marketing

5 Critical Things Your Brand Must Accomplish

I’m beginning to get familiar with a start-up that a colleague of mine is leading and as I do, I’ve noticed that his firm has a branding problem.brand 640

Actually, they have a number of branding problems.

So far I’ve attended a couple of public-facing events the organization has hosted, checked out how they appear in search results, visited their website, looked at their printed pieces, and spoken to a few of their employees and customers.

At this point I feel that I have a pretty good sense what the organization does, what they stand for, and how they’re different. Based on how they communicate those messages, I should be getting a clear and consistent sense of their culture and how customers benefit from their relationship with this organization.

At the highest level an organization’s branding must accomplish 5 very critical things:

  1. Establish who are you. (Introduce your brand, both textually and visually).
  2. Define what goods/services you provide.  (What specifically is offered within your industry/segment).
  3. Preemptively answer how your offering is it better or different than alternates. (The reason why someone should buy from you).
  4. Be relevant to your primary customer. (The benefit statements, language and proof points must resonate with your core, target customer).
  5. Help establish credibility.  (Building trust and authority as a foundation for the customer relationship).

So how is my colleague’s firm doing so far?

The Good
A number of brand elements are well in place.

  • They are consistently using their name, both visually (font, color and logo) and textually.  This should help with retention and recall.
  • The voice and tone of the language is also consistent.  That consistency establishes familiarity and trust.
  • There are some common message elements which show up in multiple places, helping to build identity.

The Gaps
There are some missing pieces.

  • The organization’s name, in itself, calls up off-message connotations.  This happens frequently if an organization’s name has broad, established usage in other contexts.  This is not usually an insurmountable issue (unless there are strong negative connections) but must be consciously dealt with. As mentioned above, an effective brand builds identity through visuals and language.  The more consistently your brand resonates at every level – visually, conceptually, consciously and unconsciously – the more powerful an impression is created.
  • In my colleague’s situation, they are using a tagline to help define the brand, which is excellent.  However, they are using a tagline that  could credibly be used by other suppliers in their market.  Instead of adding definition and speaking to what’s uniquely better and different, the more general tagline contributes to keeping the brand somewhat nebulous and therefore not as compelling.
  • Sometimes organizations speak using their in-house knowledge and expertise and forget to translate benefit statements into customer terms which are understand and valued.  A miss here means that your relevancy will not be as high as it could be with your customers.  One easy way to test if you have gotten to the root of a benefit that a customer will value is to use a Lean/Six Sigma analytical technique call Five Whys.  Simply put, keep asking why until you reveal the explicit benefit a customer will quickly understand and value.

Whether it’s contained in your Mission Statement, boilerplate language of a Press Release, or detailed in the About section of your website, refining the brief explanation of your organization’s unique offering will help clarify foundational elements of your brand.  I recommend starting with an internal document which lays this out and is agreed upon with your critical stakeholders.  This is often called a Value Proposition and should be compelling, differentiated and true…and can serve as a guide for all customer-facing materials.

CMO: The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Love

170102947

Rapid change. Complex analytics. Brand advocacy, creativity and strategic leadership. Judged on execution and impact….and by the way, the clock is ticking.

These are some of the challenges that face to the evolving role of the modern Marketing leader, requiring a dizzying array of skills to deal with a rapidly changing environment and high CEO expectations.

RAPID CHANGE

As McKinsey & Company presaged a few years ago, “Few senior-executive positions will be subject to as much change over the next few years as that of the chief marketing officer”.  A number of factors are driving that change:

  • The liberation of the information consumers use in making buying decisions
  • Multiple, online channels of interaction between consumers and brands
  • Rapid evolution of digital marketing technology
  • Competitive intensity and the shortening lifespan of competitive advantage

The Liberation of Information:

Consumers today have access to product reviews, detailed product descriptions, comparative price data…and that’s before they ever hit your company’s website.  “CMOs face a power shift from selectively informed consumers to consumers “armed to their teeth” with information and choice”, as detailed in The Changing Role of the CMO – Evolution and Revolution At Work by the Vivaldi Partners Group.

The empowered consumer can be at multiple phases in the buying cycle (awareness, consideration, investigate, purchase and use) at the same time, quickly obsoleting any notion of a linear narrative with your customer.  In addition, being transparent, factual and honest about your brand has never been more consequential given that customers will detect gaps and inconsistencies across your message points (customer service, technical support, trade shows, in-person sales, online, print, etc.).

Multiple Online Channels of Interaction:

Of course customers will, if you’re skillful and can break through the noise, be listening to your messages across your platforms (blogs, social media, Pay-per-Click advertising, your website(s), and email).  “Designing a consistently positive, rewarding experience across all those touchpoints takes system-wide thinking and an integrated service-delivery approach. Point solutions, such as focusing on the call center, the store, or the website, no longer cut it in a multichannel environment”, says Peter Dahlstrom, Chris Davis, Fabian Hieronimus, and Marc Singer in the Rebirth of the CMO,  (HBR Oct. 2014).

But as important your messages on your platforms (and they best cohere), the messages about your company and products/services hosted on 3rd-party sites are potentially even more important.  These include other purchase channels that have customer reviews, consumer interest groups (these exist in both B2C and B2B), user-developed content and the social media ‘twittersphere’ and beyond.  Being keenly aware of the digital conversations about your brand, bringing that information into your organization, and appropriately directly or indirectly responding can be critical.

Rapid evolution of digital marketing technology:

As Aditya Joshi states in Technology Questions Every CMO Must Ask (HBR Oct. 2014), “Marketers today encounter a mind-boggling array of technologies.  CMOs I talk to are swamped by meeting requests from technology vendors, and most feel an acute pressure to climb on the tech bandwagon”.  Marketing technology has dramatically evolved over the last decade and continues to quickly mature.

Digital Marketing platforms (for landing page and forms development, social media management, email marketing), Web platforms (for eCommerce, product and content search, and online customer experiences), CRMs (customer relationship management for a 360 degree view of your prospects and customers), Customer Review platforms, Analytical tools (Google Analytics, KISS metrics, etc.), Online communities (for customer engagement, customer feedback, and market research) et al. are enabling marketers to track how well they are evolving customer relationships and which activities are positively contributing to each step of the customer journey.

These systems create multiple imperatives:

  • From the sea of data these systems produces, what actionable insights are being generated?
  • How will you scale Marketing’s impact by connecting the dots across these systems and the other critical enterprise systems linked to production, development, finance, reporting, etc.?
  • Can you successfully set expectations for return-on-investment timing and business impact?

Competitive Intensity:

In the Rebirth of the CMO the authors state: “Digital disruption…has created an increasingly commoditized product and service environment. Digital has removed barriers across sectors, even in old-line businesses known for “sticky” products, such as telecom and insurance. And that same transparency has radically shortened the shelf-life of any new competitive advantage.”  As information has become more democratized, barriers to awareness have been lowered.  A firm I worked with saw it’s competitive ranks climb from 30 to over 300 competitors in less five years.

TOUGH AND GETTING TOUGHER

The pace of change will not slacken in coming years and the systems and technology will necessarily (thankfully) continue to evolve.  Role expectations will not soften either.

Shelagh Collins reports that the IDC Predicts Hard Times Ahead for CMOs (CMS Wire, Dec. 2014) that “One in four CMOs will be replaced every year through 2018.”  Why?  “Chief marketing officer turnover is partially due to a disparity between CEO expectations and the hiring of the CMO to execute them. ‘If the CEO isn’t sure what he wants when he makes the job requisitions specification, it’s not surprising that the CEO might be disappointed if the CMO doesn’t perform over those first 12 or 24 months’, according to Rich Vancil, Group VP, Executive Advisory Group.”

Last year Fortune reported that although CMO tenure has improved in some sectors, it remains significantly lower than CIOs or CEOs.  They report that CMO tenure is “shortest in the healthcare, automotive, restaurant and communications/media sectors, averaging between 28 to 32 months.”

Ty Montague (Are CEOs to Blame for Short CMO Tenures?  HBR July 2013) states CMO tenure is “astonishingly low compared to other execs in the C-Suite: eight years for CEOs and ten years for CFOs. So why is CMO tenure so short? Experts have pointed to a host of reasons: the explosion of social media, the rise of big data, general complexity and chaos, incompetence…”

SO WHY DO IT?

While as Dahlstrom et al state “The need to deliver on organization-wide imperatives creates lots of pressure for CMOs”, it also “has elevated – and complicated – the role of CMO. Delivering above-market growth increasingly hinges on differentiating the customer experience and building tighter customer relationships . That in turn relies on not only having excellent marketing capabilities, but also connecting marketing with the entire organization.”

To be a CMO today is to be at the cross-currents of change, with customers, technology and the organization.  Technology is enabling marketing capacity and capabilities to positively impact the strategic direction of the company, customer engagement, product definition, brand vibrancy, and revenue growth.

Marketers experience in their personal lives, and see all around them, dramatic changes in the way customers learn about and purchase products.  Marketing leaders have a unique opportunity to work across the entire organization to build a shared vision for uniquely delivering value to customers.

Executing against that vision, with products and programs that result in dynamic customer relationships, could not be more critically important or rewarding in business today.  If you like leading change, technology and analytics, creativity and strategy, and continuously evolving yourself and your team’s marketing skills, being a CMO is the toughest job you’ll ever love.

Cultivating Distrust

As strategists and marketers one of our more complex tasks is to listen to customer feedback, probe market dynamics, understand competitive intent, divine replacement or disruptive technology and synthesize the varied inputs into actionable information for the business.  My experience has been, however, that even the least xenophobic teams trust too completely in their own data and their own framing of market and customer dynamics, which leads to numerous strategic and marketing errors of omission and commission.

Take for example the dutiful front-line marketing team which shares at company meetings first-hand accounts of deals they won and lost.  The stories are captivating and no doubt provide insight into operations, science/engineering and other teams who rarely have the chance to directly observe the real-world dynamics of their product deals.  We know, however, that there is bias in the selection of which deals to present to the audience and that a few instances of competitive dynamics is not data but mere anecdote, no matter how well intentioned.

What about the team that does more systematic sampling of wins and losses, convincing the sales force to document the final disposition of all deals from their funnel on a quarterly basis.  Can we trust this information?  While having more data points and in theory, not being selective which deals to include, is clearly moving in the right direction, the source of bias is the sales rep making the observations.  Anyone who has been through this exercise make recognize the top 3 reasons why “we” lose from this type of analysis:

  1. Customer relationship with the competitive account manager
  2. Lack of product performance/features
  3. Price

It’s not that the sales team is intentionally trying to skew the data, nor that marketing teams believe that this is necessarily the best method to collect deal dynamics.  Nevertheless, our not wanting to rock the boat by putting an objective, market research firm at the helm of collecting information directly from the customer trumps our own instincts to distrust the information we’re gathering.  Worse, folks further from strategy and marketing may end up feeling good about the collected data and be even less suspicious of their own plans and strategies which align with the “data”.

I am always mindful of the elementary school biology example of the frog placed in a shallow pan of water on the stove.  The frog does not jump to safety when gradual heat is applied to the pan.  So how do ensure we can take the mental leap out of our own business to think objectively about the opportunities and issues facing the company?

It’s a slight shift in focus, from trying to find the right data and answers to finding the right questions.  The right questions are always more valuable than answers.  Remember your inner three-year-old and follow your why!  A few other tips to cultivate healthy distrust:

    1. Seek out customers who purchased in the past but haven’t bought recently.  Ask them why they’ve stopped buying and if there’s anything the company can do to earn their business in the future.
    2. Stay close to technical support and customer service.  Repetitive issues, even at low levels, are the smoke that can sometimes lead to fire.  Remember that the customers that reach out to you are just a portion of your dissatisfied customers.
    3. Use 3rd party market research firms to conduct win/loss studies, surveys and focus groups.  Try to understand if your value proposition is still relevant, credible, distinct and positively impacts purchase intent.  Watch the win/loss trend line over the year.  Seek out unaided impressions of your firm vs. the competition.  Try using QFD to understand what the customers values most when selecting your product vs. the competition.
    4. Travel with sales on customer visits.  See if you can bring you to an unhappy customer, not just the best and brightest account.  Even better:  have them bring you to the customer who is a die-hard fan of the competition!

If you can sit with objective data and resist drawing conclusions for as long as possible, ask a lot of questions, listen and observe deeply, cultivating an outsiders mindset, you will always find new opportunities for improvement and growth….that you can believe it.

Medtech Innovation: Everything but the prototype. Answer these 5 questions first.

So you’ve got an idea for a new medical device. What’s the first thing you want to do?

If get money to make prototypes is your response, perhaps you might want to think again.

Sure, SBIRs (Small Business Innovation Research grants from the US government) are out there specifically to support such work. The urge to get hands on and make something is tough to resist, especially if you’re an engineer by training. But if your goal is to build a business and solve a problem, I recommend holding off on the proof of concepts, bench-top testing, and rapid prototypes.

I know, if you have a working prototype you can get customer feedback and use it to get funding for your company. But those funders, whether angel investors or venture capitalists, will ask you these types of questions before giving you one red cent:

  • What’s your “killer app”? (I know, you’d think they wouldn’t say that in healthcare!). By killer app they mean what is the critical problem you solve with your idea? In today’s healthcare environment that boils down to can you make care faster, better or cheaper…and ideally all of the above.
  • What is the evidence (data) that validates your idea that you can improve patient outcomes, improve safety/quality of care, or reduce the cost of care? You may be thinking how am I going to get evidence without a working device, but at the early stages you need a rationale and then a plan to validate your rationale.
  • Who are the 5 KOL (key opinion leader) clinicians that will attest to the fact that your idea (a) will do what you claim (assuming the technology works out) and (b) will buy it when it’s approved for sale.
  • What is your reimbursement strategy? It’s hard to get hospitals/physicians to purchase and clinicians to adopt new technology unless there’s an economic incentive to do so. If “new code” comes out of your mouth, you’re in trouble because it’s unpredictable and takes a long time to get a new code. So, if you can get approval for reimbursement using an existing code, all the better.
  • What is your regulatory pathway? To investors, the FDA is an unpredictable, time-sucking hurdle. The fact that current approval processes are under review and changing creates uncertainty, the enemy of VCs and Angels. Ideally you have a number of recent predicates that will enable a 510k submission. And if you were thinking of going the CE route and enter the U.S. market after a European entry, be prepared to reduce the early sales in your revenue model as the healthcare markets are smaller and adopt more slowly than the U.S. market.

Bottom line: Investors will be thinking up front how they are going to get their money out of your company up front. The first step in building that case is getting really solid answers to the above questions. Following that you can begin to think about your team, technology and testing plans…and your company’s exit strategy. But before you put money and time into prototypes, think about building your healthcare business case. If you do, you may find a way to bootstrap your business as good ideas attract money and people.

Habits of Mind: 4 Ways to Avoid Becoming a Maze-Running Rat

There was a fascinating article published in this Sunday’s NYT magazine titled “How Companies Learn Your Secrets” but it could have easily had at least three other titles that centered your focus differently, including “Habits of Mind” and “How Not to Become a Marketing Rat” (my friends at HubSpot would tell me that none of these titles are highly effective because I don’t have a number in the title, as in 4 Ways to Avoid Becoming a Marketing Rat, but I haven’t adopted that habit just yet).

This article is fascinating for a number of reasons:

  1. It is instructive to think about the amount of data that companies are collecting about our purchases and the accompanying “predictive analytics” that attempts to presage our buying behaviors.  It gives me pause as a marketer when I think about the dearth of customer insight that B2B customers have.  Oh sure, we look at market size, competition, unmet needs, and even deep research around specific solutions.  But the point-of-purchase data-collection that loyalty programs enable (you know, that little dongle that’s on your key ring that you fork over to get a “discount”, is an act of self-identification that enables purchase tracking) is generally missing from B2B.  While Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has been broadly available for decades, the most successful ones piggy-back onto enterprise systems tailored to support order efficiency, inventory management, and production forecasting and fulfillment – not generating deep insight into buyer behavior.
  2. Repeated tasks become automatic (read: habits) and when this occurs – neurological activity, thinking, and discernment are reduced.  We know this to be true not only because of the sensors that were stuck in maze-running rats over at MIT in the brain and cognitive science department, but also because of our own experience.  Driving to work, reaching for your smartphone to check a message, taking a shower…from mundane to complex, we are attentive at the beginning and end of these tasks but in the middle, we too run the maze on autopilot.  Or in the words of the Times author, “once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making”.  Putting my marketing hat back on, I wonder how many habits we and our companies have learned about marketing.  Take for instance New Product Introductions (NPIs), where over time a well-worn path has been established to create a data sheet, brochure, print ad and a press release.  In regulated industries, a company’s quality system may have even enshrined some of these deliverables.  But what if the formative “three step loop” of habit creation, cue (new product), routine (traditional NPI deliverables) and reward (product intro), is no longer providing the expected results?  Can we break the habit and move to a marketing mix that blends inbound marketing with outbound marketing?
  3.  Focusing on customer habits as opportunities to insert your product or service may miss the mark as it doesn’t necessarily identify customer motivation or high-level needs.  The Febreze story in the article is a great cautionary tale.  It shows that while P & G was focused on neutralizing odors and  getting Febreze adopted into the cue (bad smell)-routine (spray Febreze)-reward (bad smell bye-bye) cycle, that’s not necessarily how people are wired.  First, odor habituation is working against this model.  Secondly, if I love Fluffy, might I have a stake, either consciously or subconsciously, in minimizing the negative smell?  Finally, it’s really hard to create a new or replace a existing habit in your customers.  Think about how long it’s taking to replace paper medical records or film-based x-rays.  Again, if the focus of inquiry is close to the product or service, you may miss the dominating higher-level needs or motivations.  Check out how Febreze ended up changing their marketing approach to become a billion-dollar franchise.
  4. Finally, and to the motivation for this article:  Research has demonstrated that “simply understanding how habits work makes then easier to control”.  Awareness is key and emboldened by the research at Columbia University and U of Alberta, we can revise our personal habits, corporate/marketing habits, and habits of minds.

“Getting to Know David Freeman, Industry Thought Leader”

As it originally appeared on Schwartz Communication’s PRx Blog:

PRx Blog

Getting to Know David Freeman, Industry Thought Leader

Name: David Freeman
Title: President
Company: Freeman & Associates Consulting
My first job in healthcare was: My first job in healthcare was as a PR Specialist and Tradeshow Manager at HP Medical, in the headquarters operation.  I was 26 years old and I remember the feeling of awe when I first came to the company for an interview (the first of 9 interviews). HP was famous at the time for its open workplace environment (read low cubicles). As I rounded a corner I looked across a huge expanse of desks and people and computers on every desk!

It was a great start in healthcare because I had the opportunity to learn about HP’s entire portfolio as well as travel to conferences like the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology, where I got to interact with clinicians, sales reps and marketing professionals from around the world.

What I like most about working in healthcare is: It’s of course trite to say that I work in healthcare to make a difference.  And that the industry attracts good, smart and caring people. All true. But working in an office, caught up in conference calls and cross-functional meetings, a challenging regulatory environment, demanding quality system requirements, it can be easy to forget why I feel so passionate about being in healthcare.

However healthcare has a way of stripping the business veneer away and reminding you of what’s at stake and how you make a difference in a way that I imagine few industries can. Every time I visit a hospital on business, suit and tie, folio in hand, there’s a moment when the environment breaks through and I realize that I’m surrounded by people in crisis and that I’m connected to assessing and preserving health.

I was a pediatrics product manager when the first Iraq war broke out. We were racing to develop a pediatric transesophageal ultrasound imaging transducer. The miniaturization of the electronics was pushing state of the art at the time but my clinical trial sites at children’s hospital in the U.S. and U.K. had conveyed how important this innovation would be to assess surgical repair of congenital heart defects from behind the heart, out of the sterile field, after the repair but before the chest was closed.

The European OEM firm we were working with to develop the transducer had a sister division that got caught up in the night-vision scandal and the State Department put the entire company on hold for business with the U.S. Six months in on a scheduled nine month project we scrambled to find an alternate firm to work with to restart our effort. Our schedules slipped and while we kept our clinical trial sites informed, one day the head of Pediatric Echocardiography from the largest of the U.S. children’s hospitals reached me by phone at my desk.  He proceeded to tell me about a patient they had lost on the table the day before and that the transducer might have saved the patient’s life.  He was upset and emotional and asked me what was taking us so long.

Similarly, I was involved with Schwartz to build awareness of sudden cardiac arrest from the early days when every new airline placing AEDs on board was still news. At each turn, as we worked with corporations, public places, schools and home users, the calls would come in…hi, my name is (pick a name)…and I’m just calling to thank you because my (husband, father, daughter…) was saved by your device.

It’s that vital connection to people, to saving and preserving lives, that keeps me loving this industry.

When I’m not working, I like to: We have four kids and I love spending time with them. Other interests include music (jazz and chill), taking nature photographs, writing poetry, and keeping up with the world and technology.

Who had the biggest influence on your career?: A woman named Cynthia Danaher, who was at HP, has been the most influential person on my career. She heard me interacting with customers on the trade show floor (when I was in my first healthcare job) and recruited me to work in the ultrasound business. She demonstrated a mix of three qualities as a manager that I admire to this day:  (1)  The ability to personally connect with people, (2) Passion for advancing the business, and (3)  Intellectual rigor of the work she did and asked of her team. I learned an enormous amount from Cynthia and HP about management, marketing excellence, and corporate ethics.

People would be most surprised to learn that I: Went to a canoe/survival camp when I was 15 years old in Northern Canada where I learned to portage wood canvas canoes for up to five miles and survived 5 days in the woods with nothing but a match and a knife.

If I wasn’t in healthcare, I would probably be: If I wasn’t in healthcare I would probably be an unknown writer.

You can find me at (email, Twitter, LinkedIn):
Web: www.freemanb2b.com
LinkedIn: http://tinyurl.com/26shj26
Blog: www.freemanure.wordpress.com
Twitter: @freemanb2b

Tags: David Freeman, healthcare, healthcare PR, medical device PR, public relations agency, Schwartz CommunicationsPosted by Jayme Maniatis on December 7, 2010 at 12:31 PM
Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.schwartzcomm.com/mtype/mt-tb.cgi/3481