Category Archives: Success Factors

General writings on building a successful business.

Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks

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I am not a great marketer — more comfortable with business development and product, honestly — so articles on marketing always fascinate me. I’ve been working hard on a new product as I keep teasing you with and as apart of that have been spending a lot of time thinking about the story. Mark Suster wrote a great piece a few weeks ago on why, when building a product, it is better to think about the story then think about the features.

Ever notice how some companies tend to be in the press all the time and your big new product launch struggled for inches?

Mostly it’s because your marketing campaigns suck.

Or more directly – they are likely narcissistic resuscitations of your newest features or bragging points that nobody but your marketing team and your mom care about.

I recommend that companies move beyond narcissistic marketing to what I call “point-of-view (POV) marketing.”

Here’s what I mean …

Let’s start with what it takes for a journalist to want to write a story. Here’s what’s going through his/her head:

  • Is this story “newsworthy” or am I being asked to publish a press release?
  • Do I have an “angle” from which to write the story (first company to do X, company does biggest X, consumer behavior is doing X)?
  • If I’m covering a company can I get evidence of what the competition is doing so the story is balanced?
  • Do I have data or facts to present so the story has legs?
  • Can I get sources to talk on-the-record or off-the-record to lend credibility to the topic?
  • Will I have information that other journalists don’t have (otherwise known as a “scoop”)?

But mostly they’re thinking, “Will my audience even care about this topic?”

The ultimate measure of success for a journalist is viewership so if nobody cares about your shitty little company and the story you’re trying to pitch then the journalist doesn’t want to publish. And it’s their judgment that becomes the ultimate arbiter of this.

And beyond eyeballs they also care about “journalistic integrity” (aka their reputation) so they want to be sure they’re not being gamed. That’s why having long-term relationships with journalists matters and why having people close to the journalist who can vouch for you.

Yes, I took a big excerpt but it’s a long article full of wonderful examples. Well worth a read.

What Happens When the Marketing Mix Changes?

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What happens when you take away one of the 4-Ps? It makes the whole universe of marketing a heck of a lot harder. In essence, this is what has happened in the modern software business and this is why the smartphone world will never end up like the PC world.

If you are not familiar, the 4 Ps are:

  • Place
  • Promotion
  • Price
  • Product

When Apple came out with the iPhone 3G in 2008 it also changed the rules of software sales. By building an App Store, Apple took away one of the 4 P’s, Place, and put all the stress on Price, Product and Promotion. Not too bad, you’d think. Even I was a big proponent at the time. Back in the Palm days we talked about how much easier it would be for customers if there was one single place to purchase apps and download them directly to the device. After all our biggest problem in those days was awareness and our biggest support problem was installation. By having a store on the device that would take away these problems, our world as developers would be so much better. What could go wrong?

Yeah, well, the law of unintended consequences always finds something.

By removing Place suddenly all the emphasis was put on the other three Ps. Since all apps were in one spot, it became clear very quickly that reasonable software prices were not sustainable. App prices began to drop and drop and drop until prices for the average app reached about $0.35 each. With Place defined and Price so low, Promotion became a problem. Where can we each promote our apps and still make a profit when the average app is only a few cents? And how do we promote when the only place people go to find apps doesn’t take ads? So it all comes down to Product.

Don’t get me wrong, some products found their way in this world. Gaming, in particular, has done quite well with its pay-to-play models, where the app can build buzz, become its own network effect, and then build revenue off a small sliver of heavy users. But this hasn’t worked as well in productivity where apps are either a few bucks or, if you really want to be successful, free. Most of these free apps have some way of making money away from the app stores.

I’m only picking on software but this is also one of the major problems with smartphone hardware as well. Once upon a time we bought PCs from a plethora of computer, retail or web outlets. Now, unless you are an Apple customer, you head to your local carrier store. For device manufacturers Place is gone, too. The carriers dictated Price, Product features, controlled all Promotion. Compared to the carriers, app stores so far have been downright benevolent.

What breaks this logjam, at least for the software world? I don’t fully know but clearly business models are changing. Games have started to figure this out. Fewer and fewer of them are fixed price, buy once stuff. Pay to play models are more and more prevalent. The same will be true for productivity apps. The future clearly will be some sort of freemium subscription model. The beauty is these models don’t need to be expensive. The infrastructure is cheaper, the distribution is cheaper. But it still costs money every year to develop and support these products. I hope consumers will adjust.

Really Hard Work

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I really like this very short post by David Smith, esteemed writer of iOS apps. David doesn’t like the idea that to win you have to work really hard. Instead, he thinks the key to success is persistent work.

The difference isn’t just semantics. There is a big difference in how you view your goal if you are trying to work hard versus working persistently. It isn’t about the amount of energy you expend or the stress you survive.

In my experience the people who succeed are typically the ones that outlasted their peers for long enough to become confronted with opportunities well prepared.

I hope he’s right. What is this for me? 16 years and counting? (Although I must admit there has been plenty of stress along the way!)

Map The Future

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My friend Michael Mace wrote a book on a topic that, I think, he is one of the world’s foremost experts in: mapping the future. I met Mike when he was the chief competitive officer for Palm. Since then we have had long conversations about where the market has been and where it was heading. I am constantly amazed at the foresight he has had.

Mike just released a book on the topic called Map the Future and I was privileged to read a pre-release copy.

Most companies think about the future the wrong way. Visionary companies try to impose their will on the future, like a military drill sergeant; analytical companies try to predict the future in detail, like a weather report. Both approaches fail when there are changes we didn’t anticipate. The reality is that the future’s not determined yet, so you can’t predict it exactly, and you can’t always control it. What you need instead is a map of the possibilities, like a highway map for the future, so you can see where you can and can’t go, and then nudge events toward the future you want to see. Map the Future teaches you how to build that future roadmap, and how to use it to drive strategy.

Mike describes it as a cookbook for business strategy. I highly recommend it: Mike’s site, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.

Artery Calcification

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There were two very large pieces of news in the tech world last week: Google cancelled Reader, its RSS feed reading service, and Mailbox, an innovative mobile email client, sold to Dropbox.

These are both interesting news items to me for primarily the same reason. Let me explain through the Google Reader example. There’s a lot of angst in the tech community about this decision. Those of us who use Reader use it avidly and its disappearance leaves a huge hole. The problem, though, is that Google has stopped any innovation in RSS feed readers years ago.

Big companies, in my opinion, are like plaque in an artery. They enter a market, clog it, and then stop letting anything get through. The shear size of these big companies clogs all innovation and we, as consumers of these products, are left wanting more. Google with Reader isn’t the only example. Microsoft has done this for years with Outlook and Office. Intuit has done this for years with Quickbooks. PeopleSoft did this for years with CRM software. In each case, these solutions calcify until some major change happens to blow things up. Generally this change occurs around a shift in technology. In the past 15 years that has been a rise in the web and a rise in touch, mobile systems like smartphones and tablets. In Google Reader’s case it is Google blowing it up. When these changes occur we see amazing innovation with new winners. Eventually, of course, those winners calcify, too. We get Twitter, Facebook, and Salesforce.com, for instance.

And that leads me to Mailbox. In the old days a company like this could never compete with Microsoft’s Outlook. They could have built an email client that sucked in Outlook data, even streamlined and improved it, but to compete? Wasn’t going to happen. But because of the web and mobile over the past 15 years, Mailbox has a chance. In just a few short weeks 1.3 million people joined its waiting list and the company received multiple acquisition offers, with Dropbox dropping as much as $100 million to own it.

The combination of web as plumbing and mobile as front end is doing that to a lot of software areas now. We’ve mostly seen this in social and pure consumer apps, Instagram for example, but that’s temporary. It will happen to productivity apps, too. The key is looking at the old problems and old solutions in a brand new light, re-orienting around the customer and the problem he is trying to solve but utilizing usage paradigms perfected in the technology generations before. Mailbox didn’t look at email and see it as solely a communication tool or CRM tool as Google and Microsoft had done before. Mailbox looked at email as a way to organize the things you need to do instead, realizing that a lot of people use their inbox as a task list.

This pattern is very straight forward and has occurred every time the technology changes. First we get solutions which are the same as the old platform but now available on the new platform. Think the email client on every mobile device today. Then you see innovation around those ideas, Mailbox as an example but there are others, too. Then one of these solutions becomes dominant and, over time, solidifies its control of the market, overserving it, and slowing innovation. Finally, technology changes and the cycle starts all over again.

When markets change and technology change, that’s when real innovation occurs. Google canceling Reader is a huge pain in the short term. But in the long-term this creative destruction is the only way things get better.