Category: blog

I differentiate marketing services from marketing as a business function.  The former, can be called little M marketing and the later big M marketing. Marketing services can be strategic and include communications, demand generation, sales tools and training, and all the functions supporting strategic decisions such as market research, competitive analysis and customer analysis. Marketing becomes a true business function when it goes beyond providing services to the other business functions and actually leads those functions by integrating its services into business plans.  One could argue that the line between marketing services and marketing as a business function is blurry[…]

In Good to Great, Jim Collins outlines several key steps or stages that successful companies do well.  My two favorites are ‘get the right people on the bus’ and ‘hedge hog the concept’. Both phases reflect the need for deep collaboration within the management team to hammer out a unique executable strategy.  Collins realizes this is a team process of ideation, analysis, trial, reflection, and adaptation.

The subtitle of this post is ‘How to break down complex problems into productive dialogs and activities’ As I have said elsewhere, I believe that corporate transformations that involve changing markets, products, and business models have three ‘legs’: Product management Programs management Branding All three require closing the gap between vision and EXECUTABLE strategy but the most complex and fundamental is product management. The classic high-tech problem is that product management, while owning the core of the business plan, tends to be more technical than market or business oriented, leading to evolutionary, not breakthrough outcomes.  Product management should have technical[…]

Five years ago, I spent a few days working with a very smart colleague and friend figuring out which spaces were likely to be interesting going forward.  We identified a lot of things and lots of spaces, but if I boil it down, it’s data-driven businesses delivered as a service.

Most business leaders will tell you that teams need: Trust (from transparency) Committment and Compassion (in the trenches support) Stability (structured goals, processes and organizations) Accountability (focus on results) Why don’t we measure these more religously?  Why are only some in our MBOs?  Why not take it upon yourself to measure these and see if the management and operations team think they are valuable enough to harden into MBOs? Something to think about.

A lot has been written on social media and social media strategies and optimizing social media tactics for  the tweetisphere while nurturing automation mines the whole blogistan via SEM, I mean SEO. Who’s kidding who?  One aspect of marketing that’s unlikely to change is that word of mouth will remain king.  The question is who’s word and who’s mouth.  More importantly is the meaning of that word which is really the other 3 Ps beyond promotion. So if we simplify, the cloud means marketers can scale.  The old guy in me thinks “so we can scale up bad marketing to[…]

This is an attempt to capture some of my thinking about marketing technology products. Since I believe that marketing, at it’s core, is about organizing the dialog to drive business, I’ve structured the topics from A to Z and plan to post commentary on: a. Advertising and AIDA b. Branding and your business model c. Category creation d. Direct marketing e. Events f. Functions & roles g. Growth strategies h. Hiring i. Investor relations j. Jiggles–naming k. ‘Kill something, eat it’ l. Lead generation m. Measurement n. News o. Objections p. Pricing, Positioning, Partnering q. Qualifying Questions? r. ROI s.[…]