Both as organizations and individuals, it is assumed that we will learn as we age. But do we?
Years ago, a senior colleague in marketing strategy once told me that he has a lengthy “not-to-do list”, which far exceeded the length of his “to-do list”. I could say the same thing. Having tried many things over the years, my not-to-do list is lengthy, and my to-do list has organized itself into a set of fundamental principles.
However, I meet many businesses that seem institutionally uncertain as to what they know, and how they learned it. Such organizations doom themselves to mediocrity; companies that learn the truth about themselves and about their markets typically experience the most growth.
Are we rigorous about learning from the past? Do we take the time to catalogue and make sense of our successes and failures? It is often said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” But that is a glass half-empty perspective. In the pursuit of excellence, we should say, “Those who do not learn from history cannot repeat it.”
As a group, we in business should take some time to collect data, assess, and reflect. We’ve been around for a while—we’ve done a lot and seen even more.
But what have we learned?
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To create sustainable business growth, a company needs to learn the landscape and then engineer the vehicles needed to navigate the terrain. Effective marketing strategy is directed at integrating market knowledge and expertise with people, process, and tools—creating an effective and timely response to the challenges and opportunities in the market. Market knowledge needs to be transformative, or else you will remain stuck in place.
This is why STA Tech Marketing emphasizes transformation (part of the See, Transform, Act model) as being essential to the branding and marketing process. Sure, you can give the visual and verbal expression of your company’s brand a public facelift—for example, by renovating your website or sales material—but at the end of the day the services you perform and/or product that you produce will determine how your brand is perceived in the marketplace.
We all know that a transformation process is where the hard work takes place. However, it is the most under-estimated and under-supported part of the marketing process. This is why STA and its partners work with executives and managers to help guide the transformation process. Our joint goal is to ensure that the necessary transformation takes place in a supportive environment, so that the company can attain the best long-term results.
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In professional services you market yourself. Firms that understand the nature of professional service marketing also understand that each encounter with the client is a marketing event—not just a marketing opportunity (where marketing may or may not take place) but an actual event where marketing activity occurs whether or not it rises to the level of consciousness. Team members who do not or cannot understand this reality may not jeopardize your current book of business but they do limit growth opportunities.
Despite the increased role of the internet in professional services marketing, the average firm receives the majority of its leads through word of mouth or referrals. (This includes technology firms—STA’s primary client base.) Business usually moves by transfer of trust from one person to another. “I have experienced the services of this firm, and they have my trust, so I recommend them to you.” Even when your firm is identified through some other means (such as through an internet search), the best prospective clients will need to receive that transfer of trust in some way—by speaking to your other clients or by reading their statements.
In competitive professional services environments, differentiation is often achieved through experience: what it is like to work with your company on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year basis. The primary way that current clients understand your brand is through that experience. The primary opportunity to plant the seed for new business is within that experience—whether that new business comes directly from the client you already have, or from a referral to a new client.
This being the case, one of the most certain paths to growth lies in successfully building and developing your workforce—hiring team members that have well-rounded capabilities and providing marketing/communications training to all client-facing staff. The value of every client-facing team member at a professional services firm should be measured in three dimensions. First, does the team member have the expertise, experience, and discipline necessary to perform the work? Second, does the team member understand how communication is important to building and maintaining strong relationships? Third, does the team member understand how to identify and capitalize on new business opportunities?
For some firms it may seem an insurmountable obstacle to require that all client-facing team members measure high in each of these dimensions. However, in order to achieve sustained levels of growth in revenue, profit, and book value, you must acquire or build a high level of capability in these areas. Though it might not seem like marketing, this process is in fact the most fundamental marketing action that a growth-minded firm must take.
STA helps professional services firms to consider these matters in a variety of ways, including working with client executive teams to create business, brand, and marketing strategies—these create the context for evaluating team composition and development needs. We also assist in workforce skills analysis and by establishing guidelines and training for both internal and external communications.
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Fear plays a major role in frustrating implementation of new information technology solutions. Often this fear is referred to as “change resistance,” but executive teams and information technology leaders must be careful to examine the cause of that resistance—to accept and come to grips with fears and associated emotional needs.
While some solution users won’t accept a particular change out of purely intellectual, reasoned principle, most of those labeled as “change resistant” are actually afraid—whether or not they are cognizant of their fear, and whether or not they can intellectualize that feeling and convey it to others.
To be afraid is not shameful—all people have fears and over the course of our lifetimes we must grapple with those fears to grow both personally and professionally. Significant changes in how we perform our work have the ability to impact our overall quality of life, including our relationships with others. Often when we are faced with such a scenario, it becomes a perceived potential threat—and the “fight or flight” mechanism starts to engage.
Attempting to address an emotional feeling or need with either a purely intellectual response or no response at all is a failure in either capability or responsibility. This can lead to failed IT solution implementations or adversely impact both the immediate and long-term ROI for the solution. Rather than ignoring the emotional component, you can proactively dispel fear and help solution users to embrace the change that will inevitably occur.
This opportunity begins with the information technology needs assessment, well prior to solution selection and implementation. Mature, outcome-oriented information technology project leaders use this opportunity not only to define current state and target state (performing gap analysis and developing a summary of functional requirements) but also to identify emotional needs, including needs that are the result of fears regarding the current solution as well as the new solution and its implementation.
The value of collecting these impressions/insights is realized in the ability to create one or more value propositions for the new solution that impact the user on an emotional level. Moreover, you can create messaging strategies associated with the implementation process that anticipate and address potential fear-based objections and emotional needs. The value propositions and messaging need to be used early and often so as to quiet the fight or flight response before it becomes engaged, opening the door to productive interaction with and around the solution as implementation moves forward.
Designing the most successful information technology implementations includes both understanding and addressing fears and emotional needs. This strategy accepts the reality that a large portion of the corporate team will first make a judgment regarding the solution based on emotion (whether hope or fear) and then shift their intellectual thinking to justify the emotion. It also more fully considers the whole person, leading to superior results.
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The Client: STA was engaged by an IT services firm in Washington DC to serve the needs of a client seeking to make communication and collaboration improvements for approximately 2,000 staff members located in 185 offices nationwide.
The Challenge: The goal of the project was to work with the client organization’s internal communications team to select an enterprise social networking tool. STA led this effort, drawing on its expertise in marketing/communications and technology to assess the client’s needs. We then worked with the IT services firm to research and evaluate potential solutions.
STA’s Solution: STA designed and conducted a series of structured interviews with stakeholders at the national headquarters and state/local offices to learn as much as possible about the organization’s needs. During these interviews, STA learned that the need to communicate and collaborate in an online social setting extended well beyond the staff members of the organization, to a large group of service partners and customers. This increased the number of potential network users to more than 100,000. This finding escalated the strategic significance of the project, leading to increased executive project involvement at national headquarters as more departments were made aware of the project’s importance and strategic implications.
The Results: The organization significantly expanded its viewpoint as to how effective use of enterprise social networking tools could improve outcomes across a variety of strategic initiatives and operational practices. Armed with this knowledge, it was able to make prudent decisions about the prioritization of features within the list of functional requirements. After evaluating a broad field of potential solution candidates, we were able to identify three options for the client to consider. After a careful review process, the client developed confident consensus around one solution candidate.
The Client Said: “We couldn’t have done this project without you! We particularly appreciated how you showed us the strategic challenges and opportunities, and kept us oriented and focused throughout the entire project.”
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In September 2012 STA was selected to perform a branding project for a successful government contractor listed in Washington Technology’s 2012 Top 20 Rankings, with nearly three billion dollars of revenue. Major lines of business include defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and healthcare.
STA will brand a new software product of strategic importance to the client’s organization. It is a three phase project (currently nearing completion), including brand research and the verbal and visual expression of the brand.
“Being selected to perform this significant project speaks well for STA Tech Marketing’s visibility in the market, as well as its experience and expertise,” commented STA CEO Peter Mirus. “STA’s strategic message is resonating with decision makers that favor structure and accountability in their branding and marketing projects.”
About STA: STA Tech Marketing provides fractional CMO, brand/marketing strategy, and marketing execution to growth-minded, tech-oriented companies. Our goal is to help clients build, sustain, and protect business growth and value. STA’s approach: See. Transform. Act. We help our clients to SEE the market through the eyes of their customers, TRANSFORM themselves to approach the market, and then ACT to engage the market using sustainable and measurable means.
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The Client: The client organization is the “world’s largest professional association dedicated to the training and development fields” and offers a relevant certification for members that increases professional competency and leads to advancement opportunities.
The Challenge: The competency model supporting the certification program had been updated, resulting in the need to redesign the program “products” based on the competency model, including a robust set of resources preparing learners for the program. In addition, the client also planned to provide the resources digitally for the first time, in the form of a website featuring a responsive design to accommodate learners on variety of digital devices (desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones). The design also needed to anticipate other steps in the technological evolution of the organization, such as learning management systems and private social networks.
How STA Got Involved: Springboard International, a growing organizational effectiveness firm with expertise in performance and learning, was poised to win the project award but needed a partner with strong marketing/communications and technology expertise to round out its team. STA was identified by Springboard International as an important partner and we contributed to the RFP response. Partly as a result of STA’s expertise and experience, the client awarded the project to the Springboard team.
STA’s Solution: We immediately integrated into Springboard’s team and got to work on this intense project featuring demanding requirements and rapid-fire deadlines. STA informed the team (including client stakeholders, Springboard’s internal team of strategists and instructional designers, independent learning/training industry experts, the web development contractor, and software vendors) with strategic insight and best practices for technology use for the learning resources design, development, and web production. We provided project leadership and kept communication about important technology issues open, positive, and straightforward—taking great care to make sure that all participants were on the same page.
The Results: STA’s partnership with Springboard resulted in a comprehensive and detail-oriented learning resources design that won approval and praise from the client. In addition to addressing the immediate need of redesigning the resources to correspond to the updated competency model, our recommendations anticipated a variety of future growth opportunities that will allow the client and the certification program to flourish long-term.
Springboard said: “STA’s technical expertise, customer focus, anticipation of project risks, education of the team, professional deliverables, and simply wonderful Project Lead abilities definitely contributed to the success of this project. STA has been an outstanding asset to our team!”
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All differentiators have to be demonstrated. Some may be articulated first and demonstrated afterwards, creating emotional and intellectual resonance immediately through articulation and later confirming and deepening that resonance through demonstration. Others may be demonstrated first and articulated later, in which case typically the emotional resonance is created through the demonstration and the intellectual resonance by means of the articulation.
In industries where it is difficult to find differentiators of true distinction (including areas of information technology), common differentiators may be perceived as trite or cliché when articulated—simply because all (or most) competitors make similar claims.
In such cases, true self-discipline is required by a company that wants to grow, because it must focus consistently on excellence in the small details—and hence become known as the company that does common things uncommonly well. This is THE true differentiator, particularly in commodity laden industries, because the world is long on talk and short on the self-discipline necessary to consistently demonstrate how the clichés (complete with the usual superlatives) are actually true in some instances.
The task of demonstrating how common things can be done uncommonly well might not be glamorous, but it is an authentic and reliable path to achieving clear differentiation in the minds of discerning audiences, and achieving the business growth that you seek.
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Technology companies have many different approaches to naming themselves, their services, and products. Some companies find it to be a very simple process: they sit a bunch of people down at a table and do some brainstorming, kick around some ideas, settle on a couple of options, have a trademark attorney screen the name to make sure it is available, and then move forward. This is a fine way to create a brand name, and it can work well for the company that is confident in its creative abilities and has a very clear idea of its market position.
Technology companies with a less clear idea on market position favor a more strategic approach, beginning with market research and continuing through the process of building differentiators and positioning. Having completed such a process, they feel sufficiently informed to generate naming concept that will resonate with customers.
STA’s clients, including a variety of technology product and service firms, often assert that they know the market in which they operate and can therefore embark on aspects of branding (including naming) without additional market research. We often must politely challenge the accuracy of this assertion.
Some clients intuitively collect information about the market using roughly the right approach—and do in fact have all or most of the information needed. However, we know from experience that companies frequently are missing key pieces of information. For example, many companies can identify only a small percentage of competitors in their space—typically the client’s customer base sees a broader variety of companies as potential competitors than does the client. This might seem like a small missing piece of information but it has a great deal of impact on naming. At the least, you do not want to cause market confusion by using a name similar to one used by a competitor.
So be sure that you have good, verified knowledge of your market position before naming your technology company, service, or product.
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A brand is only as good as what you put behind it. As a result of conducting a brand strategy process, your people and/or your product might need to change in order to produce the desired business outcomes. Hence, it is prudent to assume that every brand strategy process is to some degree an organizational change process.
In my experience there are four types of companies that undertake a branding process:
- Bad companies don’t brand properly for long-term success and fail to take advantage of the opportunities presented in the process. They conduct their branding work in fits and starts, ignore qualified outside perspective, and often focus primarily on the visual expression of the brand (logo, business cards, brochure, etc.) to the exclusion of developing a truly sound brand strategy and identity.
- Mediocre companies often know that brands are more than logos, and might go through a successful branding process (in terms of getting to the conclusion of the strategy creation part), but ultimately find they are unwilling to make the changes necessary to drive a higher level of success.
- Good companies intuitively find good strategic branding partners who will help them identify and understand change opportunities—and then take action to make sure desired outcomes are achieved.
- Great companies share the same characteristics as “good” companies. The difference between them is typically that the great companies have better leadership, team members, focus, and drive for excellence (among other areas in which they excel).
My perspective (yours might differ) is that most companies are either mediocre or good. Truly bad companies (in this case, “bad” reflects poor business skills and not an ethical judgment) don’t last long or don’t create much impact. Many companies aspire to be great, but few actually make the grade.
A reasonable question for most business leaders, therefore, is “How can I tell if my/our company is mediocre or good?” I find this question is best answered by some sort of leadership assessment (these are most accurately conducted by disinterested third parties). As the leaders go, so often the company goes. (Mediocre leaders eventually will have mediocre teams and good leaders will eventually have good teams, even if those conditions were not present at the outset.)
Typically, by spending time in conversation with business leaders, their managers and subordinates, I can tell if the brand strategy process will be successful—and it often has to do with leadership. Some warning signs (among many) include blame shifting, lack of willingness to set clear standards and hold people accountable, lack of clarity surrounding roles and responsibilities, entrenchment, and significant divisions among partners (or leadership team members) as to whether the process is even necessary.
Some positive signs include willingness to make and implement tough decisions, a desire to have assumptions challenged and discussed, an eagerness to “know what we don’t know,” a holistic understanding of what a brand is and how it functions, the ability to define clear goals, and a spirit of eagerness (rather than trepidation) about seeing the brand strategy project outcomes in action.
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