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.

As the Edinburgh Festival Fringe gets underway, with comedy continuing to grow across popular culture, perhaps more B2B organisations will take the plunge and find new ways to use video to cut through to customers or even to engage their own employees?

Clearly considerations around audience, message, objectives and brand will always play a role in deciding whether comedy might be the right route to take. And while we have had great success introducing it into campaigns over the last few years, it is arguable that comedy could be used more often than it is. If you are thinking about whether video could form part of your web 2.0 marketing strategy, and what story you might have for your audience, our planner (available here) may help to put it in context.

I’ve listed here a few videos that spring to mind as examples of organisations that have taken the first step, but please do suggest your own…

Perhaps the classic high-production-value video is the EDS Superbowl advert from 2000:

Which does have a less well-known twin (with a slightly more involved business message):

Then there are vendors who have a more specific axe to grind, as in the case of Lawson, making a case for ‘Simpler is Better’ when it comes to software…

And while Lawson’s first video from 2007 (above) has 65,000 views on YouTube, the latest installment (below) from April 2009 now has over 300,000. Clearly, lessons to be learnt around the determination to see through a new media campaign.

Outside of IT, there are some very imaginative examples like this one from a supplier making the point that the time has come for their product (I won’t say any more to avoid giving away the secret to a very clever, very rewarding watch):

But what video round-up would be complete without Mr T? Especially Mr T promoting virtualisation: “I pity the fool who doesn’t use Hitachi Data Systems virtualisation”…

Such has been the success of Cisco’s recent proactive social media strategy that the FT’s Tech blog has felt compelled to write about it.

Cisco have been piloting a social media strategy around its new Unified Computing System. The broad approach is to use social media channels to test-run messaging and potential feedback, then use that feedback to tailor the message to different stakeholders before the formal launch.

The FT blog states, “By the time the Unified Computing System launched, Cisco had drummed up considerable interest in the new product. It had had more than 53,000 interactions with customers, and honed its message to near perfection. “It’s about anticipating the issue, getting feedback from customers, then adjusting our message,” said Ms Gibson.

“All this advance work paid off, says Ms Gibson. Upon the official launch, the UCS was met with wide applause. The new product attracted enormous media attention, and 98 per cent of the stories were positive, according to the company.

“Ms Gibson says the effort was a success, and Cisco will be incorporating the strategy in the future. “The idea of using social media for market conditioning is going to inform our launches going forward,” she said.”

The FT’s major thrust here is that the value of social media marketing here has come from its proactivity; using social media tools as a kind of giant, virtual market research panel.

An IDC survey of 515 Western European IT decision makers in organizations with more than 50 employees showed surprisingly high usage of open source enterprise applications. 9% of respondents reported current use of an open-source back-office application, while 7% of respondents used an open source CRM application.

From a general perspective, the survey showed that the main driver behind open source adoption is the absence of an upfront license payment along with a lower total cost of ownership. The main inhibitor inhibiting organizations from adopting open source applications are concerns related to the level of software support and the quality of open source software.

“In an enterprise applications market in which large vendors boast a 10% market share, adoption rates of 9% and 7% appear very high,” said Bo Lykkegaard, research director, European Enterprise Applications and Services, IDC. “Of course, usage can mean anything from departmental use or niche use to enterprisewide deployment. We expect the majority of users of open source enterprise applications to use commercial enterprise applications at the same time. Despite this reservation, the survey results show that open source adoption in ERP and CRM has reached a critical threshold and should now make a ‘bleep’ on every vendor’s radar screen, particularly for those that compete in the midmarket.”

“We see vendors of open source enterprise applications attracting equity investments and heavyweight leaders and growth rates are typically above 20% per year, sometimes much higher. IDC believes the net effect of the emergence of open source enterprise applications will be one of price pressure, in particular in the midsized segment. We do not expect a religious war between an open source community on one side and commercial proponents on the other. Rather, it will all come down to a battle over who can provide the customer with the most ERP or CRM per euro.”

April 2nd’s New York Times reported the then-growing rumour that IBM was to buy Sun Microsystems for $7bn. The deal could easily increase IBM’s hold on some key hardware and software markets, especially as regards datacentres. However, reports out late yesterday suggested that the deal had collapsed after Sun’s board ”balked” at reduced offer and IBM withdrew it.

CIO Magazine’s top 3 initiatives for CIOs make interesting reading. It suggests that 2009 is a great year to look to outsourcing for economic, efficiency and innovation advantages. Its top 3 suggestions for CIOs looking at their outsourcing arrangements are focused on structure of deal, cost of deal and rationalisation. Which on the face of it makes pretty gloomy reading for outsourcing providers.  Look deeper however, and there are rays of light in the article, and possible angles for lead gen campaigns.

1. The article suggests reviewing the structure of agreements to make them based on demand/consumption rather than people/T&M. Such agreements require better alignment between supplier and customer - surely a major factor in generating useful leads, proposing a solution and winning the bid
2. Portfolio rationalisation for application outsourcing – the article also suggests an optimum mix of outsourcing suppliers depending on the size of the CIO’s organisation. A bigger share of the pie will be up for grabs for suppliers willing to invest in getting it.
3. Cost-cutting: keeping costs down was always going to be one of the three. However, the article says that CIOs can also save money by spending it - if you can get to market faster, make quality improvements or improve productivity versus what’s already being delivered then you’re in a good position.

If CIOs are looking at these three priorities now, it’s a great opportunity for marketers to work with sales and take propositions to companies based around one, two or all three of these priorities.

It’s worth noting the many comments that that have been posted in response to this article. The backlash against offshoring is clearly gathering momentum, especially in the wake of the money earmarked for IT projects in the economic stimulus package.