Category: leadership

Marketing problems

FabrizioLeave a comment

I have worked with start-ups and SMEs for most of my career (about 14 years now), and up to this day, it is difficult for me to explain why there is a general lack of interest towards marketing in these contexts.

There is plenty of evidence out there that tells that startups often fail for reasons that good marketing would address. Be it focusing on building the product/service and not the customer, lack of market need and pricing issues, product market fit or plainly bad marketing.

Perhaps the most reasonable explanation for why this is happening is that people still equate marketing to advertising. If you fall into this trap, it’s easy to believe that marketing is something to take care of only once you get traction (i.e. you have cash).

In one of his most recent posts, Seth Godin suggests a list to understand what a marketing problem looks like.

. There are people who would benefit from your work who aren’t engaging with you.
. There’s a change you seek to make in the culture, but it’s not happening.
. You’re having difficulty persuading other people of your point of view.
. The service or product you make isn’t resonating with those you seek to serve.
. You’re fighting in a race to the bottom, and it’s wearing you out.

Seth Godin

I would add:

  • The story people tell about you is not the story you tell about yourself.

Be sure to give these issues a thought if you are starting something important, and be sure to have somebody close to you who can help you investigating a solution. Marketing has moved a long way past advertising, and continuing promoting that false equation will just drive your enterprise into one of the future articles about why startups fail.

Write it down

Fabrizio3 Comments

If I am consistent enough this year and I stick to my resolution, by January next year this blog will have around 400 posts. That’s a lot of content, yet I am fairly positive that if there is one single idea you should take from this page, it is the following.

When you have something on your mind, write it down.

It might sound extreme, and I don’t mean you should write down everything that comes to your mind. Neither I am talking about to-do lists or grocery store items you need to remember next time you go to the shop.

If something sticks in your mind long enough to make it relevant for you, put it on paper (or on screen). It is valid with ideas, no matter how early stage they are. It is valid with impressions, feelings, talks, chats we want to have, changes we want to make.

When we keep things in our mind, they always make sense, as our brain automatically fills in any gap there might be to make it reasonable for us. This happens very fast, without us even noticing it. And it is dangerous, because when we eventually speak our mind, those gaps are not that easily filled with words and sensible concepts. They become chasms, and we fall into them.

Writing things down forces us to take an additional step. It not only makes space in our mind. It will also help us crystallize our thoughts, make it more likely we will take action (or not), and improve our chances to be successful with that action (or inaction).

Start here. Next time you have an important meeting, a conversation in which you want to deliver your point, a chat with a colleague you want to ask to change their mind. Write it down. Read it. Is it clear enough? What is missing? What else could you add? Write it again. Read it again. Repeat. Until you are ready.

It is one of the reasons why I re-started blogging after that long. And it’s the most important message I can leave behind.

Write it down.

“Does it get me votes?”

FabrizioLeave a comment

Politics, politicians and political parties should lead us towards the future.

They should see what we can’t see, as we are caught up in our day-to-day routines and problems. And they should make sure that our struggles, efforts and work have a purpose. Be it a better lifestyle, an healthier country, a more communal World.

What is happening across the border, instead, is that we are the ones calling the shots. The only thing that matters is our vote, and so instead of asking “does it make sense?”, the only question politics, politicians and political parties want answered is “does it get me votes?”.

I spoke to a very plugged-in House Republican. And he told me, listen, most House Republicans do not have federal workers in their district. So, he point-blank said, it’s not in our interest to end the shutdown.

Lisa Desjardins (full story on PBS)

It sounds crazy, considering the amount of discontent in the World today, yet we have an incredible power. It is up to us to force the political entities to stop acting as managers, carefully allocating resources to do more with less, and embracing once again the leading role that perhaps they once had.

The two parts of action

Fabrizio2 Comments

There are two parts in action.

  1. Knowing what needs to be done.
  2. Doing it.

The first part has to do with learning, and arguably nowadays we are in the perfect context to get to know what needs to be done. Information has never been more available, there is a “five-step” list to get to do almost everything one can think of, education and peer-to-peer sharing of experiences is facilitated like never before.

The second part, on the other hand, has never been so difficult. It is where 99.9% of us fail.

Investing and the stock market is the perfect example for this. There’s a beautiful lesson by Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital, in one of the latest Motley Fool Money podcast (interview starts around 18:50). To summarise it:

Stocks return 9-10% a year on average. We know that. Yet they rarely return between 8 and 12% in any single year. The average is not the norm. Why is that? It’s because of emotional excesses. To the upsides, that then require corrections, and to the downsides. If you think about the value of a company in a 60-year time frame, that is not impacted by what happens day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year. It is pretty stable. The changes in earnings in one quarter is not really important. But people react excessively to these things.

Howard Marks

Nobody wants us to be emotionless robot, yet if we set out to do something important to us, this is a lesson that is better to keep in mind.