George West conducted interviews of industry leaders. These were published in the WTRS Newsletter on a regular basis.
| Jennifer McLean – Author of “Credibility Branding”, a book to guide executives in emerging technology markets George: Can you tell us a bit about your background? Where did you come from and how did you get to where you are here today? Jennifer: I started my marketing career working with national clients such as the Gap, Hostess, and others for newspaper advertising campaigns about 20 years ago. As part of that I started getting more and more into promotional programs where we would create a promotion to increase the circulation of the paper and invite guests to sponsor it. This was really the start of creating something more than just advertising and I think I have always focused on that a little bit. Around the same time, this is now the early 90’s, I was a bit of a computer geek. I went to a bunch of computer shows, and bought mother boards and components. I actually took my x286 to a Pentium 3. I spent a ridiculous amount of money to do that, but it was so much fun. I used computers in my daily work quite a bit. I was using it as part of the sales process. Long before most people even had a computer, I had one of the first black and white laptops. That kind of got noticed in my company. At that time I worked for what would be akin to the Time Warner of Canada, Rogers Multimedia, and they started the first online portal. It’s called CANOE.com and its still there, Canadian Online Explorer. We also launched Yahoo! Canada as part of that, in fact I still have Jerry Yang’s card in my wallet. So I got into technology through that route at the very early days of the Internet. Back then, that was considered technology, although its now considered media. That was the start of my career in tech marketing. Later I added a PR specialty and was working as a communications director at a company in Vancouver. I saw the huge value of public relations and that the return on investment was so much higher than from traditional advertising, direct mail and so on. We were getting interest from customers based on articles that were written. This started adding to my thought process about the importance of credibility. That is when I started the model of credibility branding and through the year’s I have worked with a many pretty well-known high tech companies: Microsoft, Canon, Pioneer, a whole bunch of startups, and now I would consider myself a market strategist specializing in emerging technologies and emerging markets. George: I had a question in there. What do you think is wrong with advertising and how does Credibility Branding help bridge the gap? Jennifer: About 2 years ago Al and Laura Ries wrote a book about the death of advertising and the rise of public relations (they also endorsed my new book The Credibility Factor). And it was an interesting concept that I think hasn’t really been embraced. Part of the reason is that public relations still has, I think, a fairly low profile. This is in part for a good reason, and also why I came up with this, but advertising is a communications style that doesn’t generate tremendous interest. For example, if you have a lot of money, and you can focus on a brand-focused advertising campaign that targets lifestyle, it can be successful. A good example would be Target or the Apple iPod. Lifestyle advertising generates an emotional response that is relevant to the demographic the company is focused on. That is when advertising works. The majority of the advertising, that people pay a lot of money for, doesn’t work as well because they don’t have the infrastructure and the money and the resources to do that kind of a branding outreach. Advertising, I believe, works better when you’ve got a really sound communications strategy, and I am talking a bit about credibility branding here again, when you have really created a foundation of credibility in the marketplace by using influencers who are already talking about you. Once that happens, you have trust established with your customers and your constituents. And once that trust is established then advertising has much more power because someone is going to read it and it will be the third or fourth point of contact with them. Not the first contact where you are trying to poke them into interest, but they are now already interested and they will now look at an advertisement and say, “Oh yeah. I heard about these guys. I read about them in ‘so and so’, or ‘so and so’ told me about them, or I saw them in a blog, or when I was at a conference one of the keynote speakers had their product in their hand.” When those things happen first, advertising is much more powerful because then you can mold the communication strategy much more clearly in an ad than you can with an influencer. But advertising definitely has its challenges these days, without a doubt. George: I think what I understand you are saying is that advertising works best when it becomes a reminder rather than and introduction. Jennifer: In certain instances. It’s not the case in every instance, but I would say the majority of the time, yes. George: So let’s tie this into Credibility Branding. In a little more detail what is credibility branding and how does it differ from traditional advertising? Jennifer: Credibility Branding is a different viewpoint on your company, on your product, and on your culture. It is basically how to build a credible company from the ground up. Integrity is a piece of this, but integrity for integrity’s sake is not going to affect your bottom line. Credibility is about thinking about the points of credibility in your company and how that will quicken the sales process. It’s about creating trustworthiness in your products, how to build a credible company from the ground up in order to drive highly influential editors, analysts, early customers, celebrities, industry pundants, strategic partners, and the like. And it is creating the “” of credibility that influences the influencers who in turn influence your customers. By getting an influencer on board quickly, you have immediate and instant credibility. So if there is a trusted source out there who is endorsing your product, you gain instant credibility among people who agree with that source, even if they don’t agree with that source, it adds credibility. Basically, this increases the speed of market acceptance and brings the customer to sales quickly. I often say that it opens the door to the sales guy. It’s a first foot in the door because they have already seen your product and they have already seen the endorsement by influencers. In the process, Credibility Branding actually creates loyal and long term subscribers to your products and services because they already have trust in it. And the sales cycle is not as long because you don’t have to work as hard. So it gets executives thinking more about the impact of credibility and how to make the company’s product stand above the competition by using credibility. Or, even better, standing out as a benchmark of excellence. I have a model called “The Credibility Pyramid” that focuses on the points of credibility in a company. The base is a strong management team, this is the key piece of the model. It is also critical that the management team is well-known and has the right industry credentials, and if not, you can take steps to improve that. Ways you can do this is to get a board of directors or board of advisors that is in alignment with the product’s market focus. Second point of credibility is to really examine products. Make sure that the products you are offering have a clear return on investment. Find the right customers, not just any customer, but think outside the box on the customers that are actually going to improve your reputation, not just the bottom line. And also pursue strategic partnerships with brand-recognized companies, partners that just by association will put you at a different level and increase your standard in the marketplace. You can use your partners for promotional purposes, or improving the technology. And then I think one of the most important things, that many companies don’t do, and that is part of the Credibility Branding Pyramid, is the market trends. Find out what is going on in the market. Leverage those trends to your advantage. Inset your vision into these market trends. At the end of the day, companies do best by examining their customers more, using them as influencers. The model encourages companies to, examine the points of credibility, you can actually mold and manage these points of credibility so that it’s setting the stage from a positioning and messaging perspective before a company even goes out there with a marketing campaign. George: What do you see are some of the challenges facing high technology companies facing as they try to enter the market today, particularly in these emerging technologies and markets, and how does credibility branding help to minimize some of these challenges? Jennifer: I think one of the biggest challenges facing a company developing products using an emerging technology is focus. That focus relates to a number of areas within the company. I am going to reference the notion of culture. Does your company have more of a sales-driven culture, which represents a majority of companies. Or is your company an engineering driven culture, or a marketing-driven culture. In my experience, a small percentage of companies are based on a marketing-driven culture, more than half are sales-driven, and the rest are engineering-driven. Not being a marketing-driven company is probably the biggest challenge. What I mean by marketing-driven is that notion of looking from the ground up at everything you are doing as a marketing opportunity. So, for example, looking at your sales strategy. Is your sales guy running the show? This is very common. The sales guys come in and they want the sale, no matter the cost. And that cost is what I call a “seat-of-the- pants” approach where there is a frenetic environment and the sales guy turns on a dime depending on his customer. And features and benefits of the products are sometimes even adjusted for that one customer. That is a lack of focus. What most companies are not doing is starting from scratch, looking at the market opportunity, looking at the market need, looking at what pain their product is going to solve in the marketplace. And that’s actually a key issue: benefits versus features. In an engineering-driven culture, it’s kind of a “if you build it, they will come” type of approach. They focus on “that little knob over there can create this really cool GUI which really is, like, cool”. Versus creating a product that is actually going to meet the needs of the customer. Sometimes in an engineering-driven environment, the product marketing person and will meet with customers and will clearly see the opportunities for product improvement that the engineers will resist to their death. Credibility branding is kind of changing the bottom line culture of a company and part of that is a different way of thinking. Part of what Credibility Branding does is to offer tools and models to adjust the perspective of your organization. It allows you to just think about things in a different way. For example, competitive research. Do you know how many companies do not research what the editorial community is saying? Companies do great research of the financial aspects of the marketplace, which are really important and have to be done; on the feature set of their product and comparison to their competition, which are really important and have to be done; and they completely forget the positioning piece. The positioning piece is perception, and perception is reality. If you are not creating a perception that matches the market opportunity, you are not going to win anyone over, including the editorial community. Most companies don’t do competitive research beyond the features and the finances. Looking at a competitor’s press releases, for example. How are they positioning themselves? How is the editorial community embracing that positioning? Are they getting influencers on board? Who are these influencers? What are they saying about them and the market? Doing this kind of research beyond the traditional linear approach, and looking at the messaging and positioning opportunities available is an important process that is often missed. From those messaging and positioning opportunities companies can then focus on the influencers that are going to match that and that are in turn going to improve the success of quickly getting recognition in the marketplace. In terms of getting back to what mistakes are companies making, many are focusing too much on “product myopia”, which is the features and benefits of the product and what does versus how it improves people’s lives. George: Let me endorse what you are saying here, we spoke with a gentleman probably about six months ago, who is in the fortuitous circumstance of being able to simply invest in high tech companies rather than having to build them himself. He made the same point to us. He said that when somebody comes to me and says that I am going to build a chip and it’s going to provide you the ability to get online a tenth of a second faster on average than you would today, he said “Somebody may invest in that and they may make some money, but it’s not for me. I want somebody to come to me and tell me that this is a pain point. This is the problem that somebody has that’s causing them issues and this is how I am going to address that’. He said that that is the kind of company he gets interested in. Jennifer: Exactly. And those kinds of companies are bound to succeed. My sister actually worked for a technology company recently and she did training. She would go back to the engineers and say “Well, here is what the customers need”. She doesn’t know that much about technology, but she knew enough to know that it wasn’t that hard a thing to fix. And the engineers refused. It was a fundamental piece of the product that was impacting what the customers did with the product every day, and the engineers wouldn’t change it. George: I am laughing here. That attitude was the key to my decision that engineering was not a viable future for me. So I know exactly where that’s coming from. Jennifer: The challenge is to get a company that is marketing-focused. Especially since most are engineering- or sales- driven. The other side of that challenge is a marketing culture is very difficult to implement within that environment. Frankly that is why I came up with this model in the first place. It was to speak to an engineer and speak to a sales guy in a more linear fashion so that they would be able to understand the marketing opportunities beyond features. Ironically it was a backward creation and as I started to apply it from a forward perspective, using it as a foundational strategy, and it really works. George: So it sounds like a common mistake you see companies making in the emerging technology marketplace today is either to be totally focused on the features and functions of their product, or that the solution gets created by the sales force in the presence of the customer since the product itself doesn’t really match the needs of the marketplace. Rather than going in ahead of time having some confidence that you know what the customer wants. Jennifer: Yeah, and then there is that piece of it which is not doing the basic editorial research. The editorial community is briefed by every company. They have to deliver information to their readership that is relevant. They are the absolute best filter to determine what customers want to hear. And companies don’t read what these guys are saying about the industry. This needs to be an important piece to consider in planning and strategy. There is finance, there is features and benefits, and then there is research: reading. Talking to customers is also a huge piece that is missing and I think many companies don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to hear what their customers have to say. Another thing that I think many companies are missing is a regular audit. I would say do an audit at least two times a year. You talk to your customers, you talk to your vendors, you talk to the media. You get a third party to do this, and it’s not through your sales guys. You get a third party facilitator to come in and create these audits. You get more information from this program than anything many programs and end up with such a clear picture of what is going on that your strategy is so much tighter as a result of it. You guys have had the experience of what that looks like. George: Absolutely. If we take it back to the work that you did for us, I just have to absolutely endorse that audit process. It is just very powerful and if I can make one editorial comment here, I see a lot of companies that say they do audits who typically bring their top customers someplace and feed ’em and wine ’em and send them to the golf course and go back and ignore what they said for another year until its time to do it again. Jennifer: The discussion of focus also goes to the opportunities that come with emerging technologies. Sometimes there are things that are in the marketplace that you don’t realize are opportunities until you introduce the technology. Most of those opportunities are not real. They just look like they could be real. So many companies fall into the trap of going out and losing the initial focus they had on the market they were pursuing and are unsuccessful. It’s that notion of customer acquisition. It’s a lot cheaper to go out to your current customers and increase their spending, and it’s also a lot cheaper to go after new customers in the same marketplace rather than pursuing all these new market opportunities because you have good evidence there, you have proof of concept. You have customers that validate, how they use your product. Some of them are definitely important, but the majority are not and I have seen so many tech companies fail by going after these new, sexier, market opportunities that just take their focus away from their core competency. George: That comes back to this whole concept of focus. Jennifer: That’s right. George: Have I forgotten to ask you any questions I should have asked? Jennifer: The only thing I would add is a couple of questions for your readers to consider: Is your company and or product clearly differentiated from your competitor’s? Clearly differentiated, on all levels. Do you know who your evangelists are? And what are those evangelists saying about you? The alternative is who are the cynics and what are those cynics saying about you? Do you know what your customers really think about your product and your company? Its time to gain a new and better understanding of how credibility can influence your brand to increase the speed of sales. Jennifer McLean, author of The Credibility Factor, a new book which focuses on how to influence the influencers for immediate credibility as well as an almost instant increase in the speed of sales. “If you are wondering how to successfully launch a new product, company, or concept with a small budget, The Credibility Factor shows you how.” Jay Conrad Levinson, The Father of Guerrilla Marketing. Author, Guerrilla Marketing series of books; Over 14 million sold; now in 42 languages. Jennifer McLean Author of The Credibility Factor The Nascent Group 714-457-1878 jennifer@credibilitybranding.com www.credibilitybranding.com Find out more about Credibility Branding…. West Technology Research Solutions, LLC © 2007 All Rights Reserved |