Olivier F Fontana's space

It is really upsetting to see that, in the last 6 months or so, there has been a revival of the so-called climate change debate.

Well, as the hilarious Bill Maher puts it well:

• “[…] people have stopped thinking global warming is real. One major reason pollsters say is we had a very cold, snowy winter. Which is like saying the sun might not be real because last night it got dark”
• “on this side of the debate every scientist in the world, on the the other Mr. Potato head. There is not debate here, it’s just scientist vs. non scientist and as it’s a scientific debate the non scientist don’t get a vote”

If those people were to either stop from sharing their uninformed opinions or do some research, such as reading this great Scientific America article “Seven answers to climate contrarian nonsense”

In this other article, “what explains past climate change”, Scientific American also explains that climate changes like the “little ice age” of the middle ages was followed the “medieval warm period” and was most likely due to natural event such as: solar strengths fluctuations, El Nino/El Nina phenomenon (for an event in the Pacific Ocean), volcanic eruptions etc.

None of those natural events can explain what’s happening now. None. Our impact on CO2 and other climate change inducing gases are the overwhelmingly dominant reason for this. Period. Discussion closed.

Let’s now focus 100% on solving this, not on discussing it over and over again until 10’s of millions (to be conservative) of people are going to be directly impacted by this change.

Dan Arieli came this week to Microsoft to talk about his new book “The Upside of Irrationality”:

He shows how the intrinsically irrational nature of human being such as not making the best choice at a given time based on analysis or reason but on previous choices or any existing situation are really intriguing. He also touches on why willpower is not sufficient but how we can work around to still achieve the desired results (his moving story of how he managed to go through 18 months of grueling tri-weekly interferon injections and their side effects to treat his Hepatitis C was a great case in point of his theory).

This really made me thought as a marketer, a manager and a dad. I highly recommend you to read this, especially if you are naturally more inclined to be a “reason” person than a “feeling” one. Humans are intrinsically irrational and, to take a geeky EE major analogy, also intrinsically hysteresis-like, that is that decisions are at least as much based on past decisions as on new reasoning.

I was recently asked this question by a (non-marketer) friend and I believe the answer is yes.

Pretty much regardless of the importance of the plan or the industry core specificities, the plan structures will be the same. Those are heavily documented in the marketing literature so I will not get into much details in this post. What I am proposing to share is a high-level, easily digestible, framework that anyone could apply to its particular need.

As always in marketing, it all start with 3 key points…

At an abstract level a marketing plan always has the following sections:

1. The Analysis
2. The Strategy
3. The Execution

1. The Analysis

One way of thinking about the analysis is that, similar to the mind sweep in GTD, this is the section where using –depending on the situation- a mix of quantitative and qualitative tools, market research and gut feel, brainstorm and rigorous analysis, you will gather in one place all the elements necessary to make the key decisions that will inform your choices of goals, focus area, strategies and execution.

A few key elements about this section:

• This is where tools like the Porter 5 forces, BCG growth-share matrix, GE matrix, etc will be used to analyze a situation
• Segmentation will be needed in most cases very early in this analysis as each segments will have different dynamics, needs, pattern, timelines, constrains, potential… One simple way to explain segmentation is to think of it as the subset of customers that purchase the same product or services (or roughly the same) with the same purchasing behavior and customer profile.
• The analysis needs to finish with a SWOT or something equivalent of your liking. This step is very important as it will help you crystallize the key elements that will inform the next steps: goals and strategies. One way of thinking about the SWOT analysis is that if your analysis is a funnel with many insights and data coming in, your SWOT is the end (the small section) of this funnel, a summary of the elements you decided to keep to make your decision. The next step, defining your goals, is then pretty straight forward:
• Build on your strengths (S) to capitalize on the opportunities (O)
• Tackle your weaknesses (W) for the ones that need to be improved. Forget the others.
• Identify which threats (T) are the most dangerous and decide on mitigation strategies for those ones.

2. The Strategy

The strategy section is really made of 3 independent sections:

• The goals: Based on your SWOT you need to decide what are your top goals, what you are trying to achieve with this strategic marketing plan
• The Strategies: For each goal you need to develop one or more strategies (more than 3 per goal probably mean you have over-extended yourself or are not clear about what is really going to work). You probably need to build several strategies and select the best one(s) based on criteria that will change depending on the situation (cost, resources, timeline, risks….)
• The Tactics: Each strategy will be associated with one or more tactic, the actual activity you will carry out to execute this strategy.

What can happen as you are trying to rationalize this section is that:

• You will need to prioritize which goals, strategies and tactics are the most important
• You will realize that a given strategy can influence several goals
• You will also see that a given tactic can influence several strategies.

An example of the latter would be a trade-show participation that would, for instance, both help the “generate more new leads” strategy and the “show industry leadership” one.

Amongst the classic tools to inform tactic development is the 4P model. I use an extended 6P framework for the high-tech B2B markets. Another one is the AIDA model, or its variations for your specific market and value chain. One last example would be to approach these by asking questions around breath vs. depth vs. tiered strategies for the given goal and have a toolbox of activities to chose depending on this choice., See here for an example of going through this process in 5th “P”  (for Partners) of the 6P framework.

From a graphical metaphor standpoint, this will be also a funnel, but starting narrow with a few goals and expanding as strategies and tactics get defined.

3. The Execution

The execution part is where tactics needs to be translated into clear and actionable activities. This is also where reality kicks in as this is where the marketer will have to:

• Define clear and specific metrics to gauge of the activities’ success
• Potentially combine, simplify or eliminate activities as getting into the detailed implementation exposes resources constraints or other blockers that forces re-prioritization.
• It’s also where continuous monitoring of these results, fine tuning, adaptation and overall real-life sanity checks will need to take place.

One way of picturing this phase can be as a shape starting as wide as the strategy one then staying as wide as the end of the strategy funnel (if all tactics are executed and are distinct), or narrowing, boiling down to a narrower set of core metrics and implementation aspects, down to potentially a bare-bone set of activities.

What I just shared is nothing new or ground breaking in any way shape or form. It’s just a way for a newcomers to the process of strategic marketing planning to grasp, at high-level, the conceptual phases on this process.

This process can, depending on the situation be extremely simple, such as 5 bullets points from analysis to executions and metrics, up to tens of pages (or more) of analysis and planning. In both cases, and anything in between, the high-level phases will remain the same.

In marketing we often use the dichotomy of breadth vs. depth strategies.

• Do you target a wide audience with your ads (e.g. TV ads) or do you focus on more ads in a single vertical medium (e.g. a trade magazine)?
• Do you build broad programs or do you go an engage customers or partners 1:1?
• etc.

In some businesses neither approach is the best one. When the business has a very complex, lengthy or challenging sales cycle a new paradigm is needed.

If the customer requires many touch points before making a decision, if the product is very technical and will involve more training than selling between the awareness and the sale stage or if the players involved in the process will be of different functions, for instance technical managers, engineers, purchasers, senior execs, legal department, etc a third hybrid approach is needed.

This is what I call “Scaled depth” marketing.

Scaled depth is about building a programmatic, scalable but high-touch process to engage customers from awareness to sales retention.

• Programmatic: You need to standardize to a certain level the marketing and sales activities reaching those customers throughout the sales cycle, from the moment they first hear about you to the one they purchase your product.
• Scalable: These programs should intrinsically have a cost structure (human or $) that grows slower or ideally is flat as the sales pipeline grows. In other words, you want to ensure that a twice larger sales funnel will not involve twice the amount of investment in people and marketing dollars.
• High-touch aka Depth: These programs have to be built leveraging all the needed elements of a traditional B2B mix, but will have to be perceived by the customers (and rightfully so) as not being standard cookie cutter programs but as personalized 1:1 or 1:few engagements and activities. A blend of savvy use of digital marketing and value adding go-betweens such as distributors and partners will be often necessary to achieve this depth perception.

In a later post I will provide some more specific examples of how this “Scaled Depth” model can be implemented.

I’m guest blogging today on Jerry’s Weissman’s blog on how his core presentation concept of “less is more” is also very applicable in another key communication medium these days: email.

Check this out.

In a post from last year, I was sharing with you the scary picture of a recession that did not look like anything close to what we had experience… except the 1929 crisis. (this graph focuses on stock decline and unemployment).

Here we are, one year after and an amazing jump in the stock market since this post and many people, from journalists to pundits, are now hanging to every piece of good news, hoping that this time we’re out of the woods.

Well, to be honest, I’m still not convinced and even if my knowledge of economic theory is limited I’m just trying to look factually at available data:

• Unemployment in the US is still above 10% (above 16% if you count discouraged workers, part-timers than would prefer full time jobs and marginally attached workers), and without the social net Europe possess this means an even more tremendous pressure on people’s savings (if any are left) and standard of living.
• Nearly 25% of the US mortgages are still under water (meaning that homeowners owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth. 10% owe 25% more than they house is worth! Combine this data with the previous, i.e. what if such a person loses their job and need to sell their home, and you have a sure recipe for disaster. Interesting to note though is that most of those underwater mortgages were is specific states (with up to 70% of mortgages underwater in Nevada!)
• There are more and more talks about a commercial property market bubble (though it seems small in the US compared with the one in China)
• The public deficits in most (all?) industrialized countries is staggeringly high
• Home sales are still at a record low and foreclosure very high
• I’m not aware of stock market booms of 50-70% (As we witnessed last year) that were not followed by some kind of dip right after (if not a crash in most cases, significant dips are  not uncommon)
• One data point that does point to a more positive outlook

And to put these data points in pictures:

www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/03/employment-chart-roundup-2

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/p/employment-graphs.html

 
http://econompicdata.blogspot.com

http://econompicdata.blogspot.com

www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/030510-Steinberg_chart1.jpg

So what to conclude from all this?

Well as far as I’m concerned I draw the following conclusions:

• We’re not out of the woods yet, even if the worse seems to be well behind us. To quote Churchill after the blitzkrieg: “It is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”, and to be fair I’m fairly sure we’re beyond the end of the beginning.
• Uncertainty will abound for quite a while still. Spending, financial risk taking and over confidence are maybe not the best thing to focus on right now.
• But as in all crisis, there will be some pockets of extreme growth and the ones who will find and act on those will succeed far beyond what’s possible in boom time. Historically, many fortunes were made in time like those. The trick is “only” to find those pockets of opportunity.
• In the meantime, as I prefer to miss a potential growth than to stress on potential heavy losses, I’m being super conservative on my investments until later this year at least. I’m also trying to lock-in future costs now as I doubt the rosy hypothesis of a Suze Orman of an average 8% long-term growth of investments make any sense right now.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

Can you find the relationship between this picture:

And that one:

Well, the first one is a zoom on the steps of the Sacré Coeur basilica in Paris taken from the second picture. This is possible because the original picture comes from here. This is a 26 gigapixels stitched pictures (that is a picture made of more than 2300 pictures stitched together in software to make a 26,000 Megapixels single picture) that you can navigate from the site.

If you play with it you’ll also be able to see people at the top of the Eiffel tower, walking in the streets as well as if you’re really patient, 10 easter eggs hidden in the picture by the people that did it. (hint: http://diesellaws.com/the-10-easter-eggs-in-paris-26-gigapixels).

Enjoy!

A few days ago a colleague asked me what were to me the best trainings, outside of my formal education, I’ve been to since I joined the workforce.

Looking at it from a knowledge worker and knowledge workers manager perspective, with lots of communication, cross-group collaboration and permanently having to juggle multiple projects here are, without doubt my top 3 that I would advise anyone looking to grow as a professional and a person to take (In no particular order):

• Power Presentations, by Jerry Weissman. In this previous post I already mentioned Jerry’s books. Hi 3-days, 4 persons only, intensive presentation training is not only far above any other presentation training I’ve ever taken, it also teaches you skills and behavior that are applicable outside of the realm of pure presentations such as in one-to-one conversations.
• Take Back Your Life, by Sally McGhee. It is based on the same principle (they co-own the IP) than Getting Things Done (GTD) from David Allen but is focusing on its application within the context of an heavy email and Microsoft Outlook environment. This is just a vital class, as always only works if applied , to manage a complex high speed multi-project knowledge worker environment. All my posts relative to my application of the GTD principles can be found here.
• Dale Carnegie’s training. This soft skills class through its unique blend of theory, application in real-life and long term approach (4h per week for 12 weeks) is a great training for someone that want to work on his or her soft skills around interpersonal awareness and collaboration.

After Fastfood nation, and other movies exposing what the agro-industrial complex is trying to camouflage this is a movie that is trying to break out to expose the issues linked with the use (and abuse) of chemicals in agriculture.

Interestingly enough, not only cutting this use will help our children’s and our own health, it will also help in the fight against climate change as explained clearly –even for non scientists- in Al Gore’s last (long but very informative and solutions focused) book Our Choice 

In this previous blog post, I quickly went over why repaying one’s mortgage was often a great and safe investment.

Before drilling into the nitty-gritty of the actual discounted cash flow one important disclaimer (that was actually pointed out by Tye on the post) if: how does inflation impact this?

Indeed, when looking at cash flow and timing together, a low or high inflation will make a huge difference. For the same reason that investing by repaying your mortgage earlier is a safe investment because it’s a guaranteed return (i.e. your mortgage rate + marginal tax rate) it’s also a non-inflation adjusted one.

If you think about it, the money you’ll put in your mortgage now, actually translates into a shorter repayment time, so you are actually saving money on payments your would have had to make 10 years form now. With a low inflation rate, this is great. With a high inflation rate, given the time value of money, the value of these payments will be much smaller and you might indeed be better off investing them in a (somewhat or completely) inflation protected way.

Finally, on Renaud’s comment about tax rate, have a 55% marginal tax rate makes repaying the mortgage even more interesting as, what you are saying now, is that you are doubling the gross return of your investment. Some quick math to explain myself.

At a 55% marginal tax rate (MTR), for each $100 (or €100 ) you put in your mortgage, the government will give you a tax cut of $55. Or, put another way, for each $45 of net cash spent to pay your, say, 5% interests, you’ll get $55 paid on top of this by the government, so your 5% interest mortgage is actually more than a 10% gross return. Guaranteed! Pretty cool.

I know I’m over simplifying here and that another key variable is also the availability of your cash (in this case the cash is tied in the house until you’re done repaying it fully).

The upcoming DCF calculation will help give a bit more mathematical ground to all this… I just need to find the time to finish it now.

Great talk from TED. The secret to success. All make sense and are maybe a “duh” moment for many but there a great summary AND he is a fun presenter in only 3m30s.

• Have passion for what you do: Do it for love of it not of money
• Serve something of value to others
• Ideas : be creative, listen, observe, be curious, ask questions, make connections…
• Good: become excellent at things through practice, practice, practice.
• Hard work, but on something you like doing and have fun doing
• Push: push yourself, physically, mentally.
• Persist: never give up, even through failure or naysayers.
• Focus on the one or few things that you can really move

Interesting concept. I’ll have to test it. I’m a bit dubious the “take the whole 2 sentences as one picture” will work but you never know…

Found this video after reading this post: http://www.dailyblogtips.com/one-speed-reading-trick-that-does-work/ ; thanks to a list published in one of http://sourcesofinsight.com/ post.

You may wonder what I’m referring to. Well it’s actually a simple one that many people in many countries do naturally but that, for whatever reason, is very undeveloped in the US.

It’s the early mortgage repayment.

Think about it. Let’s imagine that you have a mortgage with a 5.5% interest rate and that your income puts you into the 28% tax bracket (marginal). Now do the math.

If you want to $100 the real calculation and reasoning can start as follow: What is the risk free investment I can find that can guarantee me a 5.5%/(1-28%) = 7.64% gross return?

None!

When you reimburse your mortgage in advance, thereby reducing your total payment years (but not monthly payment), you are virtually making a 7.64% risk free investment (under the above assumptions). You will never pay interest on it so you are not making 7.64% gross but your are saving 5.5% net. What’s left in your pocket it the same result.

Another way to look at this is to think in term of cash flow over the years. Let’s assume you have a mortgage that will run for another 10 years for it’s 50k capital to reimburse, still at 5.5%, and that you have an extra $100 to spare. You have 2 (savings) options: reimburse the mortgage or invest it.

A future post will share the actual calculation taking into account the time value of money and under various assumptions.

I stumbled recently on this telling graph that shows how many years we have left for some key commodities. Yes, the numbers could be off, like they were for oil 20 years ago. However this would only push the problem a little further in the future, not centuries.

Take Gold: 45 years before we run out. At least with 43% of the used gold being recycled this should allow for wedding rings to be still around for a while. More seriously look at Uranium: 60 years. Obviously, even if you discount the environmental aspects of Nuclear power plants, those plants are not a long term viable solution to combat global warming. (click  below for more details)

I heard recently (but haven’t found data else where to confirm this, if you have pointers I’m interested) that we only have 25 years left of Lithium, and this is before the use on Lithium (for Lithium0ion batteries in Cars) become really widespread. How do we move to batteries powered cars without it? Concerning.

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2605/26051202.jpg

With the advent of powerful search tools into email boxes, be them web ones (a-la Gmail or Hotmail) or PC based (Outlook), it seems that many people believe it’s OK to have huge inboxes, to stop filing as you could always search and to focus on “the important emails”.

I stumbled on this 1m30’ video from Ritz Carton’s Simon Cooper where he talks about email and how he uses it. There a couple of nuggets that I believe make lots of sense from a GTD perspective:

1. Don’t leave your office without emptying your inbox
2. Being on top of your inbox is a key aspect of keeping in control of your business (or responsibilities)

Numerous time have I been waiting for colleagues or external parties looking for an email they wanted to share with me or, worse, telling me they had not received my email or had forgotten about it because it’s somewhere within their 1300 emails, including 500 unread ones.

How can you know that:

• Things you should be on top of, are happening as expected?
• You are not letting people down by dropping the ball on some requests?
• You are not wasting your and other people’s time by permanently looking for this email somewhere in your inbox? (“wait I’m sure it’s here – I recall seeing yesterday – of maybe if I sort by name, or by date- oh let me do a search….”)

By cleaning your inbox and leveraging a process a-la GTD you really will be in control of your life and deliverables. By allowing your inbox to explode in size you won’t. This is a simple as that. At least for the vast majority of people.

I stumbled on this article from Wire magazine last summer and found the implication for Science of how data storage and processing had exploded very interesting:

In particular I found this specific remark to be an eye opener: “ At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.“

In the early 1900’s the work from Einstein, Planck, De Broglie and others did exactly this for physics. Up till then, in its vast majority Physics was using a pretty well defined model:

1. Observe a phenomenon
2. Try to build a theory, backed up by sound mathematical concepts
3. See if the theory fit
4. Tweak the theory to make it fit.

With general relativity or quantum physics the process was put on its head. It started with math and ended-up with finding experiments that would validate the theory or not. The most recent example of this being the LHC in Geneva that will, hopefully, help validate some theories around string theory and/or dark matter.

What we’re seen now with this gigantic (I could actually even dare to create the term “Petantic”, as we’re in the Petabit range not the Gigabit one) amount of data, the math come first. This time it’s statistics but the concept remains. First do the math, then leverage them to find applications (search ranking…).

The most interesting part of this is that (and this quote from the article sums it up well:”That's why Google can translate languages without actually "knowing" them“), as the amount of available data is growing exponentially, the web –in this example Google- will be able to become closer and closer to true artificial intelligence by doing not what computer do usually (calculations) but what the human brains do, and how it’s built: by creating and recognizing patterns.

The applications are endless and the potential really exciting. Except, of course, if you’re just coming out of a Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines movie or you have just finished reading Dune:The Butlerian Jihad.

A really powertoy to easily resize your images from Windows Explorer is back. I used to use it a lot on XP. Now it’s back, and in source code for those that want to play with it, on codeplex: http://phototoysclone.codeplex.com/

Additionally to the classic 4Ps and the “Partner” one (see previous blog posts there and there) I sometimes feel the need to add another one: Projects.

What I mean by “Project” is that, is many cases, B2B companies may have a few customers (aka “Projects”) that drive a very large portion of their revenues. It’s not unusual that 10 to 20 customers could represent 80% or more of a high-tech B2B company’s business.

Therefore, it would be foolish, given that much concentration, to only focus your marketing activities on generic breadth elements, such as broad segmentation, awareness activities (ads, campaigns, events…), etc without spending some time ensuring that your bread and butter business is being taking care of.

Let me illustrate this with an example. Let’s assume you sell 3 products: a gizmo, a gadget and a widget. You are trying to grow your business by coming up with Gizmo+ a premium version of Gizmo. You do your due diligence and have the first 5 Ps well covered:

• You will sell it through the same channel  (Place)
• You will price it 20% above Gizmo (Price)
• You will promote it on your website and through search based ads as well as leveraging the national Gizmos conventions to launch it (Promotion)
• Feature wise, G+ (the code name you gave your new product) will be available in 3 more colors, quantities of 1, 5 and 10 and will incorporate all the features also found in Widget. (Product)
• Finally, you will provide G+ demo kits, rebate offers and marketing collateral to your partners that they can promote G+ together with their total solution (Partners)

What if your top 12 customers, representing 80% of your business, don’t need this product and it only addresses new customers or small ones? What if 2 core features present in Gadget but not in G+ would make most of those customer speed up their upgrade cycle? Would it not make more sense to invest a little more –even if this means missing a specific market window for the rest of the market (e.g. Christmas season)- in order to satisfy those key customers?

Maybe. Maybe not. However, until you do a full analysis you won’t know. Maybe you will need to meet all those 12 customer one to one to train them in advance, maybe they will threaten to switch to your competition if you don’t add those two features.. or maybe it’s OK to go ahead as planned.

My point is that, in many situations, you can’t afford not to be diligent about those “Projects”, this key set of customers and projects representing such a large part of your business.

In conclusion

In my experience, specifically in B2B high-tech industries, adding the Partners and Project “Ps” can help bring up potential issues and opportunities early on, foster consensus amongst the various product, support, sales and marketing teams, and maximize the success potential of a new marketing initiative.

Marshall Goldsmith posted on his blog an answer to a question about “going global” as a business leader. I added my 2 cents. Check it out and tell me whether you think my comment make sense…

In my previous post I wrote about the limitation of the traditional textbook “4Ps” approach to building marketing mixes in particular in the field I’m the most familiar with: the B2B high-tech one.

The other Ps one can find in the literature, for most of them, I believe don’t really apply in this market. (see this same previous post on these other Ps).

So, what’s needed then?

In my experience, I found that 2 more “Ps” were needed: Partners and Projects. Let me elaborate a bit on these.

Partners
Most B2B high-tech solutions seldom works in a vacuum. A solution offer by a company almost always requires third-parties companies to step in and complete the solution. Therefore, unless your company is in the business of providing these additional functionalities or the integration or customization needed (think “IBM” or “HP” for instance, although those still use numerous partners), you must enroll one or several partners to make a sale happen and satisfy a customer need.

Examples of the need for such ecosystem are plentiful so let me just give a few examples…

• A “box” vendor will need companies to install and integrate the box into a broader system:
• A router to an network infrastructure
• An MPEG2 encoder to a satellite broadcasting system
• A software vendor will need partners to integrate the software
• A system integrator to integrate a CRM system into an existing backend
• An embedded device OS vendor to port the OS on a specific hardware
• A system vendor will need third-parties to complement their solution
• A media-server software vendor for a digital signage solution vendor
• A storage solution vendor for a hosting solution provider

As you can see the examples are endless. However there are a few key dimension one can think of while thinking through this mix:

1. What is the type of ecosystem engagement and structure needed?
• Depth: a few key partners?
• Breadth: a large ecosystem, for instance located close to the end-customer across the globe?
• Tiered: a limited set of key partners and a much larger set of breadth ones (such as the tiered Microsoft Partner Network, formerly known as Microsoft Partner Program)
2. When will partner impact our product sales cycle:
• Before the sale: need to offer this 3rd party solution as part of our total solution (and quote to customer)
• With the sale: the customer will simultaneously purchase our solution and products from one or more partners
• After the sale: one the customer has initiated the purchase, he will use this partner’s products or services to install, integrate, support or expand our solution
• All of the above?
3. Do we need one type of partners or are they various categories of partners?
• Software vendors, hardware vendors, system integrators, trainers…
• Small, medium or large companies?
• multinationals, regional players or small local players?
4. What type of partner marketing activities will I be having?
• Depths or Breadth partner marketing activities?
• Depth:  1:1, such as face to face meetings, partner-level partner account planning…
• Breadth: 1 to many partners, such as a webcast, partner summits, newsletters, websites…
• Or a combination or both?
• What type of partner marketing activities: to, through or with partner marketing?
• To Partner marketing: Targeting partners to inform and train them, influence their management chain and sales force, integrate your messaging into theirs,etc.
• Through partner marketing: Providing partner the tools to promote your solution through their sales channels.
• Customer-ready collateral such as customizable leaflets, PowerPoint presentations, product demos…
• Below the line marketing support: company co-branded email campaigns templates, banners for shows or websites, branded swag (stuff we all get)…
• With/Co Partner marketing: when activities are done together such as:
• Your company present on a partner booth at a trade show (or vice versa)
• A combined technical seminar or webcast, each company presenting its own part of a total solution
• Promo offer combined both products for a better price
• All of those 3?

This framework, integrated into the process of developing a marketing mix can help ensure this critical part of the puzzle is not overlooked.

The last “"P” I use is Projects, or the impact a few key projects or customers can have on the overall business. This will be the topic of my next post.

Amongst the numerous tools that every marketer should have in his or her toolbox, the famous “4Ps” are surely the most well known (with the BCG matrix probably).

If you don’t know what this refer to, well you probably don’t need to read this post. If you do I won’t insult you by explaining them in details.

Although this Product-Place-Promotion-Price quartet seems to cover most of the aspects of a traditional marketing mix, I found that in B2B high-tech markets this was too limited.

First let’s look at a few extensions already proposed:

1. People
2. Processes
3. Physical Evidence
4. Packaging
5. Public Opinion
6. Political Power

plus many other random ones, that could in most cases be folded into the initial 4Ps such as principle, purpose, perception….

My take on this is that although I understand the thinking behind these, I believe they are mostly subset of others or tactical/support issues. Not core marketing mix aspects especially in a B2B high-tech market.

The first 3 are more detail implementation level aspects of products and promotions for Service industries for instance:

1. People

This P is all about the various people in your organization that will interact with your customers. You want them to do the right things (to oversimplify my understanding of this). Duh! Of course! You also want the light to stay on, the email system to work, etc. This is not to me a mix element per se but a fall-out of the the overall strategy.

For instance, if you release a new product or service but your customer support does not know the products, or how to react to specific expectations (think of a “gold level” customer, say for a credit card or a hotel chain, not being aware of this new tier of customer or not treating them better than the average customer), this launch is poised to fail. But, this is more a “must-have” infrastructure adjustment, not a mix element per se.

2. Process

As per People, this is more about infrastructure than market mix per se. It’s about implementing the product promise the way it should be nothing more. It’s intrinsically part of the “product” “P”. Or it should be.

3. Physical Evidence

Once again this is to me more an extension of a product or service feature.

4. Packaging

This one is straight forward: Packaging is part of the “Product” or the “Promotion”, depending on what your do (default packaging or special one linked with a specific promotional activity). And in the B2B high-tech world, it’s really so minor that’s calling this out separately is not worth it. Especially when talking about products like industrial devices, software…

5. Public Opinion

Public opinion is nothing more that the result of our promotion overall tactics. Be it press relations, analyst, community, social networking (such as my new Twitter feed, LinkedIn, Viadeo, plaxo…)…

6. Political Power

I would agree that is some situations, lobbying with the governments, unions… could be a key element of success. However, although it’s good to keep this in mind, I would argue that, in most cases, this is not critical to a product launch.

The one big exception would be, in the B2B high-tech space, or in the high-tech space in general, the power or standardization bodies (such as the ones that built the various MPEG standards, OpenCable, GSM…). This could be a critical part of the mix in some cases… or completely irrelevant in other cases.

However, this is often very strategic, long term and involve much more investments that a traditional, regular, product launch. If this is not fixed by the product launch it is probably too late. One exceptions are products that could be “field upgraded” as needed, such as Wireless draft-n routers to final versions ones.

One can find more about those extra “Ps” on those sites:

• http://mgv.mim.edu.my/mimspeaks/00002/20060205.Htm
• http://www.12manage.com/methods_booms_bitner_7Ps.html

In conclusion for now….

In the next blog post I’ll move to the 2 extrat “P”s that I believe, based on my experience, are often very important within a B2B High-tech environment: Partner and Project.

I don’t know whether it’s because there is indeed a surge in those books, articles and consulting services or it’s just like when you have planned to buy a blue Ford you start seeing them everywhere but lately I’ve noticed that the consequences of the latest research on human brain have led to lots of management or business books around these themes.

For instance, Brain Rules, talks extensively about how the brain works and how this could be used to change the way classrooms and office are designed. The key elements I got from this book were that:

• That the brain is wired to work better when exercising (think about our ancestors walking in the savanna for hours to find a prey to hunt), hence why exercise is so good for the brain.. and why we should be working at our computers while being on a treadmill!
• That is takes up to a decade for short-term memories to be fully ingrained in our long-term memory
• That emotions and feelings heighten our learning and memory capabilities (do you remember where you were and what you were doing on 9/11? I certainly have a vivid recollection of this meeting room in Eindhoven I was in when I learned the news.
• and many more interesting facts,

Another one I just finished, Management Rewired, although a bit long winded and going through many detours (I was expecting something more business focused), has many interesting points about the fact that feedback and praise don’t actually really work and very interesting thought-provoking ideas like encouraging someone to do something we know is bad, then cutting the reward associated with it thereby indirectly demotivating the person to do this again.

Or, on the flip side, that the best way punishment worked was by not giving it. That the positive impact of not giving it when the person expected it was much more important that the one coming from a praise or reward (unless the reward keeps on increasing, which is a tough one to achieve!).

A third one, Buyology,  examine the human brain mechanics as it applies to the science of selling and advertising. Still based on the latest research on brain science. A little bit scary sometimes as advertising and manipulation can easily become close cousins in the wrong hands.

Finally, moving from books to marketing consultancy, a company like Studio B, also leverage these developments in brain science to help company develop better white papers, leaflets or even PowerPoint presentations.

Interestingly enough many of the points they advocate on their website, match with the philosophy of presentations that Jerry Weissman teaches for 20 years. The difference being that his teaching are based on experience as a TV producer not brain science. Still the conclusions are very similar in many aspects.

I find this change from a “computer” modeling of the human brain to the re-discovery of its very special way of functioning fascinating. I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years we teach us in that front. What I’m sure of is that Ray Kurzweil and his assumption (in his book “The singularity in near”) that within 20 to 30 years computers will be able to simulate a human brain, and even the whole humanity in a computer the size of today’s laptops seems to me completely unrealistic.

I was looking for a quick way to start a new task in Outlook when not in Outlook (in Outlook, the shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+K).

A quick look at outlook help file and voila, through the simple /c ipm.task command line switch on Outlook associated with one of my keyboards programmable keys (or could be a Windows shortcut to the file, for instance CTRL+SHIF+T).

Specifically, here is how to implement it:

1. Locate the folder in which Outlook is installed. In my case on a Windows 7 x64 its "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\"
2. Open notepad
3. type the path in 1) starting with a “ + outlook.exe” /c ipm.task
   This should give: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\outlook.exe" /c ipm.task
4. save the document as namefile.bat (in my case I just called it newtask.bat)
5. Associate this file with a shortcut key:
• If you keyboard as programmable keys then use them
• If not then:
• create a shortcut to the file (right-click on the file name in Windows Explorer, “create shortcut”)
• right click on this shortcut and associate to the short cut you want (See below)

I also saved the file on my SkyDrive

I’m a big Jack Welch fan. Well, as any MBA grad I had to go through tons of GE case studies, but that’s not the only thing. I really liked “Straight From the Gut” and “Winning” (see below). Really gave good insights into how a top leader could, should, spend his or her time.

This week, MSN partnered with Jack and Suzy Welch for an online “business reality show” (based around seemingly Microsoft’s People Ready campaign but does not really matters if the content is good isn’t it?).

I just watched the first episode this week, a “work-out” sessions at Hertz. Interesting. Jack in action.