Two things happening at Holland-Mark right now. First, we’re in deep with the start up community. As of last night, the MassChallenge 2011 Awards sent a new batch of financed and confident entrepreneurs out into the world, which was a promising reminder that Boston is not shying away from innovation and opportunity. (We even have a district to prove it!) Secondly, we’ve been drinking Fred Reichheld’s Kool-Aid vis-s-vie the revised and expanded The Ultimate Question 2.0. To be clear, we’ve believed in the power of NPS since the Harvard Business Review introduced it to us years ago, but the release of Reichheld’s latest edition has a timeliness that makes it all the more relevant. There’s a simple system for measuring, structuring, and understanding opportunity and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what NPS as a system can do for businesses of all sizes.

But how can NPS guide decisions for how business like ours (businesses in the business of consulting other businesses) approach opportunities? It’s obvious that it’s more than a tool for measurement– meant more as a framework for guiding smart business decisions and positive growth– but is it possible that NPS could tell us what is a bad business altogether?

Groupon. The daily deal phenomenon has attacked our inboxes, removed our ability to assign accurate value to any good or service, and raised our standards while removing our desire to be… loyal. In retrospect, it’s easy to ask the question, “in an age where loyalty is becoming the most valuable customer attribute, can a business that promotes trial over relationship really be viable?” and even easier to say, “NO!” but the truth is that we wanted cost and experience to have a different relationship, and that led us all to discount that driving down cost can dramatically increase volume… and the experience is soon to follow.

So, what does this have to do with Mr. Reichheld and NPS? Everything. If you’ve read the book (either one), you’re familiar with the concept of good and bad profits. Bad profits are those made when the end game is profit and the means to that end does not take into account the emotional, intellectual, or experiential toll on the customer. Good profits, on the other hand, are those made with the willing–and happy– consent of the customer. In other words, it’s the age old adage, “you have to spend money to make money,” but with a twist. You have to spend money improving the lives of your customers and in turn they will spend money improving your bottom line. How? With loyalty that begets an enthusiastic referral to friends and family.

But Groupon is, by design, a bad profit for any business, specifically any small business. By investing money in short returns, companies dilute the experience for existing customers and in turn lose their good profits and promote short-term bad profits with disloyal “brand tourists.” Imagine if every company who offered a Groupon instead invested those losses in substantial perks for existing customers? The loyalty that it would engender would, theoretically, lead to sustained growth and profits.

Another way to look at it is through the lens of promoters, detractors, and passives. The elements of NPS. The “Groupon Gamble” is that passives– or those who are unfamiliar with the brand– can become promoters. Unfortunately, the reality of business is that with a massive influx of unmanageable business, you’ve gambled your promoters to passives and your passives to detractors, resulting in a business with upset regulars and a slew of strangers bad mouthing the experience all over the internet.

The good news is that it’s not over for Groupon. There is still ample opportunity for them to invest in good profits for their customers, the retail stores who trusted them to help build their business. Instead of diluting stock, perhaps investing in a system to help small business owners manage the boom in business and actively convert new faces into loyal customers. Essentially, Groupon could reposition itself as a good profit opportunity for businesses if they are willing to invest in good profits themselves. It’s a cycle that, if taken seriously, can benefit everyone– even investors in the beleaguered start up. The question is whether or not anyone is willing to step out of line and suggest radical change to promote a radical change in outcome?

Besides us.

Related articles

• Do Businesses Really Like Groupon? (blogher.com)
• Groupon, so who exactly profits here? (coverboom.com)
• Groupon Down 30% (coverboom.com)

There is a constant conversation taking place between marketers, strategists, creatives, and brands about the differences between branding for B2B and branding for B2C. There is the debate about color palette. (When in doubt, go blue!) What colors feel safe? What tone feels “business-y”? Is it okay to be serious and be clever?

To us, the truth lies in answering a question different from whether you’re a B2B company or a B2C company, but rather one that focuses on the individuals comprising the Bs and the Cs. Chris has often been heard remarking about the “magic consumer transition” that we sometimes believe takes place while commuting from home to work. The underlying consideration there is whether we truly do think that a CEO thinks or responds differently to words and visuals whether he’s behind a mahogany desk or taking a call from his (or her) deck on a sunny Saturday.

Focus for a moment on social media and the effect it’s had on the formality of our communication. There are no longer ivory towers or hallowed halls, and the businesses who continue to subscribe to this method of engagement (or lack of) are quickly losing share. As people we value warmth and competency as much in our business interactions as we do in our more colloquial, consumer lives. You may be drawn to the stability of specific bank, insurance company, or institution, but your experience is determined by the individuals you encounter within that organization, whether it be a teller, mortgage broker, financial planner, teacher, professor, or administrator. Individually they may present as buttoned-up business people, but behind the pleats and tweeds they are human beings who have a significant impact on the image and engagement of a brand.

Increasingly, we find that consumer loyalty and advocacy is built upon the relationships to individuals within an organization. Restaurants provide good food and a charming ambiance, but it’s the chef who stops by or the bar tender who chats with you while you wait for your dinner date who create that experience. There is no aspect of big M marketing that isn’t influenced by the blurred line between B and C. The way you position, message, and iterate product should focus on the one thing we all share: being human. Creating value for customers– both in communication and product– hinges upon understanding human nature above the nature of business.

There is no debate as to whether the rules are more stringent when you cross into B2B, but it has less to do with how people make decisions and more to do with red tape and legal constraints. The brand emerges when you find the humanity within your audience and then craft a story that appeals to them and passes the “business appropriate” test. It’s then the job of the organization to empower employees to embrace this balance and create experiences that are at once true to the brand and relevant to the customer.

Anecdotally, I live around the corner from one of the finest hotel chains in the world, the Taj. The brand stands for luxury and unparalleled experience. And while for guests this manifests in exquisite amenities and superb customer service, it’s adapted to meet the needs of the friends and neighbors of the hotel, as well. There’s no caviar offered as I pass by, but on a rainy day the staff is always ready with an umbrella, or a bottle of water when I jog by after working out. And this morning, after trying fruitlessly to hail a cab, it was a ride to work in their car service. So while I may not have the opportunity to lay my head upon those delightful pillows, or experience the luxury of tubs the size of my apartment, the luxury is tailored for me by a staff who knows my life and does everything they can to make it that much more luxurious.

Related articles

• Which Is The Best Business Model For Your Startup – B2B Or B2C? (entrepreneurs-journey.com)
• Why does B2B customer experience get the short shrift? (customerthink.com)

Here’s the full video of his presentation:

He left attendees with some time-tested advice about the value of being imperative: “all four of these things [relevance of offering, clarity of message, consistency of experience, and driving of engagement] must come together to create an imperative relationship with your customers or your prospective customers, and really the translation of all that is about getting to love. It’s about getting to a place where your customers don’t just buy what you’re selling, they actually promote what you’re selling to others just like them.”

Related articles:

http://masschallenge.org/blog/bootcamp-day-2-recap-points-clarity

http://bostinnovation.com/2011/06/30/inside-look-at-masschallenge-bootcamp-2011-photos-mcbootcamp/

Related articles

• One Simple Thing (talkofthecampus.wordpress.com)
• Social Business Bootcamp for Startups (oneforty.com)
• Are You Ready For The Next Social Media Marketing Boot Camp? (socialtimes.com)
• Former students pumping it up with MassChallenge (paulgsilva.wordpress.com)

The dialogue boiled down to a debate about what marketing really is in a startup environment, and what it’s becoming more generally.

So what is marketing in a startup? Well, bottom line, it’s a lot more than advertising. Most people agreed, and yet the two words are often used interchangeably in the panel, as they so often are in the wild. When someone talks about how marketing doesn’t matter much for a startup, they’re really talking about marketing communications… the importance of which seems to have declined precipitously not only for startups, but for businesses and brands across the board.

5 Levers of Startup Marketing

Advertising – marketing communications, really – is just one lever of Marketing (note capital “M”) in a startup. And it’s often the least important one.

Inbound marketing, to borrow a phrase from the HubSpot juggernaut, is another lever. Call it social marketing, content marketing, blog/twitter/facebook marketing… It’s the place most startups begin, in large part because it’s powered by passion instead of cash. But more than a cheap advertising, it’s also a great toolkit for pulling the other 3 levers.

Lead generation, or more specifically Funnel Development is the third lever. Dave McClure put this idea on the table a while ago, and David Skok has since taken it to a whole new level of science. It’s rooted in the belief that marketing is really just a process of breaking the bottlenecks in your sales funnel. If you can instrument your marketing process in a way that finds those bottlenecks, then execute to bust them open, you win. It’s interesting to me how much momentum this idea seems to have in VC circles right now, and that’s probably equal parts because it works and because it’s reassuring to the engineering types that lead most startups.

The fourth, and I would say most important lever of startup marketing is Product Strategy. Alex Bogusky’s Baked In really brought this idea into focus for me, but it boils down to the idea that, today, your product is your most important marketing vehicle. It needs to tell your story in a way that resonates in the marketplace, and if it doesn’t, no amount of “bolt-on” marketing is going to solve the problem.

The fifth and final lever, and the one which polarized the audience most intensely, is that of Brand Strategy. On one hand was the cheap logo crowd, noting the availability of great crowdsourcing options where all you need to get a logo is a dream and a $100. On the other were those who felt equally strongly that understanding the emotional value proposition of your offering, and placing that at the core of your entire marketing program, is the absolute key to success.

I closed the panel with a variation on a simple question: If you had $10 to spend on marketing an early stage, tech-oriented B2C startup, how much of it would you spend in each of these five dimensions of Big M Marketing?

Answers from the panel and the audience varied widely. So what’s yours?

Related articles

• Startup Marketing Meetup (holland-mark.com)
• 12 great tips for digital media startups (from Startup 2011) (cyberjournalist.net)
• Meetup: How To Build A Sales & Marketing Machine (sellingthedogfood.com)
• Why I’m Never Going Back To Entrepreneurship (businessinsider.com)

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“Offerings” are now at the core of the Holland-Mark delivery model. More service delivery methodologies than products per se, our offerings help make sure each client gets the benefit of our best thinking and experience, while giving us the ability to better leverage our Principal’s time across clients.

New Marketing Truths

Our offerings are based on a set of observations about common truths in the marketing process today, which we’ve observed consistently across categories and client types:

1. That the way we buy has changed, and brands must be seen as imperative to grow and win in the Value Economy;
2. That the way we sell must change, moving beyond the implementation of marketing communications tactics, to a set of more broadly focused and substantive strategic Marketing objectives required to make a brand Imperative;
3. That the first of these objectives is to achieve Relevance of Offering, meaning alignment between internal perception of your brand’s core value proposition, and the external truth of what the market wants;
4. That the second of these objectives is to achieve Clarity of Message, meaning the ability to communicate your core value proposition in a way busy, distracted prospects can easily grasp, get excited about, and share with other people;
5. That the third of these objectives is to achieve Consistency of Experience, meaning reinforcement of the messaging around your core value proposition at every point of contact with the marketplace;
6. That the fourth of these objectives is Driving of Engagement, meaning establishment of an ongoing and mutually beneficial dialogue between the brand and the external constituencies that matter to it; and finally…
7. That having achieved these objectives, investments to maintain them will enable a brand can establish a virtuous cycle and a sustainable competitive advantage over time.

New Marketing Implications

Our four core offerings correspond with this approach, and the first 3 are pretty well defined at this point:

Sync™ is a fast-track planning and innovation methodology which shapes a product or service experience to align more closely with the right market opportunity and the reality of the customer need;

One Simple Thing™ (OST™) is a brand strategy framework which distills messaging down to a singular thought which is true, relevant, motivating, and distinct;

Every Point of Contact (EPOC™) is a comprehensive examination of the 360° experience of a brand, including all passive and active touchpoints with all constituencies.

The fourth has really come into focus over the last few months, as we’ve extended the thinking behind our social marketing-oriented Content Hub to incorporate offline marketing communications planning and tactics. Doing so led us to shift our focus a bit, away from either a digital- or an analog-only delivery model, and toward a set of objective metrics which enable us to measure and manage the impact of our marketing programs.

This fourth offering is now called Engauge™. In a nutshell:

Engauge is an alternative to conventional media planning, where focus is shifted from the relative cost of impressions to the relative cost of results. Progress is measured in the migration of individuals through five “stages” – Targeted, Connected, Inquired, Closed, and Promoting – each of which can be measured and examined over time.

Building the “Sales & Marketing Machine”

The case for this shift in focus toward the measurement of outputs was made pretty powerfully the other night in a talk by a venture capitalist named David Skok at a Meetup of the Lean Startup Circle in Cambridge. His presentation (“Building a Sales & marketing Machine,” available here) was a huge hit with the startup crown in attendance at this event. This came as no surprise to us, since businesses at inflection points common to startups now comprise the majority of our client revenue.

But extending Mr. Skok’s model beyond the boundaries of B2B software-oriented startups requires enlarging its scope a bit. While we agree wholeheartedly that content-driven digital marketing should be at the core of most brand’s marketing communication programs, the fact is a little “push” communication is still necessary even after you enable the world to more easily “pull” what they’re looking for from you on the web.

Building the New Holland-Mark

While the evolution of these offerings will no doubt continue, with the christening of Engauge we’ve reached a kind of inflection point as well. In a way we’ve found our own “Product/Market Fit“, and the work of aligning our internal competencies and delivery model with it is well underway. As is often the case our web site reflects the agency we were 2 years ago, rather than the marketing consultancy we’ve become. We’ve now begun work in earnest on a new one to advance these ideas, but – as always – clients come first.

While the days are long and the change is not without it’s challenges, we’re incredibly grateful to the clients walking beside us to Imperative, and to the people on our own team being squeezed into new boxes and stretched into new roles to get them there.

They say change is the only constant, and that companies who recognize that and adapt to it are the only ones who succeed. It’s been a bumpy stretch of our journey to Santa Clara, but the road smooths ahead, and we’re grateful to be on the bus with you.

ACIS brings education alive through one-of-a-kind travel experiences. The One Simple Thing™ that powers every touch point with the brand is Insider, referring both to their intimate local knowledge of the destinations they serve, and the close family of team members, regional directors, group leaders, teachers, and students that comprise the extended ACIS family. Over the past few months we’ve helped ACIS translate that positioning into many facets of their business, from the details of their offering, to the way they engage with alumni, their catalog, and the Web.

ACIS actually approached us for help getting their social house in order a while back, and we started by helping senior execs Peter Jones and Joel Cody get up and running with simple, personal blogs. After that we set to work giving the community of travelers – always ACIS’ most potent source of new business – a voice that extended from ACIS.com into the open social networks. The application we built to do that was called Tripstream, and it was all about empowering ACIS travelers to capture and share the  experience abroad as it happened.

Tripstream v1.0 was a kind of experiment off to the side of ACIS core business, a toe in the water to see if the idea would catch on. When it did, we realized we needed to more closely integrate the voice of our travelers with the content available through ACIS.com, and a vision for the new site was born.

After a complete re-architecting of the content map and main navigation, a head-to-toe redesign, and a lot of hard work by the development team inside ACIS, the all new ACIS.com was released into the wild a few days ago.

There are many parts of this site we really like, you can poke around yourself to see them. What I’m most proud of, though, is the progress ACIS has made on it’s own journey from cautious interest to confident execution in the development of its own brand, and in the realization of that brand across physical, digital, and social touch points with the people that matter to it most.

So congratulations to Peter, Joel, Jeff, Jeff, Susan, Erin, Laura, Andres, Liz, Amanda, Caroline, Sarah and the rest of this fantastic team. We’ve come a long way indeed.

I would also point out that the camera adds 10 pounds. And 10 years.

Starts with a clear statement of what we do, thought I’d bounce a draft off you folks and get some feedback. Here’s what we have so far:

Holland-Mark is a marketing services firm focused on making brands “imperative.”

We believe that consumer and business-to-business buying habits have changed permanently in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Where people once bought what was “interesting,” today they buy only what is “imperative;” what they truly feel they need or expect a return on investment from.

While advertising can make products “interesting,” marketing communications alone cannot make a brand “imperative.” Imperative brands have four attributes in common:

• Relevance of Offering – A product aligned with the evolving true needs of its target audience.
• Clarity of Message – A truthful, relevant, motivating and distinct statement of its core value proposition.
• Consistency of Communication – Reinforcement of the above at every point of contact with the brand.
• Driving of Engagement – An ongoing, mutually beneficial relationship between the brand and its primary external constituencies.

These requirements correspond with Holland-Mark’s four core offerings:

Sync™ – A management consulting offering which shapes a product or service experience to align more closely with the right market opportunity

One Simple Thing (OST)™ – A brand strategy offering which distills messaging down to a singular thought which is true, relevant, motivating and distinct

Every Point of Content (EPOC)™ – An audit of the 360° experience of a brand to ensure consistent alignment with OST™

Content Hub – A social marketing program which enables client organizations to engage effectively across social media channels.

So what do you think? Do you get that? Would you pay for it?

As we prepared to jet off to Baltimore on our favorite airline, I checked in online. I had no trouble confirming our seat assignments and printing our boarding passes. But take a look at the attached screen shot.

Two concerns:

1)  The use of the word “ALERT.” Since 9/11, a travel “alert” is alarming, an emergency, potential danger . . . the fact that they’ve transitioned to a new reservation system is certainly not worthy of an alert – maybe a “please note” or “We’re pleased to announce.” Happy Jetting?

2)  The irony in pointing out that the new reservation system will result in longer than usual wait times and lines. The transition is complete, right? Shouldn’t we now be the beneficiaries of the transition? And what might those benefits be? Happy Jetting?

It’s easy to be a critic. And JetBlue does such a good job so often. Delivering on EPOC isn’t easy – a never-ending challenge for us all – but I couldn’t resist pointing this one out.

Happy Jetting!