Note to CMO: Minding Your Capability Gap

Dear CMO:

You need to begin a dialog with key stakeholders in a complex market, full of misunderstandings and competitors. You need to start a blog with multiple authors, clearly articulated roles for each writer, and enough discipline to ensure that solid content gets published early and often.

The problem is, everyone agrees and no one does it. The blog is launched and quickly gathers cobwebs.

You empower your channel marketing organization to curb sales entitlements, bringing facts and not feelings to the incremental lift you get out of channel investments. Your channel people know how to do it, attack it with energy, and have the facts to make the case stick.

The problem is, you've also decided to decentralize your divisions and give them enough autonomy to cut separate deals with your channel partners, effectively putting two cars in the parking lot. Not to mention, frustrate your channel marketing team's best efforts.

You correctly identify the Achilles Heel of your competition, taking advantage of their disintegrating channel relationships and their depleted field sales organization while promoting the strength of your own capabilities in the field. You launch a campaign aimed at face-to-face evangelism to C-level officers, driving mindshare and thought leadership -- plus actual feet on the street execution: something your competitors can't match.

The problem is, your field sales people are scared to death of calling on anyone with a title more senior than Junior Procurement Specialist. The thought of speaking directly, while making eye contact, with a C-level officer in a client location makes them weak in the knees.

Your paradigm-shifting SEM concept promises to change the face of how customers acquire qualified, branded leads, so your plan on orchestrating a thought-leadership forum with top-to-top communication with marketing leaders across multiple industries makes game-changing sense.

The problem is, your operational people are all in India and you're having one hell of a time managing even the simplest customer engagements. Let alone problems. Like when you over-bill a client 300% without telling them, all while failing to deliver what you promise.

You collect gigabytes of web sale data and create a zip code level demographic & psychographic analysis, showing where your best potential customers -- and retailers -- are located, down to a neighborhood level. You put a sales campaign together to put this learning to work, providing incentives and tools to ensure each and every step along the path is successful.

The problem is, the team just... isn't... ready... to do anything more complex than what they planned on doing today anyway. And it drags... on... for... months...

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Key Takeaways:

> There are no strategic problems, only people problems. Each and every one of the above vignettes illustrates a situation where the pieces are in place and the job still doesn't get done. None, with the exception of the SEM example, are structural problems -- these are primarily cultural ones.

> There is no strategy where there is no execution. A brilliant strategy ill executed is far less successful than a middling strategy done well. Execution, in other words, is more important than brilliant thinking. All things being equal, coming up with a brilliant strategy and then executing against it seems to be the best of all possible worlds.

> If you don't control all the moving parts, reduce their quantity until you control all of them. How many times has a program hung up because a third party is late with a proposal, a quote, a contract, or some other critical component? When in doubt, make and don't buy. If you sales team isn't up to the task, have marketing make the face to face call. If you can't get a major brand to provide your value-added promotion, make it yourself. You'll save time, probably money, and whatever you lose in brand cache will be more than made up for by speed and execution.

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The "capability gap" is the critical open ground between the right situation for the right company and its ability to execute it. Often, these gaps are focused on problems with structure -- the SEM example, where the needed (and lacking) operational people are on the wrong side of the world from your customers and lack the language and cultural training to make them adequate to the task. But more often, the gap is in the minds of the people you are relying on to get the job done -- the pieces of the structure that "fit," but don't "work."

How one deals with this in a business setting is more often than not an exercise in simplification and focus. Reducing your dependencies to a few carefully chosen resources is usually the right first step. The second is figuring out why the problem exists in the first place.

As a famous 20th Century philosopher once said, "Companies with communication problems don't need to communicate more -- they need to reduce the need to communicate." Another famous 20th Century philosopher said, "Just win, baby." Both are rules to live by.

Regards.

Note to CMO: Powerlines and When to Keep Them

Dear CMO:

Brandweek tells us that Memorex is soon to launch its first branding effort since the 70's. Well, welcome back, in any case. What I find interesting is that Memorex has decided to change its tag line.

Quick -- close your eyes and tell me what Memorex's tag line is. Can you? Are you old enough to remember analog, type II, and 2-pack polybags? I am -- of course, I ran that part of Sony's marketing once upon a time, a long, long time ago.

Memorex is blessed with the one and only great tag line from the old recording media days. "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" still makes sense. Maxell had the image -- the man in the chair -- but Memorex had the words. And Sony had the brand halo. Sure, the product wasn't as good as Sony, or Maxell, or TDK, or even Fuji (not that anyone knew Fuji made probably the best recording media products on earth at the time), but for anyone who wasn't absolutely passionate about coercivity and retentivity, they remembered the tag line and bought the product. They owned the, "I really don't care which brand I buy" middle of the category.

Now, the tag line will be "Fits Your Life." Like jeans, Special K, home owners insurance, The Gap, Visa, Restoration Hardware, your Motorola cell phone, or virutally any other product category, Memorex apparently Fits My Life. Why does Memorex fit my life? How does a recording media product "fit" anything? At Sony, we launched CD-IT, the first audio tape that was available in CD lengths. We also launched UX Turbo, a type II audio tape that was built for in-car use: a shell that didn't warp under extreme heat conditions, a tactile button allowing you to find the A versus B side without looking, labels that had instantly adhering glue so they wouldn't peel off in your car stereo, and a tape formulation pitched higher to cut through the ambient road rumble. Sony "fit your life." Memorex?

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Key Takeaways:

> Per Steve Cone's excellent Powerlines: "The More Things Change, The More Tag Lines Should Not. Lines that connect with employees and consumers are priceless. Their power builds over time and is impervious to the whims of fashion."

> Ego, boredom, and the fact that you just inherited a brand with a long standing and excellent tag line are not good reasons to change it. Expecially when you've got the only good one in your entire category.

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Memorex is bored. They've been hearing, "Is it live?" since the 70's apparently, and because they've been exposed to a good thing for this long, they think everyone else is, too.

Frankly, none of us has even thought of the Memorex brand for forty years. And now that they're back, they've decided to water down the one thing they had going for them. A killer tag line.

I'm happy to be wrong, if someone can show me rock-solid quantitative testing that says, "Fits Your Life" is a more powerful tag line than "Is it live?" But I don't hold my breath.

Regards.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.

Note to CMO: Ocho Cinco and the New Frontier of Personal Branding

Dear CMO:

This is the best branding news of the day. Maybe the year. In a world where stars of various reputation have branded themselves with pseudonyms -- from Cher and Bijan to Flea and Bono -- we now have Ocho Cinco.

Yes, that Ocho Cinco. The all pro wide receiver of the Cincinnati Bengals formerly-known-as-"Chad" has now legally changed his name to the Spanish translation of his jersey number and sometime nickname. Ocho Cinco Johnson. Like the difference between Madagascar Vanilla Bean Gelato and 'Nilla Ice Cream, apparently the Spanish version has more cache. William Arruda must be shedding a happy tear (or maybe just a tear, I'm not sure).

I feel diminished only having a "vanity" URL.

In honor of 85's bold personal branding move, I think a few of us in the blogosphere need to follow suit. I'd like to hear from Epiphany Kerley, Chaos Beck and Whack von Oech about their plans. I'd do the same, but CMO could be mispronounced "schmo," which isn't the hook I'm after.

Regards.

PS: Hat tip to Smoking Gun via Drudge. Photo courtesy of Flickr.

Note to CMO: Killing Giants, Influence, and Decision '08

Dear CMO:

Politics and products both have the same needs, but live in different time frames. Where one is a sprint with a finish line – usually an election -- the other exists freely in space, proving its relevance over an extended period of time. This makes drawing parallels between the branding of politicians and of brands particularly difficult, because what works for a presidential nominee won’t necessarily work for your breakfast cereal or blogging platform. However, certain unalienable rights still exist: both need clear propositions, both need to be differentiated, and both need breakthrough.

Let’s look at the marketing of the current election in purely “influence”-laden terms:

Barack Obama = “Liking”

We choose to like Barack Obama because he is appealing to us. He plucks certain chords of optimism, of “change” and “hope,” and returns frequently to America’s love affair with “new.” We like new things here. We have a short attention span as a nation and a culture. Even if things are going well, there’s a certain gravitational pull of “new” that appeals to us, where in other cultures it might be seen as a negative. Here, it works.

John McCain = “authority”

We choose to like John McCain because we look up to him. We see him as an authority figure who has suffered for his country and has put it first for his entire adult life. We see experience, dedication, and leadership – all things we look for in a commander in chief. We like performance in America, and he delivers against this desire.

If we view our election in terms of the vocabulary we’re developing around Killing Giants, we have a different competitive view of each candidate:

Barack Obama = “Aikido”

Obama chooses to use his opponent’s strength against him, portraying “experience” – his own Achilles Heel – as a negative. The Obama strategy suggests “experience” = “old” = “not new” = “out of touch.” As he said in his acceptance speech, “John McCain… just doesn’t get it.”

John McCain = “Show Your Teeth”

McCain says bring it on. Let’s compare qualifications. Coke versus Pepsi. I’ve done it, you haven’t. Where Obama runs an adroit flanking maneuver, McCain launches a frontal assault.

What makes this election that much more complex, particularly in terms of these two views, is that the choices of running mates both aim squarely at the opponent’s strategy:

Joe Biden is running on authority, McCain’s strength and Obama’s weakness. As a matter of public record, Biden is the only Senator in Washington who has served longer than McCain, which muddles the argument of “experience versus inexperience” for the Republicans.

Sarah Palin, a relative unknown on the national stage, has burst out of the starting gates and seized both “liking” and “aikido” from her opponents -- Obama’s strength and McCain’s weakness. She’s smart, accomplished, funny, attractive, and very human. And, not for nothing, she’s a she: by attacking her, the Democrats further drive a wedge through their own party, half of whom are still smarting from the absence of Hillary Clinton on the ticket. Further, her perceived “inexperience” is a trap: she’s served in public life as long as Obama has, and in an executive capacity, both as a mayor and a governor of a state. She’s the physical embodiment of our “Thin Ice” strategy – leading her opponents out over the thin ice of her own making.

Forget the politics of the above. I couldn’t care less who you want to vote for or whether you have an opinion at all. This is a fascinating series of events, and holds tremendous messaging, marketing, and communication lessons for all of us.

Regards.

PS: if you haven't seen the discussion over at The Daily Fix, analyzing the messaging of each candidate's acceptance speeches, take a look -- the Dem's are already hashed out, and the GOP will be up on Friday. Thanks, CK, for organizing and providing the graphic, above, too.