Brand Value and the Exit Strategy

A client recently experienced the value of brand marketing – the kind that makes a small business appear larger or more influential than its size would normally warrant.

When we first took his company to market several years ago, he had just bought the business. For long-term planning purposes, I asked him about his exit strategy, and he replied that there were two options: build up the business to a point where revenues from a large installed base allowed him to cruise into retirement, or to sell the business one day.

In order to maximize resale value, it was key for the company to build brand awareness – superior technology doesn’t promote itself, I don’t care what engineers say. As a new player, another challenge was credibility. Plus, the company had a small marketing budget. When you run into this situation, the client has to be willing to commit a fixed budget every year so that even if the marketing campaign is low-key, it’s consistent every year. When there are good years, you can bump up the marketing activities, but the baseline remains consistent.

We allocated the major part of the company’s marketing budget to placing ads in the premier publication for his industry. Not full page ads, and not in every issue, but decent size ads running in every other issue to create a consistent, credible presence and to get across the key messages.

Nothing gets a message across as well as quotes from happy customers, so we also ran a case study campaign, pitching ideas for contributed articles to the editor of the publication and building a relationship so that we could have some influence on the timing of the stories; the goal was to have the contributed articles run in issues where the ads didn’t. We didn’t make this happen in every issue, but on the whole, the strategy was successful, nearly every issue contained something about the company, and the market noticed.

Over the next few years, the company got tangible proof these activities were making a difference: from the number of enquiries through the company’s website to the number of attendees at trade shows who came to see the product. The client came back from one show and told me, with a big grin, that one of the major players had been heard to ask “Who ARE these guys?”

Now a competitor has approached them about buying the company. The client is convinced that a consistent approach to marketing has helped establish brand value, making the company a valuable target for acquisition.  Love it when good things happen to good clients.

Haitian Creole Translation in a Hurry

This is a very brief post, what a crazy busy month. But I have to write about this.

One of the highlights of the month for me was writing a feature story for the Microsoft Research website about the amazing work their Natural Language Processing (NLP) group did for the aid effort in Haiti.

Ever wonder how disaster relief workers communicate with victims who speak a different language? How many translators can they make available to the various humanitarian agencies?

It turns out that between translation technology and cellular broadband wireless coverage, some of the aid workers can get access to smart phone apps and translation web sites. Web sites such as CrisisCommons have volunteers who leverage technology to support aid efforts, and some have built mobile applications that make use of translation tools or websites.

However, Haitian Creole is not on the list of major languages supported by the online translation services. When a Microsoft employee who was involved in the aid effort approached the NLP about solving this problem, the research group pulled together a Haitian Creole translation system in five, you heard me, five days.

Translator Fast-Tracks Haitian Creole

Why post this on a blog? Because the research group hopes that the word gets out so that more people make use of the system — and that includes developers who build applications that benefit the aid effort. See the “What You Can Do to Help” section at the end of the article, and pass it on.

Study of a Case Study

It’s always a pleasure to work with bright, motivated young marketing professionals. The only thing they are missing is experience, and sometimes this leads to poor planning and missed deadlines when they discover yet another situation where the classroom fails to reflect real life. Given recent discussions with some colleagues and clients, I am starting to think that this blog should be about sharing those hard-learned lessons that experience can teach you. So this blog entry is about working on case studies.  

When a company wants a really effective sales tool, there are not many kinds of collateral that deliver as much impact as a well-written case study. A case study contains so many positive elements: it’s a customer testimonial; it helps prospects relate to a real-life situation; it can be used as content for a website; it can be content for a company or customer newsletter; it can be pitched to publications as a feature article. If published, the magazine reprints make an even stronger selling piece, since it implies editorial approval.

Despite the high value of case studies, there have been very few times in my career where a case study assignment has been a smooth, uninterrupted process. Why is it so difficult to actually write a case study? Because the stars that need to be in alignment are mostly outside your control. So before you hire a writer to work on “a bunch of case studies”, only to have this resource sitting and waiting for the go-ahead, here is the project workflow. In an ideal world, of course.

Communicate your plan to Sales. Salespeople are always eager to promote their successes. Have them nominate customers who would make good case study candidates. Unless Marketing has a direct relationship with the customer contact, ask Sales to sell the case study idea to the customer and provide you with an introduction to the contact who will work with you on the story. You want to avoid situations where you build plans around a customer who turns out to be ‘not ready’.

Confirm that the customer’s company policy allows case studies. Companies are more wary than ever of talking about their operations or recommending vendors in public. If their industry or company is under scrutiny, PR activities come to a standstill (except for damage control) and only the highest priority activities get any attention. Helping to promote a vendor does not come under the list of priorities, even at the best of times. But if the company is open to a case study, find out what the parameters are. Sometimes there are no guidelines, it’s a “let’s see what you come up with” situation, and the story goes to their Marketing and Legal departments for review on a case by case basis.

Communicate your plans to the Customer. It’s good to prepare briefing notes for your customer contact, to make his/her job easier if the idea needs to be sold to the customer’s organization. Include the general intent of the story – the classic is to describe a challenge, the solution requirements, the solution deliverables and implementation, the happy situation afterwards. Include how the story will be used: in a data sheet, on the website, as a contributed article to a certain publication.

Build in lead time for customer reviews. You may have pre-sold the story idea to a publication, and your friendly editor is on deadline and waiting for your story. Legal and Marketing approval from a customer can take longer than writing the story, and you want the friendly editor to stay friendly, so avoid making deadline promises you can’t keep.

Project manage the process. Your writer has to develop the case study with help from various subject matter experts (SME). The salesperson provides some background on the before and after, Marketing provides messaging and the benefits to highlight, the systems engineer outlines the implementation challenges, the customer contact provides their view of how your product has vastly improved productivity and delivered on cost savings. The customer is only one SME; the others are from your own organization and probably very busy. You need to help make the connections happen. Then, once the story goes to the customer for review, you or someone with job title clout needs to track the review and approval process. Nudge things along in a professional, courteous way.

Follow up and get more case studies. I can pretty much guarantee that if you started out with a list of ten case study candidates, that even if you do everything right, a few will opt out along the way. Or get too busy to work with you. No problem. Maintain a list of case study candidates, both new customers and the existing ones who opt out. Follow up to find out if their situation has changed. The goal is to have an ongoing case study program so you can freshen up your website and collaterals with new stories. Ping Sales regularly to find out if they have any customers who would make good case studies.

When to work on case studies. I recommend initiating a case study with the customer shortly after your solution has been installed. The project will still be top-of-mind with the customer and you’ll get more attention. Their implementation team will still be there for a few months after it goes live, their impressions will be fresh, and they are going to be as eager as you to promote their success. It’s still honeymoon time. Wait a year and that team or manager may have been transferred to another project and you’ll be speaking to a newcomer who lacks knowledge about the original reasons for bringing in the solution, and who may not be as positive.

Perhaps you are both writer and project manager for some case studies. Well, as you can see, writing the story is the least of your challenges.

A Light-hearted Trade Show Promo

When you win a customer in Hawaii, it’s like having your promo theme handed to you on a silver platter! When I found out that Dynacore Equipment’s newest customer is based in Honolulu, it seemed pretty clear how we could leverage this at the PCI Conference (PreCast Concrete Institute) in September to capture the attention of prospects, and have some fun as well — trade shows can be pretty tedious.

It’s an uneasy time for the industry, and we know that manufacturers are hurting.  This is an opportunity to show the market that despite the downturn, Dynacore is solid, doing well, and even acquiring major new customers; oh and by the way — if you want to visit a reference site, there’s now one in Hawaii.

Before Dynacore shipped out the hollowcore extruders to Hawaii, we dressed them up in (admittedly tacky) Hawaiian decorations and did a photo shoot.  My favorite design team at Honeycomb Creative made up a post card we are mailing out to conference attendees.  “We can’t send you to Hawaii, but we can send Hawaii to you”.  The offer is: come to the Dynacore booth for a chance to win a Hawaiian gift basket worth more than $100, shipped to your home.  Dynacore has even agreed to ship the tacky Hawaiian decorations with the trade show booth, to continue the theme while we are there.  Fun, but making a point.

Research Projects Make Good Stories

There are more than 800 researchers working at six Microsoft Research labs around the world and lab directors want to recruit the world’s top PhDs.  One of the goals of the Microsoft Research website is to provide content that attracts the talent they hope to hire and also provide the general technology audience with a look at how Microsoft is advancing the state of the art.  Each week the site features a story about a research project and the people who have worked on the project. 

In terms of sheer, brain-churning difficulty, these feature stories have been the most challenging assignments in my career.  The preparation work always makes me wish I had paid more attention to Cmpt 405 back at university.  Was that Algorithm Analysis or maybe it was Computational Linguistics? 

Imagine reading through a research paper (or three) written by computing science PhDs for other PhDs, then interviewing the researchers and hoping your questions do not seem too inane.  Then imagine writing a story for a general audience that properly describes the goals of the research, the technical challenges, and the way it might impact existing or future technologies. 

This work has provided exciting glimpses into the future and given me far more appreciation of the “magic” that we take for granted in all the technology that we use.

Here is a list of some stories I wrote for the Microsoft Research website.

Building Green Supercomputers

Datacenters were responsible for 1.2 percent of the United States’ electricity usage in 2005, or the equivalent of five nuclear power plants. This is an increase of 100 percent from 2000.  At current growth rates, by 2020 the carbon footprint of datacenters will surpass that of the aviation industry. SiCortex is in the business of green high productivity computing (HPC), with desk side systems that draw less power than a PC, up to supercomputers that can compete with a Cray for processing speed, but which take up a single, self-contained cabinet and need only a single 3-phase plug. 

This innovative start up had been successful selling to universities, research labs and government facilities by talking technology;  they realized that their sales cycles could be easier if they could talk to lab IT managers about cost savings.  They needed a white paper that addressed the total cost of operations of running a HPC facility and explained how SiCortex and its low-power architecture could reduce lab computing costs by more than 60 percent annually.   

The interesting thing about this assignment was that many of their technical papers and data sheets contained references to business value, but the information had not been consolidated into a single document that built a business case addressing total cost of ownership; the data was there, the optics were not. 

 SiCortex is also actively working with industry groups to define a “green index” for computing and is working with experts to make the Green Computing Performance Index (GCPI) a standard for comparing energy efficiency for HPC.  In addition to price performance, SiCortex hopes to make performance-per-kWatt an essential metric for buyers.  This white paper evangelizes the need for such a performance index and is aimed at manufacturers of computer systems and components.

Shakespeare Does Software

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival puts on more than ten shows a year in three theaters over a season that begins in February and ends in November.  One reason this respected theatre company can do so much is because their IT department has developed innovative software for stagecraft.  The Festival wanted to share their technology advantage with the theater community and decided to take their software to market, with the goal of launching the first application at USITT, the largest theater stagecraft conference in the US.  The first solution to be packaged as a product was lighting software that controlled the moving lights (intelligent fixtures) on stage.  But they had never launched a software product before.

I took on the role of product manager pro bono.  It’s good to support the arts, and it was also a chance to do something totally different.

Working with a small team of developers and one IT manager, we defined a list of deliverables to have ready before USITT.  They had decisions to make about pricing, licensing policy and product road map.  They needed marketing communications materials to take to the show, a product demo, and a website. And very importantly for a team that felt nervous because they had never worked a trade show before, they needed booth training. 

We did all of this on a shoestring.  The team went to USITT in March 2009 and caused a sensation.  Reports are that the novice booth bunnies did a great job at their first trade show. 

The next challenge: setting up a sales organization!

Marketing a Research Lab

Attracting the best research talent in the computing world is a competitive business; Microsoft Research Silicon Valley wanted a brochure about their lab that would help their recruiting efforts.  After some telephone conferences to establish the scope of the project, I met with the director and assistant director of the lab to establish the correct tone and messages for the brochure. 

They emphasized the culture of collaboration at the lab, reflected in everything from building design and décor to flexible office hours.  They also wanted to make it clear that Microsoft Research puts a priority on advancing the state of the art in computing research for the industry overall, not just for Microsoft. 

A few things became clear over the course of the day.  First, that the most compelling words a potential candidate could read about the work environment at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley are words from another researcher. Next, that we would need several photographs of the lab to properly convey how every gathering spot in the building was also equipped to support discussions and brainstorming.  I interviewed a number of researchers and we took some photos.  The result was  a brochure with photos and quotes that conveyed a positive and accurate image of the lab’s working environment.

A Good Product Video Works Hard

Today I am reflecting on the many ways a good product video has contributed to Dynacore Equipment’s marketing success. 

Working with video clips supplied by Dynacore, I created a script, and with help from the production team at BaseTwo Media, we delivered a 5-minute video (in English and Spanish versions) that highlights Dynacore’s low cost of operations and maintenance. The company has been pushing a total-cost-of-ownership message, because if customers do the math, Dynacore’s low consumables costs beats the competition hands-down. 

How has this video been working for Dynacore? 

More effective trade show presence: some manufacturers in this industry are big enough to ship huge machines to trade shows. This is something Dynacore wants to avoid. With this video, Dynacore can ship just a couple of machine components and still demonstrate the operational features of the hollowcore extrusion system by showing the video.

More effective response to phone and email enquiries: again, this is an engineering-centric industry.  They want to see machines in action. Posting the video on the Dynacore website allows them to send a link to the prospect. 

Better channel support: with agents in Central America, Europe, the Middle East and Far East, sales support can be challenging.  With DVD versions of the product video, agents are able to show the machines in action — and  very importantly, in action at various Dynacore customer sites.  A video proves that the machines are real, installed, and working.

Unexpectedly, this turned out to be a valuable educational tool. Dynacore has been working with an agent in Mexico for a few years now, and one of their managers said to me, “Now I really understand what makes these machines better than all the others”.

Better industry presence: all Dynacore ads now mention that there is a video on their website.  Also, the premier trade publication for the pre-cast concrete industry is CPI; it has set up a promotional video area on their website. Dynacore is one of the few hollowcore machinery manufacturers to submit a quality video to the site.

Of course the video is only one element of an integrated marketing program for Dynacore.  But you know your messaging is making an impact when the competition starts putting out ads about their low operations costs!

< Click here to watch the video!

Helping Network Managers Sell to Business Managers

Strangeloop Networks is a start up that builds acceleration appliances that automatically optimize web applications in real time without the need to add code to the website or make infrastructure changes to the network.  Stangeloop’s appliances dramatically improve user response times, increase application performance and server throughput, and reduce bandwidth requirements.

The small marketing team lacked content development resources.  They needed better sales tools because their target customer was no longer the technical pioneer enthusiast – they were now selling to larger companies who needed business justification, and needed collaterals to help their champions (the network managers) make the business case to line of business managers. 

I wrote two white papers that highlighted how a slow website could impact business, especially for e-tailers.  The first white paper required finding data – reports, statistics and analyses – that could quantify the cost of downtime and poor response time.  To accompany the white paper, I also developed a spreadsheet that could be used as a sales tool to help customers calculate the cost of lost business opportunities and open up business level discussions.  In keeping with Strangeloop’s new strategy of selling to business managers, I also updated their web site content to emphasize business benefits rather than technology.