Big Lou broke even on his investment in 12 hours, and had made a cool $200 grand after 3 days of launching the site. I know this because he shared intimate details of the project’s economics in a refreshingly plainspoken follow up statement, which you can giggle admiringly through here. Today I got an e-mail titled, “A statement from Louie CK.” It read exactly as follows:

Hi.  This is LOuie.  It seriously is me. Im even going to leave the O stuipdly capatalized because who would pay an intern to do that?? Okay so you bought the thing with my fat face on it and you clicked the button that said i could email you. And i know that now you are thinking “aw shit. Why’d i let this guy into my life this way?”. Well dont worry. Because i really swear it that i wont bug you. I will not abuse this privalage of having your email. You wont hear from me again… Probably, unless i have something new to offer you. The reason i’m writing now, in the back of a car taking me to the Tonight Show set, is to let you know that as of now there is some new and cool stuff on my site, related to Live at the Beacon Theater. Theres a thing where you can download and print a dvd box cover and label so you can burn and make your own dvd of the video. And theres a new option where you can gift the special to as many people as you want (for 5 bucks each) and they’ll get a nice gifty email from you with a link to the video.

Also, some of you may know, i recently made a statement (that sounds so dumb. Like i’m the president or something) about how the video has been doing online. Im pasting it in here below in case you missed it.

Lastly I’m planning to put some more outtakes of the show on youtube and i think i will put one on the site that is only available for free to you folks on this list, who bought the thing and opted in. But dont hold me to that because really i just thought of it and typed it.

Okay well please have a happy rest of the year and more happy years after that. And please even have been happy in your past. What?

Thanks again for giving me 5 dollars. I bought 3 cokes with it.

Regards. Sincerely, Actually,

Louis

There is much to be learned from this. First, dis-intermediation is awesome. Look for ways to go direct to your audience… not only to pull cost from the equation, but so you can maintain a direct relationship with your customer in ways that will benefit you both.

Second, sometimes your most important business asset is the balls to try something that sounds crazy to everyone else, and maybe even to you at first. Think it through, of course, in terms of downside, upside, and risk. But if you really think you can pull it off, the only way to know is to give it a shot.

Third, people give you what you expect of them. Treat them like pirates, and they become one. Show them some trust, and they feel bad about screwing you out of your due. So they don’t.

Fourth, its thrilling to be spoken to like a person, by a person. Brand managers, take heed. And finally… Newton’s own Louis CK is an an innovator worthy of some love and attention from the BostInno community. So as one divorced, balding, bearded Dad to another; between two guys just trying to make a few sheckles and get some love in the downtime, I say unto you…Well played, sir. Well played.

This content was originally posted on bostinno.com on December 16^th, 2011

She’s got a gig in a play up the street and had stopped by the restaurant for dinner. Afterward, she shared this from her Twitter account…

Guy Niel, Post390′s GM, picked up the thread on HootSuite, and the restaurant responded with this:

She said something nice in return, this time with a link to Post390′s Twitter account:

And the restaurant responded:

The whole thing took an hour. By morning, Post390′s banana cream pie was in the Boston Globe, and in New York Magazine popular food blog, Grub Street Boston.

There’s so much to be learned about how marketing has changed from this silly little exchange.

First, the spark that ignited this whole episode was banana cream pie worth talking about.  We say this all the time… but your product is your marketing. If it’s not good enough to inspire advocacy, measured by the creation of net promoters, you need to focus on that first. If it is, your marketing should flow organically from that.

Second, listening is no longer optional. There’s a conversation happening on the web that you care about. It might be about you. It’s probably about at least one of your competitors. It’s definitely about the problem your product solves, or you wouldn’t be selling enough of it to care.

Finally, the power of digital media lay in it’s potential to create scalable intimacy. A conversation between a local brand and a genuine celebrity took place in real-time last night, in front of the 90,000 people that followed both. That was inconceivable 10 years ago, but it’s how smart people do digital today.

Kudos to the good folks at Post390 for embracing this model so fully in such a short time. You guys earned what happened last night and this morning, and I’ll be stopping by for some banana cream pie myself a little later today.

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 formulation we use includes the following elements:

• target – an actionable universe of buyers,
• segment – the key, predisposing attribute of likely buyers within the target,
• brand – a name you call yourself,
• category – a competitive frame that helps the buyer understand what you do,
• distinction – what makes you unique within that competitive frame, and
• proof – perceived evidence that your claim of distinction is true.

String those things together, and you get a blurb that looks like this:

For [target] who are [segment], [brand] provides the [category] with [distinction] because of [proof.]

Examples from established brands:

• - For drivers who value automotive performance, BMW provides luxury vehicles that deliver joy through German engineering.
• - For people around the world, Coca-Cola is the soft drink that is the real thing since 1886.
• - For industrial manufacturers who are challenged to differentiate, BASF is the raw materials supplier that makes products better through engineering depth.

Can you articulate the hypothesis of your startup – the core value proposition on which you’re betting your livelihood – in the form of a positioning statement like that? If so, can you get your team to agree on it? And if so… Does it hold water?

Give it a shot. Worst case, you’re likely than not to get some clarity from the attempt.

It took 5 years for the first wireless remote to be delivered, using finicky photoelectric cell technology, and then another 15 for the infrared technology we use now to be delivered to the market, in 1970.

That’s 20 years of competition among set builders, resulting in a slow, incremental march toward commodity feature status.

In contrast… the first commercially available MP3 player – the MPMan – was born in 1998. It held 6 songs.

Rio, HanGo, and Nomad players followed within months, each pushing the storage limit to new heights in rapid succession, until Apple launched an iPod that put “1,000 songs in your pocket,” in 2001.

3 years of intense competition, culminating in a category killer that still dominates a decade later.

The age of product innovation as annual event is over. If you’re not actively evolving your product, incrementally and every day in the direction of what your customers will want once you get to the marketplace, you’re doomed. Pizza. Uckfayed.

If you began to think about your brand’s social marketing program primarily as a means to stay connected to what customers are saying about your product, your competition, and the problems you’re both trying to solve… how would your approach to it change?

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)

I spoke at Harvard on Saturday, about Innovation. I introduced the idea of the shelf life of zero.

In the good old days everything had a lovely long shelf life. The store owner on Main Street could make a decent living doing pretty much the same thing for years. The consumer products company (think Polaroid) could invent a technology that would sell for decades. High performing countries could milk their superior infrastructure and capital capacity to dominate economic trade for a long, long time. No longer. The pace of change and the change of pace, has now put everything and everybody in the ugly position of having to stay ahead (or at least even) every day. Ahead of peers, ahead of customers, ahead of friends…it’s exhausting. And I wonder whether we understand as professionals and people how exactly to stay ahead.

We understood that going to college was the way to get ahead with the inference that we would then get a job, start a career, and at some point get to relax our pace of learning and development. That once we hit “manager” status we would get to slow down, imbue the youngsters with our wisdom and know-how, and coast home. Ha. Good old days indeed. Today we all have to learn as much or more, more quickly than when we were fresh-faced, wide-eyed collegians.
So the questions are many: what should we really learn, what should we unlearn, and what should we avoid learning to ensure that we have any capacity to learn, all to ensure that our shelf life is at least zero.

Exhausting indeed.

- they don’t subscribe to process as a means to innovate
- with that said, they have a five-step process:  alignment, discovery, analysis, envision and evaluation, deployment.  Smells a bit like Sync, our non-process process.
- as Chief Strategist Jon believes there are four keys to effective innovation:
- an approach (not to be confused with a process)
- an environment
- tools
- people
- And that people are the key of the keys.  Diversity of backgrounds, ages, strengths.  They gather in dedicated project rooms for days and weeks on end, with white board walls and lots of markers.  Two requisite abilities of an innovator:  empathy and being non-judgmental.  I could work on the latter…
- because the nature of innovation is necessarily subjective they don’t put a lot of emphasis on quantitative anything (phew).
- they always build prototypes to help the client understand what the hell they’re talking about…
- and finally they believe the economy has moved from Innovation as Process (Henry Ford) to Innovation as Information to Innovation as Connection.  Not a particularly profound view but certainly supports the importance of collaboration and transparency to create anything.   Most of Jon’s points were right on, particularly the people part and the need for empathy, being non-judgmental, and working hard to work together.  Easily declared, not easily done.

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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.