Problem

Just as all good stories have a villain, all good products have a problem (in high tech marketing, that’s why "solution" is such a popular word).  But many times in marketing, we acknowledge that there is a problem, but we don’t spend enough effort getting to know it, and we certainly don’t spend enough time talking about it.  The problem your product solves is the villain in your story – so build it up, show the reader how evil the villain can be and what effects it has on its victims.  The better we are at articulating the problem, the more our attractive our solution becomes.  Here’s a problem from last year that many companies are still playing to: gas is wicked expensive.

Promise

When we launch a product – ahem – solution, we make a promise.  Example: to develop a car that goes 40 miles without burning a drop of gas.  As you think about your company’s promise (or promises), try to balance the bold and the relevant – making a strong statement, but making sure it appeals to the people that can make or break your company.  And by all means, remember to link it to the problem you’ve identified and promoted.  If you find that your company’s promise has nothing to do with your market’s problem, go back and rethink one or the other.

Progress

I’ve identified a problem, and promised the market that my product is going to save the day.  Now what?  Pretty quickly, we have to show progress, demonstrating that we’re on the right path to delivery.  The need to show progress is most acute when there is a long gap between the promise and the delivery of a solution.  Think about GM’s announcement of the Volt in 2007.  Here we are two years later, and still nothing.  But that’s cool, right?  Because every six months or so, the company has provided updates on its progress – announcing the availability date of the first production model, leaking photos of the new design, and indicating that testing has begun.  Many of my clients develop complex solutions to difficult problems, and that can take awhile, so I spend a lot of time working with them to keep the progress flowing.

Proof

Here’s the big finish, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the end result of lots of progress made delivering on a promise to solve a problem.  Proof can come in many flavors – quantitative, qualitative, case-by-case, market wide, from an analyst, from a test lab, from a customer, or even from a simple photo.  When GM finally rolls the first Chevy Volt off the line, pictures will be taken.  But is a photo adequate proof that they’ve delivered on the promise?  How about when the first Volt owner drives her car 40 miles without a drop of gas – is that enough?  Maybe a stellar M.P.G. rating from the E.P.A.?  GM’s first profitable quarter?  We’ve all got our own burden of proof when it comes to the promises companies make, so it’s only fair that our constituents will have their own benchmarks too.  For that reason, when it comes to proof, too much is never enough.

I’ve been using these four Ps for some time to help keep my clients (and myself) on a path to good marketing.  I like to create a simple table with a column for each of the new four Ps, and start by listing each of the promises made in marketing.  Then I fill in the problem, progress and proof columns for each promise to see where the voids are.  Give it a try- it’s a simple excercise that can tell you a lot.  I promise.

The notion that we must choose between the art and science of marketing neglects that people have a left brain and a right brain, and we use them both simultaneously.  This applies to the marketers doing the work, and the consumers and business professionals we’re trying to reach.

When I contemplate buying a car, my logical side needs to hear that it’s safe, reliable and affordable.  But those aren’t the only characteristics that interest me, because my emotional side wants to know that it has a killer sound system, wicked acceleration, and comes in a hot color.  Marketers must hit me with science and art to win me over.

Similarly, when I plan a campaign to introduce a new high tech product to the market, I must appeal to both the logical and the emotional. To do so, I might highlight how the product can save a business tons of money, while making the professional look like a genius in front of the boss.  I, too, must hit the target with science and art to win them over.

Is marketing an art or a science?  It’s both.  Must we choose one at the expense of the other?  No.  Do I ask and answer my own questions?  Sometimes.

Slowly, then not-so-slowly, the pool of media we marketers were targeting began to dry out- readership, page counts, ad revenue and staff began to dwindle.  And the marketing practice of leveraging these conduits to generate awareness began losing its effectiveness.  And so began the shift…

The major movement underway begins with our audience, who have reduced their reliance on the media to tell them what’s up, and instead have turned to one another for information.  Through user reviews, product ratings, online forums, blogs, tweets, homemade videos, and social networks, the mass collective of customers for just about any product has found a voice of its own.  Your customers are no longer only consumers of information, they are also producers of content.  They are both informing and being informed – about the prospect of a new storage array before it’s even launched, or the problems with a software update for a router before its first "official" review.  And this shift is forcing an evolution in the role of the marketer.

With users empowered to talk to one another, we can no longer pretend that we are in complete control of our messages.  We can no longer simply talk through the media and to the market.  Here are a few implications of the shift:

• We must speak directly to our customers- build a community, provide the information they want, and be more candid than ever before.
• We must give our audience a voice- allow them to speak directly to us, make sure they know we’ve heard them, and close the loop when possible.
• We must enable our customers to talk to one another- providing a forum for users and curious prospects to exchange information and ideas.
• We must not censor- nurturing our credibility and trust by encouraging open dialog with and between our audience members.
• We must listen- learning from the people who are most important to our success, and letting their voices guide our actions.
• We must build killer products- testing and double testing new features before release, and avoiding mistakes that will become very visible to customers and prospects, very quickly.
• We must over service- ensuring that the customers we have are over-satisfied, and well armed to be ambassadors of our brand.

The shift is on.  Are you ready for it?

Obama’s speech got me thinking about my recent experiences marketing high-tech B2B products, and how the more substance I included in a campaign, the better results I achieved.  Some marketers believe that in building awareness it’s better to keep things general than it is to dwell on the details.  After all, you have to cast a wide net if you’re going to catch a lot of fish.  But here are a few reasons I think it makes sense to err on the side of substance:

• There are a lot of choices out there- so prospective buyers need substance to hone in on the right product for their needs. 
• Information is everywhere- so consumers will do their own research to find the details fast. If they can’t get the information they’re looking for directly from your company, they’ll find it elsewhere- and chances are they’ll stumble upon information that is outdated, innaccurate or less than flattering in the process.
• Details drive perception- so proving that your company is more than an empty message will send the impression that you have a plan (much like Obama accomplished in his speech).

There are plenty of ways to burn through a marketing budget without getting much return.  Sometimes I feel like a broken record when I say this, but the most important thing we can do is focus.  We should focus on the audiences that are critical for success.  We should focus on the conduits to those audiences that offer the most credibility and the broadest reach.  We should focus our messages on the one or two things that meet the audience’s urgent needs, while differentiating us from our competitors.  And most importantly, we should focus on our marketing goals as an acid test for green lighting any program.

Budgeting is a pain.  Always has been, always will be.  But an even greater pain than the act of budgeting is the realization that we’ve wasted precious dollars on programs that didn’t provide a return.  In order to avoid this kind of pain, focus on your audience, conduits, messages and goals before you start plugging numbers into a spreadsheet. 

It is also filled with advertisements for coin dealers and others providing services to the hobby.  Most of these advertisements consist of a bunch noisy words and I fly right by them.  But, my page turning stopped abruptly when I saw this advertisement.

What caught my eye, was the simplicity of it all. Really just three lines (and two pictures): Wishful thinking. Sure thing. Insist on PCGS.

[If your not familiar with the concept, PCGS, is a third party grading service for coins.  For a fee, they authenticate, grade and encapsulate coins.  The value of this is that the encapsulated coin is now liquid with most people in the hobby accept a PCGS (and a handful of other grading service) grade as a sure thing.  The difference in value of an ungraded and graded coin can be enormous regardless of what the owner might wish.]

Of course, to those in the hobby, the advertisement need not be explained; it portrays a simple problem/solution value proposition and a company name.

OK, Jeff, I’m not a coin collector, so what’s this all got to do with advertising in the high tech B2B space?

The answer is simple, take a look at 90% of the advertising you see in one of your industry’s trade publications.  A majority of the advertisements are filled with noisy words. The PCGS advertisement reminded me that B2B print advertising is not necessarily about selling and it is certainly not about getting the spec sheet for your product out there.

What B2B print advertising is about is page stopping and branding – getting the audience to stop, even briefly, and recognize your message and name.  This is best accomplished with simplicity, just like PCGS.

These masses of competing signs remind me of crowded markets, and how difficult it can be for a company to get its message across when so many others are plastering the neighborhood with their own signs.  When you find yourself up against several other companies that all claim to do exactly what you do, it’s time to stop printing signs, and start looking at your messaging and marketing mix.  Here are a few tips that might help your company slice through the noise.

Get to know your market and audience

If you expect to reach your audience better than your competitors, you need to know your audience better than your competitors.  By segmenting your market into a few manageable groups, you can talk to each group of companies based on their unique attributes rather than as a single unrelated mass.  But go beyond segmenting your market – profile your audience too.  Whenever there are multiple stakeholders involved in a purchase (as is often the case in high tech business to business selling), it’s important to separate those who can recommend, influence, overturn or approve a deal.  Once you know who you’re talking to, work to understand the unique concerns of each group as the foundation of good positioning.

Be Different

If your competitors are all saying the same thing, don’t join the party.  Look at what the other companies in your space are claiming, then find the holes in their stories that present an opportunity for you.  The more you can align a differentiated message with the unique concerns of your audience, the better chance your message has of getting through.

Change The Channel

Just because your competitors are printing signs, it doesn’t mean you have to.  Look at all the options available for generating awareness and find a venue that nobody else has thought of.  If all of your competitors are advertising in a trade publication, sponsor their monthly newsletter instead.  If everyone else has a booth at a trade show, secure a keynote speaking slot and sponsor their cocktail reception.  If everyone else uses lawn signs, get a blimp.  You get the picture.

Just because everyone else is saying or doing it, it doesn’t mean you have to join them.  The key to standing out in a crowded market is doing a better job of talking to people on their terms, presenting a better story than your competitors and selecting opportunities for awareness that nobody else does.  

The web site says that RoboCup is an international organization that promotes artificial intelligence, robotics and the like.  Once a year, teams of robots from all over the world face off in a soccer world cup competition.   But, what immediately caught my eye was the RoboCup mission statement in big, bold font in the upper right of the home page.

By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer championship team.

Aside from the visionary time frame, the less-than-perfect grammar, and whether you believe soccer bots can beat Brazil (or Germany), that’s a mission statement – a date with a well-defined outcome.  (High tech B2B companies take note!)

See the 2008 finals between Team Osaka (Japan) and the NimbRo (Germany) on YouTube here.  Fortunately, they still have 42 more years to comply.

In the beginning, the usual process with a high tech start-up is: start a company, get a creative designer to design a logo, pick some colors and fonts.  Sometime later, messaging is developed.  So, the look and feel (visual brand) and the language (verbal brand) of the company are disjoint and possibly out of sync.  With so many companies vying for your audience’s attention these days, consistency is critical – so it is critical that the visual and verbal brand act as one.

There are three main concepts to think about when architecting an integrated brand.

1. The Word - Think about what your company does.  What word does it bring to mind?  Now, how can you get your brand to look like this word?
2. The Core Values – Think about how your company does what it does.  What values does it bring to the market.  Now, how can you add flavor to your brand that reflects these core values?
3. The Market – Think about your competitors, partners and customers.  What do their brands look and sound like?  Now, how can your brand stand out while fitting in?

By approaching your brand development in this structured way, you are more likely to have a tighter bond between what you say and what you look like.

You have to give up something in order to get something.

Ries and Trout point out that there are three things you can sacrifice: product line, target market and constant change.  They give several examples of companies (Fedex, Smucker’s, Staples and others) that sacrificed one of these three things to increase revenue, improve margin and gain market share.

I think there is something to be learned here for high tech start-ups.

High tech companies are almost always started by engineers; and engineers can do anything – and often do.  Most of the technology that high techs introduce to the world could be applied to a number of problems.  And, it probably can.  So, what usually happens is the it-can-do anything technology is thrown at the wall like spaghetti to see what sticks.  The spaghetti approach, while perfectly understandable, can cause problems:  lack of focus, unfinished products and features, employee chaos and market confusion.  While the first three are internal challenges that can be sorted internally, once the market is confused it is hard to unconfuse it. So, while it’s OK to have long term vision and a five year road map; make some sacrifices in your outbound communications and make sure your messaging is simple, consistent and focused on one (or a small set of) problems and markets.   If you tell the world that you do it all, you probably won’t be believed. What have you sacrificed lately?