We normally shy away from any kind of blatant self-promotion in this blog (yes, really!). But we recently had the great news that we’ve been shortlisted as Finalists for two categories in the 2010 B2B Marketing Awards, which hopefully excuses a quick congratulatory post…
The first category is Best Lead Nurturing Initiative, for our programme with Oracle’s Supply Chain Management business unit. And the second category is Agency of the Year, so congratulations to the whole team here (and thanks especially to clients, partners and suppliers for their support). Fingers crossed for the ceremony in November…
IBM has released its 2010 Global Chief Executive Office Study into the lives and pressures of CEOs in the world’s top organisations. IBM calls 2009 the ‘wake up year’ for many CEOs and, as this survey was run in 2004, 2006 and 2008, profiles this year’s performance against past results for comparison.
Research on this scale and into this target audience is rare for free download. In total 1,541 CEOs took place in face-to-face interviews – the research will tell you their full demographics, but suffice to say there’s a broad spectrum of public and private-sector organisations from across the world. Interestingly, 3,600 students were also interviewed (the CEO of tomorrow) and their opinions used to add another dimension to the report. [These ‘views of generation Y’ are being given increasing attention by all the decision makers we speak to – the world is changing so quickly that sometimes only the new generation seem able to keep up...]
In 2010, for the first time, the primary challenge of CEOs was complexity. We probably all know this already – interlinking networks of suppliers and dependent third-parties – but removing or managing complexity isn’t something we see all that commonly as a message in many campaigns. Perhaps this could be a key to aligning your propositions with boardroom priorities.
What do bearded entrepreneur Alan Sugar and marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno have in common?
One answer suggested by last week’s episode of ‘Junior Apprentice’ is that neither would be much fun on a camping holiday. Lord Sugar set his ‘junior apprentices’ the task of creating a new camping product and pitching it to retailers. The episode is full of mentions of the lucrative size of the camping market, something that Adorno was writing about 40 years ago.
In his essay ‘Free Time‘, Adorno discussed the way that the culture industry takes our real need for ‘freedom’ and brings it back within the capitalist system (through organised hobbies and activities like camping), where money can be made and people controlled (’recharging’ before another busy week at work):
“The naturalness of the question of what hobby you have, harbours the assumption that you must have one, or better still, that you should have a range of different hobbies, in accordance with what the ‘leisure industry’ can supply [...] It is linked to the inner needs of people in the functional system. Camping – an activity so popular amongst the old youth movements – was a protest against the tedium and convention of bourgeois life. People had to ‘get out’, in both senses of the phrase. Sleeping out beneath the stars meant that one had escaped from the house and from the family. After the youth movements had died out this need was then harnessed and institutionalized by the camping industry. The industry alone could not have forced people to purchase its tents and dormobiles, plus huge quantities of extra equipment, if there had not already been some longing in people themselves; but their own need for freedom gets functionalized, extended and reproduced by business; what they want is forced upon them once again. Hence the ease with which the free time is integrated; people are unaware of how utterly unfree they are, even where they feel most at liberty, because the rule of such unfreedom has been abstracted from them.”
I wonder how many of the junior apprentices were questioning their role in profiting from pseudo answers to people’s desire for freedom…
As an aside, Adorno also has interesting views on sun tans as we approach the summer holiday season. This section follows on from his analysis of the camping industry:
“Taken in its strict sense, in contradistinction to work, as it at least used to apply in what would today be considered an out-dated ideology, there is something vacuous…about the notion of free time. An archetyptal instance is the behaviour of those who grill themselves brown in the sun merely for the sake of a sun-tan, although dozing in the sun is not at all enjoyable, might very possibly be physically unpleasant, and impoverishes the mind. In the sun-tan, which can be quite fetching, the fetish character of the commodity lays claim to actual people they themselves become fetishes. The idea that a girl is more erotically attractive because of her brown skin is probably only another rationalization. The sun-tan is an end in itself, of more importance then the boy-friend it was perhaps supposed to entice. If employees return from their holidays without having acquired the mandatory skin tone, they can be quite sure their colleagues will ask them the pointed question, ‘haven’t you been on holiday then?’ The fetishism which thrives in free time, is subject to further social controls.”
If there are marketing lessons to learn from Adorno (and there may well be something in his insight around how an industry can identify deep inner needs and align its products to those – even if it’s not possible to truly answer the inner need), it doesn’t really seem appropriate to think about them. And the fact that we now spend our free time letting ‘the culture industry’ (in the form of programmes like ‘The Apprentice’) train us to be better business-people… well, it’s probably better that we don’t go into that either.
If there’s a lesson to learn from last week’s episode of the ‘Young Apprentice’, it’s that no amount of salesmanship can shift a poor product – and that the difference between a poor product and a good one can be as simple as 5 minutes discussing a target audience.
We’ve shared below the slides that Colin Cram presented at the recent Sales & Marketing Forum.
A founder member of the Central Unit on Purchasing (forerunner of the Office of Government Commerce (OGC)), Colin held senior procurement positions in the public sector for over 30 years, responsible throughout for shared services, outsourcing and organisational re-engineering, and third party spends of up to £7bn a year. His presentation steps through an overview of procurement in the public sector (scale, challenges, realities for suppliers…) and highlights some potential changes that could deliver savings of £25bn and fresh opportunities for suppliers…
A write-up of our latest Sales & Marketing Forum (”A very public affair: Being an effective partner to the publc sector”) will be coming soon – but in the meantime…
We’ve had some great feedback on the latest forum (and one note to make the cocktails less strong next time – you can’t win them all…). While we wait for the ‘official’ writeup, here are a couple of related links:
In a post last month (”Waitrose – showing the way for B2B content marketing?“), I was full of praise for Waitrose’s tactic of taking over an entire ad break and turning it into a ‘mini cookery programme’ with Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal. And I’d still stand by the opinion that it was a great example of content-led marketing that B2B marketers can learn a lot from (particularly those marketing to senior executives, who share some key characteristics with the Waitrose demographic).
But the recent coverage of Delia’s latest Waitrose recipe (’I’d be ashamed to offer Delia Smith’s risotto to a guest‘) highlights the dangers of getting your content marketing (or perhaps your core service?) wrong. Complaints about the seafood risotto have been posted on the Waitrose website and featured on Watchdog and Have I Got News For You. So a slight wobble in execution perhaps – but for me, it still shows that this is the kind of marketing that is getting noticed and being talked about.
There’s a great round-up of other B2C ‘Branded Content’ campaigns on this AdAge blog. Towards the end of the article there’s a list (including Waitrose) of examples that provide some good food for thought.
We recently reviewed one of our most successful content-led lead generation programmes (it’s been running for 2 years now, draws 500 people each month to the content site and brings in details of 100 new contacts each month from a very restricted target market of EMEA enterprises across Telco and FS industries). (And we didn’t pay Delia and Heston £2m to create the content…). We’ll give a more detailed review of the campaign and our lessons from it over the next couple of weeks.
Marketing Automation Systems are a hot topic for many B2B organisations at the moment. But Ben Hanna argues in his blog that when selecting one, the feature list should not be your be-all and end-all decision point. Yes, the feature list should help you rule options in and out, but does all-singing and all-dancing really mean, all-importantly, that it’s the best choice for you. We’re using and looking into these systems a lot at the moment, so Ben’s argument is interesting to us. Gartner’s magic quadrant is a good place to start from when choosing a system, but Ben highlights four areas as having a major impact on usability and results that you might not immediately consider:
Customer Support
Online Help & Marketing Automation Training
Process for Rolling-Out New Features & Bug Fixes
Are You Impressed by How the Vendor Develops YOU as a Prospect?
The last point is the most interesting. Once you start using Marketing Automation Systems, you realise just how complicated they can be when used correctly. Done well – by which we mean completely, comprehensively and with buy-in and integration across your whole customer touch-base – they can be very effective. But it you’re trying to improve your marketing, you have to worry about vendors that let you slip through cracks in your own systems. Are the dogs trying to sell you a marketing automation system eating their own dog food? On the whole, we’ve seen some excellent examples of content-led marketing combined with accurate, timely targeting coming from a range of marketing automation vendors – we’ll share some of the high points in a future post.
You may already have come across Infor’s “Down with Big ERP” campaign (positioning Infor as plucky/fit-for-purpose underdog in a similar way to Tibco’s “Greg the Architect” and Lawson’s “Lars Lawson” video series).
Infor’s campaign has created a fictitious “Big ERP” character to represent what they see as the problem with the top software suppliers. The campaign is being taken to market across far more channels than either the Tibco or Lawson examples; this video provides a neat summary of the purpose/campaign activity:
One interesting note – it seems that this video on YouTube currently has less than half the views of an unoffical response video (600 vs 1600 views).
You’re a brilliant marketer, so you probably already know this…
A post last week on Harvard Business Review made an interesting case that even seemingly irrational or generic flattery can have a lasting positive impact on someone’s perception of a person or a business.
The point that Andrew O’Connell makes is that even if flattery might seem insincere at a rational level, it can create an unconscious positive feeling or openness to a brand that is much longer lasting than any rational evaluation.
There’s some powerful thinking behind this that could apply very well to go-to-market propositions or campaigns. We talk a lot about ‘fear messaging’ or ‘hope messaging’, but this tends to presume that the target audience is waiting helplessly for the solution we have to offer. Next time, why not consider whether more ’sympathetic messaging’ might be a good option (”you’re already ahead of the game, so we’re sure you’ll be considering [insert business challenge/solution here]“)?
We discussed some other examples of ’sympathetic messaging’ in a previous post on making the most of a more psychological approach to buyers. In that post, we looked at the potential to encourage buyers either to feel indebted, or to accept a proposal based on being consistent with their previously expressed views/actions.
As the most successful campaigns get more and more personal, these psychological angles will become steadily more essential to consider and get right…
We’re just finalising the details for the next Sales & Marketing Forum (pencil 11 May into your diaries, and see details here of the previous session), focusing on what it will take to be a successful supplier to the public sector over the next few years.
So it was interesting to hear ‘File on 4′ this evening on Radio 4 – a neat example of how political necessity may affect IT suppliers to the public sector. Listen again to the programme here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r0vxg – it covers high profile issues with projects in the Rural Payments Agency, Fire Brigade and (of course) the NHS, asking whether a new government should scrap these projects and define new ones in a very different way. Whether or not all the claims are justified, it certainly highlights a feeling that exists in political debates and general public opinion.
Suppliers are up against some strong external prejudices and preconceptions (based on headlines like the average cost per year of 100 Accenture employees on one project being £200,000 each) – as well as the likelihood of new buyer priorities and strategies after May. It’s going to be very interesting to hear expert views on what this means for supplier sales & marketing strategies. I’ll update more on the Forum as soon as we have the details.
We normally shy away from any kind of blatant self-promotion in this blog (yes, really!). But we recently had the great news that we’ve been shortlisted as Finalists for two categories in the 2010 B2B Marketing Awards, which hopefully excuses a quick congratulatory post…
