STEP #2: Imaginitive Marketing… based on Boringly Consistent Messages

(expanded from “5 STEPS TO GROW AN INSURGENT BUSINESS“)

In STEP #1, we defined our core proposition, an innovation of such value to a specific audience that it outweighs the risks of buying from a newcomer. Here in STEP #2, we discuss how to communicate our offer to potential customers, kicking-off the sales process.

But first, a couple of home-truths about the marketing environment in which we live as insurgents…

No one knows who we are, or what we do. Even if we are part of a larger, diversifying organisation, our brand has limited value if we are addressing a truly new space.
Everyone is permanently bombarded with marketing. To cut through in this ultra-noisy environment, our messaging must be:
- Relevant
- Succinct
- Remarkable
- Understandable
- Consistent
- Repeated regularly
We have a limited budget, every $ of marketing spend has to count.
It’s individuals who make decisions, not faceless departments, companies or markets. As discussed in STEP #1, the core of our challenge is to change human behaviour, which we know is really tough.
Scepticism is inescapable. The poor success rate of new businesses is widely known. Many people within our stakeholder community (customers, partners, investors, even some employees) expect us to fail. (We will return to this topic in STEP #5: EVERY SUCCESSFUL INSURGENT NEEDS EVANGELISTS).
The clock is ticking. We have limited time before:
1. We run out of money, and/or
2. We lose the faith of our backers.

In this context, Marketing isn’t a nice-to-have activity, it’s fundamental to the success of the insurgent business.

Positioning Statements

For me, every new product introduction starts with a Positioning Statement, one of the most valuable tools I took from business school. Written like a single sentence, it comprehensively defines the customer value proposition on a single page:

As per many of the best business tools, the simplicity of the output belies the value of the effort & thinking required to create it.

When I first give a blank Positioning Statement to technical folks (R&D, Product Marketing Engineers, etc.), I invariably receive at least 3 pages of {Unique differentiators}, explaining in depth where our new product beats the competition, parameter by parameter. Whilst this is a valuable starting point, it has to be distilled into a simple, succinct message.

Remember, no one knows who we are, or what we do. We have just a couple of seconds to grab someone’s attention as they scroll past our press release, walk past our (tiny) exhibition booth, scan the first page of our website, etc. The headline has to be powerful enough to get members of our target audience to pause and absorb. And by the time they have come across that same, consistent message 10 times across different media, they may just want to learn a little more.

The power of a well-written Positioning Statement is that you can share it across your organisation, and your marketing agencies, to drive a consistent result. Your press releases, website, sales collateral, social media engagement, individual customer presentations, product packaging should all seek to state and reinforce the core proposition. Even R&D, when they are looking to add bells & whistles to the product, will have the context to judge what’s in and what’s out.

Internally, you should be completely bored of repeating the same message over & over again. However, hugely diluted by real world mass marketing, by the time your prospects are on the receiving end, each snippet will be but a fleeting glance of your offering.

For the creative marketing folks, the key challenge is to find 10 different, impactful ways to say exactly the same thing.

Generic vs Specific Messaging

In STEP #1, we spoke about balancing product innovation (driving differentiation) with customer familiarity (facilitating adoption). Here, we are faced with another balancing act – do we target a small, very well-defined niche or a larger market segment with greater sales potential? Obviously, more potential customers are tempting. However, the broader our target market definition, the less precise we can be with our messaging, risking that our communications don’t land effectively with prospective customers. The answer invariably lies somewhere in the middle but when you can’t quite decide, I would generally recommend that insurgents lean towards smaller, better defined opportunities. Secure those first wins, build momentum and grow from there.

the Industrial Market is a Fallacy

There is no such thing as the “Industrial Market”. It is a convenient, catch-all label for a collection of disparate, smaller markets each with their own characteristics. Sure, you can add up the sizes of all these different markets (or more usually subtract the sizes of obviously non-Industrial markets such as Automotive & Consumer from the total and call it Industrial!) to arrive at an impressively large number but it is completely useless in terms of creating targeted messages that mean something to the intended audience, it’s just too vague. As insurgent marketeers, we need to dive many levels deeper to identify addressable targets.

B2C vs B2B Decision Making

Marketing 1.01 tells us that consumer purchases are largely driven by emotion, where brand is important, but that business purchasing is driven by logic because the “decision making unit (DMU)” consists of experts from different departments. Such wisdom collectively comes to the “right” choice for the company. What a load of hogwash!

In a corporate environment, where the downside for failure is so much worse than the upside for success, the purchasing committee becomes incredibly conservative, with no one wanting to put their head above the parapet and suggest something new. This is where the mantra, “No one gets fired for buying IBM”, came from in the era of mainframe computing. The tried & tested solution might be twice the price of the newer alternative but if it all goes wrong, we can roll out the “we bought the best” excuse (and in more hushed tones, “it’s not our money anyway”).

Rory Sutherland (see Further Reading below) is very good on this topic.

Customer Champions

Risk-averse purchasing committees are obviously bad news for insurgents trying to break new ground. When you are reviewing your list of potential customers, beware spending too much time chasing opportunities in organisations where this is an entrenched purchasing approach.

One antidote to risk-averse purchasing is the “customer champion”. These are people who have the vision, interest and determination to challenge the status quo within their own organisations. Some are mavericks who do not command the respect of their management, but many are powerful influencers. When you find such champions, latch onto them and give them every support possible to help them sell your concept internally within the customer.

Timing is Everything

In all of our marketing communications, you need to consider the prospect’s likely position in the sales cycle and define the messaging & call-to-action accordingly. You can’t eat an elephant in one sitting and you are not going to close a sale on the first interaction. What do you ideally want the recipient of your communication to do? Visit your website? Read a review? Download a specification? Share a video? Request some samples? Call your technical sales team? Place an order? Marketing textbooks sometimes refer to the acronym “AIDA” which stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. It’s a useful mnemonic to check that your communication is encouraging the relevant customer response.

Amplifying Your Message

As an insurgent, you rarely have all the pieces of the puzzle. Likely your innovation will be part of a larger system.

One cost-effective method to amplify and extend the reach of your message is to partner with other companies within the ecosystem. If your product improves the overall solution, you will usually get a good hearing because everyone wants to show off their own offering in the best light. You can even end up with other companies selling on your behalf and adding vital credibility to your start-up status.

Obviously, this approach works best when there is little overlap between your product roadmap and those of your chosen partners.

Scarcity Value

Scarcity has value in marketing communications just as it does in other areas.

Homes used to be deluged with direct mail which invariably went straight in the bin without opening. In an era when physical mail volumes are falling (e-mail, e-billing, social media, etc.), a professionally presented, personalised letter can really stand out.

Two former INMOS colleagues of mine, Mark Mason MBE and Simon Zimbler, left to start their own advertising agency. They invited potential clients and influential journalists to their launch event where the RSVP was by way of carrier pigeons! Do something different to stand out.

Demos

If a picture paints a thousand words, then a working demonstration paints a thousand pictures (or Powerpoint slides!). But a word of warning… the goal of a demo is not simply to show that your product can be used to build something the customer makes, they will know better than you how to design their particular type of equipment. The goal is to reinforce the benefits of your unique features in a relevant, interesting and eye-catching manner.

Case Study: “The Big Pull”

When I was at Nexperia, we launched some power MOSFET devices designed specifically for companies engineering high torque, low speed motor control equipment such as fork-lift trucks, automated warehouse robots and similar. Our differentiation was to run cool whilst managing the high currents associated with these types of systems. I challenged our team to create an impactful, relevant, yet low-cost and transportable demo to support this proposition – “I want dancing robots”, I recall saying in reaction to the Boston Dynamics video that was going viral at the time. And the guys delivered!

Kudos to my former Nexperia colleagues Richard Daley, Stein Nesbakk, Sami Ould-Ahmed, Timi Abimbola and Aanas Sayed for this demo and the resulting video.