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Signs with Manners

July 19, 2017 //
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There’s a new-ish kind of road sign on Irish roads. I like it. The sign combines a speed camera and an instruction.

When you’re travelling along a road with a certain speed limit, the sign shows you the speed you’re going. If you’re going in excess of the speed limit, which is also displayed in the sign, the speed shows red. When you dip under the speed, it shows green. Crucially, after it shows you your speed in green it then posts a ‘thank you’, also in green.

These are signs with manners. They thank you for obeying their rules. But, crucially, they remind you about the speed limit in a creative way and also encourage you to drive below the limit. You comply, and you get your reward, someone’s – or something’s – thanks.

I have no data on this, but I would imagine that these new-ish signs are effective, certainly more effective than other kinds. Until, perhaps, we tire of the novelty factor. But will we ever tire of someone using good manners?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language

Work and Public Transport

July 12, 2017 //
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Work and public transport don’t really play nice, do they? At least in rural Ireland, as I discovered to my cost the other day.

I needed to go and see the company that was doing the accounts for my limited company and for me and her ladyship as individuals. We only keep one car between us, and as MGL (aka My Good Lady) needed it to go further than me, into Galway city, I decided that I would use my legs, combined with public transport to go from my town, to the neighbouring town for the meeting, a mere 15km away.

Now I say town, but by English standards these would be 2 villages, with about 3 and 5 thousand people respectively in them. Although I don’t think there’s a bus service between the 2 places, on paper it was easy: walk to the train station, take a 10 minute train journey, and walk to the company’s office for a 2pm meeting.

I ambled down to my local station with the insouciance of a man on a day’s holiday, and collected my pre-booked ticket from the machine. So far so good. My train was an inter-city train, and my destination was the one stop before the train’s final destination.

The train was half an hour late. Apparently a train had problems earlier in the day and all subsequent services were backed up. This had the effect of depositing me at my destination station at 2pm, the time I needed to be at my meeting. This train station used to be located right in the town, but 5 or 10 years ago had been rebuilt in a new location which was – literally – in the middle of nowhere. It was laughable. It was almost as if the location had been picked precisely for its maximum inconvenience. No-one except those with oodles of time on their hands could do anything but drive to the station to use it.

A half hour’s walk later I was at the office for my meeting, 2:30 instead of 2pm. Fortunately it was a nice day, and double fortunately I was able to put my meeting back. What struck me, however, was how difficult it would be to work or run a business where I live without a car. Public transportation here is too unreliable and too skeleton, not does it make financial sense for the powers that be to lay on more of a service.

I don’t have the answer. I do have an answer, which is that work and public transport don’t mix well. Not until we move to a society where you can pick up a driverless car or a Coke Car locally, rather like a Coke Bike, and leave it at a handy communal destination. For now though, 90 minutes from door to door to go 15 km does not go…

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Categories Customers, General

Product Marketing in Agile Environments #4

July 10, 2017 //
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In this last post, for now, in the mini-series on product marketing in agile environments, I offer you my third thought on what has worked well for me. In fact, I talked about it briefly at the end of my second thought.

The third thought is this – and how difficult is that to say for a non-native speaker, with 2 voiced ‘th’ sounds and 2 voiceless ones! – leave the detail until the end. The detail is the filler, the proof points, the things that are only needed when the audience has engaged and wants to go deeper.

In your earlier iterations of the content to support your new product or enhancement, you focused on the high level, the really important stuff that resonates with your audience, the reason why you developed the product in the first place. People are busy, they are subject to a constant, heavy flow of information. They don’t have perfect memories; they’re only going to remember one thing you tell them, if you’re lucky, and you’re probably going to have to tell them multiple times anyway.

This is a good thing, because in an agile environment the exact detail of what you’re offering isn’t decided and baked in until the end. So your job is to build up the interest and demand with high level, highly distilled and focused messaging which helps your personas self-select. Once they have engaged and want to know more, then you can hit them with the detail which you now have.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Product Marketing in Agile Environments #2

July 5, 2017 //
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In a previous post I introduced a mini-series offering thoughts and experience on how to do product marketing in an environment where agile software development creates a sea of small releases rather than a desert with a few major milestones affording you time to circle the wagons.

My first thought is that you should stay true to the principles of what you’re trying to do. Faced with a barrage of product enhancements and releases of all sizes and shapes, you have to prioritise in terms of your audience, your audience segments, and their personas.

What is most important to them? What will attract their customers and keep them loyal? What does your enhancement or release do to help them help their customers? Answering these questions should drive what you devote to building a story about, and, perhaps more importantly, what you choose not to focus on.

When you wear this special lens which focuses on what their customers care about, you can develop messaging which helps your customer solve these problems or capitalise on these opportunities. It’s never about your products’ features and functions, unless they uniquely guide your customers to an understanding of how you can solve their real problem, which is sometimes not the problem they think they have.

Don’t get bogged down in the iterations of your solution, get bogged down in why your customers should care about where you’re heading.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Product Marketing in Agile Environments #1

July 3, 2017 //
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I thought it worthwhile to do a short series on product marketing in an agile environment.

Many product marketers are used to gearing up to perhaps 3 major releases a year. They have runway, they can plan with an end goal in mind, and they have time to align the resources and get the detail right.

When faced with an agile software development methodology, however, they find the traditional approach more difficult, since the cadence is now ‘sprints’ every two weeks and a release every three weeks, or something of that order. It requires a different approach.

First, however, some definitions are probably in order. By product marketing I mean the process of influencing customers to buy – and enabling sales people to sell – business-to-business products. Agile software development is the process of developing software in iterations and a bit at a time, allowing for flexibility and course correction on the way, rather than traditionally going from a start to a finish line in one big go. Noice that I’m not talking about agile marketing, which is essentially doing marketing activities in a way that borrows from agile software development.

What tends to happen to marketers not used to agile are the following symptoms:

  • You’re not sure what you’ll be getting in the end product
  • You’re not sure when you’ll be getting it (stifle your sniggers if you can make that argument for traditional development…)
  • Stuff happens and the product is out there before you’re ready or before you even know about it

What product marketers generally prefer is a small number of large meaty releases that they can get their teeth into. With agile you can sometimes feel you’re faced with a roadmap littered with lots of small releases, all vying for attention.

It’s against this background that I thought the subject warranted a mini-series. Stay tuned if this is your bag. If not, feel free to click away…

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Content Marketing Hunger

June 28, 2017 //
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Content marketing, the business of producing and promoting online the kinds of materials which educate and edify rather than overtly sell what you have, relies on an endless stream of idea and information, even in an era where constant recycling and repurposing is not only the norm but considered a best practice.

I do quite a bit of content marketing, paid and unpaid. In fact I suppose what you’re reading right now is a form of content marketing. It demands quite a portfolio of skills, like creativity, writing ability, attention to detail, and organisational prowess to name but a few. There’s one thing above all else, however, that it needs in my opinion.

You have to have a hunger. A hunger to acquire. Content marketing hunger is what drives you to devour information in the hunt for inspiration you can turn into information of value to the people who want to read your stuff. It’s a kind of inquisitiveness that has given me 599 ideas and counting for blog posts, and that’s just for my hobby, not my day job.

The information doesn’t have to be about your domain of expertise either. Information from all areas helps spark ideas that you can synthesise and shape into meaningful new content for your audience.

If you stay hungry, and stay curious, you’ll always have the catalyst for content.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

Ryanair and Sitting Together

June 26, 2017 //
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Well, they’ve finally done it. They’ve enforced the algorithm. The party’s over.

Let me explain. With Ryanair you pay a base price and then you can pay for optional extras like priority boarding ahead of the plebs, choose your seat, insurance, car hire, extra bags, that kind of thing. You can check in early if you pay to choose your seat, or you wait til 5 days before departure and take pot luck on seat choice for no extra bucks.

If you were travelling with someone, however, and had booked your flight in the same transaction, although Ryanair always said that there was no guarantee you could sit next to that person for free, you always did. Until now. Well, until a few weeks ago, when they obviously tweaked the seat allocation algorithm.

When I checked in, those few weeks ago – 5 days before my flight with my daughter, who’s under 14, I went straight to the boarding pass stage, eschewing the pay-for-your-seat option and – lo and behold – she’s at the back of the plane and I’m at the front. What’s more, both of us got middle seats. Ryanair and sitting together no longer applies unless you pay. There is no more base price if you want to sit next to your friend or family member.

I wonder if the algorithm would still apply and they would split us up, were my daughter 3 rather than 13…either way, it’s a case of Ryanair further squeezing the rag to get another couple of drops out of it. Bearing in mind a few years ago they were making about €11 profit per traveller, another €4 for a chosen seat is a tidy uplift. I wonder how much customer goodwill will leak as a consequence.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Queueing Theory

June 23, 2017 //
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I was waiting for a colleague of mine a few Saturdays ago, in the lobby of the local credit union – which is a bit like a local community bank. When I got there there was no-one in the queue, and I had been in earlier, when business was very slow. Five minutes later there were 6 in the queue. Just my luck I thought, and it reminded me of the old adage about waiting for a bus and then three come at once – although I suspect that has more to do with bus drivers moving in packs because they can complete their route more quickly by alternating which bus picks up the poor punters at which stop.

Queuing theory is fascinating. The whole science of it fascinates me both as an observer and a not very patient queuer. Back in the day we would all queue for a specific teller, and it was always a trick as to which line to pick. These days you see banks employing one queue which then distributes to the next available teller, and you see it also in some parts of supermarkets, airport passport controls and retail outlets. But, then again, you still see situations where you queue for your teller of choice, like in, well, other parts of supermarkets, airport passport controls and retail outlets.

I remember doing a bit of queuing theory at college when I was doing my MBA. It involves quite a bit of calculus – a subject which always sends me thinking about the unbelievably clever soul centuries ago who invented those formulas in the first place.

I mentioned this to my colleague when he turned up. As it turned out, he had an even more nerdy interest in queueing theory than I did, and we then proceeded to debate the strategies of some retailers to offer fewer servers so that the longer queues deter people from revisiting, pushing them online, though it’s highly risky.

But, the fact that you can use mathematics to account for and plan around the sheer randomness of something like people turning up somewhere and queuing is amazing to me.

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Categories Communication, Customers

The 4:3 Work:Play Balance

June 21, 2017 //
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It seems to me slightly unfair that in the main most of us have to work 5 days for 2 days off. Your working week and your weekend; one is longer and goes slow, the other shorter and goes fast.

It’s an evolution I suppose. In earlier times we were working 7 days a week, because we were hunter-gatherers, or we were slaves. We were literally working to survive. Then comes the industrial revolution and the factory existence and it wasn’t uncommon to be working 6 days and get one solitary day off to recover. A hard life, and one which I’m sure a good number of people still have to endure.

Starting from the other end, if you’re working no days or one day a week, you’re probably independently wealthy, or you can rely on someone else to bring in the bread. If you’re 2 days on and 5 days off, or perhaps 3 days on and 4 days off, then you work part-time in my book. Nothing wrong with that at all. It works great for many millions.

Which brings us back to where I started. 5 days of work and 2 days of play doesn’t feel all that evolved to me. 4 days working, however, and 3 days to yourself – well, that feels a lot more equitable. If your work situation is flexible enough that you can fit your working week into 4 days, or if you can get by on 4 days’ income rather than 5, then that feels a lot fairer to me.

There are 168 hours in a week, of which we’re asleep for about 58, leaving 110 hours left. When you factor in getting ready for work, getting to work, lunch, getting back from work and getting changed, that’s about an 11-hour day, or half of the 110 hours at your disposal if you work 5 days. Half the hours are work-related, so my feeling is the balance of days should be closer to half as well.

We simply need to have the right culture and make the economics work for the 4:3 work:play balance.

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Categories Customers, General

Sport is in the Entertainment Business

June 12, 2017 //
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Sport is in many ways the descendant of the gladiatorial contents from ancient times. You have your protagonists, or your actors, and you have your audience. The job is to entertain the audience of paying customers.

The other day I took my mother to a cricket match near where she lives. It was a match between England and Ireland, what’s called a One Day International, and the first of a 2-match series. England, as I write this, are the world leaders in this version of the sport, and Ireland are fast coming up on the rails into the top tier of international cricket. England’s pool of players to draw upon is massive, Ireland’s is tiny.

This was a 50-over match, so each team receives 300 deliveries from the opposition to score as many runs as they can. Whoever scores more runs, wins. A lot rides on the toss of the coin as to who decides to bat first or bowl first. The decision hangs on many things, like ability, confidence, the pitch condition, and the weather. Ireland has beaten England once before in a memorable ‘ODI’ in the World Cup over a decade ago.

Ireland won the toss and decided to bat first. ‘Uh oh, I said to my mum, ‘that could shorten the day considerably.’ Ireland were duly skittled out for about 130 – 300 is a good score – , lasting barely half the 300 deliveries they were entitled to, and England knocked off the runs required with about 200 deliveries to spare. Instead of the match being scheduled to finish at 6:45 pm, it finished about 3pm.

I was furious at what I considered to be arrogance on the part of the Irish captain to opt to bat first. He obviously felt he could win the match, but generally it’s better to bat second, because you know what the target is and you know the run-rate you need to get there. In my view, his thought process should have been: ‘You know what, this is a big step up for us, and a big chance for us to shine. It’s also the first game in the series, and there’s going to be an adjustment period as we step up. Let’s put England in, they’ll probably score about 300, and we can give ourselves a chance and not panic.’

What he also should have said was, and this is going to sound like heresy: ‘You know what, we’re in the entertainment business, and there are 15,000 paying fans out there, 90% of whom have come to see England play. They’ll get more value out of the day, and we’ll have more chance, if we bat second.’

We can’t forget that sport is in the entertainment business, with the emphasis on business. If you’re David against Goliath, you should let him do his thing first, give the crowd a show, see what he’s got and then you might see a weakness and sneak a win. You’ve got no chance otherwise, and people will stop paying to see what looks on paper like a one-sided show. After all, look what happened the last time?

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Strategy
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