Tag: customer experience

Elements of value

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It is not enough to say that your company focuses on delivering values to customers.

What is value?

If you don’t stop for a long moment considering this question, you are not focused on value. Value is economical, and it is also technical, social, personal, functional, aspirational. Value takes into consideration material costs, and also possible issues, adoption, expansion, scale. Value is transactional and relational. Value is co-operative.

And once you have identified all the elements that make up your value, you still have two steps to take.

First, you have to understand the why of value. Why does it matter. Not tomorrow, not one year from now, not one day maybe. But now.

Then, you have to build a system that constantly delivers on the elements across the various departments, that captures and measures the elements, that continues assessing them, that creates incremental evidence for them, and that ensures that they are not replicated by competitors and new entrants.

Value is a complex concept, not another organisational buzz word.

The marketer’s dilemma

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Got an interesting newsletter from Peep Laja at Wynter.com this morning, that got me thinking of the marketer’s dilemma.

If a marketer does boring and safe, nobody will object. If they do as it’s always been done. If they use terms like productivity, efficiency, streamlined, best-in-class, seamless. Even when every one at the table has a different understanding and a different experience of what those terms mean, nobody will object. Because who is going to stand up and say “what is productivity?”.

If a marketer does specific and unusual, on the other hand, everyone will panic.

Of course, boring and safe will bring you nowhere, because boring and safe is what 94.97% of companies do. So, the marketer’s dilemma is really between being accepted among their peers in the short term and being well received by the market in the long term.

It is a difficult choice.

Overestimating

Fabrizio1 Comment

We are bad at communicating in written form.

We overestimate our capability to share meaning via a written message, and most importantly to share the underlying emotions, mainly because we fail to understand that our audience is often in a different state of mind.

Two considerations.

If you are about to send a written message, and even more so if you do that for a living (as is the case for marketers), you will increase the chances to be effective when you spend enough time understanding who you are sending to. Also, if you plan to add some color to the message (anger, sadness, sarcasm, humor), use visual cues (emoticons, GIFs, images).

If you are responsible for the internal communication of an organization, you will increase the chances for your employees to be effective by providing more training and tools that support visual communication rather than written communication.

On hold

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When we hear, read, or consume content, all we get is often about us.

Our fears, expectations, experience, knowledge. What we think about the author, about the medium, about the source. The day we are having, the day we are not having. Likes and dislikes. How confident we are today, what we have been told yesterday, where we are going tomorrow.

In order for us to learn, we need to be able to put all that on hold. To make it about the one delivering the message. To suspend our reaction and just be hearing, reading, consuming content in the moment.

If we do not that, everything will just be a confirmation of what we already know.

Squeezed or integrated

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There are two ways to do product marketing.

Reactive product marketing is when product marketing is squeezed between departments. Product marketing managers react to the needs of the other parts of the organization. When product releases a feature, product marketing has to find a way to communicate that feature. When sales targets a new type of customers, product marketing has to come up with a custom presentation. When marketing is running a specific campaign, product marketing has to come up with some content for mid and bottom of the funnel.

Proactive product marketing is when product marketing is integrated across departments. Product marketing managers engage other parts of the organization to coordinate the whole flow of information: from customers to product, moving through marketing, customer success, customer support, sales. And the other way around. In this scenario, when product releases a new feature, how to communicate it is already known, because the feature was actually developed following to research promoted by product marketing. When sales targets a new type of customers, custom presentation are already in place, because the new strategy was recommended by research promoted by product marketing. When marketing runs a specific campaign, product marketing is actively involved in planning what content is needed, as well as who to distribute it to and where.

I understand most product marketing organizations are probably somewhere in the middle. Just always be aware of what type of product marketing you aim to be.

One is execution, the other is the cornerstore of go-to-market.

Which one are you?