John Porcaro: mktg@msft: The Real Goal of Marketing
John is blogging about what marketing means to him and comments upon an entry by Chris Sells:
Marketing people are customer-focused in the sense of always thinking about why customers aren’t buying enough stuff, and how to get them to buy more. You’re customer-focused in the sense of caring about what customers need, and helping them accomplish it, even if that doesn’t result in selling anything.
“But don’t take it so hard. It’s not as if I said you were too honest to be a banker, or too smart to be a teacher. (God, what if girls thought you were too handsome to be sexy?)”
WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Problem is, lots of folks in the profession agree with the statements above. And many of the folks I work with might even subscribe to the old “broadcast” model of marketing (throw out a message or product to enough people and a lot of it will stick).
But in focusing on understanding and meeting customer needs, marketing becomes a synergistic, simple proposition, a win-win partnership where you’re exchanging value for value. A “marketplace” in the purest sense. I’ve seen far too much success when I was sincerely listening and meeting customer needs to ignore that doing it that way is the easiest way to make money, to sell product, to get visitors to websites, to drive demand.
If marketing is the former, count me out. That definition feels more like an underhand ‘door to door’ conman than an attitude for the 21st century.
As I blogged on Thursday I’ve recently signed up for a marketing course. I think it will be a great course and i knbow I will come across some of this thinking. I just hope it doesn’t get in the way of the good stuff.
For what its worth, Chris (and John) I’m with you. Talk to the customers. Find out what they want and try and work out a way to give it to them.
Some people get this, some people don’t. Unfortunately in my current organisation I would say the latter have the upper hand.
Anyone recommend how I can go abut integrating moblogging into MT? I’ve just got a delightful camera phone (a Sagem MY X6) and I think it would be good to make use of it!
Ideas on a postcard or the comments section!
Thanks!
Seb’s Open Research
Conferences: analyzing bang for the buck
Computer science researcher Werner Vogels cooked up an interesting way to put a value to a conference.
I think there are a number of criteria to consider when selecting a conference:
Innovation - will you hear new stuff that may challenge you
Technical - will you learn about techniques/technologies you will use
Political - will you get a better of view at the strategic level
Networking - will you hook up with (new) people
Career - will this conference help you to advance your professional goals
Entertainment - Will you be able to have some fun
Location - if the conference sucks can you go somewhere else
From there, he assigns numerical values and computes ratios to rate a number of geeky conferences. As it turns out, Chris Pirillo’s Gnomedex comes out on top. Now how would you rate the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Werner?
Apologies for copying this in total but I felt it needed to be viewed in full.
I’m not sure I could apply this to ECTS 
Well ECTS was every bit as good as I had hoped. Stunning games, great game play and other distractions a plenty.
Games I particularly enjoyed watching and playing were:
XIII from Ubisoft which won several accolades at the show. Cel shading, great gameplay well worth the money and on my list to purchase!
SWAT: Global Strike Team (saw this on the Xbox) - very good team based mission profile game
Metal Gear Solid Snake : Snake Eater from Konami was a very interesting demo and I look forward to that, although I hope it will be a bit more flexible in gameplay than MSG2.
Other things which are probably worth keeping an eye on are:
Half Life 2 (there were queues to see the demo so we didn’t make it)
Nokia’s n-gage looked really good. The games I saw were very impressive considering the size of the machines. My only slight concern would be the battery not holding out.
Vodafone Live! was also enjoyable more for the playing of retro games than anything else!
Anyway, well worth the visit.
I signed up for a course in Marketing today. I decided to take the plunge after advice from our Director of Product Marketing and Strategy and John Porcaro.
Thanks to both of them (John the beer is still on, I hope?)
The course is ratified by the Chartered Institute of Marketing and is their Level 2 qualification (Advanced Certificate in Marketing)
I’m genuinely excited tonight. I can’t wait to begin
In addition tomorrow is ECTS (10am outside Earl’s Court - I’m the big guy in the glasses) and Saturday is my daughter’s birthday!
Fun, Fun, FUN!!!!!
Guardian Unlimited | Online | Second sight
Tom Coates in the Guardian muses on the changes about to come to the ‘blogosphere’.
It’s a strange time to be a weblogger. Our little hobby looks like it’s finally about to enter the big time. I mean, you know you’ve made it when Lycos has a weblogging system, right? When AOL’s system has just been launched? When Blogger has been bought by Google?
He goes onto make some very good points about communication in blogging, i.e. its about listening (or reading) just as much as writing:
A future weblogging culture should be able to find counterpoints to arguments, to identify experts quickly and easily, and it should help good commentary bubble up effectively from new or low-trafficked sites. Mechanisms that help us know who to read, who to trust and who to ignore should be permeating the entire community invisibly and pervasively.
Yep, that’s certainly a good point although quite how you can do this easily is unclear. It has taken me some time (a few months) to make contacts and dare I hazard acquaintances (that could be friends!). Would this be the way of the future? “I vouch for John, he tells it how it is but David talks rubbish” but then who is to say I’m playing with a straight bat? (oh more cricketing metaphors). I’m not criticising Tom’s points merely wondering what kind of mechanism will arise?
Matt.Blogs.It
Matt blogs ‘Reforming project Management’
Create mechanisms for employees to engage fully in the mission of the company. Some people are just dying to make bigger contributions. Blogging is just one way to share ones voice.
Companies clueful enough to want to listen to their participants will find blogs to be a great way to tease them out and get them interacting.
I think this is based on Halley Suitt’s article called ‘Glove Girl’ about an anonymous blogger inside a company.
Anyway. Some very interesting points in here worth absorbing not least of which is the idea of actually listening to your staff. How many managers do that and do it all the time rather than on token occasions or as a empty gesture. I like to think I always listened to my reports (when I had some). i didn’t always agree…
I’ve often see mention of listening to customers, or suppliers / partners but very little made of listening to employees. Time for a change I would suggest.
Iunctura Daily — Center for Strategic Relations
Establish open communications between engineering and marketing to flow this information into sales literature. This open communications helps you create products that address real solutions customers desire and are willing to purchase.
Only about 10 to 25% of your engineering efforts should focus on improvements outside of specific customer demand. It’s find to have R&D focused on the next great achievement, but use improvements in the current product to finance these efforts.
Clearly connect the efforts of engineers to those of sales and marketing. Focus on improvements customers will pay for and that can be produced at a reasonable cost.
Regularly bring in small groups of engineers with marketing, sales, and support people to discuss how each group can support each other. Remember, each are all on the same team. When employees know others in these other functional areas they are more likely to work together for common business objectives.
Communication is a good thing Cross pollination of teams is a great idea, to be encouraged. I think I shall suggest it in work and see what happens…
Conversations with Dina
Dina has found some more Creativity links (well link)
An example of a checklist:
The Five Senses
1. Touch. Feeling, texture, pressure, temperature, vibration.
2. Taste. Flavor, sweet/salt/bitter.
3. Smell. Aroma, odor.
4. Sound. Hearing, speech, noise, music.
5. Sight. Vision, brightness, color, movement, symbol.
And the point:
Customized checklists should be developed for individual problems or ideas when several factors must be considered. Listing each condition to be met or part to be covered will assure that none are overlooked. The mind can attend to only about seven items at one time; more than that will have to be recalled from memory, either by force of will or through a checklist. Checklists help enormously in keeping the idea maker or problem solver alert to multiple aspects of the issue at hand.
Sounds like using brainstorming to identify attributes that you need to consider, then using the created list to generate thoughts about the overal idea…
i like this. I think my manager tends to use similar techniques to help. Its almost like developing a process in abstract.
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