Get Better Before You Start Shouting

Posted on Tuesday, 31 July 2012 8:27 am by markpilip

Marketing and communications professionals in companies and agencies often get called on the carpet to answer questions about why the product isn’t selling enough to please the executives. At times, it culminates in an agency review or with the termination of the offending marketing folks.

After all, it’s the ad guy’s fault when nobody buys the Zune, right?

Most of the time, it’s not the fault of the marketing team or the agency. There’s only so much one can do with yet another line extension or another “me too” commodity beige box of mediocrity. Yet, the thinking goes, maybe the audience just can’t understand the message. If it was just a little more simple, shouted a little bit louder, had a more innovative stunt marketing campaign…

Let’s get us a new adman and yell a little bit louder. After all, it couldn’t be that product differentiators got rounded off in committee or that you bent it to the whims of one or two important customers.

Or maybe, as Seth Godin reminds us today, perhaps the product just wasn’t good enough. That’s something that’s very hard for a large corporation to accept, particularly when it’s easier to have an agency review and find some guys who can sell that stuff for us.

Takeaway: Before you start shouting about your new thing, ask one simple question. Is it worth shouting about?

Posted in Branding, Communications, Marketing, Product Development | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Discovering New Ideas Through Books

Posted on Tuesday, 24 July 2012 8:45 am by markpilip

My colleague Miten Sampat recently wrote about his college experiences in visiting bookstores and discovering new books and his concerns over the demise of bookstores. He also touts Findings as a service to help with discovery of new ideas.

That got me thinking that I haven’t shared my book list yet. I often share it with university students and suggest looking at book lists as a way to get to know people. In fact, one of my favorite interview lines of query is to discuss the books a candidate has read recently.

Here’s my list of 20 or so books that I’ve found invaluable over the last few years. I’ve added a few comments about each one to explain why the book is important to me and why it might be to you as well.

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Groupthink: A Caution for Summer Planners

Posted on Monday, 23 July 2012 9:44 am by markpilip

The classic article Groupthink was just brought to my attention via RSS feed. Most of us have heard of the 1952 article, but how many have read it recently or at all? If you’re taking part in summer strategy or budget planning sessions for 2013, reading this article is highly recommended and will help you fight it.

Be alert to groupthink and its impact on your strategy or execution.

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Remember D-Day

Posted on Wednesday, 6 June 2012 5:38 am by markpilip

At 0016 hours today, the Horsas began to crash-land near the Caen Canal in Normandy, France. The liberation of Europe was under way.

Over 24,000 young men jumped from planes or landed in gliders to support the 160,000 men who waded ashore. They were not veterans of combat. They did not consider themselves heroes. They were there to do the job of freeing Europe from tyranny.

The stories of their heroism are well documented, yet increasingly forgotten. It is likely that you will see nothing of today’s importance from the mainstream media as you check the news this morning.

We should never forget their sacrifices. I won’t. Today is D-Day.

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Scale and the Unbelievers

Posted on Monday, 21 May 2012 9:22 am by markpilip

There are two things that matter when building great products, movements or companies. They are easy to follow, easy to understand and also incredibly easy for those of us with MBAs and too much corporate experience to screw up.

  • User scale
  • Forgetting the non-believers

User scale is not about scaling to allocate your fixed costs over a larger user base. Or scaling revenues, advertising impressions or distribution channels. Great products, movements, and companies are created when the number of end-users expands exponentially. I was reminded of this by yesterday’s GigaOM article on YouTube.

YouTube users now upload 72 hours of video every minute to the site, up from 48 hours per minute last year and 24 hours in March of 2010. The explosion of content is mind-boggling and it matches a pattern we’ve seen again and again with Facebook, YouTube, the civil rights movement, the spread of most current major religions and the pet rock.

What drives user scale? Again, pretty simple. Good ideas. The idea that you could share your daily comings and goings with friends via Twitter is a good idea, as was the idea that you could show your hipness by carrying a pet rock or wearing a mood ring.

Good ideas do not include: How can I drive the stock price? How can I keep this machinery running 24×7? How can I cross-sell $10/month more to 5% of my installed base? MBA ideas, all. Do you think Gandhi overcame hundreds of years of cruel British imperialism by worrying about his installed base?

Forgetting the non-believers is the second critical component. This morning Seth Godin reminded me of this by recommending that we “shun the non-believers.”

Not everything is for everybody, even pet rocks. So why do you care what the naysayers think? Your idea isn’t for them. Fine.

There’s another group of non-believers you also have to forget about. It’s your own internal folks. They look like they might share your cultural beliefs and norms, but are still threatened by your ideas. Your idea might put the current company out of business. Or you (or them or your team of MBAs) out of a job. Since they’re not going to help you, why do you care what they think?

Takeaway: Good ideas, companies and concepts scale users quickly and tend to alienate non-believers. Do those to make great things.

Or keep making undifferentiated beige boxes of mediocrity.

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Product Development, Strategy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Give it Away

Posted on Friday, 11 May 2012 8:37 am by markpilip

In the digital world, the more you:

  1. Give things away.
  2. Share your ideas.
  3. Fail.

the better you will do. It’s contradictory to everything we learned in business school.  But in B-school we were operating in a world of scarcity. Everything cost something and nothing cost nothing.

In the world of abundance the model has changed.

What’s the cost of giving away a bit of your digital product to try? Zero.

What happens when you share your ideas? Better ideas get invented.

What happens when you fail? You increase your rate of learning.

Give, share, fail. How frequently will you do those three simple things today?

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What Doctors Can Teach You About Dashboards

Posted on Thursday, 19 April 2012 5:00 am by chuckullan

I’m pleased that today’s guest post is from Chuck Ullan.  Chuck’s a fellow direct response marketing disciple and analytics ninja who provided me with much wise counsel when we worked together at AOL. He now runs his own analytics firm, lives in Hawaii and, with his wife Kirsten, writes about their life on the Big Island at Enter Sandland. The doctor is in

When you go to the doctor’s office, what do they measure each time?  Heart rate and blood pressure.  Why?

HR and BP are great for monitoring trends in health and whether there is a critical issue to address.  But if there’s a change or a problem, they don’t tell you why.

Why not run a battery of tests every time you go into the office?  Because it would be wasteful, time consuming, and most of them would be irrelevant.

When doctors identify that something is wrong, they order diagnostic tests to help identify the cause.

Same goes for corporate dashboards.

Dashboards are the business health monitor.  Metrics often include top-level revenue and expense items, plus forward-looking drivers such as leads.

Dashboards bloat because of the belief that if there’s enough detail, you can identify why things changed.  No one wants to sit in front of the CEO and say they don’t know why there’s a dip in the numbers.

There are an infinite number of reasons why performance can change.  The answer is almost always buried in the details, not in the next level down from the top.

The more metrics you use to explore the why, the more points of variance. You create 20 new fires for each one issue you nip in the bud.

When you spot a problem, go investigate.  Don’t try to anticipate.

Dashboards work for alerts, not analysis.  Less time to create, less wasted time chasing ghosts.

Stop hoping to answer why.  Doctor’s orders. . .

About the Author: Chuck Ullan is President of Top Shelf Analytics, which improves the profits and visibility of direct response marketers by measuring and modeling campaign and customer behavior.

Posted in Analysis, Data, Direct Response, Strategy | Tagged , , | Comments Off on What Doctors Can Teach You About Dashboards

Clerks as CEOs

Posted on Monday, 2 April 2012 7:31 am by markpilip

Zynga buys OMGPOP for $180 million–a terrific win for all involved. So CEO Dan Porter took the opportunity to throw one of his team under the bus when he declined a job offer from Zynga. Why not just ignore it and move on?

To his credit, Porter took back his tweet. However, the tone has been set. What about the next time a team member does (or doesn’t) do something that Porter doesn’t agree with? Are you sure you want to work with him?

Takeaway: Leaders can be judged by their actions. Managers can be judged by their policies. Clerks spew things out. Consider who you’re working for before you join them.

Posted in Leadership | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Real Innovation…

Posted on Friday, 23 March 2012 8:24 am by markpilip

…changes the courses of industries, if not society. Real innovation gives us the lightbulb, Linux, and the Internet.

Real innovation also breaks your company’s current profit model, organizational structure and strategies. Real innovation is also messy, scary and “dangerous” to one’s current job. Real innovation requires us to be bold and to have the courage to do what we believe to be right.

But most of us are content working in the same comfortably consistent way as yesterday, adding features to our beige boxes of mediocrity. And wondering why nobody cares.

Why?

Posted in Branding, Communications, Leadership, Product Development | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Reacting to Mainstream Media Articles

Posted on Monday, 19 March 2012 8:33 am by markpilip

The recent retraction by This American Life of the episode about Foxconn’s iPad factory working conditions demonstrates why my immediate reaction to stories published by the mainstream media is appropriate.

Wait.

Apple’s slow/no response to the original story turned out to be correct.

Unless there’s a huge problem–your service is down or people’s lives are in danger–immediate reaction to that piece on CNN or the article that shows up in a Google Alert isn’t warranted. Despite what your executives believe.

The situation is never as dire as that which is painted in the article, the facts are never fully disclosed and the timeline isn’t 100% correct. Also–and this is important–nobody cares about it as much as the echo chamber in your building would have you believe.

Take a moment to gather the facts. Get the full story (as a corporate communicator, this is sometimes the hardest part). Formulate a response. Go to sleep. Respond tomorrow. It will be OK.

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