Yesterday I commented that the business world is changing more rapidly than it used to. That’s obvious to all of us. The implication for companies is that reacting to change is no longer enough for survival. For a company to survive – and certainly to thrive – it must proactively adapt to change. It must spot trends before and as they emerge, and innovate in order to enjoy success in the future.

How can a business do this? It isn’t as mysterious as having a crystal ball. The great innovative companies that I’ve seen do it through these four tools:

1. They use customer insight and competitive intelligence tools that work, and they try new ones as they emerge.  (I’ll write about some cool new competitive intelligence tools in my next blog.)
2. They have internal and external feedback mechanisms to track customer and employee satisfaction and capture ideas.
3. They have structures that are lean and nimble so they can innovate and implement new ideas quickly.
4. They are open to the possibility that they don’t know everything, and build structures to allow them to tap into market movements that are difficult to foresee.  One tool for this is a Gambling Fund.  I’ll also write about this in a later blog.

Marketing prof Robert Kozinets has a provocative article in the National Post on the evolution of marketing.

He says marketing is dying, at least marketing as it’s now understood -  “the broadcasting of commercial and promotional information” and will be replaced by “consumer centric management”.

I agree with him that marketing as ’shouting-really-loudly-in-as-many-directions-as-you-can’ will die (thank heavens) and be replaced by something like consumer-centric management.  But that’s what marketing always has been.  It’s just become somewhat confused in the last couple of decades.  What we’re seeing now is it getting back to its core meaning – defining a target market, understanding customer needs, developing products and services to meet those needs, defining effective messages and getting them out there (to purists: yes I know there are a few more things in marketing strategy).

That’s why I think marketing is being rediscovered rather than dying.  Am I overly optimistic?

I just saw an online advertisement for what seemed to be a neat marketing tool – a tool that measures the ‘freshness’ of your website (http://FreshWebSiteFeeling.com).  As we all know, websites stale-date quickly and you have to constantly add new features, contents and visuals to keep up. 

Based on the ad I saw, I thought this site would scan the site in question, evaluate the functionality / look and give it a freshness rating.  Instead, the tool is just a little calculator that, when you indicate when your site was last updated, will tell you how many ‘web years’ old it is.  Like the old dog years calculation – 3 human years is 21 dog years, etc.  Whoppee.  Nothing to do with how many dollars you invested or features you deployed. 

As a tool it was lame.  And my visit to the site very disappointing.  I won’t ever go back – and I think less of the company as a result. 

The lesson: Don’t let your marketing get ahead of your company.  Marketing is dangerous when you don’t have the goods to back up your promises.  The business world is littered with examples like this, and it’s the reason marketing has a bad reputation among many people.   

There are some amazing advances in marketing execution with the advent of vendor portals like elance and vendorseek.  You can get your logo designed or website built in Argentina, Pakistan, Latvia or any other country at an unbelievable price – in many cases 20 – 50% of what you’d pay for a local vendor.  We’ve used these sources in the past, with some good and some bad results.  Our learning is this: these sources can be good, in 2 cases –

·         You don’t really need sophisticated design. What we’ve seen in comparing local vendors (who do charge more than those in typical ‘offshore’ countries) to offshore vendors is that local designers have a sophistication that can’t easily be matched by those outside of Canada and the US.  So if your brand / packaging / image is important – especially if it’s a consumer product you’re dealing with – it’s worth the money to spend on a local vendor.  On the other hand, if you just need a graphic designer to execute what you tell them to do (move this circle here, change the color, increase the font size), then offshore is a good way to go. 

·         You have lots of time to project manage.  We had a website designed a while ago by an offshore vendor.  The price was about half what we might have paid locally.  But wow did we pay the price in hours of time project managing our offshore vendor.  Our marketing manager was on the phone or email with them every day for about 5 weeks.  By the time we tallied up those hours, we really hadn’t saved much money.  And thank goodness our marketing manager was willing to invest those hours, otherwise our offshoring experiment would have been a budget disaster. 

We’ll continue to experiment with offshoring of marketing functions – as we’ve seen in offshoring of other activities,  this is a trend that will grow when used judiciously. 

When I talk to CEOs of small B2B companies, I often hear, “We don’t need marketing, we’re very sales-oriented”. I’ve heard it dozens of times. Here’s why I think it’s wrong, but why I understand where those CEOs are coming from.

When Mezzanine was in its early days, we were very sales driven too, and a lot of our success came from that orientation. But something happens when a company grows -or tries to grow – beyond the size of what the CEO him or herself alone can sell. It becomes very difficult to attract and retain business development people who can also do what the CEO does, because they rarely have the same expertise or industry knowledge. And that’s when marketing is absolutely critical.

If the company doesn’t invest in marketing to build the reputation of the company, increase awareness and generate leads, the new sales people that the company attracts are going to have a very hard time being successful. I’ve seen it cause hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars in recruiting, training and compensating business development people who end up failing in their role and leaving the company within a year.

And that’s why you need marketing in your sales-oriented company!

Lots of companies are asking us what they should do about marketing themselves effectively in these tough times.  I heard a fantastic no-cost example of great marketing yesterday.   John Ulcar of Crosslink Technology (www.crosslinktech.com) was telling me about a product his company makes for utilities and telephone companies that helps them deal with holes created by woodpeckers in utility poles. It’s a problem that costs utilities millions in pole replacement costs annually. 

And Crosslink has the solution – it’s a compound that, when cured, mimics the flexibility and hardness of wood, so it can be poured into the holes and repair the poles at a much lower cost than replacing them. 

And how did Crosslink market this product?  Very simply, and very humorously.  Rather than giving the product a boring name like wc-6361, they came up with something funny and provocative.  Pecker Patch™.  That gets a laugh, and the attention, of customers.  Add to that the obvious cost-saving and quality benefits of the product, and you have great, cost-effective marketing.

You can read about Pecker Patch™ at http://www.crosslinktech.com/Pecker%20Patch/Pole%20Repair%20Brochure%20EnglishRev4.pdf

The lesson: have some fun with your marketing.  In times like these, we could all use a laugh.