Bad Marketing

My father-in-law passed away just over a year ago. It was a sad event for all of us, but he had been ill for some time, and though we miss him a lot, it was not unexpected.

What does that have to do with marketing?

Recently, my now-widowed mother-in-law received a couple of marketing letters directed to my father-in-law. The first piece was from Bell Canada, and it said, almost verbatim, "Where is (my father-in-law's name) today?" We had moved my mother-in-law to a different provider when she moved into a new appartment.

Another letter recently arrived from a State Farm insurance agent, that read: "It's easy to figure out that you want home and auto insurance that fit how you live."

Now I'm not a marketer. I don't claim to have great knowledge in this area, or expertise in finding new prospects for my own business. But would this not be a great example of how companies waste millions of dollars on sending out marketing materials to people that aren't their prospects. And to make it a double-whammy, they have now alienated someone (actually several people) who were upset by their correspondences - all because they were using an out-of-date mailing list!

I wonder what Seth Godin would think of this?

There's a reason it's called Business Intelligence

Yesterday, I was part of a presentation to a mid-sized finance company with some big information problems. We (Dynamic Intelligence) had been asked to provide knowledge related to the BusinessObjects platform, while the company we were partnering with was focused on the back-end systems. In the room were various participants from the prospect including a VP and a couple of directors.

Anyway, the presentation began, and we discussed the many challenges and problems the client was currently facing that could be resolved by deploying a Business Intelligence solution - how there could be a vast saving in terms of staff-time looking for information, how having the right information could prevent bad decisions, etc. The prospect seemed to get it, and was understanding the business value.

Then, the coordinator brought up a slide showing the project timeline and phases. This is where (I think) it went off track.

Although our discussions to this point had been about the business value of the project, the slide seemed to reference all the 'neat' technical things that would be done for the project - Documenting data sources, defining mappings, blah, blah, blah...

What happened to the business? For me, looking at it, it seemed to say, 'Yeah, we know you've got some business problems to solve, so we're going to put in some really cool technology to fix it. We'll let your users know when we've got it done.'

So what's the issue?

Business Intelligence is about solving BUSINESS problems! The initiative should start with business users, be championed by business users, and it should be focused on having a thorough understanding of the business requirements before making it a technology project.

If you let technical resources drive a project/product to the user community, you end up with something that resembles Microsoft Bob or Sony Betamax.

As a footnote, I think the prospect understood the business value, and was going to ensure the project had the right team behind it. For my part, I learned not to let someone steer the ship I'm on, unless I really trust them! :)

Seth's Godin's Blog - Bear Shaving

Seth Godin's Blog posts are great! Yesterday's post, "Bear Shaving," is one of my favourites so far.

In a nutshell, Seth's point is that too often people choose to deal with the symptom of a problem without ever addressing the root cause. The example Seth uses is shaving polar bears in response to global warming - an extreme but entirely ineffective response.

Something that Seth doesn't mention is an equally ineffective but so very common occurrence - responding to a crisis with an appropriate reaction, but when the response is too late to be effective. Think about, for example, removing an appendix after it has ruptured. Or apologizing to a customer for a customer service glitch, after they have switched to another provider.

The point is - make sure your response is appropriate to the situation, but also make sure you respond while it is still relevant.