The Long Play

I learned recently that the research firm SRI employed researchers that developed the hyperlink and many of the conventions that we use today on websites and other digital interfaces.  And the same team pioneered some machine intelligence, AI, and voice recognition developments that were behind Apple’s Siri application.  It struck me as ironic that over the decades, this group sought to undo its own work.  You don’t have to click on anything, if you can just speak to your devices.

Planar, now a Leyard company, has a history of this kind of cannibalization.  We make our own products obsolete regularly.  The Planar® LookThru™ OLED transparent display addressed many limitations of previous offerings and has essentially replaced the Planar® LookThru™ LCD offering.  We have single displays that are larger than 2x2 array of tiled video wall products, making this style of display easier to specify and install than previous generations.  We add features into products that used to require separate purchases or third-party equipment.  You have to look no further than the latest version of the Planar® UltraRes™ display to see how much image processing, scaling, and control we have built into the product, especially once you consider the free iOS or Android UltraRes App.  As the bezels have been shrinking on LCD tiled video wall displays, like the award-winning Clarity® Matrix™, we have also introduced cutting-edge, fine-pitch LED technology that is truly seamless (see Planar® DirectLight™ or the Leyard® TVH or TW series).

Innovation companies that last are ones that aren’t afraid to kill their best product lines with a new idea.  To stay relevant, I heard someone say recently, you need to be prepared to run a different company every few years.  In the fast-moving space of display technologies, flexibility is a requirement.  Planar has been innovating for over 30 years and Leyard for over 20.  It’s a testament to our shared commitment to the long play.

Why CMOs Should Drive Product Strategy

When my company reorganized several years ago, we went from a business unit structure to a functional organization, and I was considered for a position that would run marketing as a member of the executive team.

As part of those discussions, I negotiated to have the role include both traditional marketing functions, such as advertising, PR, events, and sales tool development, but also product strategy in the form of product management and road map planning. Why? I had three reasons:  

1. MarCom Is A Pink Ghetto
As a female executive, I was sensitive--sensitive to my observations and the reputation that marketing (and human resources, by the way) had of being places where women got stuck in their careers. Careers focused in these areas resulted in professionals who were often pigeon-holed and excluded from real participation in the business strategy.

I am not sure who coined the phrase, but I had heard it applies here: the pink ghetto. It's a place where women are seen as a support function for other more “important” roles, such as sales, finance, or R&D--roles typically held by men, at least in the technology industry. I didn’t want to get stuck and had worked throughout my career to gain broad experience that made me a better business person, not just a better marketer.

In my role, which combines both go-to-market and market requirements, I have broad impact on the company, and my team is able to impact the direction of the business overall.

2. Marketing Is The Center Of The Hub
Being responsible for products, I am at the center of creative ideas and cleverness. I get to work closely with R&D to determine what can be done and the relevant and high-value applications of technology. I get to work closely with the sales team to determine how to aim them and equip them to capture the market potential of new offerings. My team and I get to be in the center of the hub and are tasked with combining what can be done with what should be done to create new possibilities for the company.

3. Customer Empathy Runs Deep
True innovations are grounded in customer empathy. Understanding the customer problems is the foundation of “solutions,” which companies are so anxious to talk about but execute so poorly. And that customer understanding not only affects the products we bring to market, but how we market them.

This may involve creating sales tools that require a deep understanding of the product in order to simplify the customer experience and accelerate the buying process. Without responsibility for both the product road map and marketing communications, this connection would be more difficult to make and would cause “marketing” to be less strategic and more reactive, instead of leading the charge of innovation in the marketplace.

This article was posted on CMO.com.

The Art Of Marketing Marketing

Many companies devalue marketing, considering it the department that makes pretty pictures or the administrative support for the sales team.  Others strongly value the strategic involvement of marketing in product strategy, branding, strategic planning, and industry leadership.  I am blessed to work for an organization that models the latter, but I certainly am familiar with the former.

This topic is a big one (worthy of more than one post).  To get the conversation started, here are four key questions that you can ask yourself to help you answer the question of how to market marketing in your organization.

1. Can you express your motivation for wanting to market marketing in terms of overall business results?

Do you think that investing in a marketing automation system and nurturing campaigns will generate 20 percent more revenue next year?  Do you believe that improving the brand consistency across the organization will lead to higher customer perception of quality and improve gross margins by 2 percent for the next product launch?  Do you believe that developing a new interactive platform for sharing product benefits with your sales channel will reduce the sales cycle by two months resulting in a 13 percent increase in revenue with the same effort?  These are the types of questions you should be asking, when you are thinking of advocating for anything in a business environment.

If you don’t know how to answer these questions, it could be an indication that you are not yet ready to advocate for a larger and more impactful role for marketing in your company … and that you should get ready.  That in itself should be a call to action to learn more about your business, your drivers of value in the market, your customer problems, your solutions, and overall business strategy … and how score is kept financially.

2. What is the perception of your brand and that of “marketing” in your organization? What should it be?  What is the gap?

Before you would embark on a brand-building campaign, you would always begin with data to identify the “as is” state and to quantify the “to be” state.  And to identify the gap between these states.  Often this is accomplished with surveys, voice of the customer, share of voice analysis, or other tools.  Why not do the same thing within your organization to gauge how far away the organization is from what you envision as the ideal?

It is also important to know whether your brand is strong enough in the organization to lead that charge. What are you known for in the organization?  Why do people come to you?  Does that align with what you need it to be to advocate the change you are advocating?  What can you do to change the perception and reputation?

3. What “marketing” does your customer really need?

This should probably be the first question, as anything (besides that which is required for regulatory, legal, or financial compliance) that isn’t seen and appreciated by customers, probably isn’t worth doing.  It is the definition of waste and the hallmark of bureaucracy.  But coming back to my point, what value does the customer perceive in the marketing you do?

Are they able to make better and faster decisions because of their access to technical information?  Are your resellers able to sell more because of the sales tools you provide?  Are they able to reduce their costs with more accurate quoting resources?  Are they able to achieve business results because of the value proposition of the products you provide?

Some service firms have found that dedicated sales and marketing staff is not nearly as effective as sending their consultants right out to their clients to share expertise directly and wet their appetite for more (a topic covered extensively in Patrick Lencioni’s book Getting Naked).  Some technical engineering firms, website developers, or agencies find that their engineering teams are best equipped to sell and market to their technical buyers and that all that is needed from marketing is some communication tools to help facilitate these conversations. Each business will be different.

4. What is the winning formula that is worth repeating?

Like any system, it is important to look at inputs and outputs.  If you want to answer questions 1-3, a good place to start is your wins.  What are some situations that have gone well that you think are worthy of replication?  Go back and analyze a big order, a design win, or project award and ask everyone involved how it came to be, the touch points with the organization, what sales tools or marketing resources were used, and what made the difference.  There is no sense automating or “improving the efficiency” of things that are not effective.

Photo Credit: DRivers@WorldLaw via Compfight cc

This article was published on the TalentCulture blog.

The Trap of Competitiveness

It is a frequent request from sales teams: create products that are more competitively priced or competitively featured. It sounds good and this kind of request has send product marketing and engineering teams off to create me-too products for centuries. The trouble is that is hardly ever works out as well as one would hope.

See, when you set out to make a competitive product, you have actually given up the one thing that might just be the key to your success: the ability to set the criteria for which products are judged and buying decisions are made. You have let your competition decide what is important and make you play catch up.

If you have the creativity and capability, it is much more fun (and probably more successful) to do something your competition isn't doing. Create a new product category. Solve a new problem in a new way. Sell to new customers in a new way. Go after a Blue Ocean or a Purple Cow, as the authors' suggest. Do something to set the pace and decide the rules of the game and then get your competition chasing you (or better yet, dismissing you as an outlier and you can be successful without them even noticing).