The P for People

What would you charge to introduce a total stranger to a dear friend?

I’m pondering this question since I stumbled upon the term “transactional social media”, which I understand as “social media with the primary aim of converting non-customers into customers”. “Transactional social media” may sound like a contradiction in terms, like selling hard…. to friends – but that’s exactly where we’re heading. At least that’s what services like Zuberance and NetAffinity seem to suggest, which enable automated social network activation, spot influential preference, drive peer-to-peer (social) recommendation and (business) introduction.

The basic idea here is that a friend’s advice is followed 90 per cent more often than a stranger’s (i.e. seller’s commercial) call-to-action. Which makes sense.

Do you remember the times when Nike and Sony (man, they used to be so cool!) would supply influential teens with free product, just to get to the other members of their peer group? I think they called those tactics “member-get-member”. Those where bedtime stories compared to what we’re about to witness in social space. The opportunity is just too big, fat and juicy; the social data mining technology too readily available and powerful.

It’s about time we marketers (re-)define the 5th marketing P: People (Preference, Psychology). Because more than ever, to get to people, you need to go through people.

In social space, ordinary people can quite easily be turned into resourceful sales reps. It’s just a matter of applying the right triggers, penalties and rewards.

Next: Apple iBrain 1

Yeah why not. Check out the latest updates on Apple’s patent applications, and you’ll agree: They have reached the point where the only thing left to enhance is the human body proper.

Keyboards are gone. Wires are gone. Interfaces have become super intuitive and user friendly. Recent patents show they want to share files by literally pouring them from one device into the next. What about Wifi Power, the idea to charge iPhones, Pads, and Pods just by putting them close to the electricity socket. No strings attached.

Apple are about to bridge the gap between the human brain and technology. And with batteries that can be charged without a cord, they have cleared the road for the ultimate move: get rid of the devices, and join the brain and the technology together.

It shouldn’t take more than a couple of years to browse the web with a wink of the eye, deviceless. To pay electronically by nodding at the sales rep. To watch a movie, learn a language, meet new people by just sitting in your chair with your eyes closed. (Provided the chair is next to a power point, otherwise you’ll start hibernating right in the middle of Shrek 8 – I warned you!).

Sometime soon, our minds will live online, on an Apple pay-per-use subscription. They’ll charge extra for thoughts on ugly things (and Steve Ballmer). And we’ll be less equal.

The Basics of Targeting SMEs

Marketing wisdom: The cost of recruiting a new customer is about 10 times as high as the cost of pursuading an existing customer to buy more. And: The bigger the company, the more money it generally takes to turn them into a customer. Therefore, invest most of your marketing and sales budgets into acquiring small companies with a high potential to grow.

Selling to small companies means: Simple solutions, short sales cycles, easy selling for the channel, low-touch volume business, hockey stick sales – future revenues guaranteed 110%! It’s a no-brainer.

Except for companies that got used to selling to very large corporations. In order for them to be able to sell to small companies, considerable cultural change and financial investment are called for. Product development, sales force, customer support, marketing team, channel infrastructure – the whole thing needs to be refocused. It’s difficult to make things simple and easy. It’s like building a new company, costly in many ways. Not straightforward at all.

And vice versa. Right?

To build a position in the Cloud…

This week, my company NetApp launched a new visual identity. Check it out before you continue: www.netapp.com

Did you ever bring a new product to market? I bet the positioning piece was the hardest part of it. Getting aligned with business goals, thoroughly understanding the competitive landscape, writing a crisp positioning statement, followed by a sound value proposition can be quite a cathartic experience for the business leadership and the marketing teams involved. You spend a year on research, sessions with the board, with internal and external stakeholders, going through several rounds of SWOT analyses, trying to avoid marketing myopia (if you don’t know what this is, read this – a marketing classic from the 60′s. YEAH!), just to understand how you’re going to market. It’s essential to get it right, because it will determine your every next move, and in the end mean the difference between succeeding or failing. And usually, everyone involved understands this, so the stakes are high – that’s what makes it hard and painful.

Some years ago, at my previous company, we were asked to bring a new software to market, opening up the SaaS category for that particular type of solution in the Dutch market. Within 6 weeks. Great learning experience, and indeed, the positioning piece took us over 3 weeks. The rest was mere execution.

And that was just about positioning a single product… Imagine what happens if you’re trying to find a differentiated position for a global brand in an ever consolidating, high speed, dog-eat-dog business environment, like my company NetApp in today’s IT industry – where every single vendor is working hard to gain sustainable competitive advantage and build a defendable position in the Cloud space.

Cloud, or shared infrastructure as it is often referred to, has the potential to turn every best-of-breed solution into an ingredient of a broader value proposition – simply because many solutions together make up a cloud infrastructure. With that, Intel’s brand challenge has become everybody’s issue in 2011.

This week, my company NetApp launched a new visual identity, to keep up with the differentiated position of our Cloud solutions and services portfolio. The new look & feel is personable to a level that’s rarely seen within the IT industry: it’s made up of hand drawn, colourful, abstract illustrations, there is a new handwritten font, and the more foundational illustrations depict customer success stories. It has gone from a techy, masculin, blue-black-and-white-with-lots-of-stock-photography look-and-feel to a more feminine, open, likeable, creative presentation, with a clear emotional dimension.

Have a look yourself: Successful Businesses Are Built On NetApp – featuring the business transformation story of our customer Suncorp.

The new visual style is different enough to match the quality of our solutions and services – we’re anxious to see how the market responds to our new appearence.

How do you like our new brand looks?

Apple doesn’t do social

Remember my post Brands like friends?

I concluded: “That’s why of all the things you can say about brands, this one is imperative: they have to be consistent. If not, it’s psychotic, schizofrenic, or – at best – somewhat confused. Most people don’t want to be friends with friends like that.”

But what about brands that don’t really want to be friends, like Apple? Apple is the most admired brand around, the brand most people want to become friends with.

Apple is very consistent in it’s behaviour towards the market. They create brilliant consumer electronics, build and dominate new categories, and make lots of money doing so. iPad 1 generated $9.7 Billion incremental revenue for Apple in about 10 months time. iPad 2, introduced 2 weeks ago, will probably do better. Meanwhile, iPad 1 goes down in price, leaving the competition battling the user experience of an aged product, forced to go down in price without even having launched their products yet – they don’t stand a chance.

Apple made me think about communities this week. Simply because they do not invest in building or supporting a community. They don’t do social. They don’t have Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter accounts – it’s not a lack of focus, it’s a statement. So I was wrong in another recent post, when I said that Apple wouldn’t buy Twitter, because they’d probably want to create their own social platform. Rubbish. They don’t do social.

Nevertheless, research after research shows that Apple is the strongest brand, the most admired company, with the largest fanbase in the history of high tech. And that fanbase is of course a community – the corporation Apple is just not investing in it.

This is very much aligned with their Do It Yourself customer support (outside of the US, where it is quite hard to find an Apple store, the website is about the only means of support). With Steve Jobs’ famous one liner: “You can’t expect the customer to know what he wants.” They don’t listen to the market, they create and direct the market. They are fundamentally not interested in their buyers, their fans. And although I am a fan of Apple’s products, and an admirer of their marketing strategy, I am sure this attitude will eventually bring Apple Inc. down. Because every successful product (strategy) will be copied, and you just can’t be brilliant all the time.

When I walked by the Apple flagship store in Palo Alto, California three hours before it started selling iPad 2 on 11 March, there was an endless line of fans waiting, filmed by television crews from all over the world, who in their turn were filmed by film crews from all over the world. Apple had provided them all with umbrella’s, customers and media the same, to keep them safe from sunburn.

2011: Estimating the Likelihood of Conversion

All marketing blogs that matter agree that 2011 will be about prospect and customer targeting. The Million Dollar Question: How to serve the right content to the right audience at the right time through the right communication channels? Many call the discipline focused on answering this question Content Marketing.

Why? Costs go down, conversion rates go up, and on average, customer life cycles will be extended, which will have a positive impact on overall revenue. A million dollar question, indeed!

In their 2006 Harvard Business Review Article “Knowing what to sell, when, and to whom”, Kumar et al state that “despite the abundance of data that many companies collect, most do a poor job predicting the behaviour of their customers.” They go on to present a rather crazy mathematical function to estimate the likelihood (Li) that a given customer or household (i) will purchase a given product at a given time.

Applying this formula to customer data “ups the odds of successfully predicting a specific purchase by a specific customer at a specific time to about 80 per cent, a number that will have a major impact on any company’s marketing ROI.” You can buy the full article for a mere $6.95 here.

However sophisticated this thinking, it applies strictly to customers. What about prospects? How can we estimate the likelihood of a prospect converting into a customer? By delivering on the promise of Content Marketing.

In 2011, paid, owned and earned media models will be refined to enable companies to move from 1-to-many to 1-to-few communication strategies. Push and pull tactics will have to be re-articulated in the new social marketing paradigm. Marketing Automation systems are designed to gather digital body language and help marketers identify response patterns in order to predict future audience behavior. Lead nurturing and scoring mechanisms will help us understand which prospects are ready to engage. Integration with Sales CRM systems and Customer Data Warehouses will close the loop between marketing and sales and eventually bring a higher return on marketing and sales investments.

Eventually, the content marketing strategist will be able to calculate and predict the likelihood of  a given prospect converting in to a customer. Let’s use 2011 to work on the statistical function to come with it!

Relationship branding (1): Imagine Virtually Anything

Ruim een jaar geleden maakten Cisco, VMware en NetApp bekend nauw te gaan samenwerken aan het datacenter van de toekomst. De marketing-communicatie voor deze samenwerking – onder het thema Imagine Virtually Anything (IVA) – wordt door de drie corporate merken gedragen. Nu dit thema ook door gecertificeerde wederverkopers kan worden vermarkt, is de tijd rijp voor brede markt-communicatie. Ik zal de strategie die hiervoor werd voorgesteld in een aantal bijdragen uitwerken.

Kort en goed: VMware produceert software voor server- en desktopvirtualisatie, NetApp levert hardware en software voor dataopslag en -management, en Cisco is marktleider op het gebied van netwerkoplossingen. Door producten en diensten uit de drie portefeuilles te combineren, ontstaat een zogenaamd dynamisch datacentrum, dat zich qua capaciteit, prestatie en kosten eenvoudig aanpast aan de veranderende eisen van de onderneming. Flexible IT dus.

• Persbericht
• IVA landing page

Achtergronden
De samenwerking tussen NetApp, Cisco en VMware en de bijbehorende marketingstrategie kwamen tot stand op corporate niveau, in de Verenigde Staten. Men kwam overeen internationaal samen op te trekken. Maar het is een harde wedstrijd en risico’s worden gespreid. Tegelijkertijd Cisco sloot daarom een vergelijkbare overeenkomst met NetApp’s aardrivaal EMC, en EMC tastte 3 jaar geleden diep in de buidel om VMware in te lijven. The plot thickens…
Daarnaast zijn zowel Cisco als VMware, anders dan NetApp, decentraal geleide organisaties. Een afspraak in The Valley heeft daarbuiten niet veel draagkracht – in Europa kwam Imagine Virtually Anything 1.0 niet veel verder dan een incidenteel persbericht. De kansen voor het programma leken dus gering – maar de marktdynamiek in 2010 gaf deze samenwerking wind mee.

Nieuwe impuls
In de zomer van 2010 wordt de eerste fase van IVA geëvalueerd, en besloten tot uitbreiding. De gezamenlijk ontwikkelde oplossingen werden aangevuld met services, gedeelde klantondersteuning en een propositie voor wederverkopers. NetApp, het kleinste merk van de drie, heeft het meest baat bij de samenwerking en neemt het voortouw.

Target Syndication (1): Where Content Marketing Meets Nurture Strategy

Een collega vroeg me deze bijdrage in het Engels te schrijven.

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Shifting audience behavior
Audience behavior is changing fast. There’s a lot happening in the marketing and communications space to illustrate the shift. It’s not in everybody talking Social Media (instead of doing it). It’s not in Apple announcing the iPad. It’s not even in Facebook beating Google as number 1 US website. It’s much more profound – these are all just agents of a fundamental shift in information consumption, that has changed the face of marketing and communications.

In day-to-day business we already see Pay-Per-Click performance deteriorating at tremendous pace, traditional advertising and media agencies dropping out of business, new marketing services emerging every day, start-ups being able to beat established brands in pr ink shares. Smart marketers beat rich marketers across the board.

Prospective customers do not respond to traditional triggers anymore. They found new ways to gather buyer information, delaying or even suspending their dropping into the qualifying mechanisms marketers have put in place over the last 10 years: CRM, telemarketing, lead management. If we are unable to capture the prospective customers’ attention with the right message, at the right time, at the right place, we will fail. The prospect is changing the game, taking charge of the relationship.

3 converging trends enabling target syndication
Over the next weeks, I will dig in to the 3 converging trends that together allow vendors to regain control of their go-to-market, and deploy sales/marketing strategies that will bring more focus and revenues than ever before.

1. Data quality & Buyer persona definition
Advanced CRM and database systems bring rich detail to any suspect, prospect and (ex-)customer database. With the right allocation of resources, strategies for enrichment, cleansing and augmentation, corporate databases will become more powerful than anything any media agency or buyer could ever provide. Deliverable: a 360 degree view of the prospective buyer – whether that is a net new contact, a customer looking for refresh or upgrade or a former customer deciding to return.

2. Content Marketing
Marketing PR is changing from a pure mass-marketing push to a much more intelligent, laser-targeted, audience-based communication instrument, that will take on a new task: deliver the various segments of our audiences within – or outside of – our database with exactly the right content, at exactly the right time. Knowing the audience means understanding where they are in the buying cycle, and providing them with exactly the right sequence of content pieces, allowing them to gather information, discover value propositions, evaluate alternatives, consider competitive offerings, and finally decide on investing. New e-marketing technology and methodology, like marketing automation, prospect nurturing and lead scoring, will help the marketer to deliver these tailor-made content pieces when they are most effective.

3. Marketing Automation
As audiences evade traditional lead qualification schemes – i.e. attend marketing events, subscribe to e-newsletters, download fact sheets from corporate websites, call internal sales desks – new technology enables us to track audience behavior and build our databases on a unprecedented scale. Marketing Systems – like Eloqua, Silverpop, Marketo -  are taking over behavioral tracking, information delivery and follow-up, lead nurturing and scoring, opportunity hand-off to sales. Marketers will focus on data analysis and segmentation, campaign strategy, content creation, and lead reporting.

Target syndication
Knowing where tomorrow’s buyer is, is easy. She’s already in our database. Knowing where next year’s buyer is, is what marketers will be focusing on more and more. How do we home them in on our value propositions? Our databases will be bigger, broader and deeper. Our campaigns will not be 1-on-1 yet, but they’ll be targeting clearly defined buyer personas, and provide them with exactly the right content. We will syndicate this content through all available channels in order to deliver our targeted messages: landing pads, social media, search, blogosphere, 3rd party comms, online and offline events, publishers, strategic alliances – we will find our prospects, and we will tell our sales in great detail who they’ll be calling on, kind of like in the old days.

B2B is dood, of: Waar is de doelgroep?

B2B is dood, schreef een kennis laatst. Marketers moeten zich richten op de business consumer, dus B2BC. Het idee is dat mensen consumeren als “privépersoon”, en als “medewerker”. De grens tussen die twee rollen vervaagt en het beslisproces voor de aanschaf van een nieuwe plasmatelevisie verschilt niet wezenlijk van de wijze waarop wordt besloten tot de investering in een nieuwe netwerkserver. Waarom zou de communicatiestrategie van Sony dus anders moeten zijn dan die van HP? Wat kan KPMG leren van Lego?

In de steentijd (ik bedoel: 15 jaar geleden) was B2B moeilijker dan B2C. Houd je prospects in de gaten! Dat kwam aan op het netwerk, rondrijden, handjes schudden, dineren, evenementen organiseren en bezoeken met een tas vol folders (of wuppies) en verkopen maar. B2C toen, ach: Gewoon netjes de 4 p’s afwerken met je reclamebureau, dikke campagne ertegenaan (GRP’s keihard uitonderhandelen!) en rustig gaan slapen. Komt Kerst: mooie bonus, fijne relatiegeschenken, goede vooruitzichten.

Met de opkomst van CRM werd B2B makkelijker dan B2C. Bedrijven verzamelden informatie over de doelgroep, bouwden steeds rijkere profielen op van suspects, prospects, klanten en ex-klanten. Het landschap voor zakelijke media was overzichtelijk, net als het beslisproces – het gedrag van de doelgroep was redelijk voorspelbaar. Voor elke groep kon je daarom een eigen sales- en marketingstrategie ontwerpen, en verkopen maar.

Wat vergelijkingssites deden met consumentenmarketing, doen social media met B2B-marketing.

Consumenten houden niet van CRM (“Bel me niet!”). Bedrijven houden niet van CRM (“Bespaar me je cookies!”). Mensen beslissen zelf voor welke producten en diensten ze prospect zijn.

De zakelijke doelgroep is nu zo ongrijpbaar als de consumenten. Het medialandschap is versnipperd. Vroeger vonden we 50 tv-kanalen veel; nu kiest onze doelgroep – zakelijk en privé – uit 50 miljard websites. We kijken geen tv meer. De invloed van printmedia is tanende. Traditionele bannercampagnes responderen allang niet meer – de optimisten onder ons willen nog weleens een bannercampagne lanceren om wat aan de brand awareness te werken (“Wat ruik ik? Wordt er weer marketingbudget verbrand? Kom mannen, help blazen!”). Rich media banners vormen de laatste stuiptrekking van een overleefd communicatiemodel. Alleen outdoor- en bioscoopreclame garanderen nog kijkers, maar of onze doelgroep daar bijzit? We weten het niet. We weten alleen dat we geen controle meer hebben over de wijze waarop onze prospects informatie vergaren, elkaar informeren, over investeringen beslissen.

De B2B-doelgroep is niet hetzelfde als de B2C-doelgroep. Ze zijn even zelfbewust geworden – dát is wat B2BC betekent. En dat biedt grote kansen voor elke marketer.