Thanks for posting and keep it up. I’m good friends with some of yours too, like Paul Dunay.

Jeff Ogden, Director of Marketing
Aplicor
http://www.fearlesscompetitor.com
Author: How to Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net/getcustomers

I’ve got you to thank for the idea to poll my own community to find out how they are using, or hope to use, social networking for job searches and career development. It takes friends like you to remind us how to use the tools we have right under our noses to tap into the knowledge and opinions of our communities.

Thanks, Jeff!

Sue Connelly
KITlist.org

This is a great post. Hopefully you will some more . . .

My first reaction to what you are describing is that corporate America is very stiff for the most part. Looking at recent job descriptions for marketing positions on Craigslist for instance, I was struck by the lack of imagination and the rigidity in the recruiting criteria. Traditional marketers tend to forget that they are dealing with a fluid entity, human nature. Marketing analysis, although essential, can only go so far. Creativity, play, experimentation, intuition, psychology, need to have a part also.

Thank you so much for that thoghtful, kind and provocative comment!! I can’t even begin to address all the issues you raise here – and in fact that’s what I’m thinking for my next few posts

I agree that sales and marketing need to work together – in fact the basis of what I think is that sales and marketing really are one thing, just different faces – it really comes down to how companies relate to their markets and communities, and sales and marketing are just different aspects of that relationship.

I think the key for marketers is to understand the whole community – not just those on a buying trajectory (leads, in common parlance), but the trend and direction of the participants in the market (buyers, not competitors in this context) – and ALL the participants.

Understanding that leads to influence (toward buying behavior) which leads to relationship (buying) is the goal. The metrics and dashboard you describe answer the all-important question: How do I know I’m getting there?

I did change my format slightly…I left the comments link (slightly reworded) at the top and added one at the end of the post. I think it accommodates without intrusion. We’ll see.

And we’ll see as I write, and hopefully others respond, where this conversation goes…

Rather than expanding on email vs. blog comments, I’d like to refocus on the issue you raised in your earlier post: How do we measure and monitor and tweak our programs, so that we achieve the level of performance now expected of other professions (lean manufacturing, for example)? It’s no longer possible to say we can’t connect the dots, as “big-brother Internet” is able to track every key stroke. Tools like http://www.Leadlander.com, http://www.Vocus.com, http://www.MeltwaterNews.com, Google, and Alexa.com, help us all see the activity that’s generated as we embark on various marketing efforts. To ensure that our clients (and their management teams) understand the impact of their programs on revenue, Tech Image is implementing client dashboards that paint a visual picture of the results, including such things as Web traffic vs. article pladements, coverage vs. competitors, coverage by industry, positive vs. negative coverage.

Dashboards like the one described above can deliver the facts that management needs to understand PR or Marketing’s value. It’s not possible for marketing to close a sale, but marketers should definitely be acknowledged (and compensated) for their ability to fuel the pipeline and accelerate the sales process. Marketing typically has responsibility for the message, value proposition, education (via user groups, white papers, published articles, etc. ) lead generation (via advertising, PR, events), credibility/closing (via awards, product reviews, analyst and success stories).

By coming together at the sales planning table, marketing and sales can clarify their complementary roles in the sales process, and how they will each be rewarded.

Thanks for fueling the discussion, Jeff!

I’ve been using the theme as designed with little modification. I’ll try moving the comment link and see what effect that has.

I don’t know if they still have it, but it was a marvelous service. It definitely made my parents’ lives a lot easier when both my brother and I had activities all over town, and my parents had to work late!

It’s definitely an interesting concept, and I hope it works out. This could be a good alternative for people who don’t want to take regular public transport, as well as reducing the amount of taxis on the road. Plus, if the mini-buses could be fitted with hybrid engines like many of the buses in London, it would be a far more energy efficient mode of transport for many short-trip commuters.

It should be interesting indeed. I’m looking forward to it.

Drew

It is in fact the kind of marketing I practice (is this new?) that assumes that buyers and sellers enter into relationships of some kind (they can be strong, or very weak, but there is some interaction) before transactions are even considered.

I urge (and train) my sales and marketing people now to assume that before you ever have any contact at all with a prospective customer, that customer has had contact with you. That can be references, advice from friends, exploration of your web presence or any number of other interactions.

I’m hoping to center my posts in the coming weeks around this idea and how marketers (and their companies) deal with communities, contact and interaction, and how it changes the game.

It should be an interesting conversation

–Jeff

Drew

It is at that!

It’s so true that we’re all members of many communities at once (a base assumption of my brand of marketing).

You might, for example, read my blog as a marketer interested in Disruptive Marketing, or as a blogger wondering about another blogger. Or both – or maybe more than that. Still, I hope that my content is relevant to the marketer in you. At least.

I wonder if you seeing my tweet and commenting on my blog and linking back to your blog makes this officially a navel-staring event?

Does your question assume that we can only have one audience?

And aren’t some of the bloggers also potential clients? Or referral sources?

And what happens if one of your clients suddenly launches a blog. Does that mean they aren’t your target audience any more?

It is an interested web we weave, eh?

Drew

“Ceteris Paribus” – brings back memories of all-too-many economics classes

I think we are in basic agreement, and if we were in total agreement, I’d worry

I think there’s a lot to differentiation, but still hold to the idea that “Brand” is nothing more and nothing less than the total experience the customer has of your company (or you, or whatever..).

There are lots of ways to create an experience (think Apple, Disney, United), but whatever the experience you create – that’s your brand.

Thanks for all your comments and for engaging!

–Jeff

Mostly I agree – and mostly I don’t know enough about public transit to really know how to solve the myriad problems than plague every public transit agency outside of New York City (maybe there’s an example to follow? Maybe).

My thinking is that the best way to find the “right” solution – the solution that works best for now (situations change all the time, and so must solutions) is to experiment.

One of the truths about any public or government agency is that experimentation with ways to deliver better service rarely if eve happens.

This program shows a willingness to re-think, to break the traditional bounds, and to try something new.

It may fail. But frankly, if I were running AC Transit (or any company for that matter, in any industry), I’d rather see a portfolio of spectacular failures with a good chance of getting to one great success (ask any VC how to do this), than trivial if any improvements over the status quo.

So you’re probably right. But I still give them credit for trying something different.

–Jeff

If you ask the reasons why most of us prefer our cars, they’re pretty simple to enumerate:

convenience
come and go when I want
get directly from point A to B
much faster
don’t suffer the effects of weather
no time wasted
privacy

There might be others, but those are the biggies. And, they’re pretty obvious. I’ll bet most public transit officials use their cars to get to work for the same reasons.

Yet, cars are extremely expensive and wasteful and polluting, and could be argued to increase the security threat to our country by creating dependency on foreign fuel sources (over 90% of which are located in unstable regions of the world). So, we also have compelling reasons to consider alternatives if they worked.

So, I’ll give them credit for trying to do something different, but by the solution, they haven’t really addressed the problems (because they haven’t studied the problem from the outside-in), and continue to ghettoize the service (routes for seniors and po’ folks).

For example, most traditional bus routes through suburban neighorhoods should be abandoned. Only arterial routes should be covered with large (and fast) vehicles, and collector vans could be used to get people to arterial transfer points. By themselves, these changes would increase utility and therefore ridership, which would increase frequency and address most of the objections. If you take or plan to take transit routinely, then bookings could be done over the internet which would enable optimization of route planning (the same minivan picks up the same 8 people at the same time at their house every day), which would increase ridership even more, making virtually all neighborhood routes custom. To satisfy random needs, you could still have one small pickup vehicle go through neighborhoods at set pickup points, but there is no longer a need for a 150 seat bus, since most regular riders (or those than can plan a day ahead) are already accounted and planned for. Within a downtown core, you could virtually eliminate routine use of private cars if the service was clean, fast and efficient, and I had a wait of no more than a couple of minutes, and this could easily be done by increasing the numbers using the system, which would increase the predictability and therefore plannability of service by eliminating most random spikes. Then, I’d be willing to leave my car at home, because it would be more efficient to step outside an office and hop onto a train or bus than it is to waste time finding and retrieving my car and paying for parking.

Once off arterial routes, all drop offs should be custom — how ridiculous is it for the bus driver to go 3 houses past mine because that’s where the stop is, when I’m the only person still on the bus? (Was common when I used transit as a teenager).

By designing a system to these constraints, I’ve eliminated almost every issue but privacy, but in so doing, I might actually have improved the enjoyment of getting from A to B by having a small group of travel mates who I get to know. And, I’d still have a car to handle exceptions.

I think to really improve public transit, they need to think truly disruptively (and that includes pricing, which I didn’t mention), not put window dressing on the existing service by adding a seniors route. The biggest impediment to really fixing it is the fear that the economics won’t work, but that’s because within the current framework, and even with the changes you describe above, you haven’t changed ridership behavior.

Now, I’m not saying that this is a plan, or that the ideas are perfectly thought out — far from it. I just wrote them out on the fly off the top of my head — but if implemented exactly as I’ve described, it would be light years ahead of the transit planning in any city that I know of. And, that’s what is so shameful about the current state of thinking and innovation. If I can do this in 5 or 10 minutes, surely those who are paid to do this for a living should be able to come up with a better vision for how public transit should work.

re: taking a hill and owning it. I think this is right (for most companies), but if you define the hill too narrowly then you’ll have trouble. For young companies, it is important to have singular focus after you’ve found the hill to fight on – but we must also remember Moltke’s Theory of War — No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy — and listen to customers, study the competition and react to changing conditions quickly on the fly. Grown up companies need to be constantly evolving, or they become irrelevant, but the evolution should be over long periods of time. This doesn’t often happen because a) leadership changes too often at the top now, and b) most leaders lack the clarity of vision to ensure this evolution happens and have too much hubris.

Your friend seems to believe in constants, but there are only temporary constants. There is a Latin phrase for this: “ceteris paribus” — all things being equal — which shows how old the idea is, but it also acknowledges that things don’t remain equal, and that any given thing can only be assumed constant for a short period of time. It does no good to take and own a hill if the hill erodes or there is an earthquake (which is what we create with disruptive innovation).

re: the brand. What a brand stands for may evolve, but almost by definition, a brand is like a fingerprint. You cannot duplicate the sum of customer experiences from how I use a product, to its quality, to what I see communicated about it on TV, to how good customer service is, to how the phone is answered when I call reception (or if the phone is even answered — it happens too seldom these days), to its coolness, to reliability — it just isn’t possible for two brands to be identical and to have identical value to the consumer. We won’t ever choose the same things for the same reasons, but we will probably by and large agree on what a brand stands for and how it is perceived. You need to be in touch with what your customers want, and evolve your product, but not (necessarily) your brand identity. Reinvention of a brand can actually be quite damaging unless something is broken, because you break the engagement with the customer.

Anyway, I think we mostly agree, and these are fine differences.

Thanks for your comment.

As a long-time Apple loyalist myself, I have to agree about Apple’s brand. (and, yes, there will be an iPhone in my near future as well!).

Mostly I agree with your premise. “Brand” in the very best sense of the term (and the way you are using it) is how the customer experiences it. It’s the product, the image, the concept, and everything else that the market community experiences about the brand.

My experience tells me that most companies don’t really own an experience in the minds of their market community in the same way that the leading brands do. And creating that kind of brand power requires that they do something disruptively different in order to separate themselves from the crowd and own an experience.

Once they do, they can escape the all-too-common commoditization trap.

The other thing I’ve found in my experience helping companies transform themselves and their markets is that even the best of brands, even the strongest of brands are constantly being threatened by competition wanting to capitalize on the value (look at the number of Apple imitators).

Apple has held “cool” as a core image of their brand for a long time. But what “cool” is has change dramatically, and Apple’s success, in large part, has to do with their willingness to try new things, listen to their market community and keep innovating. And not just product innovation, image innovation, service innovation, retail innovation, process innovation, innovation in everything that the market community experiences about Apple.

I have an on-going debate with a friend (another marketing professional for whom I have great respect): She says that the point of branding is to determine what hill you are going to take and own. I respond that in order to succeed over time in owning a successful brand (which, as you point out is much of your marketplace value), you have to anticipate, adapt to, and shift with a shifting landscape.

Apple, and other successful brands have done this well over time.

But I still contend that in order to keep you competitors from duplicating your brand, you have to keep it ahead of them and relevant to the market community, and keep reinventing it continuously.

The most recent evidence of a great brand powering a big market advantage is the release of the iPhone. Whether you view the brand as the iconic Steve Jobs or Apple, it doesn’t matter. Our expectation of their new products is that they will be breathtakingly innovative, exciting, change the world kind of stuff. They will excel at simplifying and making the user experience more enjoyable through outstanding industrial design which succeeds at both a functional and aesthetic level, which they won’t compromise to save a few pennies on production cost.

I don’t believe that there is another company on earth that you could say that about, and that if you didn’t say the name Apple, most people would still know who you were talking about. That strong brand propels sales, inspires excitement and enthusiasm, and allows them to charge higher prices for fewer features than the their competitors.

There are other brands that are equally strong, although for different things — Lexus, Coke, Starbucks, to name a few. Competitors can copy your services, your products, your features, your pricing, your messaging — but they can’t duplicate your brand.