outcomes involving children are headline-making events. If these organisations viewed media coverage as a benign publicity resource they could mine for “free advertising,” they would be hammered by the fallout that would ensue.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on July 7, 2011

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Posted in: Francis's Favourite Fictions, Public and media relations, inmedia Public Relations — 3 Comments

My three buckets of customer segmentation

iStock 000003823850XSmall 300x249 My three buckets of customer segmentationBy Francis Moran

Marketers are well familiar with the concept of segmenting their marketplace. Segmentation is the process of dividing a broad and undifferentiated set of consumers into ever-smaller segments until you have identified that group of potential customers that is the best match possible for your product or service. My wife is also afflicted with this contagion we call marketing and that gives rise to some strange conversations in our household. One such conversation a few years back resulted in our developing an easy-to-understand explanation of market segmentation we refer to as finding your gay Acadian dog lover. The key to segmenting the marketplace is to identify those traits — some demographic, some taste-based, many certainly geographic — that define the customers most likely to be interested in your product or service. Not only does the process tell you a lot about who you’re trying to sell to, it also gives you a lot of insight into how you might reach them.

Market segmentation belongs in the strategic up-front part of a marketing plan because it defines the pain common to the customers in your target market segment or niche, and helps you figure out positioning and messaging that will be effective. As our resident neuromarketer Bob Bailly writes in his contributions to this blog, the most effective appeal is an emotion-based appeal, and segmentation helps you identify the emotions and passions of the people you’re targeting.

When I get to the implementation part of the marketing plan, the part where I need to decide the proper mix of tools, tactics and channels to actually transmit our messaging to our target customers, I like to use a different sort of segmentation that I call the three buckets of customer segmentation. It looks not at how the market might be divided according to a propensity to be interested in your product or service. Rather, it looks at the customers you’ve already identified as your target market and then segments them based on their individual propensity to actually buy your product or service some time in the near future.

Bucket No. 1: I know my pain and I’m actively searching for a solution

This whole process is based on an understanding that you can’t sell anything to anyone who doesn’t feel the need for it. The more burning that need, the more motivated your customer will be to buy. While “need” can be manufactured by willy marketers — does anyone really need a 10th or 20th pair of Jimmy Choo shoes? — our approach in B2B marketing is based more on the pain that a customer is feeling because something within her or his company is failing in some way. Please don’t think that this means we abandon emotion here; the most effective B2B marketing connects the dots between a pedestrian enterprise requirement and the emotions — fear of failure, job loss, prestige or joy of achievement, success and reward — associated with leaving that requirement unmet or with solving it.

In bucket number one, then, our customers knows their pain and are actively searching for a solution. To win those customers’ business, you must get your message into the channels where they are looking for a solution.

In today’s world, that almost always means search; customers are turning to the net to find solutions for their problems and if you are going to win the business, you must be found here. It is critical to remember that customers rarely search for specific solutions, so using keywords that characterise your product or service may not get you found. This is especially true if you, like most technology companies, have developed a novel way of solving a problem; by definition, the marketplace knows nothing yet of your solution and so can’t go look for it. You need to figure out how your customers are going to characterise the pain they’re feeling, or the objective they’re seeking to accomplish, and write your Google ads or optimise your website content accordingly.

Besides search, customers actively seeking a solution look elsewhere. They might go to a trade show looking for exhibitors with products or services that meet their needs. They are unlikely to start looking for advertising. They might look for media articles about their issue. And, if they have selected a short list of vendors, they might access white papers or other material you  make available about your product or service, and they might read analyst reports.

Customers in Bucket One are the most attainable customers imaginable. They have a need that you can meet and they’re looking to spend money. These customers, depending on your sales cycle, are your revenue for this quarter and the next quarter. But you’re going to have to compete for them against anyone else they might find in their search.

Bucket No. 2: I know I have a pain but I’m not actively searching for a solution

Customers in this bucket share one critical trait with Bucket One customers — they know they have a pain. However, for any number of reasons, they are not actively searching for a solution to that pain. They may have become inured to it. They may believe there is no solution to it, or that available solutions are too costly or too cumbersome. Or, they may have been burned in the past by solutions that did not live up to their billing.

These are the customers I like the best. The marketing job here is not one of hard selling, it’s one of educating, and so it’s a process in which a great deal of value can be created by the vendor for the purchaser. For example, I often engage with prospects for our PR services who are looking for a proposal from my firm and from a couple of others. In talking with that prospect, I sometimes discover that their real challenge is not picking the right agency, it will be winning budget approval for the program. So I move into a different mode. I tell them I can develop a proposal and take my chances beating out the other agencies but that I still might not win the business because the real hurdle will be winning executive approval. I suggest they leave aside the competitive process and if they do, I offer to put in as much effort as necessary — do deep research, meet with the executive team, put in a lot of time, design the actual program — to create a proposal designed not just to be the best they could receive but also designed to solve their real pain, winning budget approval. Such prospects are in Bucket 2 because although they know what their real pain is going to be, they aren’t pursuing a solution designed to solve that pain for them. I show them a way to solve their real pain and, not coincidentally, disintermediate my competition in the process.

This is the possibility with Bucket 2 prospects. If you can be the vendor who educates such prospects about the availability and value of a solution that genuinely solves their real pain, you may well have the field all to yourself. Even if you can’t kick the competition right off the bus, you still stand a better chance of winning the business if your educational process is of better quality, less directly promotional and more authentic than the competition’s.

Media relations, white papers, webinars and other content-marketing tactics are the most effective way of reaching and winning Bucket 2 prospects because these tactics, done properly, are all about educating the marketplace. Messaging needs to acknowledge the pain, correctly identify the costs associated with it, and make the business case for your solution in an emotionally appealing fashion. It can be a longer process than simply winning the business of a Bucket 1 prospect who’s ready to buy. You should think of Bucket 2 as being your pipeline for the next three quarters beyond this current quarter.

Bucket No. 3: I don’t even know I’m bleeding from the neck

In my world of technology marketing, the biggest challenge is often making customers realise that the old way of doing things is costing them in serious ways or, at least, that a new way of doing it will create new value. These customers usually are not even aware of the downside of what they’re doing or the upside of adopting new ways of doing it. They are in my third bucket and, like Bucket 2 prospects, they respond best to marketing approaches that open their eyes without yet trying to open their wallets.

Many of the same educational materials that work well with Bucket 2 work well here. The messaging, though, needs to create an awareness that a problem actually exists before trying to make the case for a solution, let alone trying to sell in your solution.

Early in my career, I developed a communications strategy for the federal government around soil conservation. Our target was urban and off-farm Canadians who needed to understand that soil erosion was a serious economic issue that could have an impact on the quality and cost of food. Why did they need to understand this? Because the feds were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on soil conservation and remediation programs and wanted to cultivate broad taxpayer support for such spending.

As part of an integrated program, we designed a gorgeous poster that featured an iconic Canadian farm scene nestled in a pair of human hands, with soil starting to drip out from beneath the cupped hands. Our original headline for the poster was, “Soil erosion: It’s getting out of hand.” The client insisted that this be changed to, “Soil conservation: It’s in our hands.”

Not such a big deal, you might think. You’d be wrong. The change, though subtle, fundamentally altered the entire impact of the poster. It changed from an urgent alarm telling urban Canadians that there was a problem they needed to pay attention to, to a gentle reassurance that everything was being taken care of. How could our target audience develop support for the soil conservation program and its massive spending if they weren’t told in the first place that there was a serious problem that could affect them?

What bucket are your prospects in?

I’ll assume you’ve done a good job of market segmentation and that you know who your gay Acadian dog-lover, or your exact market niche, is. But do you know which of my three buckets each of those prospects are in? And if you do, have you figured out the different approach you need to take depending on which bucket they’re in? I’d love to hear from people who have designed their marketing programs with this understanding well in mind.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on June 23, 2011

Posted in: Marketing strategy — 1 Comment

Where’s your next VP of sales or marketing coming from?

vicious circle 300x144 Wheres your next VP of sales or marketing coming from?By Francis Moran

It has been a common lament of technology companies in Canada that this country lacks high-quality sales and marketing talent, driving CEOs to source their c-level executives from south of the border. The most common refrain is that they are looking for someone who has “been there, done that,” and such folks are simply not lying thick on the ground in these parts.

I’m pretty sure I don’t buy into the underlying proposition but let’s assume for the moment that it has merit. I certainly wouldn’t argue that you would want to de-risk your go-to-market and sales strategies by hiring folks who can demonstrate they have the ability to build and drive world-class sales and marketing organizations playing in your target market. While I do think such folks can be found up here in the frozen north, the bigger criticism I have with CEOs who go head-hunting for talent down south is that they perpetuate a chicken-and-egg situation that ultimately plays against them.

If you’re never going to hire someone who hasn’t already done exactly what you need doing, how will we ever build a Canadian talent pool? How will you ever beak free of the vicious circle that sees you hire in expensive talent that isn’t committed to the local market and so won’t stay very long, thereby starting the whole cycle all over again?

The answer seems quite obvious to me — you oblige your expensive hires to transfer their knowledge to their teams so as to create the next generation of c-level executives who are a-level players.

This obvious solution seems to be lost on many, however.

I had the sorry experience a few years ago of sitting in on a bit of a complaint-fest by Ottawa-area technology CEOs who had a number of challenges, some more legitimate than others. One CEO told the story of how long it had taken him to recruit his latest VP of marketing and how much it had cost in head-hunting fees. “And I’m just going to have to do it all over again in 12 or 18 months,” he said. I asked him how many people in his company would be reporting into the new VP and was told there were five people in the department. “And so,” I said, “A key part of your new man’s mandate — indeed, something that a big part of his at-risk compensation will be based on — is that he identify and groom his successor, right?”

You could hear the crickets chirp.

For this guy, it was a lamentable but clearly acceptable business practice that he spend a fortune in time and company resources to lure into town the latest in a string of hired marketing gunslingers who would do his thing for a year or so and then make tracks out of town, leaving nothing behind. Completely lost on him was the concept that he had not just the opportunity but, indeed, the obligation to his shareholders and the local technology community, to make sure that his new guy’s personal knowledge and skill set were converted into institutional knowledge during the oh-too-short tenure with the company.

Fortunately, there are some more enlightened CEOs out there, and I met one of them yesterday.

As part of an entirely outstanding presentation to Communitech‘s Techworking breakfast in Waterloo yesterday morning, Polar Mobile‘s Kunal Gupta said he searched high and low in Canada for a new VP of sales before identifying the perfect candidate in California. While Canada is a wellspring of technical resources like software engineers, Gupta said, “I was disappointed we couldn’t find the business talent locally that we needed to scale the business.”

I challenged him afterwards in the same way I had challenged that first CEO and Gupta was way ahead of me. Oh ya, he assured me; his new sales guy is contractually obligated to spend a significant portion of every month in face-to-face interaction with the balance of the team in Toronto precisely to make sure that that personal knowledge is captured and converted into institutional knowledge. (My colleague Linda Forrest will report tomorrow on the rest of Gupta’s excellent presentation.)

How tough is it for you to find the seasoned business talent you need to scale your business? If you’re constantly having to go elsewhere to hire that talent, what kind of a farm-team system could you put in place to make sure that the next generation of marquee players your company needs is being cultivated right within your own organization?

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Posted by: Francis Moran on June 2, 2011

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Tories are a PC, NDP are a Mac, Bloc’s a RIM. Are Liberals a Kodak?

800 debate elex signs cp 11 300x168 Tories are a PC, NDP are a Mac, Blocs a RIM. Are Liberals a Kodak?By Francis Moran

The morning after the election that wouldn’t change anything, the political landscape in Canada has been radically, perhaps permanently, altered.

The Conservative Party of Canada, led by prime minister Stephen Harper on his fifth stab at power, finally grabbed the brass ring, winning 167 seats and a decisive majority. That he did it with just a handful of seats in Québec defied all conventional wisdom that said Canada can’t be won without Quebec. Certainly, no Tory predecessor has managed to take the country with so few seats in Québec.

The Liberal Party of Canada, long nicknamed the Natural Governing Party for its historic hold on the broad political centre of the country, went down to its greatest defeat in history. First-time campaigner Michael Ignatieff, better known in Washington and London as a globe-trotting journalist and intellectual before returning to Canada several years ago, did what no Liberal Party leader, not even John Turner with his epic 1984 loss that yielded a scant 44 seats, has managed to do before — reduce the once-dominant Liberals to third-party status for the first time since Canada was born.

The Bloc Québécois, born as a protest party when the Meech Lake Accord failed to bring Québec into the Canadian constitution in 1987 and the dominant political force at the federal level in that province ever since, saw the wind go completely out of its sails. Decimated across the only province where it runs candidates, it was reduced to a mere four-seat sump that will see it lose both its leader, Gilles Duceppe, and its official party status in the Canadian House of Commons.

Finally, the New Democratic Party, perennially the third party or worse in Canada, achieved an historic triumph by winning 102 seats and becoming the official opposition. Leader Jack Layton built on his ever-growing success over the past several elections but nobody, least of all Layton, expected a seat haul as impressive as this one.

The results show a growing polarisation between right and left in Canada that may become the established political narrative in this country for some time to come.

The results and the campaigns that produced them also showed sharp divides between several competing marketing philosophies, with lessons to be learned for politicos and marketers alike.

In a modern social-media era where openness and engagement are supposed to be the watchwords of the day, the Harper Conservatives, with their obsessively managed campaign that sharply controlled the message and kept the leader almost hermetically sealed away from any but the most carefully vetted of voters, proved you can still win with a command-and-control messaging strategy. Further, their politics of fear and loathing, characterised by nasty attack ads that vilified Ignatieff, were devastatingly effective. In a continued environment of economic worry and doubt, they successfully portrayed themselves as the safe harbour, just like Microsoft or IBM.

On the other end of both the political and the marketing spectrum, the NDP ran an open and inclusive campaign that, emulating U.S. president Barack Obama’s 2008 race, put a premium on hope and aspiration even if the details of their platform were sketchy and the sums in their economic plans didn’t quite add up. Like Obama, a vote for “Smiling Jack,” as the Canadian media dubbed Layton, was a vote that said “Yes, we can,” at the same time as it said, “But we’re not entirely sure how.” In this approach, the NDP most resembled Apple — all the features may not be fully worked out but it’s a far better looking and hipper product than the competition.

The Bloc Québécois is like any company that has nowhere to go when the sharp point of differentiation on which it once galvanised its marketplace is now revealed as much less appealing than the more comprehensive feature set and more attractive design of the competition. Like RIM, which built its market dominance mainly on the one-note tune of superior security, the Bloc has found itself out of harmony with a marketplace looking for a more forward-thinking feature set.

And Ignatieff and his Liberals have learned that market dominance, even persistent and historic market dominance, will wither if you don’t offer up something new. In this campaign, Ignatieff was compelling on why Canadians should not vote for Harper but he was completely unpersuasive on why they should vote for him. With nothing new to offer, the Liberals have seen their market share erode like the Kodak of the early digital photography era. The biggest question is whether they, like Kodak, can resurrect themselves by taking the best of their historic dominance whilst evolving for the contemporary marketplace.

Postscript: This was to have been Canada’s first social media campaign. However, while social media channels were fully engaged with the election, I did not see the election fully engaged with social media channels. None of the parties made nearly the use of social media to the extent we saw in the U.S. 2008 election with most of them reverting to broadcast behaviour on what are supposed to be bidirectional channels.

One notably promising phenomenon was the effort by university students and other young people to use social media channels to encourage their peers to get out and vote. However, the full impact of this has yet to be analysed and, with voter turnout up a bare percentage point or two from the all-time low it hit in the last federal campaign, it may yet prove to have had little effect.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on May 3, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy — 2 Comments

Microcarbonated marketing mush

decon.body lead 225x300 Microcarbonated marketing mush

By Francis Moran

There may be few products more reduced to commodity status than mass-produced beer. (As Monty Python almost said, “Why is mass-produced beer like making love in a canoe? They’re both fucking close to water.” The Python troupe, in the wonderful Hollywood Bowl rendition of their famous “Australian Philosophers Drinking Song,” were actually lampooning American beer, but I think the line holds up.) Still, this doesn’t prevent the big beer companies from constantly trying to introduce new elements they hope will boost their brand’s share of market by a percentage point or two. Who can blame them? Gain even one-tenth of a percentage point in new market share in Canada and you’ve boosted your revenues by some $90 million.

And so we have seen refinements of almost every sort imaginable. Ice beer, dry beer, lime-infused beer, beer in tall cans, cans that tell you when the beer is cold — countless such iterations have come and gone. You know one brewery has tripped onto something that’s working when all the rest pile on.

The latest is Molson Coors Canada’s microcarbonated lager.

Not being a beer drinker, I was first made aware of the advent of this wondrous new beverage when one of my teenage sons — also not (yet) a beer drinker, I hasten to add — pointed to a huge billboard advertising the new stuff and asked me what microcarbonated meant. I told him I was pretty sure it was nothing more than a typical beer company marketing gimmick. But his follow-on questions about why a company would spend what was obviously a lot of money telling people about a new product feature that doubtless lived more convincingly in a headline than it would on the taste buds of beer drinkers got me thinking, too.

So I looked at the website for the new beer, looked at a dozen or so online taste tests of it and polled beer-drinking friends and acquaintances who had tried the stuff. The consensus was that whatever microcarbination was supposed to do, the product was indistinguishable from good old Molson Canadian, the brewery’s flagship product.

So, what was Molson thinking?

The company’s stated objective was to create a premium beer brand but the marketing jury is still very much out on that one.

Here’s my view.

Their tagline, “The world’s only microcarbonated lager” is the kind of powerful unique selling proposition that business schools tell you every product needs. What every USP needs, though, is a genuine value proposition that consumers will buy into again and again. And this new product seems to be lacking that. While many of the folks I polled admitted they bought the beer because they had seen the advertising materials, or when they saw its shiny and distinctive new labelling in the beer store — another consistent beer company marketing tactic is to mix up the labelling and even the packaging every now and again — they probably wouldn’t buy it again because it didn’t deliver on its advertised promise of being something new and different.

There are a few sharp lessons here for technology companies.

  • It’s not what you say your product delivers that matters; it’s what your customers get out of it.
  • It’s not your brand promise that establishes how the marketplace will see you; it’s how well and consistently you deliver on that promise.
  • And it’s not your latest feature that will win the day; it’s the benefit, if any, that that feature delivers to your customers that will create a sustainable competitive differentiation.

Bottom line: Microcarbonated beer may have delivered a powerful marketing line for Molson, one that other beer companies may well emulate in their relentless quest for the tiniest improvement in market share. But unless the promise it conveys actually pans out by way of delivering some kind of value to consumers — and every indication is that it isn’t — it will end up as just one more mushy marketing line on the slag-heap of bad marketing campaigns.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on April 14, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy, Product marketing, Technology marketing — 8 Comments

We’re going to fill the tank when we get there

RunningOnEmpty Were going to fill the tank when we get thereBy Francis Moran

No sane person setting out on a long journey of indefinite length would wait until they had arrived before filling up the gas tank.

And yet technology companies tell me all the time that they’re going to do exactly that.

“We’ll start marketing as soon as we have some customers,” is a variation of a line I’ve heard often but that still pains me deeply every time I hear it.

I heard it again just the other day from an amazing company I’ve been watching for a while. Like most promising technology companies, this one has developed a new way of doing something that creates massive value for users. Their product costs less money to use than the alternative, saves huge amounts of incredibly expensive time at a critical juncture for its potential customers, and avoids the considerable environmental damage wrought by existing approaches.

Like many compelling technological advances, however, the adoption of this company’s product requires significant changes in behaviour in a risk-averse industry.

In short, this company needs marketing, and lots of it.

However, like most companies that give me the fill-the-tank-when-we-get-there line, this company quite obviously views marketing as an expense item that can’t be contemplated until revenues start rolling in. Lost on them is the reality that marketing is an investment item that ensures the revenues will roll in.

By contrast, let me talk a little about another company with which I am meeting in a couple of weeks to start work on the first ever proper marketing strategy this company has ever done.

We’ve known this company for several years. It is an important partner of one of our long-standing clients and we’ve had the pleasure of helping it out with some modest media relations requirements. Their new reality is exactly the reason why I’ve chosen to add this strategic marketing practice to what has long been a sharply focused PR practice — many of our B2B PR clients need help with more than just PR.

In this instance, this company has the opportunity to enter a promising new market, and has turned to us for counsel beyond the straightforward media relations stuff we’ve been doing. Their first request was for something tactical and, when we told them what it would cost, they had sticker shock. I validated their concern about how much marketing costs — it is expensive. But I also started to turn the conversation around. “If you view marketing as an expense item, you’ll never do it,” I told them. “You need to look at it from the other end of the telescope.”

The exercise we will bring this company through starts with its objectives for its new market and then goes on to ask and answer many questions. How big is the opportunity? How many customers are there? How many of those customers could you acquire — or do you need to acquire to meet your business plan objectives — in your first year? How are you going to acquire them? What should it cost to acquire them? What is the life-time revenue of every new customer you acquire? What’s your profit on that revenue? How much of that profit should you invest in acquiring that customer?

I’m simplifying things here but what we will have at the end of this exercise is a business case supporting an investment in marketing rather than an expenditure on marketing. The difference is subtle but illuminating. The latter creates a mindset of limited opportunity where costs, rather than results, are the key focus and the impetus is always on constraining those costs as much as possible. The former creates a mindset of expectation where a dollar spent is expected to return a multiple of revenue, where the focus is on results, and where investment decisions are made on the basis of their effectiveness.

With this business case in hand, our client will be able to put exactly enough gas in its tank to get it to where it needs to go.

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Posted by: Francis Moran on March 25, 2011

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Posted in: Francis's Favourite Fictions, Marketing strategy, Product marketing — 3 Comments

It’s not easy being a marketer

Fotolia 6691979 XS 300x200 Its not easy being a marketerBy Francis Moran

When I launched this blog a little over six weeks ago, I said that I wanted to overturn the myths that surround the marketing of new technology products and services. I acknowledged at the time that many engineering-focused executive teams at technology ventures are leery of what they see as the black art of marketing. I also said I can forgive them for their skepticism — after all, as I wrote then, we marketers don’t do a good enough job of demonstrating just how marketing works and why they should invest in it — but I have a tougher time forgiving others who have weighed in over the past couple of weeks with simplistic and downright erroneous comments against marketing.

The worst part is, many of these insults were self-inflicted injuries inflicted on the marketing profession by some of its own.

Two good examples showed up as questions on LinkedIn. The first asked, “If you could use ONLY one marketing tecnique [sic] for your consultancy, what would it be?” I was feeling a bit cranky that day and my answer probably reflected my mood. Still, moodiness aside, my point is valid; it’s not only unwise and unnecessary but probably also impossible to limit marketing to a single technique. And the very asking of the question feeds into the mythology that there’s a magic marketing silver bullet that, if it could only be found and deployed, would solve all your marketing woes. I wasn’t alone in my negative response to this one; a few other folks agreed with my take but our contrarian view did not carry the day.

The second LinkedIn question tried to put a smear of lipstick on that old pig of a PR measurement tool, advertising value equivalents. Fortunately, this parrot is well and truly dead, and the only people still trying to prop it up on its perch are those with nothing better to offer their clients.

Perhaps the worst example of pure drivel masquerading as knowledge was the ill-advised post by respected venture capitalist Fred Wilson who attracted buckets of reaction with his blanket indictment of marketing. “Marketing is for companies who [sic] have sucky products,” Wilson said in a blog post that then went on to list countless examples of highly effective marketing programs that he simply doesn’t identify as such. While Wilson sort of retracted his blanket condemnation a couple of days later with a witty piece that debugged the flaws in his first post, the reality is that he, like many who should know better, simply wouldn’t recognise effective marketing if it hit them in the face with a baseball bat. Which is what effective marketing often does.

Here’s the difficult truth, people: Marketing is hard and it’s expensive. In being hard it’s not so different from most everything else in life. But there are people who have mastered the art. They’re called marketers. You should use them. As for being expensive, well it depends which end of the glass you’re looking through. If marketing is viewed solely as a cost centre, nobody would ever do it. It is essential that marketing be viewed as an investment, as the only place in a company, along with sales, that actually produces revenues. It is the responsibility of marketers to frame the discussion not in terms of how much this is going to cost but, rather, in terms of how much new revenue this is going to generate. (And a note to Fred Wilson, who seemed most enamoured of marketing techniques that required nothing more than internal resources — those things aren’t free, either. And they just might be more usefully done by external resources who are experts at them rather than internal founders, CEOs and executives whose value to the new venture presumably lies in their product-development capabilities and not in their marketing chops.)

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Posted by: Francis Moran on March 17, 2011

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Posted in: Marketing strategy — 1 Comment