Richard Fouts
Research Director
2 years at Gartner
23 years IT industry
Richard Fouts analyzes best practices in marketing management for technology and service providers, including insight and advice in brand management, market and competitive position, messaging, sales, and go-to-market strategies. Read Full Bio
by Richard Fouts | October 7, 2011 | 4 Comments
When I was a little kid, my dad brought home a computer. We couldn’t wait to see it work … wow, a computer in our house! It was unimaginable. Correction, what was unimaginable was how long it took my dad to get it up and running. Hours of technical manuals, phone calls and unreadable error messages became a two day effort. When it was finally working, the excitement had faded and we went back to foosball, a low tech game we could count on.
The next year my brother brought home a computer he called a MacIntosh and we waited for a re-run of Dad’s frustrating scenario. But this was no episodic repeat. Big bro turned it on and started doing real work in a few minutes, showing me how to write a letter to my grandmother. When I asked him to print the letter I had written – he showed me something called a print-icon which sent my letter to an awaiting printer in seconds (I tried the same thing with my Dad’s PC the previous year, but it told me it didn’t have a driver, something I never quite got).
My brother became a loyal customer of Apple of course, and I remember him telling me after I went into marketing that Apple’s customer retention rates were over 90 percent. That was an amazing statistic. I was working at HP at the time, and we were thrilled at our 83 percent rate.
The reason I tell this story, is that I’ve just read Informatica’s renewal rates once again exceed 95% (for six years in a row). Try and find that kind of renewal rate (outside of Apple, of course). I’ve tried.
The number comes, not from Informatica, but a 2011 Data Integration Customer Satisfaction survey conducted by TNS, an independent research firm. Customers are asked to share their views and perceptions of all the vendors across a range of measures. 89% of them said Informatica’s strategic vision maps with their own. Good number, but even better is that these customers actually know Informatica’s strategic direction.
I have followed Informatica, albeit casually, for years and one thing I’ve found is that these are not people that believe in doing anything half-heartedly. And they also realize you have to stick to it. As colleague Ed Thompson says, “our research shows that there is no one quick fix that will drive great customer experience … a great experience is built from thousands of small improvements over time.”
So here’s a shout-out to the freaks at Informatica, who simply can’t resist making customers happy, satisfied, productive – and apparently, informed. It’s what they live for. Okay guys, good work. Now, go play some foosball.
Category: Brand awareness Uncategorized Tags:
by Richard Fouts | April 24, 2011 | 2 Comments
Take a look at this list of career opportunities at a major consulting firm:
Our organization is looking for experienced professionals in:
- Paid Search
- SEO/SEM
- Marketing Analytics (SAS)
- Digital Marketing and Advertising
- Digital Brand Strategy & Transformation
- Interactive Account Management
- Web Analytics
- Social Media Implementations
- Mobile Product Marketing
- Web Diagnostics
- Digital Media Planning
- Digital Data and Analytics Solutions
- Site Optimization
Anything missing? Like individuals that can conduct a market or gap analysis, construct a competitive landscape, design scenario marketing and role-based messaging? How about people that can run a customer-oriented experience design session? Or individuals that can identify stategic business options, construct logical partnerships and/or marketing alliances, translate the CEO’s vision into strategic positioning and messaging, or launch a new product?
Granted, marketing is more of a science than ever given our ability to actually measure not just buyer behavior, but how buyers feel about the experience through sentiment analysis.
But have we become obsessed the idea of being digital detectives versus good marketers? Do we have armies of people ready to analyze the data – at the expense of people that need to construct the right marketing story in the first place? To figure out the right product for the right audience for the right time?
What I found especially odd about the above list – no one is needed to help convert suspects into prospects – prospects into customers – or customers into advocates (let alone someone to run advocacy marketing).
One of the downsides of the digital obsession I observe frequently is the propensity to make premature decisions. I just saw a seasoned marketing executive abandon a campaign because it didn’t generate the right amount of traffic to the campaign’s landing page. Together we examined the campaign’s actual story line and validated it was a good product with a good value proposition – clearly being marketed to the right audience. So what was the problem? Turned out .. it was risk.
If you’ve done everything right (right product, right audience, right time) and the response rate is low – there’s usually some element of risk in the buying decision you haven’t addressed. At least this was the issue with this particular campaign. And as soon as it was addressed, traffic increased – substantially – and the campaign was back in business.
As marketers, we need to step away from the computer – turn down the obsession with data – or at least look at the qualitative dimensions of marketing before we let the numbers rule all our decisions.
Category: Marketing Strategy Marketing communications Strategic Planning Uncategorized Tags:
by Richard Fouts | April 8, 2011 | 1 Comment
First of all, note that one is capitalized ….
Seriously, I get this question a lot and there are several attributes I’ve observed.
CMOs report to CEOs. VPs of marketing often report to CMOs or COOs
CMOs manage all 4 P’s of marketing; VPs of marketing often just manage the promotional P.
CMOs aren’t always operational geniuses; VPs are good at marketing operations.
CMOs are good at knowing what they don’t know; VPs of marketing are more apt to think they know it all.
CMOs don’t have the best track record at longevity; VPs of marketing have more longevity.
Of course, you’ll always find exceptions, but these are my observations.
It’s not unlike the CIO versus the VP of Information Technology. If you were to draw a similar table, it would have striking similarity. The CIO is a strategic thinker, the VP of IT keeps the trains running on time.
CxO jobs are just naturally more risky when it comes to longevity.
Remember Career is Over? This happens when executives come in with overblown visions of transforming the business. Easy to talk the talk, harder to walk the talk.
The Harvard Business Review article from 1999.. entitled “The Smart Talk Trap“ is worth re-visiting.
Category: Marketing Strategy Tags:
by Richard Fouts | February 13, 2011 | Comments Off
How much do you typically spend to generate a few million impressions, connections, email signups or leads? What do you spend to generate a thousand click-thrus? Well – put your check book away, because the CEO of Overdrive interactive, a digital marketing company, has a cost avoidance technique.
Many of you already know about it (hint: it’s called social media) but now you have a way to quickly, effectively and convincingly measure it. It’s called Media Equivalent Value, or “the monetary equivalent of the impressions generated through social media, that would have traditionally been acquired through paid media.”
Case in point: Back in 2008, Telus marketing executive Jeff (the Canadian telecom provider ) told me he had garnered two million impressions with his social media campaign. Okay, that’ s nice. Wait, he says, there’s more.
You see, Jeff had recently launched the firm’s new Blackberry. And like any marketer he did a full scale media outreach with his PR firm (which of course charged him dearly) – and he bought some advertising. All expensive of course, but you gotta do it. But he also included several influential blogs in his space in his media outreach. He did these largely on his own. Skip to the end of the story – the impressions, click thrus, email sign ups, blogposts, tweets, re-tweets number about two million. Historically Telus spends about a dollar per impression when you average it out over their paid media campaigns. So they generated two million bucks worth of paid media …. for free.
More validation of Media Equivalent Value arrived when Proctor and Gamble yanked millions of dollars of daytime TV advertising off the air .. in favor of social networks (where it claims to get far greater ROI).
We’ve all been doing this but haven’t had a concise label for it. Now we do. Media Equivalent Value. What do you think?
Category: Brand awareness Marketing communications Public relations Tags:
by Richard Fouts | December 28, 2010 | 4 Comments
Come on admit it, you’ve said this to yourself a million times. But there is a new trend looming that just might offer a cure to ‘death by PowerPoint’. It’s from Japan and it’s called PechaKucha, which literally means ‘chit chat’.
The idea behind this technique is simple. You show 20 images for 20 seconds each. If my math serves me, that’s six minutes and 40 seconds. And – you set it to AutoRun. Sounds easy enough, but this takes courage. Be sure you dry run it a few times before you try it. Let me know what you think. And consider this – if you’re in a hot competition for a large deal (or any deal) this format has a much higher chance of being remembered that your competitor’s “death by PowerPoint.”
PechaKucha pays homage to Steve Jobs masterful talks, where he uses images versus text; stories versus bullets – and tales of how people use technology to improve their lives and their businesses. Steve’s presentations (typically 10 to 12 slides) aren’t designed to present information as much as they are designed to inspire.
In these days of social media there’s more opportunity to use these types of techniques to tell your story. But – there’s also more noise than ever as millions of people tweet, FB, blog and change their LinkedIn status updates. Noise is everywhere – and if you’re using the same old ‘death by PowerPoint’ techniques you are forcing yourself into the abundant noise.
So try something new in 2011. Drop the bullets, the features, the functions, the capabilities. Stop telling us how many employees you have, where you’re located, how many engineers you have, how many bells and whistles you’ve built into your products. Tell stories. Tell us how people use your solutions to solve really important business problems. Sure, we need to hear all those other things, but put them in an appendix.
And try PechaKucha.
http://www.speaker.org/video/pechakucha.html
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Richard Fouts | August 18, 2010 | 2 Comments
Eloqua is teasing us to attend their next webinar with the email subject line, Why the CMO Should Carry a Quota. Great idea right? After all, marketing executives are rapidly adopting the mantra, “We drive growth.”
While it might sound new, there are plenty of CMOs that carry quotas, and when I talk to them they admit it drives opportunistic behavior (you know, the kind of organization that does anything for a buck?). And it can drive growth, in the short term, but at the expense of investments that drive long term growth – and stability.
What CMOs can learn from CIOs.
This question reminds me of the piles of research that Gartner and others have done on the New CIO Leader, the one that goes beyond just making the trains run on time and takes a seat at the strategic table. The CIOs that focused on the trains were not invited to the strategic table (why should they be?) and were eventually told, “Thanks for your contribution. You’ve made it easy to outsource IT. Thanks, again. Your gold watch is waiting at the door. ”
The CMO that is driven only by revenue falls into a similar trap. They end up generating leads and supporting sales, which is obviously a good thing to do. But the organization realizes all they really need is a good Sales VP and an adequate marcomm manager. In fact, if you read the Eloqua webinar description, it essentially turns the CMO into a pipeline manager. Don’t we already have one of those?
In Eloqua’s defense, I’m sure they aren’t this single minded, so I’ll tune into their webinar and see for myself.
Category: Personal selling Tags:
by Richard Fouts | August 11, 2010 | 4 Comments
This story truly represents the perfect storm – of the bad experience – where the customer, the employee and the provider — all collided. In this case, both employee and customer were having a bad day – on the same day. The timing was perfect.
Both came face-to-face with their own break points – the end of their respective ropes; they both encountered straws that broke the backs of their respective camels. Whatever cliché you call it, both customer and customer-service-representative hit that “postal” moment at the same time, against the backdrop of the provider (in this case JetBlue, who engineered the perfect environment for the perfect storm to occur in the first place).
So what can we as marketers learn from the Steve Slater story? “It’s about the experience, stupid.” Not just the customer experience – but the employee experience. Something providers overlook.
Let’s start with the customer. Airlines have made the travel experience so appalling that it’s no wonder passengers “hit the wall.” I’m not defending the bad passenger mind you, just explaining it. It happens with any business – a customer hits the wall because the provider sees everything from its own point of view. It’s about their rules, their process and what they need to do to transfer money from our pocket to theirs. Or they turn customer requests down because “the computer won’t let me do that.”
Customer service people hit the wall because customers just don’t get it. They keep telling customers their “inside-out” story and get hugely frustrated when customers don’t seem to hear it. So they say, “take this job and shove it.” And they say things like, “customers are idiots” under their breath – while the customer also calls them the same names.
But there’s a third party to all of this – the provider who is responsible for engineering the environment for both experience types, good or bad, to occur. In their defense, JetBlue competes on the experience, and they did a good job of it in their early days. But of course, Virgin Air is now eating their lunch, by going one better. So one wonders if JetBlue has lost its experience mojo.
What Virgin gets – is that happy employees create happy customers. Its employees are as evangelical about working at Virgin Air as their customers are about flying Virgin Air.
One of my clients, Informatica gets this too. They have extremely happy customers, as evidenced by their renewal rate (because a customer isn’t really a customer until they come back). And Informatica customers don’t just agree to be customer references, they practically demand it. Informatica employees are also enormously happy, as evidenced by their low turnover and internal surveys. They’ve figured out you can’t have one without the other. Happy employees create happy customers. Unhappy employees? Well .. you get the picture…
I’m not saying JetBlue’s employee/customer experiences are no longer in harmony, rather using this story to educate marketers about the pending perfect storm. The dollars you dump into customer experience will be wasted if you aren’t looking with equal fervor at your employee experience as well. It’s not about putting a bunch of service features together, but understanding what customers go through – before and after they engage with you. It’s a much bigger picture than your own particular service environment. There are many things we all do to improve our service, but if we do it independently of the larger experience – we miss the nuances. As any experience designer will tell you, we have to craft SCENARIOS, not just service features.
But here’s the lesson of Steve Slater. In our zeal to understand the customer, we might be overlooking the experience of the employee that delivers the experience. It’s time to put the two together. We need to analyze the uber-experience.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Richard Fouts | May 27, 2010 | 1 Comment
Why you ask? Well, for starters CA is changing its name to CA Technologies. For those of you that were under a rock last decade, CA’s chairman was given a 12 year prison sentence after giving the green light to overstate the firm’s revenue by $500 million (to pump up the stock price).
The firm survived the turmoil – and is ready to put the past behind and move on. No, wait…. Its new tag line, Believe Again (the operative word being “again”) conjures up images of the past. By saying we should believe ‘again’ CA urges us to re-consider investing in them – back ‘before’ all the problems started. I believe it’s the wrong tag line at the wrong time.
But there’s another issue. Brands should be timeless. Otherwise, you end up spending fortunes on re-identification campaigns. For example, no matter where Nike goes with its product line, “Just do it” as an athletic battle cry will never be irrelevant. No matter which direction Accenture heads it consulting practice, “business performance delivered” will always be relevant. In the 1970s the Gartner brand was “helping you make better, more informed technology decisions.” Today, the IT industry doesn’t even remotely resemble its former self. But our brand is still relevant.
With CA however, Believe Again will run out of steam at some point. In fact, CA wants it to become irrelevant as soon as possible. They want us to just Believe. Of course, measuring market belief won’t be easy. When CA executives believe “belief in them” has hit an acceptable level, they’ll be back to the drawing board, with a new brand campaign, “thanks for believing in us again, now stay with us as we <<insert new tag line.>> And the coffers at their agency of record will ring all the way to the bank.
Stay tuned for Gartner research that will support your brand initiatives. Analyst and Gartner Fellow, Jennifer Beck, will head it up. She has created a strong going-in position, that good branding results in a promise the company can deliver against for all time. Stay tuned for some good insight.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Richard Fouts | April 19, 2010 | 8 Comments
Automating the management of customer references is an emerging software category whose time has come. Companies like Boulder Logic, Point of Reference, References-Online and Metia all see how complex it can be to not only recruit customers to act as references, but to manage them as well. When customers act as references, they put their reputations on the line. And when customers migrate to evangelist territory, they are worth 10 great sales people.
Case in point: now that Metia has supercharged Microsoft’s customer reference solution, the sales process moves faster, site traffic has increased and more prospects and customers download Microsoft case studies. Boulder Logic has created similar results for NetApp.
While I commend these providers, I urge them to think bigger. Marketers are leaving a lot of ROI on the table when it comes to customer reference programs, by limiting their applications mostly to sales opportunities. But, investments in the comprehensive management of customer references drives impact (and ROI) far beyond the sales organization. Customer success stories help:
- Brand managers. When brand managers point to real customers who validate the firm’s value proposition, brand equity naturally increases. As marketer Guy Kawasaki reminds us, “What others say about you is more important than what you say about you.” (Reference: Reality Check. The Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging and Outmarketing Your Competition).
- Investor and public relations. Vendors that support brand promise with viable references reduce risk for investors. Savvy CEOs sprinkle reference stories throughout things like earnings calls, major account pitches, and conversations with institutional investors to show that the business strategy is working. PR and corporate communications people also use reference stories to validate the firm’s ability to execute its vision.
- Industry analysts and other members of the media rarely settle for theory; they want to know where you’ve succeeded in practice. Few publications mention a product from a provider without an associated customer success story.
- Finance managers. By investing in a well-defined, structured customer reference program, providers note improvement in customer profitability. Why? One marketer we talked to explains it this way: “Customers who act as references are also our most loyal and most profitable. Our CFO loves this program.”
Even HR managers want to get in on the game. Recruiters love to name drop. They love to use reference stories to convince the best talent to choose them over competitors. After all, who doesn’t want to work for a company with happy customers? If you’ve ever worked for a company full of unhappy customers, you know what Dante was talking about.
As in everything marketing, it starts with customers. When customers are happy, employees are happy, managers and executives from PR, IR, HR and all those “relations” boxes on your org chart are happy. Oh yeah, and Wall Street is happy too.
Okay, I’m not trying to develop a screenplay for Disney, but you get the picture. If more people get in on the love, the results can skyrocket. So vendors, if you agree with my point-of-view, think about updating your marketing copy.
Category: Brand awareness Marketing communications Personal selling Public relations Tags:
by Richard Fouts | April 2, 2010 | 2 Comments
The Boss would take issue with marketing and communications people that include “exceed customer expectations” in their mission statements (or those lists of core values you see hanging in company cafeterias). Why?
“Because I want them to come to my next concert,” he replied when a pesky reporter called him “ungenerous and almost stingy when it comes to encores.” She was commenting on Bruce’s propensity to perform a single encore after a great concert (the only kind he gives). While the boss admits he’s been known to cave to a second one, it’s the exception. Even when the fans are tearing the house down, he resists, packs up his guitar, heads for the back door – and leaves them wanting more.
We can all take a cue from Springsteen. Consulting firms should especially listen up. Marketing copy from IT consultants includes the “exceed expectations thing” more than anyone. But as Peter Block notes in his book Flawless Consulting, you might have to exceed the higher bar you’ve just set each time you deliver – or you run the risk of under-delivering …. when in fact all you did was fulfill your commitment. Before you know it, your costs have run amuk (and you were just trying to be a nice guy).
It’s like the consulting firm that discounts their initial engagement …. to get in the door. When they propose their next phase pricing, which they refer to as “fair market value” …the client is very unhappy. You’ve set the bar with your discounting pricing. Now you shift to what’s fair ….and it comes off as price gouging or bait-and-switch.
So before you get sucked into that seemingly harmless, almost flippant remark “we exceed our customers’ expectations” make sure you’re not setting yourself up. When you give it away for nothing, you’ve set the expectation that you’ll do it again ….and again and again.
Thanks to colleague Matt Goldman for inspiring this post.
Category: Personal selling Public relations Uncategorized Tags:
