Flaming Turdbag Competitive Strategy

What’s your flaming turdbag competitive strategy?

This is neither an idle question nor a gratuitous vulgarity. The fact of the matter is that any business prospers by solving problems that others are unable or unwilling to solve. Some businesses achieve modest success by solving modestly distasteful problems. But if you want big success and loyal customers, look for the business equivalent of a flaming bag of poop on your customers’ doorstep. Solve that and win big.

First example: Wal-mart. Their retail competitors in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s chose to not compete in small towns. These locations were logistically difficult to serve and customers there were loyal to the local merchants. So K-Mart, Sears and other competitors stayed away from those small towns, just as you’d step around a flaming bag of poop on your doorstep. Wal-mart developed the logistics expertise to serve small and midsize towns and, in doing so, grew into a behemoth. The embraced what their competitors considered a flaming turdbag and consequently defeated those competitors.

I know not everyone likes Wal-mart for various reasons. Whether you like them or not, they became the world’s number one retailer by innovating on multiple fronts. Much has been written about their innovation in information technology and logistics. But the innovation that really mattered was embracing a flaming turdbag.

Second example: Fedex. Guaranteed overnight delivery anywhere isn’t easy. For UPS and USPS in the 1970′s, it was about as attractive as a flaming bag of poop. So they stayed away from it. Fred Smith of Fedex, in contrast, built an entire business around that promise. Urban legend says that his business plan got a C in graduate school. We know this isn’t true because Smith never attended graduate school. But the story sounds credible because business school professors, like venture capitalists, like things that scale easily, infinitely, and without a lot of sweat (which is why they love SaaS, software-as-a-service, models). They certainly don’t like flaming turdbags.

Embracing a flaming turdbag doesn’t guarantee success. In fact, it’s a sure road to failure if you embrace the first one you see. Nearly all of them can and should be stepped around by customers, competitors and you. Fire is dangerous. Poop is stinky. Combine the two, and who wants to deal with something like that if they can avoid it?

But when you see one that customers can’t avoid and competitors repeatedly refuse to solve, look at the situation carefully. How can you solve it? How much will customers pay you to solve it? How much of a lead in the market can you get? If you look at examples like the music industry, you’ll reach the conclusion that competitors will let you get pretty far ahead before dealing with a flaming turdbag like digital downloads.

Do you have a flaming turdbag competitive strategy? If not, is your competitor going to take your customers by embracing one?

I’ve Been Giving You Bad Advice

After a conversation with a friend who’s recently made a great career move, I realized I’ve been giving bad advice for some time now. Not terrible advice,  just not as good as it could be. Based on a couple of career learnings (read “missteps”), I’ve always counseled people to “only get involved in a business where you can be passionate about the product.”

Seems reasonable enough, and seems to fit with my career learnings. But there’s something deeper that I figured out over coffee with my friend.

Whatever industry you’re in, products come and go. It’s hard to remain passionate about every version of every product you’re ever involved in marketing. And yet, the best marketers seem to do it. What’s their trick?

Turns out they give almost the same advice I do. Only, instead of “be passionate about the product”, they say “be passionate about the customer.” Big difference. Most businesses serve only a few types of customers. Think of a toy manufacturer – thousands of products, hard to care deeply about each one. But if you’re passionate about making children happy, taking each one of those products to market will be a delight.

Apologies if the advice I gave formerly damaged your career and landed you on skid row. But it still wasn’t bad advice. It’s just that my friend’s advice is better.

Photo by Bob Formal

Making it Sound Easy – Even When it’s Not!

Wow! Five easy steps! Signing on to wi-fi in a coffee shop normally requires one or two steps. Thanks for simplifying it for me!

I especially enjoyed the scavenger hunt for the Ripple TV (whatever that is). The code is in small letters, requiring customers to walk across the coffee shop. As long as you’re forcing your customers to jump through hoops, throw in one more: require them to do the ‘Hokey Pokey’ prior to connecting for even more fun!

Are you adding extra steps to the way you serve customers? Are they really necessary? (If the competition doesn’t find them necessary, they’re probably not. And you’re probably losing customers to that simpler competition). Recruiting a Marketing copywriter to make those extra steps sound easy and fun is the very essence of turd-polishing.

Precision Words

Sometimes you’re asked to contribute marketing copy to a non-marketing deliverable. Maybe a login page.

Here are the fields to fill in, here’s the ‘submit’ button…over here on the right, let’s fill it out with a little marketing copy. You know, just something that makes the customer feel good about logging in. Fluffy, feel-good marketing stuff. That’s what you do, right?

You’re the only expert in that meeting who understands this: marketing copy is a tool. Not a filler. Words either deliver or dilute the message.

So don’t let yourself be sent off with that blank template to fill out until you’ve answered the key questions. What is the goal of this login page? Who’s logging into what? Why would they want to? Why do we want them to?

Then go craft the language as a precision tool that accomplishes the goal as surely as a Phillips screwdriver slides into the crossed grooves. Edit ruthlessly. Suddenly marketing goes from being the fluffiest part of the business to the most disciplined and demanding team in the house. Pretty cool, huh?

Thanks to @chilkari for pointing out that this applies to ALL writing, not just marketing copy

photo by saebaryo

My Tweak is Your Monkey Wrench

This post isn’t just about Marketing. It’s about workplace etiquette in a world where work is complex and requires relying on people who know how to do things that we don’t. People like your mechanic, your Web developer, your accountant…even, sometimes, your marketer.

Because surfing the Web doesn’t make you an expert on Web design any more than watching NASCAR qualifies you to change a spark plug. You know what you want and that’s fine. Don’t assume, though, that because the change looks small to you it’s actually a small change request. Which means this: unless you know exactly how much work is involved, don’t call it a ‘tweak’.

We use the word ‘tweak’ to convey ‘I don’t think this is a big deal.’ Sometimes, though, it is. We don’t know the difference because we aren’t the ones who know how to do that work.

So I suggested requesting ‘changes’ rather than ‘tweaks’. No one will freak out. In fact, they’ll thank you for letting them assess the size of the requested changes, rather than characterizing what could be several hours of work as a ‘tweak.’

Photo by Dunechaser. And yes, that’s Kaylee Frye as a Playmobil person

Dance of the Sugar Plum Smartphone

When playing with data, few things are more fun than putting two possibly unrelated sets together and speculating about the relationship. First, let’s consider this Neilsen data showing increasing smartphone adoption. More and more people are capable of running a Google search on whatever burning question comes to mind, no matter where they are. Even, perhaps, at the ballet.

Now let’s look at search volume for the string ‘how long is the Nutcracker Ballet’ over the past few years. Notice the increasing heights of the December spikes. Is the increased adoption of mobile platforms driving an increase in furtive Googling sometime right after the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy?

No, the time axes aren’t the same. But you have to admit it’s fun to look at data like this and speculate. Happy Holidays!

Who’s Educating Who?

Why do marketers use the phrase “educating the customer” so often? I can think of a few possibilities:

• Customers aren’t buying. If they don’t know that our solution is what they need, they must need education so they can become as smart as us.
• Our solution isn’t complete. Customers need to be educated in order to know that we sell computers, but they’re on their own in terms of finding a monitor.
• Our solution isn’t meeting customer expectations. The data we sell is the best we can produce, but when customers look at it they say “there are errors in this data.” We need to teach them that their standards are too high. (Would a restaurant with this attitude last a second?)

None of these scenarios are flattering to the marketer. And they’re all, frankly, a bit arrogant. They start from the precept that we know more than the customer. Our job is to smarten the customer up. School is in session. Because our solutions are complex.

Customers’ problems, on the other hand, are quite simple. Even in the technical realm, they just want the network to be up or the software to do whatever it is they bought it to do. B2B buyers want to get on with business, and consumers want to get on with their life. A solution that does that will be welcomed.

And a marketer who assumes the role of pupil and says “customers, please educate me” will do very well indeed.

Dear Product Team

I know you worked hard on it. You scoped it, you managed it, you built it, you released it. You’re rightfully proud of it.

But the fact that a Product team built it doesn’t, in itself, make it a ‘product’.

It’s a product when the value can be packaged in such a way that a customer will pay money (or exchange value in some other way, like attention or loyalty) for it. Without that element, it’s not a product. It may be a fantastic enhancement, solve a thorny problem with an existing product, or just be really cool. Good stuff. Just not a product.

If you want to be sure you’re building a product, have a good conversation at the start about how that value will be packaged. Make a small note about that in the upper left-hand corner of your whiteboard. Glance up and to the left anytime scope creeps or requirements shift.

If you’ll do that, it helps me help you. And I want to help in any way I can.

Love,

Marketing

Do you know who @I am?

Everybody loves a good “social media lets @everyperson take down a corporate Goliath” story. I enjoyed seeing Dave Carroll take an indifferent United Airlines to task for breaking his guitar and quickly soar to over 5MM views and major media coverage. There are plenty of stories validating that a complaint aired on Twitter gets quick attention, and it was funny to see Horizon Realty’s cluelessness in attempting to respond to a ‘libelous’ tweet.

But there’s a dark side to social media’s ability to break down barriers. I was delighted that Heather B. Armstrong finally got her Maytag washing machine fixed. I don’t begrudge her tweeting about it, or even asking the customer service rep “do you know what Twitter is.” Because it sounds like she had a terrible experience and an awful day, and I’d probably have tweeted it too. So where’s the dark side?

Well, Heather (a.k.a. @Dooce)  has over a million followers on Twitter. As great as it is that anyone can tweet their dissatisfaction, “some animals are more equal than others”, to quote Orwell. With about 1K followers, I might or might not get as quick or satisfactory a response as she did. And I know plenty of folks with less than a hundred Twitter followers because they’re in it for reasons other than amassing followers. I’m not sure that this new stratification – based on social media-enabled connections rather than family connections, political clout, or good old-fashioned wealth – is better than old styles of stratification.

Recently a customer had an issue signing up for service at the company where I work, and he contacted us about it. When I saw that his title was “social media strategist”, I picked up the phone just a little more quickly than I might have otherwise. I felt exactly as I felt about giving extra attentive service to the local millionaire or celebrity back in my bartending days.

Anyone at the top of the new stratification may disagree and claim that they’ve earned their clout through hard work – and you can do the same, if you’re willing to work for it. There’s some truth to that nouveau riche-sounding claim, but I’m pretty sure most of us won’t equal Ashton Kutcher or even Heather Armstrong with any amount of effort. And so, quicker than we might like, social capital is in the hands of the social capitalists, and we get back to that old question “Do you know who I am?”

Anyone who’s ever felt privilege – even the temporary privilege of drinking for free because your band is hot at the moment – believes that they’ve earned it through their hard work, natural talent or smarts. Should I accept that the invisible hand is allocating whuffie as fairly as Adam Smith believed it allocated wealth? Am I just having an uncharacteristically negative evening? Am I  searching for the cloud in the social media silver lining? Am I simply envious? I’m not sure I’ll like the answers to those questions. But I’m hitting ‘Publish’ regardless.

Photo by irLordy

Strategy Dollars versus Bake Sale Bucks

My first post-business-school job was at a shrinking company in a shrinking market space. My role was to provide the data analysis and support on major deals. Often those deals amounted to trying to reduce the bleeding by retaining large customers at reduced rates – deals our VP would call “strategic wins.” The other analyst and I joked that the day would come when we’d get paid in strategy dollars. We had a mock strategy dollar (with a picture of the VP) that we’d pass back and forth to whoever was working on the biggest, losingest, most strategic win.

In other roles I’ve seen even Fortune 500 companies hold bake sales. Think of a retail store that is short of the mark and starts selling off the fixtures. Yes, they hit the monthly goal, but would you invest in that store? Those are bake sale dollars. You can hold a bake sale to make up a cash shortfall on any given day, but it’s not a sustainable business model (unless you’re a bakery). Bake sales can take the form of a holiday discount that’s a few points deeper every year or of selling the intellectual property that the core business model is based on. Can you repeat what you did this month and scale it up? If you can’t, you have a bake sale where you need a business model.

Would you invest in a company that promised to pay you returns in strategy dollars? How comfortable would you be with an investment that generated this month’s return from a bake sale that couldn’t be repeated next month? If we wouldn’t invest under those conditions, how can we as managers possibly claim those as wins?

Photo by tiny banquet committee