Author: Dave J.

Okay, I’m a cynic about this whole Web 2.0 thing, too. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from their style of hip and approachable brands and websites. After all, our customers are going to be getting used to seeing more sites that look like theirs, and perhaps we will start to look dated.

For a good post that connects us to the Web 2.0 look, go to article at Web Pages That Suck (see not everything Vincent posts is a train wreck):

So you wanna be a rock ‘n’ roll star? You gotta look like a Web 2.0 web site.

“The hot web design style right now is the Web 2.0 aesthetic. What is this aesthetic? Just look at any Web 2.0 site on this list and you’ll see lots of white space, big type, bright colors, and rounded logos.”

And because WPTS doesn’t have an archive, here are the links from the article:

• Explanation of all the required elements of a Web 2.0 web site.
• Web20generator site generator.
• What goes into having a Web 2.0 logo (with plenty of examples).

Let’s back up Danny Sullivan’s diatribe: 25 Things I Hate About Google.

The search world is getting some potentially better choices and I don’t own any Google stock to worry about. I’ve already changed the default search tool on Firefox to ASK at work and Yahoo at home. I’m also interested in Listable and Rollyo.

Update: Looks like David Shaw was jumping on this train already, inspired by a post at if:book with this line:

“what i can’t figure out is: why isn’t there a movement to develop a nonprofit, open source search engine? we have mozilla, we have wikipedia, we have linux. where is the people’s search engine? isn’t it time?”

My further comment: The point is that Google, like King David, is getting distracted by the pretty things that it has the power to seduce or buy. Searching at Google hasn’t changed significantly over the years and I think that there is plenty of room for innovation.

I hope you enjoyed my little foray into “Back to Basics Week”. It was fun to review some of the strategic issues that we don’t face every day. As I posted last week, we marketers are mostly engaged in tactical elements.

But suppose you had a new product to launch. You’ve got your strategy and product all set, just need to do a market test to get things going, and get buy-in of the rest of the organization. This final case study (complements of Big Picture Guy) is as much about politics as it is about marketing or strategy.

“My latest frustration is based on a market test we did conduct. Operations wanted to ensure the costs were borne by Marketing. Any unsold product, they insisted, would have to be the responsibility of the product managers. Finance, always seeking to keep working capital low and turns and GMROI (gross margin return on investment) high, pushed to have a small run so that, in the event of an unsuccessful launch, only minimal quantities would be left to languish in our warehouses.

The sales group screamed that they cannot and would not sell out of an empty wagon. Without a commitment from a bearish Bull Terrier, the likelihood that we will reach the volumes needed to justify a launch is diminished. Which, in turn, means that payback period and IRR (internal rate of return) targets are likely not going to be met. So General Ledger, our under-reaching accountant with the over-arching ears, refuses to include the project in our budget calculations. The senior management team is unsure it wishes to back a project that is not even in the budget. It is all nickel-and-dime stuff.”

Read the rest here: The Waters Wear the Stones

It’s not an easy situation to resolve. BPG sums up that the situation “reminds me of this Bulgarian proverb: If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.”

I’ve accumulated a number of blog posts I want to link to. I’d like to talk more about each of these, but why don’t you check them out yourself? You might find a couple new blogs to follow:

Wetpaint Makes Wiki Development Friendly and Simple By John Blossom points to a new wiki tool and ponders where this wiki thing is going. I’ve been pondering how to take advantage of wikis in a number of ways.

Pixel Button Generator from the Generator Blog: The button is generated with the desired text and colors and is converted into an HTML code. So cool, but no use for it right now.

The Pizza Paradigm from Infocommerce Group: Russ ponders whether we really want a cell phone that’ll find us the closest pizza shop.

About invalid clicks from Google’s Inside AdWords crew. Such honesty, straight from the source, is amazing.

Business Intelligence vs. Business Espionage by Mike Smock gives us a scale of intelligence gathering techniques ranked by ethics. (Surprisingly, not on the list is calling your competitor and pretending you’re a college student writing a paper.)

B2B Marcom: An Unmitigated Disaster by Rick Short. Rick is a genuine in-the-trenches marketing manager/blogger like me, although his blog is actually a sanctioned corporate blog. He likes to give out a dose of reality, like I do:

“To me it just doesn’t make sense that smart people can deliver educated, researched, and persuasive campaigns only to consistently lose market share – unless there are other factors at work. And there are always other factors at work.”

The Worst Web Design Techniques Featured on Web Pages That Suck in 2005 by Vincent Flanders. I’ve been a fan of WPTS for years and here is a good summary of what you missed last year. If you like train-wrecks, you should add his blog to your feeds.

What Would You Do from Sales and Marketing Magazine’s Sound-off Blog: Now you can take the challenge they publish in their magazine on-line. This time their is a marketing manager left out of a sales promotion program. Don’t you think the guy deserves a trip to Tahiti?

While I had a couple articles tagged to continue the Back to Basics series, today’s email from MarketingProfs delivered a great piece titled How to Test Your Competitive Market Strategy. This draws on many elements of strategic analysis, quoting top-shelf names like Jeffery Pfeiffer and classic tools like SWOT:

The basic 101 lesson:
“There are no silver bullets when it comes to competitive strategy. Like the development of most plans, the benefits of models or frameworks, such as SWOT, often come in the act of completing it, not in the final plan or model. The SWOT process is a good jumping-off point in terms of identifying which areas require a more in-depth, strategic analysis. The resulting strategy should be flexible, anticipatory, and focused, not static.”

The 600 level discussion:
“There are many ways to determine the attractiveness of a market, including understanding its size, its growth trends, and its potential. However, regardless of that information, if it’s full of strong, deep-pocketed competitors, it may too costly to gain a foothold. The nuance there is that a number of unattractive markets can be profitably exploited through various ‘disruptions’ or innovative business models.”

The article’s length corresponds with the complexity of the subject matter, but I think it is a great piece to read or reread if you are going looking at basic business analysis/strategy. If you are looking to go with the 600-level distruptive exploit, I’d recommend Kathy Sierra’s Equalizer Slider concept for breakthrough ideas.

I should have made it ‘back to basics for two weeks’, but that doesn’t really have the same ring to it. But I’ve run out of time to make any more posts. I stayed home with the kids yesterday (school closed due to minor ice storm), and today I have a big meeting that wasn’t planned. And, honestly, there are a couple other things on my mind.

I will post at least two more pieces in the Back to Basics series next week.

(Side note: Does anyone out there have experience with business/product strategy software? Someone I know has some interest in this ‘expert’ software right now and asked for my help. Drop me a line. Thanks.)

Remember Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax where the Once-ler invented the Thneed? “A Thneed’s a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!” he told the Lorax. And the Once-ler was lucky enough to be right (at the cost of the Truffula trees).

Unfortunately, we all don’t sell products that All-People-Need. B2B marketers especially are marketing vertically. Vertical marketing refers to targeting a specific industry or application with a specific solution. (Comparable to niche marketing in B2C.)

The Basic 101 lesson from Smart Marketing Blog: A great example of vertical marketing:
“Companies are now beginning to understand that when you vertically market to a population segment you improve the focus of your efforts and messaging. For example, I have seen the Segway transporters for a while now, and always wondered why I would need one.”

The 600 level discussion:
We all thought the Segway was cool when it came out, but who would use it? They did target postal carriers initially, which was vertical, but maybe a bit misplaced. Targeting golfers is a great second try, as it reaches for a demographic that is fussy about their game and is willing to spend money on it. (In a B2B sense, the Segways would be sold to golf courses, who then rent them out.)

Vertical doesn’t always make sense in every case, but it is an important strategic decision. Sometimes its smarter to start vertical and then expand. Yesterday’s local paper featured the Speed Stacker cup-stacking game that the inventor started by selling to phys-ed teachers. This fall, Wal-mart will be carrying his cups.

…do it well, for pete’s sake!

The accused: National Instruments.
The evidence: An ad with a crossword puzzle in Lab Equipment Magazine and on LE’s website.
The accolade: Great idea to draw in readers with a puzzle with technical questions.
The crime: Making the questions center too closely about NI.

The argument: Okay, it’s their ad, they have a right to talk about the products and brands. Out of 19 crossword questions, roughly half relate to their products or brand. Two are actually hot-linked to answers about their products. But what bugs me are clues like these:

7. National Instruments CEO nickname
9. Inventor of LabVIEW

I was familiar enough with their company to answer the question about what city they are headquartered in, but these two especially smack of ‘inside baseball’. I understand that they were trying to mix-up the clues so they weren’t all technical or promotional, but how about some fun questions?

Besides, they are marketing to the Dilberts of the world. And you know how much Dilbert cares about CEOs. (Perhaps there was some suck-up going on?)

The sentence: Eat your investment in this issue. Study what GlobalSpec had to say about marketing with games to engineers. Then re-run the crossword (looks like it will be a series anyway), but think harder about the puzzle clues. The devil is in the details.

Last month I pointed to a column by Scott Dalgleish on the vagueness of quality claims. In this Month’s Quality Magazine, he brings a basic product/marketing question of quality.

Probing the Limits: Taking the Quality High Ground – Column – Quality:

“I’m currently designing a line of product for my business and I’m facing some fundamental quality questions. Do I develop a high-quality product or a cheaper low-quality product? This isn’t an easy question.

My inclination as a quality professional is to develop a high-quality product without even thinking about it, but that could be a foolish approach. As I drive past discount stores with packed parking lots, I quickly realize how much consumers love low prices.”

The basic 101 lesson:
Reading this article reminded me my MBA economics classes, which I really enjoyed because of the order it creates with such complex questions. It all is based on the supply and demand curves that intersect. Here is a good review of supply and demand with interactive curves. Scott also realizes that price, cost, and quality are not also always dependent on each other.

The 600 level case study:
Right now most of us are dealing with existing products, or new products similar to others, so that we can make some assessments of the market, at least in an educated gut/Blink-style. Scott’s problem is that there is no existing supply or demand curve for his new product. While he decides that market testing will help him decide, he also acknowledges that his final decision will be the one he can live with.

The column sums up with this subhead: “Feeling good about making a high-quality product can be just as important as being profitable.” Agree or disagree?

I had a request for an update on the GTD-PHP web server application that I installed last month. First off, it has been updated and the SourceForge page has come alive. The update has not impacted the root database yet, which makes for an easy upgrade (but means no major feature changes). See the current demo to see it in action.

Overall the application is working fine. It falls short in a couple details, but I like its usability. If you read some of the feature-requests on the SourceForge site, you can get an idea of some of the issues. For example, I’ve added a letter prefix to each of my projects so they sort out as Home, Work, Personal, Church. I also added projects titled: “Someday/Maybe” and “Home Tasks” for holding ideas and misc. small project/NA. The one thing I’d really like to do is be able to flip an item from next-action to waiting-for and back. They have added a new page with the steps for doing a weekly review, which I must start using.

I’ve also finished reading the Getting Things Done book, so I have a better appreciation of the way the GTD-PHP application is set up. I don’t use the tool for every next-action, but it is a comfortable way to maintain an actual list of things to do, available whenever I need it. I feel organized and in control! My biggest personal concern is the trap David Allen warns about, which is listing ‘tasks’ and not ‘next-actions’.