Kihachiro Onitsuka

My new year’s resolution: I want to be a runner in 2012. In the old days, you could become a runner just like that – you’d go out as you were, ran, and… mission accomplished. You’d be running – a runner. Done. Not in 2012.

Deciding to run creates many questions. What clothes to wear? You need to have an opinion on textiles, fabrics, cushioning, weather protection, and what not. How to navigate, what to listen to (not which music, but which device), which beginner’s schedule to adopt, which community to join, and finally: to auto-post your results on Facebook, or not to auto-post your results on Facebook. The latter has become an existentialist dilemma these days, and one Jean Paul Sartre never spent a minute on, I’m sure. He wasn’t much of a runner either, I guess.

Anyway, you need to buy many things now, and there’s a lot to choose from. You got to work your way through a tremendous pile of great marketing. So I bought an Apple iPod Nano, a Nike + Sportwatch GPS, and some Adidas, North Face and Superdry Japan garments, and I joined RunKeeper.com without auto-posting to Facebook. And all that before I had even arrived at the most essential of all running questions: Which shoes to wear?

A friend – who happens to be a recreational marathon runner – told me runners are very loyal to their brand of shoes. “An Adidas runner will always choose Adidas. Same for all other brands.” So it’s quite important to go with the right brand when you get started. You’ll probably be stuck with it forever. It’s a risky business.

Now running clearly is a classic thing. Every runner’s ultimate goal is to complete (or even win) a marathon. The name Marathon comes from the legend of Pheidippides, a Greek messenger. The legend states that he was sent from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians had been defeated in the Battle of Marathon (in which he had just fought). He ran the entire distance without stopping and burst into the assembly, exclaiming Nenikékamen (‘We have won’) before collapsing and dying. Good story. And hidden within “Nenikékamen” is Nike, the Winged Godess of strength, speed, and victory. Now that’s a great name for a sports brand. Read Nike’s brand history and recognise the marketing genius that put the company in the number 1 position globally.

Number 2 on any runner’s consideration list for shoes must be ASICS, a Japanese brand. Did you know that ASICS stands for “Anima Sana In Corpore Sano”, the Latin adagium meaning a “Sound Mind In A Sound Body”? Whatever else you do, take a minute and read ASICS’ brand story – it is magnificant, and it ends in 5 (or actually 6) definitions of sportsmanship spirit. Sun Tzu himself couldn’t have phrased them better. Turns out that the founder, Onitsuka, first was a soldier, and then sold beer on the black market, before turning to “help the young to become good members of society”. Yeah. He modeled the first basketball shoes after a squid, and he tricked the great African marathon runner Abebe Bikila – who always ran bare foot – into wearing his shoes by convincing him that there would be lots of glass on the Tokyo streets. It worked, business prospered, and Onitsuka decided to give away 70 per cent of his shares to the employees. He’s a giant.

So even though their shoes look beyond aweful, I decided to just do it on ASICS. It’s too good a story.

Just before Christmas, while reviewing some fresh web copy, somebody said: “People are not reading online, they only scan copy”. The comment threw me back 15 years, to the early days of my career.

Fl. 5.000,- website scan
Back then, I was a copywriter with an agency. The internet was quite new, at least to the Dutch masses, and as most organisations, our clients struggled to understand specific requirements of the web, and how to integrate it into their overall marketing and communication strategies. We thought we knew better, and helped them out. In “Writing for the web” courses, we would say things like “Use short sentences”, “Try to use bulleted lists”, “Remember: Keep it simple; just one topic per paragraph”, and “Subheadings give your copy a solid structure, and will give you a higher ranking in Altavista and Netscape”. For 5000 Dutch guilders (~EUR2250, ~USD3000), we offered a “Website scan”. It was good business. Google had just arrived. I received 15 emails per day. If even.

I may sound like an old badger to you. Social media are in about the same place right now. I think I received 15 emails a day in December with offers for a Social Media scan.

2 weeks to respond
I joined that agency right after college. One of my professors hated email. He said: “They hooked me up with an email account. I hate email. You know what? If I receive a written letter, I read it once, twice, three times before I put it down. I usually take a couple of days to think about the letter, and my response. I sit down to write. Sometimes I write three versions before manually copying it onto my letterhead. It’s a very personal thing, I will never ask my assistant to do it. Out of the question! So on average, I need about two weeks to respond to a letter. On average, I receive about 10 letters a week. It’s quite different with email. I receive an email, and if I didn’t respond within – say – 2 days, the guy rings me and says: “Hey I sent you an email, can you please respond?”. And I already receive 10 emails a day. I hate it, it’s impossible for me to correspond like that!”

No doubt
In a recent magazine interview, somebody said: “This is the age of the opinion. Everybody has an opinion on just about everything. There seems to be less and less room for ambivalence and doubt. It’s actually quite okay to have an opinion based on just limited subject knowledge.”

We don’t read. We scan and have an opinion anyway. So who needs words in 2012? My prediction: Next year, Twitter will tune down to just 70 characters per tweet – commas and question marks will no longer be allowed.

Top 5 blog posts 2011
For this blog, these 5 posts drew most attention, comments and retweets:

1. The Corporate Website is Dead
2. The Corporate Website is Dead (Continued)
3. Brands like friends
4. Social Media ROI. Rubbish. It’s free!
5. The Real Cost of Marketing Automation (Pizza Anyone?)

Happy 2012!

Infographic by SEO Book

Expensive email blasters
In a November 2010 blog post, Forrester’s Jeff Ernst – the principal analyst responsible for this particular piece of research – states that “too many companies have invested in marketing automation platforms, only to use them as expensive email blasters.” In the April 2011 report B2B marketers must better prepare for marketing automation, he cautions that “Small businesses with simple requirements can receive a lot of value within days by implementing basic features and may not ever need to do more. But for larger companies that serve sophisticated buyer needs, it takes time to build a revenue engine that produces a steady supply of qualified sales opportunities, and getting an email campaign out the door in three days does not ensure that you are on a path to achieving that bigger vision.”

Amen
Without having access to the actual Marketing Automation Maturity Model – with Sinterklaas and Christmas just around the corner, spending $499 on aging research papers may not be the most opportunistic of choices – one can guess that it’ll start with manually sending emails into low quality, poorly segmented databases, with zero business impact, and end up with nurturing, scoring, integrated communications based on deep knowledge of your buyer’s journey, with all the targeted segmenting, nurturing, scoring and integration between marketing automation and sales CRM that you can wish for – where the marketing system unilaterally sets the business strategy, aligns sales and marketing once and for all, and wins marketing prizes. Amen.

3 Traps
Ernst identifies 3 traps, around process, content, and skills, which keep companies from getting beyond this “batch ‘n’ blast” level of maturity. They’ll never reap the true benefits of marketing automation, but get stuck in the middle between a great vision, sophisticated platform and expert vendor support on the one side, and bloated budgets, frustrated marketers and low quality databases on the other. And the quality of leads generated and qualified by marketing is – and will be – questioned by sales.

KSFs
Ernst indeed warns CMOs (ordinary marketers should pay attention, too) that the following success factors are critical, if they expect ROI from their investment in marketing automation (source: Christine Thompson, Success Factors for Marketing Automation):

• A defined lead management process (agreed to by sales and marketing);
• A content strategy that supports buyers’ needs (not the marketer’s convenience), throughout the buyer’s journey — for each buyer role;
• Access to good contact data (up-to-date contact info for the buyer roles most likely to respond favourably);
• Access to the skills and budget needed to keep the marketing automation platform running smoothly.

Medieval cobblestones
My take: Without these factors in place, buying an advanced marketing automation platform and expect the ill-prepared marketing manager to benefit from it, is like buying a brand new Ferrari F1 race car, give it to a pizza delivery guy in Rome (with fuel and a full, retained pit crew of course), and tell him he’ll deliver pizza’s across town a 1,000 times faster (and much hotter too). All technical reports, all sports analysts, and all Ferrari fans would agree that that’s a terrific investment, because pizza’s are usually cold on delivery, there simply isn’t a better F1 race car around, and the mechanics will make sure it runs to its full capacity. Of course some of the preconditions to use the car proficiently – like a F1 Super License, access to the Autodrome Nationale Monza race track, some level of racing expertise, and a very wealthy sponsor – wouldn’t have made it into the purchase decision conversation. And hence our poor pizza delivery guy races the streets of Rome at 500+ mph, crashes his racehorse into the Fontane di Trevi, all hot pizza’s drown, and the good people of Rome starve, yet again. Stuck in the middle between a great vision and lots of medieval cobblestones.

Must be a hard game
Forrester’s Marketing Automation Maturity Model was first introduced in 2008. 3 years later, even great case study type companies still haven’t been able to make it past levels 1 and 2. You figure it out.

Pizza, anyone?

Once the buyer’s journey has been outlined, content strategies are put in place to serve the right message, to the right audience, through the right channels of communication, at the right time in the cycle. Superior data quality allows marketers to constantly refine audience targeting.

Economic essence
Multinational companies however have always been struggling to meet really local market requirements.  Because of lack of resources, not because of the data being unavailable. In global business, the world has to be simplified, stripped of culture variance, and countries boiled down to their economic essence, the rawest of cliches. By definition, content strategy mapped against the buyer’s journey can only magnify the lack of cultural sophistication in the “Global Rollout Marketing” approach.

So what’s the whole product?
In IT, vendors create products, solutions, and in many cases services, too. Value added resellers re-sell these products, solutions, services and some value adding substance on top of it all to end-users. By default, most VARs will sell whatever brings in most cash; vendor margin into the left pocket, sales margin into the right. It’s the way of the B2B world.

In fact many times, a combination of vendor A’s product, vendor B’s solutions and vendor C’s service would result in the highest margin. So it’s really quite hard to predict what the VAR will actually come up with as a sales pitch.

Own the touch points
Nevertheless vendors like to think they know their prospects in and out, offer the perfect portfolio to keep them satisfied, control the buyer’s journey end-to-end, and the touch points that matter along this sequence of engagements – even the ones owned by resellers.

Most really don’t.

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.

Last night in the pub, he mentioned this phrase he found: On LinkedIn, you’re connected to the people you went to school with. On Twitter, you follow the people you wish you’d gone to school with. “And on Facebook,” my friend added, “you call the whole world ‘friends’, and you update them on what’s going on in your life, mainly by referring to likeable stuff online, because that is a lot more exciting than your everyday issues and ventures. Oh, and the whole thing is eating up quite some time out of your daily schedule, too! But that’s ok, because you didn’t have anything interesting planned to begin with, did you?”

He asked: “How many people wake up in the morning, thinking: ‘What am I going to do today, that will look great on Facebook?’ Social media create a reality of their own, where only appearances count – it has nothing to do with the stuff real life is made up of: eating, drinking, fucking, working, not to mention suffering. Why the hell should I care that some asshole I vaguely know found a funny movie clip on some website? A monkey can do better than that. Get a life, god damn it!”

Bottom line: “Some day you figure out that you don’t have that many friends (and the ones you have wouldn’t borrow you a penny), your life is dead boring, and you’re wasting all this time to prove it to the world, over and over again. It’s depressing. Big business ahead for the mental industry. I will tell my shrink to offer his services right there on Facebook!”

“Jesus, I need an unlike button, just for Facebook,” my friend told the bartender, his trembling right index finger suspended in mid-air.

With friends and pubs like these, who needs social media?

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.

That’s why content marketing - the art of putting the right content in front of the right audience at the right time through the right vehicles or platforms - can be quite a challenge. What’s right for some prospect, may be very wrong for another. And in business buying situations, you deal with decision makers, influencers, purchasing departments, consultants – it’s not always, or always never, clear who is buying to begin with. So what’s the right audience? Anyway, I wrote about this before.

The good folks over at JESS3 created a Content Marketing infographic on two dimensions. (1) They map content vehicles and assets on the buyer’s journey (Awareness, Consideration, Close), and (2) they recommend the channels through which the content is to be distributed to the target audience (Twitter, website, etc). The result is a pretty great infographic – if social media have revolutionized one more thing on top of just The Way Humans Communicate, it is the genre of the Infographic. If  a picture says more than a thousand words, an infographic conveys more than a thousand metrics… And so much for lousy analogies. Apologies. 

Anyway, though being a great infographic, it’s not granular enough, and as such quite useless in b2b sales situations. To come up with an effective content strategy, b2b marketers need at least 3 more dimensions than the 2 already mentioned above:

1. Customer vs. non customer
2. Decision Maker vs. Influencer
3. Direct sales vs. Indirect sales

Customers and non-customers may receive some of the same assets, but face-to-face time with account management, customer support, and other customers have to be taken into account. Information requirements for decision makers and influencers cannot be compared. And if you do not own the relationship with a target account, the communications setup is entirely different – makes it hard to control the content flow to begin with.

Does that mean that content marketing should be ruled out in b2b environments? No – but marketers will have to spend more time on data management, segmentation and prioritisation. Because it will take an army of marketers, creatives, writers, and producers to cover 5 dimensions, through 3 buyer’s journey phases, times 30 assets. That’s just too many options.

So pick your battles wisely. And allways enjoy your infographics!

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?