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It’s been said in various places that marketing has to move on from the “fire and forget” methods of a previous era.  The tools exist and the methods have been proven out to show that “marketing 2.0″ (active and ongoing engagement) works, and the effectiveness of marketing 1.0 alone strategies (press releases, trade shows, direct marketing, etc.) are losing their effectiveness.

A “fire-and-forget” method that was showing improvement in recent years has also been hit by the recession - online advertising.

According to the March 2009 Advertiser Optimism Report by Advertiser Perceptions, the number of marketers and their ad agents that are feeling optimistic about increasing their online ad spending has dropped 16%.

Beyond merely a reduction in budgets, hopefully this means that economic realities are forcing marketing teams to get more creative and learn new techniques and tools to engage their audiences.  This change, if prolonged, could have an impact on web business models as well.

Those sites that are reliant on ad spending for their revenues will start to feel the pinch.  Could this be the beginning of a reduction in the amount of quality content that’s available for free on the web?  That remains to be seen, but investors have been pushing web platforms and entrepreneurs away from ad supported business models for some time.

Posted under industry, marketing

In 199_ (and I’m not mentioning which year) I got my first product marketing job.  It was all I wanted to do after I got my MBA — I wanted to drive the definition and completion of products.  I was coming in from an applications (sales) engineering position right into product marketing, which I thought would give me a good view on what customers needed and what the product had to look like — and it did.  I started right away defining a feature list, prioritizing them, cost-analyzing them, getting customer feedback, drive the schedules, etc.  I quickly found out that product marketing is a thankless job: there are too many people to make happy (customers, R&D, sales, executives, partners, etc.) and there’s no way to make them all happy; and you’re constantly trying to connect all of the dots and pick up the loose ends.

During my first months of product marketing, one of the company’s more experienced marketers, pulled me aside, as he was leaving the company, and told me not to sweat the “small stuff” like features, etc. and instead focus my thoughts and work around positioning and the overall vision of how the product is changing the industry.  That “lecture” didn’t make any sense at all!  I had a lot of respect for him, so I did take note of what he said, but it really didn’t change the way I went about product marketing at the time.

As a few years have passed by and I moved up through the ranks and eventually became a  executive, his comments began to make more and more sense.  In fact, I have come to the conclusion than feature-driven product marketing only sets your product for long-term failure.  It makes you focus on incremental change.  It is very surprising that a lot of my colleagues and consultant, and some that I have the ultimate respect for (example), still predominantly push a feature-driven approach to marketing.  I do realize that pitching a feature-driven approach works much better with less experienced CEOs and it is a better “consulting sell”, but I’m not convinced if it’s what really creates differentiation for their client companies.  I’d go back to what my old colleague told me — product marketing provides a lot more value if focused on the overall positioning (i.e. how differently the product is solving the customer problem) and the long term vision of how it’s bringing non-incremental value to the customer (technically and financially).

One way to drive this point is to highlight that if someone in the car industry polled customers in 1900’s about how a car should look like, the customers would have all said they’d want a carriage with a horse that eats less and “defecates” less!

Posted under business, industry, marketing

It will be interesting to see what the corporate landscape will look like when we get to the other side of the recession.  According to a report by The McKinsey Quarterly, it will be quite different to how it looks now.

“[After analyzing] nearly 700 high-tech companies during contractions in markets around the world over the past two decades. [They] found that the turmoil accompanying downturns significantly reconfigures the high-tech landscape. About half of the companies that entered these downturns as leaders—the top 20 percent—ended up as laggards when the economy regained momentum.”

There are many ways that this could come about of course, some are:

1. The leaders were slow to react to changing economic pressures and costs dragged them down
2. The leaders saved cash and did not invest in technology to keep up with market demands
3. Entrants or non-leaders innovated around the leaders with a business model that the downturn actually strengthened

Of course, “business model” is not limited to “pricing” or “cost structure”.  It could include the channel, licensing model, support structure, etc.  Everything that goes towards how a company makes and uses money.

In a software-based industry, there is a great deal of opportunity in #3.  And if you’re interested in discussing how Xuropa can help your company take advantage of the environment, please drop me a line via Twitter (sfojames), LinkedIn, or Xuropa.

Posted under Xuropa, business, industry