While the way we connect today has its benefits, it can’t replace conversation. Particularly in a business context there is no substitute for looking someone in the eye and listening to what they have to say. At the risk of stating the obvious here’s why …

First, there is nuance in conversation that can’t be replaced on-line; the tone of our voice, the nod of our head, eye contact or lack thereof. The signals are as much a part of the story as the words. The words might deliver one message but the subtle gestures, breaths and tapping toes deliver another. They provide us insight and a view into each other’s truth. There is simply no way to replace this in electronic communication ☺.

Second, conversation is commitment. Two individuals engaged in conversation have made an unstated but overt commitment to each. They have acknowledged to each other, “you are worthy of my time,” “you have my undivided attention,” “ I value you enough to focus only on you.” As I write this I realize that there are several text threads and a Facebook message that await my reply – but they wait with no expectation of immediate response.

Finally, conversation yields discovery. Being seated across from someone, whether in their office, a coffee shop or a bar is a shared, intimate experience. Emails have a subject line and it’s rare that the thread will deviate far from that context. Meetings may have an agenda but it’s almost impossible that the discussion won’t deviate in a way that gets personal. It’s these initially brief exchanges that are the fuel for closer partnership and collaboration. Off-the-cuff comments about almost anything provide insight and impetus for more conversation and relationships that grow beyond the sales call or project at hand.

These observations are nothing we don’t all know, yet we continue to sit at our desks (or on our phones) typing at clients, prospects, partners, co-workers and friends. We’ve convinced ourselves it is effective, or at least sufficient, communication. But we’ve dramatically underestimated the cost of not getting out and conversing with the people we do business with. The nuance, commitment and discovery that exist at the core of conversation is the starting point for a level of relationship that exists above and beyond what can be established solely through today’s new modes of connecting. So it’s time for me to renew my commitment to conversation. I’m confident I’ll feel the benefit in my heart and soul, not to mention in the growth of business relationships that have the potential to be more fulfilling and more profitable than the one’s I have today.

If you read this and feel compelled to comment, please do. Then give me a call and we’ll find a time to get together.

CEO Series #4 – Smart Innovation

For CEOs interested in attending the next CEO Series event, “How to Hire All-Stars,” please contact Heather Ward, the CEO Series program coordinator, at hward@holland-mark.com.

I wanted to revisit it, not so much to talk about the process, but to share why I think BostInno matters so much to the Boston startup community and beyond.

In very practical terms, BostInno is a media channel. I know Chase, Kevin and co. hope it’s a place people feel some urgency to visit, to keep in touch with what’s happening in the region we all care most about. That’s what “the view from inside” is about, and it’s what distinguishes BostInno’s point-of-view from the cold gaze of established media outsiders.

On a deeper level, though, Streetwise media (BostInno’s parent co, now focused on rolling out similar properties in DC, New York, and elsewhere) is about much more than that.

The company’s mission – and by extension it’s brand – is rooted in a simple belief about the power of communities, a belief that communities can change the world. You’ve probably heard it said that individuals can change the world, and there’s certainly truth in that. But individuals do that by creating communities of people that share their point of view.

And what does it take to build a community? Well, it takes a bunch of things… but one of them is a means of communication. And we’ve seen this throughout history.

Who here has heard of the “Massachusetts Spy?” Google it. It was a newspaper, printed 3 times a week in Colonial Massachusetts. And although most of you have never heard of it, most historians agree that the United States wouldn’t have happened without “the Spy’s” role bringing people together, sharing ideas, and crystalizing a point of view about the revolution.

Heard of Facebook? Very different medium, obviously, but again an instrument which enabled a community of disenfranchised young people across the Middle East to communicate with themselves, fueling the Arab Spring and a set of geopolitical changes people our age will be dealing with for the next 50 years. On a humbler scale you could argue TechCrunch played a comparable role as an organ of the Silicon Valley startup community (at least before it became whatever it is now.) TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Reporter were among the advantages the Palo Alto crowd had over the rest of us, organs to facilitate the flow of information among a group of smart people who wanted to change the world.

Streetwise is doing that same thing for cities across America, but it all started in Boston. It has become an organ of the innovator community here, serving the people who are managing the future by making it happen.

To quote someone smart a while back… We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. BostInno is a way for us to come together and connect. Share and refine ideas. Interact and relate. Establish and deepen professional and personal relationships. It will do all those things if the people reading this… if you, right now, decide to make it exactly that.

So there’s work to do. Join us, and let’s make sure Boston is the place people most want to change the world from in 2012 and beyond.

This post originally appeared on Bostinno.com on April 20, 2012.

To win, an entrepreneur needs the conviction to overcome inertia. People have gotten along just fine without whatever it is you hope to sell them. Fact is your early attempts to convince them otherwise will almost always fail, which means you need the tenacity to keep swinging until you connect with the market.

George Bernard Shaw famously observed that the reasonable man adapts to his circumstance, that only an unreasonable man would seek to adapt the outside world to his own needs. “Progress depends on the unreasonable man,” said Mr. Shaw. It’s a quote I’ve always loved. It means that apparent failure is just another obstacle to be overcome by an individual with the will, and the character, to do so.
That’s an attractive idea to an entrepreneur. But sometimes that attraction is fatal.

For every story of conviction overcoming a perceptual speed-bump, there are 10 of an entrepreneur who hung on too long after the point where the market responded with a resounding, “Meh.” The stronger your sales skills, the longer you’ll tend to hold out past the “point of meh,” and the higher your opportunity costs will be versus investing in an offering with the potential to be pulled by the marketplace rather than pushed by the brute force of your sales and marketing prowess.

So how do you know? How do you tell the difference between a light at the end of the tunnel, and the oncoming train of market indifference?

Here are 5 questions that can help:

1. Is your quality of execution sufficient to take quality of execution off the table as a variable?

Poor execution of the right strategy will most likely lead to failure, just as brilliant execution can hide the holes in a flawed strategy. So where are you on that scale? If you’re happy with the quality of your execution, on balance, you need to look deeper for the source of the challenges in your business.

2. Do your customers understand your offering differently than your prospects?

The world has a learning curve, and dealing with it is part of the entrepreneurial adventure. But does the perception of the people who’ve climbed that curve — your existing customers — really change in important ways from that of your further-out prospects? If the answer is no, you’re seeing something your customer doesn’t. And that usually means it doesn’t exist.

3. Are others finding success in your space?

This one is simple. Is someone in your space kicking butt? If so the competitive threat may be important, but so is the validation that you’re chasing something which can be caught.

4. Will the larger context change in some way to smooth your path to success?

m-Qube was the 800-lb gorilla in a non-existent industry for years before the US text messaging phenomenon took off. We kept our powder dry, and waited it out. Are you doing the same? If so agree on a tangible trigger and conserve your cash until you hit it. If not consider giving the money back, and changing over to a game you can actually win.

5. Is the source of your conviction what you need, or what actually is?

I love Shark Tank, and in almost every episode some amateur tells the sharks that their idea will take off because they need it to. Cuban and Kevin typically bow out soon after that. The reason? Entrepreneurs motivated by an objective opportunity have a much better hit rate than those motivated by an internal psychosis, or an external requirement.

This last one breaks my heart, and I see it a lot. I get that you hate to disappoint your uncle Nunzio, or that you promised your spouse you’d make it work this time. But the fact is those things are irrelevant to the question of whether your idea will fly, and anyone willing to point that out to you is someone you can trust over the long run.

Don’t be that person, folks. So much of the pain in life, over time, is caused by distance from the truth. And the same is true in business.

Ask these questions of yourself, and try hard to answer them honestly. If the news is bad and you deal with it like an adult, I promise you’ll live to fight another day. If the same is true but you’re a good enough salesperson to sell yourself eventually you’re going to hit somebody else’s wall, and create collateral damage you might otherwise have avoided.

There’s a fine line between being the captain of your destiny, and the prisoner of your own wishful thinking. Use these questions to help sort out which side of it you’re on, and please share what you learn with the rest of us.

This post originally appeared on Bostinno.com on March 20, 2012.

Quick Recap: Holland-Mark is not in the advertising business. We’re in the growing businesses business. We help clients achieve “Imperative” status, meaning we help make their products and services must-haves in an economy where that’s what people buy.

Imperative is, of course, subjective. That’s why creating a brand – a collective emotional response, out there – is a big part of what we do.

So how does it work? How do you build a brand that helps get you to Imperative in 2012 and beyond?

When last we met, we had Connected to the Truth of the situation, Clarified Our Message using One Simple Thing™ or some lesser methodology, and Aligned Our Offering with the emotional value proposition expressed in that message.

Armed with a clear and effective message, brought to life in a product the world wants… it’s time to make sure our other external contact points support rather than detract from our brand.

Step Four: Align Your External Touchpoints

Support your brand, or detract from it. There really is no neutral ground.

If you claim to be a service-oriented brand, but send me to an automated attendant when I need help, you fail. If you claim to be a luxury hotel, but the towels are 2’ x3’… fail.

This is where the logo comes in, by the way. It’s hard to design, or even evaluate design work like that if you lack sufficient message clarity to provide some kind of objective standard. Without that it’s just a matter of whether you like it. Amateur hour.

Beyond that, remember customers discount the claims of your marketing, and look to the “little things” to form an impression of who you really are. That means it’s important to make sure everything from your voicemail message to your lobby décor to your trade show schwag support the brand you’re trying to create. Even seemingly internal things… your employee manual, your HR policies, your operational safety protocols can have a big impact on brand perception. Doubt it? Ask BP.

Step Five: Engage The Market

OK… so now, having bashed marketing communications for 2 posts, it’s time to come clean: Most brands cannot live on tweets alone.

Old school marketing tactics are a critically important dimension of most large scale brands, and new school tactics like content marketing, mobile, and social programs need to tell the same story in roughly the same way as everything else.

I’m a huge believer in inbound tactics, of course. But sometimes – especially in lower involvement categories – they need to be augmented with media that interrupts people to deliver your message.

Step Six: Measure & Manage Advocacy

The final step in building a brand in 2012 is measuring the extent to which you’re becoming “Imperative;” meaning the extent to which you’re creating advocates, adding more promoters than detractors to the ongoing conversation about whether your product is any good.

To do this we use the Net Promoter System, based on the seminal work done by Fred Reichheld to measure and manager customer loyalty. It’s powerful ju-ju, worth getting up to speed on if you haven’t already.

We’d argue advocacy is the real currency of brand value out there today. It’s been statistically proven to predict everything from the organic growth rate to the long-term profitability of a business. Armed with the customer insights it inevitably reveals, enlightened marketing folks become empowered to drive the whole organization in the direction of a world-beating brand.

NPS is just now tipping over from a tool only the big guys use to one that can help any size business gauge its progress in making customers happy, getting them to come back, and inspiring them enough to tell their friends about the experience.
And that, in the end, is what it’s all about.

This post originally appeared on bostinno.com on March 7, 2012.

Holland-Mark is not in the advertising business. We’re in the growing businesses business. We help clients achieve “Imperative” status, meaning we help make their products and services must-haves rather than nice-to-haves in an economy where that’s what it takes to get people to spend their money.

Imperative is, of course, subjective. That’s why creating a brand –a collective emotional response out there in the hearts and minds of a target audience – is a big part of what we do.

So how does it work? How do you build a brand that helps get you to Imperative in 2012 and beyond?

Here’s how. Six steps:

Step One: Connect To The Truth

I have always believed that, in the long run, most of the pain in life is caused by distance from the truth.  Odds are that failing to see the truth of others, yourself, what you need, a given situation, or a particular relationship has caused you pain at some point. And the same is true in business.

Most of the business and product failures I’ve experienced and observed in my life boil down to missing some fundamental truth of the marketplace. So the process of building a brand has to start with a foundation of understanding those things, specifically separating the facts from the hypotheses with respect to your customer, competition, context, capabilities, and culture.

How you do this of course depends on the business you’re in, and the questions you have about it. The bare minimum is some kind of intense team discussion to try and separate the facts from the fiction. Ideally it involves some kind of systematic social media listening station, or a more formal research construct like a quantitative survey or series of qualitative interviews. With Napkin Labs now defunct, we’ve been playing with a tool called QualBoard in this application, and it looks promising.

We’re more and more convinced that this “outside-in” approach to building a brand and a business is the right way to go. Seth Godin likes to say “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.” Sounds about right to us, and very much aligned with our approach to brand building.

Step Two: Clarify Your Message

So are we ready to get going on the logo now? No, we are not.

Before anyone can produce a high quality creative deliverable on your behalf, you have to get to a place of strategic clarity around what that creative is intended to express. There is no short cut for this. It takes some time, and if building a brand matters to you, I’m sorry to say you just need to suck it up and drive your team through some kind of process that gets everyone on the same page about how – exactly – you are going to tell your story.

Our process for this is called One Simple Thing™ (OST), and with all the appropriate disclaimers I have to say it’s pretty good at surfacing a core, emotional value proposition that can drive the downstream customer experience in a way that builds a brand.

We capture OST in a one page document called a Message Model, starting with a formal positioning statement:

For [target] who are [segment], [brand] is the [category]
that delivers [distinction] because of [proof.]

For the basics on how this works, check out this presentation.

Step Three: Align Your Offering

OK… so now you have clarity. Logo time? No.

In 2012, your marketing starts with your product, not with what you say about your product. The reason for this is that people discount what you say, favoring instead what your current customers have to say about whatever it is you’re selling.

Today your marketing communications account for a much smaller slice of market perception than they once did. The reality of your product drives the perception of your prospects now, and the first and arguably most important role of your brand is to shape the former and amplify the latter in ways that trigger the emotional response you’re trying to create.

So… does your product experience do everything it can to deliver on the emotional value proposition you defined in Step Two? If you’re like every client we’ve ever worked with, the answer is no. The good news is you can probably improve your lot quickly with some “soft innovation,” without needing to reengineer your product altogether. (For more on this line of thinking you can check out Alex Bogusky’s excellent and accessibly short book on the subject,Baked In.)

So what comes next, en route to building a brand that will become an enduring strategic asset for your company? Subscribe to our channel to get Part II of this series, coming soon to a screen near you.

And the really good news… it starts with the logo.
This post originally appeared on bostinno.com on March 5, 2012.

She and I had lunch a couple weeks back, and talked about where that passion came from. She told me a story, about how her Mom used to bake for her as a kid, and how her Mom would always add something special… maybe a filling, or a candied fruit, or some chocolate. She talked about how that made her feel.

We wanted to do something special as a farewell, so we pulled a team together to create a brand and identity package for her. The One Simple Thing for her brand was obvious, given the story and the category: Love.

The tagline wrote itself: “Everybody needs some love now and then. And it’s baked right in.”

Soon after we’d put together a listening station in Google Reader making it easy for her to follow the most prominent baking bloggers out there. We created Twitter and Pinterest profiles to let her curate the best content for her followers, and a quick Tumblr-based site where the content she created could live.

The truth is it’s not always this easy, and few categories and businesses genuinely lend themselves to what has to be the ultimate OST. But it shows the power of a story to launch a brand, and that’s something I think everyone can learn from.

Good luck, Liz. Remember your brand is all about Love, and that it’s baked right in.

It doesn’t need to be that way. The way forward starts with a sober look at where we are, examines how we got here, and focuses on three very big ideas that together represent a powerful vision for the future.

Tough Love

In most big companies, marketing has become what HR used to be… a place for folks who couldn’t cut it in a real job. It’s the place where arty intellectuals can travel, interact with like-minded pretty faces over cocktails, and hide from the accountability that has transformed every other corner of the 21st century corporation. Most marketing people are mediocre. Most marketing is the sexy part of sales without the pesky accountability, and it is worthless. Harsh, perhaps, but too often true.

How did it come to this?

Modern marketing came about in an industrial age, when economic value was realized in economies of scale. If you could make a nickel on a cupie doll, you could make $100,000 on a million identical cupie dolls, as manufacturing technology drove your unit cost of production and distribution downward. The key to realizing this compelling alchemy was to get a million people to want the same thing, and modern advertising was born.

Needing first to grasp what had happened (and later to legitimize themselves) enterprising ad and media execs created the language and metrics of mass marketing. They distanced themselves from the responsibility for garish “sales” to refocus on things that “really mattered” – reach, frequency, cost per thousand – which also happened to be the things they could control. Budgets swelled, tipples tipped, and life was good for the marketing man (and he was a man back then.)

Fifty years on, the world has changed. Economic value is no longer locked in the factors of production, which have been commoditized by globalization and the relentless progress of industrial age technology. The reputation and clout of marketing people has waned. In bad times they are among the first to go; in good times their precious perks have been pruned. Our newspapers lament the dearth of US-born engineering majors at American universities, implying without subtlety that to raise a nation of “marketing people” is to cede our economic, cultural and military dominance to the teeming and industrious East.

A New Hope

In its darkest hour the marketing function has an opportunity for redemption, brought about by an odd trinity: the dawn of social media, the recognition of marketing’s role in driving product innovation, and an increasingly appreciated loyalty metric called Net Promoter Score.

Social media enables us to connect with the outside world – authentically, and personally (unless we do something utterly boneheaded like outsource the Twitter “problem” to some PR firm.) That connection invariably helps us understand what the market wants, and to the extent we share what we learn it empowers us as the Voice of the Customer within our own organizations. It enables an “outside-in” approach to product innovation, led by marketing rather than followed by it. NPS completes the picture, giving us a way to measure the advocacy that builds brands today, just like we used to measure the “impressions” that did the same way back when.

Books have been written about each of these ideas, and the ones linked above are among those worth reading. But taken together I believe they represent a path for the next great generation of Marketing people back to respectability. It is the path back to responsibility for actual Sales; to being the people within a company who truly understand the who, what, where and why of current and prospective customers. It’s an opportunity to become the people inside who are most directly responsible for the people outside - the ones who now control our brands, our fortunes, and our fate.

Through that lens, there’s never been a better time to be a Marketing Person. So long as you’re willing to do the work to be a one that gets results.

This post originally appeared on bostinno.com on February 28th, 2012.

Fast forward to 2012, and something’s changed in the fresh-faced young men and women I see today.  The smart ones don’t think in terms of “jobs” in the way I used that term, and they could give a crap about “career” in the same sense.

They’re focused on something different. Many of them are hustling to get paid for solving a problem they’re passionate about, rather than flipping burgers or shaking cocktails as they pine away for something better. Call it a “gig,” maybe, at the risk of sounding all swing-a-ding-ding. But it’s a new perspective on work that I think is good for people and the economy at large, in encouraging us all to take risks and find new ways to create distinct value.

Writer and futurist Charles Handy frames this idea with a great story:

The other day, I was having lunch with an advertising executive. He was bemoaning the fact that he had lost his job while still at the height of his powers, as he saw it. Just at that moment, the electrician who was working in his house put his head around the door. “I won’t be back for a couple of days,” he said. “I’ve got another job to fit in.” In his world, a job meant a client; in my friend’s world, it meant an employer.

There’s no obvious limit to the number of electrician-type jobs that can exist. Or plumbers. Or accountants. The world is full of potential clients — for something. The problem is that you have to create the something yourself, and most of us are not born entrepreneurs….

…I [say] to my kids, “When you leave college don’t get a job at first. Find someone who will pay you money for something you make or do for them. It will be good practice for life later on.”

Handy’s point is that a client is sometimes better than an employer, especially early in your career where you may not have the obligations you’ll have later, and later in your career when you may have the resources you once lacked.

I can name 5 really good people off the top of my head who are out there covering their monthly nut doing something they love, in the full knowledge they may or may not be doing the same thing in 12 months. And these people are happy – to a man – in a way only a minority of my more permanently employed friends are. These people control their own destiny. They know they can eat what they kill, and that’s a useful skill in an economy where disruptive change is the only constant.

The other thing these people have is a network of relationships. Networks help you spot the opportunities that so often come disguised as other people’s problems. They help you assemble the resources to solve complex problems, quickly build a team that can execute effectively, and maintain the enduring personal connections that give work meaning.

There are two signs in the foyer of Holland-Mark World HQ:

Love that is not love is work.
Work that us not work is love.

If you find yourself working at something you don’t love, don’t just think about looking for a new job. Reflect on what you love to do, and then on a problem doing that might solve for somebody else.

If you can find someone to pay you for solving that problem, you may never have to work again.

This post originally appeared on bostinno.com on February 21st, 2012.