Marketing Without BS

Up VERY EARLY this morning to drive into Seattle and listen to Zander Nosler talk at an NWEN breakfast.

Zander started Coffee Equipment Company four years to the day before he sold it to Starbucks; I heard about it on NPR in a sound bite from the SBUX shareholders’ meeting this year. Howard Schultz described walking into a coffee shop in NY (not one of his) where they had an $8 cup of brewed coffee and there was a line! So he bought the company.

Perhaps Howard recognizes nutty but original ideas, or maybe it was a fellow-traveler syndrome: A former VC once confessed that Howie had been in his livingroom trying to raise money for Starbucks and the VC’s response was, “C’mon, Howard, a $3 cup of coffee? Are you crazy?”

The echoes of this were apparent in 2006, when I first met Zander in my role as chair of the NWEN Early Stage Investment Forum. Zander was one of the applicants who was ultimately chosen to present, but during the screening and selection process another prominent VC said something to the effect that he didn’t think a $3000 coffee pot would get off the ground. In a sense he was right since the Clover wound up selling for $8,000, not $3,000.

Zander’s talk was entertaining and well done. One of the points he made was if you’re an entrepreneur, you had better learn how to sell. Before CEC he had sold practically nothing (he’s a mechanical engineer). He had a paradigm-busting product at an insane price point that was tough to haul around and demo (this isn’t your average coffee pot; for one thing, it needs 230 volts).  But they had the usual cash-flow problems most startups experience and couldn’t wait for the customers to find them. So he spent about a third of his time selling.

I wish more inventors were like him. I see way too many who confuse an invention with a business; a product with demand. If you’re having trouble generating the emotional will to actually ask people to buy your product, consider this: if you believe in it (product or service, matters not), then you owe it to the people who don’t know about it to make them aware of it. After breakfast I talked to a lady who described a company that made a medical device to do brain diagnostics. They were very conservative about selling, she said, didn’t want to try anything new but sales were lousy. I pointed out to her that maybe people were dying because their doctor didn’t know about this device…would that motivate you to take more aggressive action?

A friend just lent me “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath, and I just started reading it last night. Wish I could say I stayed up all night to finish it but the truth is my hot water heater puked its guts out yesterday in the closet it lives in and I was pretty tired after installing its replacement. But something in the first chapter caught my attention.

C&D talk about a research project at Stanford that went like this: some taps out the  rhythm (ever notice how that word looks like it’s Welsh?) to a familiar song, like Happy Birthday or The Star Spangled Banner. Someone else has to guess the name of the song.  Call them “tappers” and “listeners.”

What’s interesting is that the tappers thought that guessing the song would be incredibly easy, and the listeners almost never got the right song.

The tappers are tapping away, the song playing in their heads, and the listeners are hearing gibberish. Random taps.

So what?

Well, the point is that it’s almost impossible to approach a communication transaction purely from the viewpoint of the receiver when you’re the sender. Because the song is playing in your head. You hear it, you see how the tapping of the rhythm fits, and you believe that others will get it as well.

But they don’t. Way too much of the time.

The more complex the “song,” the harder the task. Look at any website or datasheet for a complex technology product. The authors aren’t deliberately trying to be obscure, but they failed at being clear. I have to assume they devoutly want their market to “get it.”

More on how to deal with this later.

For several years now the rage in marketing is all about branding: creating brand awareness, brand stickiness, the brand promise, integrated branding, and so on.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it now: this makes sense for soda pop, sneakers, sunglasses, wine, stuff like that. Consumer commodities. Can’t really tell one from the other, so go with the cool brand.

In my not-very-humble opinion, it’s bullshit for industrial companies.

Ok, this seems to the gentle reader in stark contrast to my Ugly Logos rant (see earlier). But it’s really not.

Let me tell you a story about Big Advertising. Years ago when I was a lowly drone in Bill Gates’ Salt Mine, I sat through a couple of memorable meetings with EnormoAgency, Inc. These two meetings were at least 8 years apart, and were with different agencies, so it’s not a factor of the time or vendor.

In both meetings beautifully-dressed account reps shows us garbage creative for a complex product, one aimed squarely at a sophisticated, discerning, and technical market. The creative–pictures and copy–were, as some of my compiler-writing buddies used to say about certain marketing materials, semantically empty. The content was a pointer to a null. Devoid of substance.

Instead we got either boring, cute, or patently offensive pictures (box shots–c’mon, that’s all you got?; human brains (”organ parts,” as BillG would later rant; and such like drivel), and the usual techno-babble feature-speak ad copy.

Crapola.

Why? These were, after all, the “top” ad agencies in the world.  If they couldn’t do it, who could?

The problem was in the portfolio. These agencies made most of their money on big print and broadcast media campaign. Who does big print and broadcast media campaigns? That’s right, soda pop, sneakers, sunglasses, wine, etc.

Consumer commodities. Can’t tell one from the other.

You don’t have to know anything about Coke to write a Coke ad. What the hell is there to know? It’s flavored water with corn syrup. A 5 year old could know everything there is to know about Coke.

But suppose you’re writing an ad for a six-axis CNC milling machine, or an ARINC 429 Mode-S translator, or a refrigerated raw water (RSW) chiller–you think a sexy product shot is going to get people to buy it? You think the degree of brand awareness will map directly to sales performance?

Buy my ERP software because we’re a great brand. Please!

The agency types that work from 10-11 on Coke, then run out for their 3 hour lunches, then work from 2-3 on your RISC compiler or hand-held data collection device, can’t and won’t learn anything of substance about your product. If you don’t believe that, get your agency creative team to sit down with your engineering team and have the tech guys whiteboard your product’s architecture. Then have the creative team call a few prospects and make a sales pitch for your product. See how far they get.

If you have a considered purchase–a complex sale–and your outside marketing and creative agency couldn’t do a sales call for you, you have the wrong marketing team.

Because all the stuff they do is supposed to sell your product.  If not, what’s the point?

So instead–instead of truly understanding the product in such a way that they can add value to the marketing communication challenge–instead of that they fall back on branding. Because it’s something they understand and it’s the best they can do.

It’s not their fault they’re not technical–that’s why they all use Macs for Pete’s sake. If they were really smart they’d use something impossible like Windows XP.

So the outcome of this is IBM spending huge sums to take out full page ads in WSJ or NYT or whatever with basically no content in the ad. Like a guy with a laptop at the beach and a tagline like “Non-stop intergalactic computing.” I’d love to reprint some but they’re copyrighted so I can’t.

Just pick up a big paper and you’ll see what I mean.

So before you fall into the brand trap, find out if your marketing agency can REALLY understand your product or service, how it compares to the competition, and how they will create and communicate strong differentiation, a compelling value proposition, and a message that really matters to your prospect.

I’m on a tear, obviously.

I have three clients with Truly Ugly Logos.

Disclosure: We (that is Workpump) don’t do logos. We’re not a design or branding firm. So I’m completely disinterested here.

In my not terribly humble opinion, all three companies suffer in the market place due to TUL. But they don’t know it, don’t believe it, and never see the results.

TULs say a bunch about a company, starting with “we have little or no taste.” That might not be a big problem for some customers, but it is for others. TULs also say “we’re not really successful, because all the truly successful companies have non-TULs.” A TUL can tell a client: “We don’t have enough money (see #2 above) so we hired my brother-in-law/nephew/niece/neighbor’s kid/serial killer/whatever to design our corporate identity. We don’t care (see #1) so why should you?”

When you live in TULville, you don’t know what it costs you because those prospects never put you on their short list of possible vendors. You never see the opportunity you lost. Your sales team never gets in the door. It’s a hidden cost. And guess what: it’s the really big companies you want for customers that care about this stuff. Your average mid-level suck-up won’t take a dopey-looking vendor to management with a recommendation (”Uh, so I know they look like two guys in a garage but really they’re a great company and we should trust our mission critical network/telephone system/audit/software development project/contract negotiation to them.”)

Like I said, I’m disinterested (not uninterested, they’re different) but wish they’d hire a branding firm and get it over with. One never will, the other two eventually will and wish they’d done it sooner.

Guess I got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.

BTW the people who need to find this post on Google and read it will search for “logo.” So logo logo logo ugly logo great logo whatever logo logo logo. Maybe Google will be smart enough to index it.

Gimli has been kind of crawling sometimes lately so I thought I’d download Windows Defender and see if some spyware had gotten past the armed guards at the gate. The main attraction of Windows Defender is the price (free).

It’s easy enough to get to the DL site but then you have to mess around with the Genuine Windows validation thingie. That’s ok, my software is legal so no worries. But irritant #1 is that I’ve already validated Win XP on this machine in the past to download other Microstuff, so why again? Irritant #2 is that I’m using Firefox and the stupid software, which is only going to go get some more exes anyway, won’t run. I have to save it and then go launch it from Explorer. Ugh. Then it downloads an exe which I have to do the same thing with. Bet if I had been using IE it would have gotten it right, you think.

Ok, irritant #3 is that Windows Defender then has to validate my Windows authenticity ALL OVER AGAIN! Hey, didn’t we just do this in order to DL you?

I don’t mind them protecting their IP (heck it’s where the $$ comes from) but boy they do it in an annoying way.

Rant over.

After a hiatus I’ve decided the world can’t really live without another blog so we switched from Google’s Blogger to this one. Like all good intentions, at this moment I have every hope of keeping this current and interesting.