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Our Lucky Day: A Sign of Things to Come?.

via Our Lucky Day: A Sign of Things to Come?.

As Seen on the Stage 4 Solutions Blog: (With a slight title change, I wrote it I can do it).

When you look at the common denominator among successful businesses, be them local, small businesses or large, multinational corporations, one thing is certain; each actively maintain, promote, and protect their strong brand name. The task is no simple act, especially for small businesses, considering the countless channels, both online and offline, in which a brand has visibility.  Why is this important?

“Your brand is your most important asset,” explained Laurel Sutton, Co-Founder of Catchword Branding, a cross vertical naming and branding leader. Things can go “viral in seconds” she said, so it’s essential to “be aware and make a plan.” At last night’s Business Marketing Association event, Laurel shared with us some brand-protection “Do’s and Don’ts,” shedding insight on the many challenges brand managers face.

Just ask Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks new point guard sensation – far from a brand manager by any stretch of the imagination. Just a month ago, Jeremy spent most of his game-time minutes on the Knicks bench, an unknown and unproven player. Now, Jeremy finds himself on the front page of newspapers and websites, globally. True “Linsanity.”

But Jeremy, a Harvard grad, is smart, very aware and has made a plan. (No he wasn’t at the BMA event last night, but his actions certainly reflect a working knowledge in the brand management field).

Knowing the trademark landscape is extremely crowded; Jeremy hired a lawyer and applied to trademark “Linsanity.” With T-shirts, mugs, and other souvenirs appearing everywhere proudly sporting the tagline, Jeremy sought to capitalize on the opportunity and make money off of his own success. Not so fast. Two other individuals had already applied to trademark the term! Again aware, this time of his intellectual-property rights, Jeremy is prepared to oppose the other applications – which he would probably be successful in opposing, sources close to the matter claim.

Laurel would wholeheartedly support his decision. “Don’t sign away rights to your name,” she defended, stressing the need to be diligent in sending cease and desist letters to protect what is yours. If one person has rights to your name, what’s stopping the next person and the next person?

Ultimately, Jeremy Lin seems to be following Laurel’s advice perfectly. He is aware, has made a plan, and has set aside time in his busy schedule to make brand management a part of his daily business routine.

So What Can You Do For Your Business?

Below are some brand management “Do’s & Don’ts,” shared with us by Laurel.

Procure

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A couple of years ago, EMC faced a crossroad. Their storage market was growing rapidly – a good thing for the market leader – right? But the, market growth was largely driven by the SMB segment, where EMC had little presence. EMC was considered an enterprise class, direct sales solution – not a winning formula for the SMB market! Competitors, such as NetApp, dominated the SMB segment with great products and strong channel partnerships, and were winning market share from EMC.

In order to grow, EMC had to transform itself from an enterprise direct sales player to a multi-channel, multi-segment storage solutions provider. This was huge challenge from a product, messaging, brand, channel, and internal organization structure and company culture perspective. But EMC did it! After 2 years of planning, testing and changing, in 2011, EMC rolled out a new go to market strategy and succeeded wildly.

EMC Corp. Revenues, Income, EPS & Market Share 2010-2011

On Tuesday, 1/24/12, EMC announced stellar financial results. The key behind these results was EMC’s new, expanded and revamped channel programs.

Helene Barnekow, EMC’s SVP of WW Field and Channel Marketing, gave us the inside story at this month’s Business Marketing Association event.

The Winning Formula

According to Helene, the winning formula for EMC looks like this:
Market Opportunity + Right Partners + Winning Portfolio + Untapped Buyers

EMC grasped the magnitude of the market opportunity, but did not have the right customer understanding, products, marketing, channels and internal organization to tap into the opportunity. They had a lot to learn and faced an uphill battle to be successful. EMC began first by understanding SMB customers. Obviously, SMBs were not just “small” enterprises. They had their own unique needs, and EMC needed to “get them”. Then, EMC invested in developing the right product for this market and for the channel partners who would be essential to selling to these customers. “Channel First” became EMC’s mantra. New leaders were hired who understood the SMB market and its channel providers. Along with new product, EMC had to force itself to adopt a new marketing culture.

For Helene, marketing is all about the 5 S’s: story, simplicity, sizzle, sales and strategy.

EMC had to create simple, easy to understand messaging that would resonate with the SMB buyer, who was typically an IT generalist who had to manage all IT solutions for their company. They were not enterprise strategic CIOs, nor were they storage specialist in large IT teams.

Simple Messaging, Significant Results

(This advertisement has only 3 words. Imagine how uncomfortable the engineering team must have felt knowing all of the great technical capabilities inside this piece of hardware are explained by just 3 words).

EMC had to connect with SMBs and their channel partners with compelling integrated marketing – FUN and SIZZLING marketing – and change their brand perception from quality, performance and premium price, to quality, simple, efficient and affordable. A tough augmentation to the EMC brand, but one that was accomplished with marketing techniques that were borrowed from the B2C world – large scale events, fun contests, a branding campaign that showcased the mini-cooper as the new brand image, and a demo that featured the 11 year son of EMC’s CMO Jeremy Burton, that showcased the simplicity of using the newly launched SMB product line. EMC took this worldwide marketing machine and customized, where necessary, to meet local needs and also to allow local creativity to be showcased. EMC’s “no-longer-boring” marketing tactics drew enough attention to create 89 million impressions and generated over 27,000 marketing qualified leads, for channel partners. As Helene repeated often throughout her presentation, “When you’re working with partners, if they are successful, you are successful.”

EMC, of course, had to recruit the right channel partners win in this new market. EMC recruited 6600 new partners in just 12 months, surpassing their target of 4400 new partners. These partners were enabled to successfully reach and win with SMBs.

Organizational & Cultural Change

Direct sales are part of EMC’s DNA; the company has a world-class direct sales team. Trying to achieve a focus on channels and their needs was extremely difficult. EMC created a new organizational structure, hired new channel experienced leaders and took their matrixed organization structure to the next level by creating a dedicated cross-functional team to drive this initiative and drive it throughout the company. And with tremendous support from the CEO and CMO, they received the investment needed to stay the course and achieve market success.

Building a Channel Focused Company

So, how do you grow a $20B company into a $28B company in 2 years? EMC will tell you to focus on the channel first. If a product is successful in a channel model, it can be successful in a direct sales environment. Marketing campaigns designed for the channel route to market will work for direct sales, as well.

EMC believes in its channel and is betting on them. EMC just announced that they will ONLY sell directly to only 1000 accounts, worldwide (today EMC has tens of thousands of direct customers). Channel partners will lead all other accounts.

Questions to Consider

1) How can product marketing create “simple” messaging? How does one fight high tech company cultures that want to tell customers EVERY detail about a product?
2) What kinds of internal conflicts are caused by a strategy shift from direct to channel sales? Do you have personal experience with such a change?
3) What are some good ways to alter brand perception to gain access to an untapped buyer without negatively effecting current customers?

Alright if you have been following this blog it’s pretty obvious I’m a big fan of television. In fact I find it hard to watch all my shows each week because I get addicted to them all. I thought I could possibly do some reviews each week and give you a little insight into my thoughts. It’s late January so most shows have started airing or have finished their seasons, so I’ll choose the ones that have just started, or will be running until the end of the season(usually around the end of May). Here’s a few shows I am currently watching. If you would like my opinions on them tell me so in the comments section. If nobody does then I’ll probably do whatever the fuck I want. Well either way I’ll probably do whatever the fuck I want, but it’s nice to know you think I value your opinion.

-Parks and Recreation

-Shameless

-Californication

-Community

-Eastbound and Down

-Modern Family

-Happy Endings

-Psych

-The Walking Dead

-The Big Bang Theory (Just Kidding)

Rethinking Capitalism – Video – Harvard Business Review.

As seen on HBR.org:
Michael E. Porter, Harvard University professor, explains why business leaders must focus onshared value—creating products and services that benefit not only the company but also society. He is the coauthor of the HBR article Creating Shared Value.

An Open Letter to Washington-

We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.

However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act–which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online–will undermine that framework.

These two pieces of legislation threaten to:
* Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
* Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
* Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
* Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.

We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

Overview: At the December Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) there were no policy changes, in line with expectations. Though some data was slightly better in the aftermath of the November meeting—acknowledged by the December FOMC statement—the Fed continued to adopt a cautious tone, prepared to “employ our tools as appropriate to promote a stronger economic recovery, in a context of price stability.” The Fed retained the Operation Twist endeavor, and maintained the pledge that Fed funds target rate would remain at 0-0.25% at least through mid-2013. November meeting minutes revealed extensive deliberation on changes to the Fed’s communication strategy, but offered little guidance on additional easing, other than verbal intervention. No decision to usher in changes to communication strategies was made at the meeting.

Commentary: As expected, the Fed ushered in no changes to the communication policy in December, which will likely wait till January at least. Under the baseline scenario of a still-elevated risk of U.S. recession, expect more QE in 2012 (meaning an expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet). I also maintain that some weakening in U.S. growth in H1 as fiscal drag intensifies and the fallout of the eurozone crisis and global slowdown on the U.S. economy becomes apparent, the economic weakness will be met by easing of Fed policy. Certainly, any rising risk of a destabilizing financial shock from the eurozone would certainly push the Fed toward unconventional easing sooner. In my opinion, the credit channel of transmission is broken, and I think the Fed needs to climb up the unconventional ladder (via purchases of assets other than Treasurys) to keep policy effective. The decision to reinvest the runoff on the MBS holdings into MBS rather than Treasurys in September and recent speeches from key FOMC members should be viewed as supportive for the future balance sheet endeavor to include MBS.

On December 8 and 9, EU leaders agreed on a new fiscal pact, which was also the main focus of the preliminary agreement between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy on balanced budget rules. However, the treaty change failed to meet the approval of all 27 countries. Thus, for now, only 23 member states will go ahead with making a change in the treaty, while Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary are considering participation, and Britain has firmly rejected the idea. According to the agreed plan, all EU countries are expected to maintain a balanced budget with a deficit limit to be enshrined in all national legislations or constitutions and quasi-automatic sanctions unless a qualified majority lifts the sanctions. In total, EU leaders agreed three main things by the end of the summit on Friday: A bailout fund involving the IMF, the acceleration of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and a fiscal compact between 26 of the EU member states (with the UK opting out). Very few details of any of these measures have been determined.

The treaty changes proposed, if approved and implemented, do not amount to fiscal union. They institutionalize the asymmetrical assumption already occurring in the EZ, whereby peripheral countries must retrench and undergo an internal devaluation, while the core countries do not make any adjustment. This ensures that growth will be elusive in the EZ over the next few years as countries across the region implement austerity measures. Until a number of key questions are answered, it will be difficult to assess how far short the EU summit agreements fall. In my opinion, the best-case scenario is that the policies announced will buy some more time. However, as peripheral government bond yields following the summit have indicated, the markets are not particularly impressed with the summit results. Consistent with expectations, and as was the case following the last EU summit, it seems likely that, as investors begin to dig into the details of the policies announced and realize how few are actually available, they will quickly recognize that very little has fundamentally changed in the EZ crisis.

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THANKS WEBSITE MAGAZINE FOR THIS GREAT LIST!

Enjoy these top 100 posts from Website Magazine editors in 2011!

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As seen on Stage 4 Solutions’ Blog. Visit the Stage 4 Solutions Blog here.

"Marketing results delivered. Flawlessly executed."

B2B marketing isn’t easy, obviously. There is constant pressure to show measurable marketing ROI, maximize margins and increase revenues. And internally, the competition for budget dollars is often as fierce as it is when fighting for market position. With so many competing priorities, B2B marketers struggle with where to focus their marketing budgets.

For many businesses, the distribution of marketing resources looks something like the left-hand side of Figure 1.1, with 60% of budgets designated to finding new customers, while the remaining 40% are used to foster the relationships that have already been formed with current customers. However, at this month’s Business Marketing Association event (hosted by EMC) we learned from Sean Geehan, President and Founder of The Geehan Group, that profitable B2B firms employ a strategy more closely resembling the right-hand side of Figure 1.1, where 70% of marketing efforts are focused on current customer programs and engagement. The Geehan Group has successfully worked with a number of industry leading companies including HCL Technologies, Adobe, Alcatel Lucent, Dell, Intel and Xerox to implement new marketing strategies focused on Trusted Customer Advisory Councils.

Collaboration With Thought-Leading, Decision Makers Works

When many B2B companies look at their customer lists, they realize that a high percentage of their revenues and profits come from a small percentage of customers.  With a small amount of customers contributing to most of company profits, marketers have discovered a significant need for nurturing the relationships of these few customers, and marketers can meet this need through the use of Trusted Customer Advisory Councils. By bringing together the decision makers of top customers, a number of tangible and intangible benefits are produced, the most important of which include: 1) Future business strategies that promote the welfare of everyone involved can be discussed, 2) feedback and insight into the real needs and expectations of customers can be voiced and heard, and 3) a community or peer group is created between the critical decision makers of the most important customers.

For HCL Technologies, a leading global IT services company, Trusted Customer Advisory Councils continue to be a booming success. Customer retention of Advisory Council accounts is 100% since the program’s inception in 2008. HCL’s source of “reference accounts” has increased by 200%. In addition to the benefits HCL gains, customers participating in these Advisory Council have seen their revenue grow at an average of 1.8 times overall growth of their organization from 2008. And they all continue to leverage their learning across their accounts.

In the end, Trusted Customer Advisory Councils drive revenue:

• Sales close rates for Trusted Customer Advisory Council program implementers increased 21-330%.
• Sales cycle times accelerated by 18-60%.
• Customer satisfaction scores increased 15-31%.
• Referenceable accounts climbed 23-420%.

When top customers refer your business to others as a trusted advisor, new customer acquisition becomes so much easier. How does your marketing budget compare to those in Figure 1.1? What has your experience been surrounding the competition for internal budget dollars? What impact would implementing a Trusted Customer Advisory Council with the decision makers of your firm’s top customers? Please share your thoughts and experiences with us.

Statistics provided by:
Geehan, Sean. “How B2B Marketers Drive Profitable Growth.” BMA Monthly Even. EMC-Santa Clara. 2441 Mission College Blvd., Santa Clara, CA. 30 NOV 2011. Lecture.

“Stop and smell the roses.”

So many of us have heard this phrase or some variation of it before. The idea that a moment of reflection from time to time is necessary to keep the balance between civilized and chaos.  There’s nothing worse than “just going through the motions” and letting all the details pass you by.

A number of years ago, a friend and I reached this conclusion in, I admit, a somewhat “altered” state, and it took this past weekend’s 4-day, 6-thousand-mile, delirium inducing thanksgiving trip home across the country and back again for me to remember it.

“Stop and smell the roses.”

Whether or not you care to believe in reincarnation, get lost in the occasional day dream, or frankly prefer to pretend life isn’t real sometimes, this is reality folks. And we only have this one life to make an impact for the better.

It’s hard to tell whether some of us just have too much on our plate (no Thanksgiving pun intended), or that some just don’t care, but I have seen far too many who simply are lost and have forgotten to

“Stop and smell the roses.”

Thank those who have helped you. Realize that we as individuals do not live in a vacuum, and that our actions have consequences, intended or not, that greatly effect those closest to us. Actions always speak louder than words.

NBC recently opted to move “Community” from its Thursday night lineup. A move that has made myself, and many other fans of the show extremely angry. Do yourself a favor and read this article, and hopefully it will sway you into watching the show.

\”Community\” on Hiatus: Why NBC is making a mistake.

Schmap Releases Tool to Break Down the Demographics of Your Twitter Followers.

Are you Ebenezer Scrooge or a Christmas Elf?.