– Buzzword Density
– Critics as Media
– J&J’s New Logo
– Emergent Phenomena, Self-Organization in Marketing
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AI in marketing given all the new advances, marketing as a science, add-on marketing (ice cream cones), and tie-in marketing (Nike-Tiffany campaign) and the risks of “rebranding”.
The OrionX editorial team manages the content on this website.
Acupuncture for “ED”?! Yes, it’s a thing and a case study in this episode. How do you position and message and demand-gen for it? Let’s not lose touch with why marketing is needed. And AMA’s definition marketing wants to be taken apart.
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Why some companies thrive during recession, or pandemic, or when the going gets tough. The misguided nature of worker productivity score/software. And touching on Ethics of Marketing, a topic we will come back to in future episodes.
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One of the most recognized names in strategic marketing and communications in HPC, and an “SC Perennial“, special guest Mike Bernhardt joins Doug and Shahin to discuss the important role that the marketing function plays in HPC. A lot has changed in HPC and a lot has changed in marketing. What should smart organizations do to improve their market presence and build a loyal customer base?
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Time to discuss pricing in B2B and B2C and the many parameters that go into it. But first: what happens when a want ad demands so many skills and qualifications that nobody would qualify?
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Doug and Shahin start with what it takes to go viral and whether it is worth the cost if it doesn’t happen organically. The main topic is the four Ps of marketing and a discussion of product and place in B2B and B2C. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.
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Topics today center around the cost and complexity of marketing, hiring marketing talent, and the unique challenges that CMOs face within the C-Suite. Fun times as usual!
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An in-depth discussion with a panel of experts, this time about the sales cycle, marketing funnel, and customer journey.
Reading list:
Panelists:
Samuel Brealey
Samuel is a marketing consultant, helping good businesses make more money by helping them focus on what matters most. Catch his sensible way of calling a spade a spade on Twitter!
James Hankins, Founder and Consulting Strategist at Vizer Consulting
James is a strategic leader with a command of modern marketing tools and record of commercial impact, which he combines with his broad and deep experience across multiple categories and some of the biggest brands in the world. He drove the emergence of Share of Search as a practical metric, and was named one of the “Change Makers” of the year 2020 by Marketing Week Magazine in the UK.
Doug Garnett, President Protonik
Doug specializes in understanding the nuances of customer values and buying behavior. He teaches marketing, is writing a book about complexity in business, and is a trusted advisor.
Shahin Khan, Partner, OrionX.net (Moderator)
Shahin tracks technologies, policies, and marketing practices that define the Information Age. He has been a (very technical) CMO in high tech for many years and has probably done every job in marketing personally, and a few outside of it.
Join the OrionX Enterprise Marketing Meetup Group to share insights about the challenges and successes in marketing to the enterprise, and all aspects of B2B marketing.
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Businesses want to be data-driven because data can provide insight. But bad data does not. So how do we make sure the data is useful? Join an all-star cast for this important discussion. Topics include:
– Why do you need metrics if your instincts are so good?
– What needs untangling?
– How should marketing be measured?
– What does it cost to measure marketing data?
– How do changes related to competition, product, strategy, market need, people etc. impact what you should measure?
– What are the pitfalls in interpretation of data?
– Metrics and complexity
Watch the video below for an insightful discussion among some of the best in the industry: JP Castlin, JP Castlin Consulting, Andrew Willshire, Diametrical Limited, Doug Garnett, President Protonik, and our own Shahin Khan.
Join the OrionX Enterprise Marketing Meetup Group to share insights about the challenges and successes in marketing to the enterprise, and all aspects of B2B marketing.
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“Another insightful discussion. Alastair’s book is a must read!”
Watch the video of a meetup discussing the alignment between marketing and finance, a topic that is critically important but doesn’t get enough coverage. Topics include the role of marketing, how a CFO views marketing, metrics, attribution, mix, etc.
Panelists include Alastair Thomson, Finance Director and CFO and author of the book Cash Flow Surge, Mike Douglas (Independent Advisor, former VP GTM at Nvidia), Doug Garnett (President Protonik), and Shahin Khan (OrionX).
Join the OrionX Enterprise Marketing Meetup Group to share insights about the challenges and successes in marketing to the enterprise, and all aspects of B2B marketing.
The OrionX editorial team manages the content on this website.
Here at OrionX.net, our research agenda is driven by the latest developments in technology. We are also fortunate to work with many tech leaders in nearly every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps, who are driving the development of such technologies.
In recent years, we have had projects in Cryptocurrencies, IoT, AI, Cybersecurity, HPC, Cloud, Data Center, … and often a combination of them. Doing this for several years has given us a unique perspective. Our clients see value in our work since it helps them connect the dots better, impacts their investment decisions and the options they consider, and assists them in communicating their vision and strategies more effectively.
We wanted to bring that unique perspective and insight directly to you. “Simplifying the big ideas in technology” is how we’d like to think of it.
Thus was born our first podcast/slidecast series: The OrionX Download™
The OrionX Download is both a video slidecast (visuals but no talking heads) and an audio podcast in case you’d like to listen to it.
Every two weeks, co-hosts Dan Olds and Shahin Khan, and other OrionX analysts, discuss some of the latest and most important advances in technology. If our research has a specially interesting finding, we’ll invite guests to probe the subject and add their take.
Please give it a try and let us know what we can do better or if you have a specific question or topic that you’d like us to cover.
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.
Competitive analysis (competitive intelligence) is critically important for strategy, planning, and sales support. But it should also permeate an organization’s DNA, preserve high ethical standards, and deliver high quality content. Competitive awareness is like security awareness or commitment to quality – it’s the duty of everyone in the organization. This is what we call a “Competitive Culture”.
A competitive culture means everyone in the organization is tuned in to the competitive realities the company and its products and services face. It is not a one-time activity, but an essential ongoing requirement. It must evolve continuously as competitors strengthen and fade, new competitors enter the market, and as you introduce new offerings or pursue new strategies.
Jesse Owens, 4 gold medals, 1936 Olympics
The competitive function takes input from and supports various stakeholders, including sales, marketing, executive management, and engineering. As it matures within the organization, it evolves into both a back-office function, with its own processes and roadmap, as well as a collective effort for the organization at large.
Everyone in the company can contribute to intelligence about the competition and can use it to enhance their work performance. And everyone must protect information that, if known by competitors, would decrease the company’s competitiveness.
OrionX has a history of excellence in developing best practices and tools across the competitive intelligence discipline and we offer a range of packages. The starter package provides:
* Target market / solutions / product roadmap review
* Program objectives, elements, timelines, calendar, dashboard
* Competitive SWOT, playbook, head-to-head comparisons, beat sheets, and more
“A very critical requirement for every company and every organization is competitive analysis. It is something that needs to be done with high integrity but also with high quality. And it requires the development of processes and the ability to look at your competition and understand why customers might be buying [from] them, and how they evaluate you based on the competition. We have developed best practices and have effectively worked with clients to arrive at a competitive intelligence function that you can be proud of.”
– Shahin Khan, Partner and Founder, OrionX
Please contact us if you would like to enhance your company’s competitive stance. Additional options beyond the starter package are available that would include ongoing execution, internal sales campaign, public campaigns, and corporate and business programs.
Stephen Perrenod has lived and worked in Asia, the US, and Europe and possesses business experience across all major geographies in the Asia-Pacific region. He specializes in corporate strategy for market expansion, and cryptocurrency/blockchain on a deep foundation of high performance computing (HPC), cloud computing and big data. He is a prolific blogger and author of a book on cosmology.
“Just how big a market is this?” If you are an entrepreneur raising money or a seasoned product manager, or a CEO planning on an IPO, someone is going to ask you that question and you need to be well prepared with the answer. Market sizing is an important and common requirement. It is an especially challenging task when you are creating a new market or addressing emerging opportunities. This is why we created a packaged solution focused on market sizing.
Market sizing can be defined as the number of buyers of your product, or users of your service, and the price they are willing to pay to get them. Given the number of users and average solution pricing calculating the market size, growth and expected market share is now possible, for example.
The main purpose of market sizing is to inform business or product viability, specifically go/no-go decisions, as well as key marketing decisions, such as pricing of the service, resource planning, or marketing tactics to increase usage, together with an estimate of the level of operational and technological capabilities required to service the expected market.
There are two main market-sizing methods: bottom-up and top-down, each with unique benefits and challenges.
Organizations can draw on several sources for market sizing data. For example:
When doing market analysis, market sizing is frequently referred to as TAM, SAM, and SOM, acronyms that represents different subsets of a market. But what do they mean and why are they useful to investors or product development executives?
Depending on your company’s product or service calculating TAM, SAM and SOM will be very different. A hardware-based company may be constrained by geography because of the service and support requirement. Whereas, today’s software company does not have these same constraints as distribution is via the Internet and by default it is global. Similarly a startup is very different to an established company, XZY Widgets versus IBM for example.
Still confused about TAM SAM SOM? Here is an example.
Let’s say your company is a storage startup and planning to introduce a new storage widget. Your TAM would be the worldwide storage market. If your company had business operations in every country and there was no competition, then your revenue would be equivalent to the TAM, 100% market share — highly unlikely.
As a storage startup organization, it would be more realistic to focus on prospects within your city or state. Geographic proximity is an important consideration at this early stage as you have limited distribution and support capability, close proximity makes sense. This would be your SAM: the demand for your storage products within your reach. If you were the only storage provider in your state, then you would generate 100% of the revenue. Again, highly unlikely.
Realistically, you can hope to capture only part of the SAM. With a new storage product you would attract early adopters of your new widget within your selected geography. This is your SOM.
TAM SAM SOM have different purposes: SOM indicates the short-term sales potential, SOM / SAM the target market share, and TAM the potential at scale. These all play an important role in assessing the investment opportunity and the focus should really be on getting the most accurate numbers rather than the biggest possible numbers.
In-depth industry knowledge, logical analysis, and a command of business processes are some of the necessary ingredients used by OrionX to arrive at reliable market size projections based on available data. The analysis can then be customized for executive updates, due-diligence, the pricing process, market share objectives, or manufacturing capacity planning.
Steve brings a unique blend of expertise to the technology industry. He has held senior VP positions in sales & marketing for HPC and Enterprise vendors including Sun Microsystems and Hitachi. He’s also worked with early stage technology and Internet start-ups helping to raise over $300M for clients.
We are excited to announce 8 new packaged solutions designed to address several common requirements. Here’s a link to the press release we issued today.
One way to see OrionX is as a partner that can help you with content, context, and dissemination. OrionX Strategy can create the right content because it conducts deep analysis and provides a solid perspective in important technology developments like IoT, Cloud, Hyperscale and HPC, Big Data, Cognitive Computing and Machine Learning, Security, Cryptocurrency, In-Memory Computing, etc. OrionX Marketing can put that content in the right context by aligning it with your business objectives and customer requirements. And OrionX PR can build on that with new content and packaging to pursue the right dissemination, whether by doing the PR work itself or by working with your existing PR resources.
In all cases, the interactions among these three areas makes OrionX especially effective. Strategy is aware of market positioning and communication requirements; Marketing benefits from deep industry knowledge and technical depth; and PR can create engaging content that is not just interesting but also insightful, etc.
Having helped over 50 technology leaders connect products to customers, we have seen several common requirements. It is different in every case, but business objectives are similar and the process can be substantially the same. Over the years, our solutions to these requirements have developed into what we can now unveil as packaged solutions: well-defined, targeted, and easy to adopt.
The packages being introduced today are:
We are also offering a free consultation with one of our partners. In almost every occasion, we’ve been told that such consultations have saved our clients time and money and given them new insights. It’s been a good way for us to show our commitment to your success, and whether or not it leads to business, it has always led to new relationships and good word of mouth.
Please take a moment to look at the new packages and let us know what you think.
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.
The world of quantum computing frequently seems as bizarre as the alternate realities created in Lewis Carroll’s masterpieces “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass”. Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a well-respected mathematician and logician in addition to being a photographer and enigmatic author.
Has quantum computing’s time actually come or are we just chasing rabbits?
That is probably a twenty million dollar question by the time a D-Wave 2X™ System has been installed and is in use by a team of researchers. Publicly disclosed installations currently include Lockheed Martin, NASA’s Ames Research Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) supports a collaborative effort among NASA, Google and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) to explore the potential for quantum computers to tackle optimization problems that are difficult or impossible for traditional supercomputers to handle. Researchers on NASA’s QuAIL team are using the system to investigate areas where quantum algorithms might someday dramatically improve the agency’s ability to solve difficult optimization problems in aeronautics, Earth and space sciences, and space exploration. For Google the goal is to study how quantum computing might advance machine learning. The USRA manages access for researchers from around the world to share time on the system.
Using quantum annealing to solve optimization problems
D-Wave’s quantum annealing technology addresses optimization and probabilistic sampling problems by framing them as energy minimization problems and exploiting the properties of quantum physics to identify the most likely outcomes or as a probabilistic map of the solution landscape.
Quantum annealer dynamics are dominated by paths through the mean field energy landscape that have the highest transition probabilities. Figure 1 shows a path that connects local minimum A to local minimum D.
Figure 2 shows the effect of quantum tunneling (in blue) to reduce the thermal activation energy needed to overcome the barriers between the local minima with the greatest advantage observed from A to B and B to C, and a negligible gain from C to D. The principle and benefits are explained in detail in the paper “What is the Computational Value of Finite Range Tunneling?”
The D-Wave 2X: Interstellar Overdrive – How cool is that?
As a research area, quantum computing is highly competitive, but if you want to buy a quantum computer then D-Wave Systems , founded in 1999, is the only game in town. Quantum computing is as promising as it is unproven. Quantum computing goes beyond Moore’s law since every quantum bit (qubit) doubles the computational power, similar to the famous wheat and chessboard problem. So the payoff is huge, even though it is expensive, unproven, and difficult to program.
The advantage of quantum annealing machines is they are much simpler to build than gate-model quantum computing machines. The latest D-Wave machine (the D-Wave 2X), installed at NASA Ames, is approximately twice as powerful (in a quantum, exponential sense) as the previous model at over 1,000 qubits (1,097). This compares with roughly 10 qubits for current gate-model quantum systems, so two orders of magnitude. It’s a question of scale, no simple task, and a unique achievement. Although quantum researchers initially questioned whether the D-Wave system even qualified as a quantum computer, albeit a subset of quantum computing architectures, that argument seems mostly settled and it is now generally accepted that quantum characteristics have been adequately demonstrated.
In a D-Wave system, a coupled pair of qubits (quantum bits) demonstrate quantum entanglement (they influence each other), so that the entangled pair can be in any one of four states resulting from how the coupling and energy biases are programmed. By representing the problem to be addressed as an energy map the most likely outcomes can be derived by identifying the lowest energy states.
A lattice of approximately 1,000 tiny superconducting circuits (the qubits) is chilled close to absolute zero to deliver quantum effects. A user models a problem into a search for the lowest point in a vast energy landscape. The processor considers all possibilities simultaneously to determine the lowest energy required to form those relationships. Multiple solutions are returned to the user, scaled to show optimal answers, in an execution time of around 20 microseconds, practically instantaneously for all intents and purposes.
The D-wave system cabinet – “The Fridge”– is a closed cycle dilution refrigerator. The superconducting processor itself generates no heat, but to operate reliably must be cooled to about 180 times colder than interstellar space, approximately 0.015° Kelvin.
Environmental considerations: Green is the color
To function reliably, quantum computing systems require environments that are not only shielded from the Earth’s natural environment, but would be considered inhospitable to any known life form. A high vacuum is required, a pressure 10 billion times lower than atmospheric pressure, and shielded to 50,000 times less than Earth’s magnetic field. Not exactly a normal office, datacenter, or HPC facility environment.
On the other hand, the self-contained “Fridge” and servers consume just 25kW of power (approximately the power draw of a single heavily populated standard rack) and about three orders of magnitude (1000 times) less power than the current number one system on the TOP500, including its cooling system. Perhaps a more significant consideration is that power demand is not anticipated to increase significantly as it scales to several thousands of qubits and beyond.
In addition to doubling the number of qubits compared with the prior D-Wave system, the D-Wave 2X delivers lower noise in qubits and couples, delivering greater confidence in achieved results.
So much for the pictures, what about the conversations?
Now that we have largely moved beyond the debate of whether a D-Wave system is actually a quantum machine or not, then the question “OK, so what now?” could bring us back to chasing rabbits, although this time inspired by the classic Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit”:
“One algorithm makes you larger
And another makes you small
But do the ones a D-Wave processes
Do anything at all?”
That of course, is where the conversations begin. It may depend upon the definition of “useful” and also a comparison between “conventional” systems and quantum computing approaches. Even the fastest supercomputer we can build using the most advanced traditional technologies can still only perform analysis by examining each possible solution serially, one solution at a time. This makes optimizing complex problems with a large number of variables and large data sets a very time consuming business. By comparison, once a problem has been suitably constructed for a quantum computer it can explore all the possible solutions at once and instantly identify the most likely outcomes.
If we consider relative performance then we begin to have a simplistic basis for comparison, at least for execution times. The QuAIL system was benchmarked for the time required to find the optimal solution with 99% probability for different problem sizes up to 945 variables. Simulated Annealing (SA), Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) and the D-Wave 2X were compared. Full details are available in the paper referenced previously. Shown in the chart are the 50th, 75th and 85th percentiles over a set of 100 instances. The error bars represent 95% confidence intervals from bootstrapping.
This experiment occupied millions of processor cores for several days to tune and run the classical algorithms for these benchmarks. The runtimes for the higher quantiles for the larger problem sizes for QMC were not computed because the computational cost was too high.
The results demonstrate a performance advantage to the quantum annealing approach by a factor of 100 million compared with simulated annealing running on a single state of the art processor core. By comparison the current leading system on the TOP500 has fewer than 6 million cores of any kind, implying a clear performance advantage for quantum annealing based on execution time.
The challenge and the next step is to explore the mapping of real world problems to quantum machines and to improve the programming environments, which will no doubt take a significant amount of work and many conversations. New players will become more visible, early use cases and gaps will become better defined, new use cases will be identified, and a short stack will emerge to ease programming. This is reminiscent of the early days of computing or space flight.
A quantum of solace for the TOP500: Size still matters.
Even though we don’t expect to see viable exascale systems this decade, and quite likely not before the middle of the next, we won’t be seeing a Quantum500 anytime soon either. NASA talks about putting humans on Mars sometime in the 2030s and it isn’t unrealistic to think about practical quantum computing as being on a similar trajectory. Recent research at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sidney, Australia demonstrated that it may be possible to create quantum computer chips that could store thousands, even millions of qubits on a single silicon processor chip leveraging conventional computer technology.
Although the current D-Wave 2X system is a singular achievement it is still regarded as being relatively small to handle real world problems, and would benefit from getting beyond pairwise connectivity, but that isn’t really the point. It plays a significant role in research into areas such as vision systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning alongside its optimization capabilities.
In the near term, we’ve got enough information and evidence to get the picture. It will be the conversations that become paramount with both conventional and quantum computing systems working together to develop better algorithms and expand the boundaries of knowledge and achievement.
References and attributions:
Paper on What is the Computational Value of Finite Range Tunneling? http://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02206v4.pdf
Paper on Benchmarking a quantum annealing processor with the time-to-target metric: http://www.dwavesys.com/sites/default/files/ttt_arxiv.pdf
White rabbit from Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll
“White Rabbit” Lyrics copyright Jefferson Airplane/ Grace Slick
Peter ffoulkes – Partner at OrionX.net
Peter is an expert in Cloud Computing, Big Data, and HPC markets, technology trends, and customer requirements which he blends to craft growth strategies and assess opportunities.
The IT industry is arguably going through its biggest transformation since the introduction of the IBM PC in the early 1980s, and a cloud service based approach is the likely destination for most enterprise workloads. On August 26th and 27th Mirantis hosted the “second annual” OpenStack Silicon Valley event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to a standing room only audience.
Setting the scene for the conference, Alex Freedland, Co-Founder and President of Mirantis, pointed out the market momentum gained by OpenStack in five short years, displacing other potential cloud platforms and propelling it very firmly to being one of just five viable cloud computing platforms for enterprise deployment: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, VMware, and the OpenStack Community and Partner Ecosystem.
On the surface this might seem to be a rather bold claim for such a young open source technology offering as OpenStack, but based on my end-user studies at 451 Research prior to joining OrionX, I find the claim entirely credible. It is important to remember that despite all of the hype surrounding cloud computing, most enterprises are still in the early stages of cloud adoption and that it is a complex transition. Although the technology platforms to build a cloud are critical to success, there are many more significant factors that will contribute to success. First and foremost, the shift to a cloud-based approach to delivering IT services is a huge cultural transition and with such transitions also come substantial business risk. This was one of the key findings of my own research, and also the main theme of the talk by James Staten, Chief Strategist of the Cloud and Enterprise division at Microsoft and until recently Vice President & Principal Analyst for cloud computing at Forrester Research.
Another factor in a successful transition is choosing the right partners for technology and business solutions. It is here that OpenStack gains enormous credibility, not so much from the current level of maturity of the OpenStack technology platform but from the massive amount of investment in both money and developers that is being poured into the effort to make OpenStack successful, something that simply cannot be matched by any single company on the planet today. There is still much to be done to turn OpenStack into a true enterprise-grade, production-ready cloud platform but it is also clear that OpenStack is funded for success, which is one very important consideration for any enterprise making a significant bet on the foundation for its future IT services.
There are too many proof points to mention that underpin the level of activity and initiatives supporting the momentum behind OpenStack, but a few recent and noteworthy ones are:
So, are we all off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of OS [OpenStack]?
Possibly, but not quite so fast! There are still lions and tigers and bears, Oh my! There is still much work to do to bring OpenStack, and indeed all the other credible cloud platforms up to production enterprise deployment standards, and this will take time even if the money and the will is there, which it appears to be for OpenStack. Here are just a few of the initiatives outlined at the OpenStack Silicon Valley summit that point to what is in the pipeline to make OpenStack more enterprise ready:
Core Improvements:
Strategic Investments
The long and winding road
Perhaps the biggest issue of all to be addressed is the current scarcity of OpenStack expertise and developers. They seem to be worth more than their weight in gold or Bitcoins, and they also seem to know it! These are some of the driving forces behind initiatives such as Intel’s Cloud for All, and why a company like Mirantis is gaining recognition for its expertise, and investment that enhances its ability to influence the future of cloud computing.
The journey to “the cloud” is a long and twisty one, and there will be more than one destination, but for now OpenStack seems likely to be one of the five most viable destinations. From here it appears to be more real than it does to be a mirage.
Peter ffoulkes, Partner OrionX
Peter is an expert in Cloud Computing, Big Data, and HPC markets, technology trends, and customer requirements which he blends to craft growth strategies and assess opportunities.
The TV series Mad Men was a smashing success, and it offered many teachable moments in marketing.
If you have not seen it, here is a quick intro: Mad Men (as in, Madison Ave men) is the story of an ad exec in the 50s-60s. The lead character is Don Draper who is a partner and the creative genius in a small but respected ad agency. His complex past, personality, and evolution form the main story line and are nicely mapped to the actual events of that period. His protege is Peggy Olson, competent and rising through the ranks while dealing with the even-tougher-than-now atmosphere for women in the workforce in those years.
There are 4 scenes throughout the 7 seasons and 92 episodes of the series that stood out for me as brilliant marketing. Each of the clips below offers several marketing lessons – story telling comes through over and over and you can see the absolute importance of mindset, the way success or failure is determined by how you see things – but I have highlighted one main aspect.
Season 1, Episode 1, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
Client: Lucky Strike cigarettes
Setup: New regulations prevent cigarette makers from making any health claims which has been the focus of their advertising up to that point. The bosses of Lucky Strike, the owner and his son, are coming to hear new ideas. Despite working on all angles and even exploring then-new methods like psychological research, Don has nothing. His boss and the account manager are justifiably nervous. But then he sees it!
This is a great example of coming up with perceived differentiation in a competitive market with similar products.
Season 2, Episode 13, “The Wheel”
Prospect: Kodak
Setup: Kodak is looking for an ad agency for their new slide projection add-on which they call “the wheel” (or doughnut) and are having difficulty making it an exciting product. They are evaluating multiple agencies. This is their stop to hear what Don has to say. They have a meeting with another agency after this scene.
Recognizing the emotional content of the product is what draws the audience in but it requires a different better name for the product.
Season 2, Episode 4, “Three Sundays”
Prospect: American Airlines
Setup: AA had a plane crash in 1962 on the same day John Glenn had a ticker-tape parade in NYC, a few days after becoming the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth. Looking to re-establish their image, American Airlines is open to new ad agencies and Don has to come up with the right pitch. They’ve all been working many days and it is now the weekend before they present to the client. But Don has new clarity on how to see it and what they should do.
This is a very powerful example of formulating the right question and leveraging what else is going on in the world.
[The video doesn’t seem to be available anymore so I include the text of Don’s revelation. Imagine a floor full of people working on a weekend and Don throws open the door to his office, stops at the 1st table and without any introduction launches into this:
“American Airlines is not about the past any more than America is. Ask not about Cuba. Ask not about the bomb. We’re going to the moon. There is no such thing as American history, only a frontier. Let’s pretend we know what 1963 looks like.”
And he goes right back to his office, new direction having been given.
Season 7, Episode 7, “Waterloo”
Prospect: Burger Chef
Setup: The agency is presenting to a new prospect, Burger Chef, after weeks of field research and preparation. The presentation happens to be on the day after the 1st moon landing. Everyone was watching it the night before. Everyone is awed by it and is talking about it. They expect their audience will be distracted. To make matters more interesting, Don wants Peggy, his protege, to give the pitch instead of him. She’s never done the big presentations and is nervous. The scene starts with Peggy’s out-of-body observation of the meeting room. Not only does Peggy eloquently find her way to her pitch, she eases beautifully into the client’s value proposition.
This is a great example of capturing the moment, going back to the basics of your value proposition, and story telling.
Here’s the script for this one:
Don: Every great ad tells a story. Here to tell that story is Peggy Olson.
Peggy: Thank you, Don.
That’s a lot to live up to. Because I certainly can’t tell a better story than the one we saw last night. [moon landing]
I don’t know what was more miraculous– the technological achievement that put our species in a new perspective or the fact that all of us were doing the same thing at the same time. Sitting in this room, we can still feel the pleasure of that connection.
Because, I realize now, we were starved for it.
We really were.
And, yes, we’ll feel it again when they all return safely.
And, yes, the world will never be the same in some ways.
But tonight, I’m going to go back to New York, and I’ll go back to my apartment and find a 10-year-old boy parked in front of my TV, eating dinner.
Now, I don’t need to charge you for a research report that tells you that most television sets are not more than six feet away from the dinner table.
And that dinner table is your battlefield and your prize. This is the home your customers really live in.
This is your dinner table.
Dad likes Sinatra, son likes The Rolling Stones.
The TV’s always on, Vietnam playing in the background. The news wins every night.
And you’re starving.
And not just for dinner.
What if there was another table, where everybody gets what they want when they want it It’s bright and clean, and there’s no laundry, no telephone, and no TV.
And we can have the connection that we’re hungry for.
There may be chaos at home, but there’s family supper at Burger Chef.Client: That’s beautiful.
Peggy: That’s nice to hear because that’s the name of the spot.”
You can’t nail it if you don’t see it, and you don’t see it if you don’t get the essence of it, at a deep level. These are beautiful examples of that.
Leave me a comment and share examples that have influenced you.
ps. If you’d like to see the script for the other ones, there is a site [sadly, this site doesn’t seem to be available any more] that has a very nice compilation for this show and many others.
* Image credit: wallrart.com
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.
Welcome to Orion and OrionX.net!
When we formed Orion Marketing more than 6 years ago, our vision was to offer a technology marketing capability that would cover the entire spectrum from the board room to customer programs. We anticipated that marketing as a function would be transformed in significant ways: more technology, more data, more social, more blending of arts and sciences, more integrated with every other function, and ultimately more critical to the organization.
This required a new model.
If marketing was to be so important, it needed first to have a deeper understanding of global trends, business strategy, services, technologies, sales, human resources, law, finance, operations, and geographies. That is a big task, but it is what it takes to begin to do great marketing.
So from the beginning, our focus has been on the new world of marketing. That means depth, breadth and quality. It means synthesis that must follow analysis to create great content. In short, it means everything that must be in place to “connect products to customers,” as our tagline said.
That was the right focus, and thanks to that and our wonderful customers, Orion Marketing grew, which enabled us to codify and hone our core marketing services. We also started a systematic program to build additional capabilities.
Today, we are ready to launch a significant expansion of our services based on a few years of work.
We have developed, delivered, and are now formally launching two additional services: Strategy, and PR services. This expansion warrants a new brand that recognizes our heritage and points to a future of innovation and customer value in the digital era.
OrionX continues the same unique model: bringing together business acumen, technical depth, insightful industry perspective, high quality work and counsel, and a natural focus on customer success.
Marketing has come a long way in the last decade. Just as companies have a well-practiced understanding of what it takes to build a great product, they now have a growing appreciation of why marketing is essential to their business and what it takes to do great marketing. They recognize that marketing is the glue at the center of the organization, and must have high quality content at its own center. Nearly 25 years after Regis McKenna’s article in Harvard Business Review, finally Marketing is Everything!
As we embark on the next phase of this journey, we strive to continue to deserve your support, advice, participation, and business.
Thank you!
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.
As some of you know, I’m a visual learner. Point being, I LOVE infographics! A few years ago, my colleague wrote a short blog about Infographics for Beginners. But a lot has changed online and I’d like to give a walkthrough of all the cool new tools available if you need to convey lots of information in an easily readable, bite-sized infographic — or maybe you just want to have some fun stuff to post on your social media channel! I made a quick infographic using each of these sites to demonstrate their capabilities with a brand, so keep that in mind before you begin to ask where I got the following images from. So without further ado, here we go:
Do you… Dare to Dream… or Dream to Dare
Canva is the first on our list of free infographic or just general graphic tools. When you first open the program it’s a little confusing as to what exactly you should do. Many of the options are listed as premium only, meaning they cost money to you. The cost for the options are cheap however, so that’s a plus. Once you do figure out which options are free and begin realizing that you can just drag and drop images from your computer straight onto the canvas (haha I see what they did there), the program really begins to show potential. The ability to import images directly from Google Drive and Facebook definitely helps. Canva is also one of the only programs that immediately gives you the correct sizing for different mediums, whether it be for a Facebook/Pinterest Post, a presentation in PowerPoint, or a physical print poster. However, as an infographic tool it kind of falls short compared to the other options. I could not figure out how to import actual raw data to generate accurate charts. In spite of this, for a free in-browser graphic manipulation software it’s pretty solid and I definitely will be using it in the future for general graphical work.
Steps to Starting Your Own Rock Band
Visme is an interesting program. It uses a very straightforward user interface that makes me feel like I am using a photo manipulation program like Photoshop or a document editing program like Pages or Publisher. On par with most infographic tools, the ability to input spreadsheet data is very easy to do.
How a song gets written
In a previous blog, my colleague mentioned she liked Easel.ly because it was so easy to use. The same stands true now as I threw together this little chart in a couple of minutes.
The Piktochart program is pretty good. It can an be a little complicated initially, but the use of what the program calls “blocks” makes the whole experience feel like I’m working within PowerPoint instead of a graphics program. Overall the experience was enjoyable and Piktochart works great if you are going to build an infographic list or step-by-step instruction sheet.
In summary, each program has a very unique feel to it. I would definitely recommend Canva if you need to do quick image manipulation before you post onto a social media site. I would use Easel.ly or Visme to do your standard type of infographic or step chart, and I would use Piktochart if you want more of a presentation feel for your image. Thanks again for reading. I hope you learned something and I look forward to seeing you guys next time!
Have a site that we missed? Think there’s a better resource for making infographics? Prove it by leaving a comment below!
Mack, along with being a marketing associate at Orion, also sings in the shower and sometimes on stage. Check out his tweets as a high tech marketing rock-star, @Mack_Ortis. Maybe if you’re really nice he’ll sing something for you?
As you set your marketing strategies, take a look at the full slide deck that covers 14 of our “Big Rules of Marketing”, available on SlideShare.
Some of our clients have used this in their off-site/planning/leadership meetings. We’d be available to present it at such meetings and tell the stories that go with each one.
Do these match your observations?
We’d love to get your feedback, and let us know if you’d like the PowerPoint/Keynote slides.
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.
When do you think people are most likely to fill out an online survey? Weekdays or weekends? Early morning or late afternoon?
Knowing when people are most likely to take the time to fill out a survey can help you determine when to launch your survey.
Here’s what SurveyMonkey discovered in terms of best day of the week. Friday ranks highest – probably because people are winding down from a busy work week and finishing up loose ends.
SurveyMonkey also looked at time of day (times below in Pacific Standard Time) and it appears that between 4am-12noon PST (7am-3pm EST) is the sweet spot during the day.
Of course, knowing when to launch a survey is only one factor. You should also have a clear idea of what information you’re trying to gather so that your questions all relate to a single objective. If your survey becomes too long (face it, who has the patience for more than a handful of questions?!), break the survey into several parts.
Cindee specializes in value proposition/messaging development, PR-AR-social and demand generation activities; she is a published author in several outlets, including Harvard Business Review.
Large, abstract numbers have always mystified me. For example, $25 billion sounds like a lot, but it’s beyond my range of comprehension. Now you can use Dictionary of Numbers, a new Google Chrome extension to make sense of numbers.
This can be really helpful for marketeers! I typed in $25 billion and got these results:
However, the tool isn’t perfect (yet). I typed in 1, 2, 5 and 10 terabytes and got “no results.” Ditto for a few other numbers I tried. But the concept is great and hopefully it’ll continue to get better.
Cindee specializes in value proposition/messaging development, PR-AR-social and demand generation activities; she is a published author in several outlets, including Harvard Business Review.
A simple trip to the grocery store will show us the overwhelming choices we face each day. When I enter the supermarket, there are more than 38,000 different items to choose from. I can choose from 10 different kinds of oatmeal alone! In most industries, brands have grown in number to mind-boggling complexity. So how do you stand out in a crowd?
Take a moment and ask yourself these questions:
I was listening to the radio the other day and the radio hosts were describing a new restaurant in San Francisco. Now, with more than 3,800 restaurants in San Francisco, it’s hard to get people’s attention. But I think this restaurant does a great job of describing themselves:
Darn Good Food (DGF) does a good job of communicating its value in a succinct and focused way:
Being able to describe your value to customers in a succinct and compelling way is at the core of your value proposition. We’ll talk about Orion’s TRUE model for value proposition development in a future blog.
Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons localjapantimes
Cindee specializes in value proposition/messaging development, PR-AR-social and demand generation activities; she is a published author in several outlets, including Harvard Business Review.
I’m a visual person, so I appreciate when information is conveyed via pictures. Infographics are very popular these days and I wanted to create an infographic for one of our clients: Curriki, an educational non-profit that provides free K-12 classroom resources for teachers, parents and students.
There are several free tools to create infographics like Piktochart and Easel.ly, but I chose Easel.ly because it’s simple to use and it allows you to drag ‘n drop objects and type data into one of several customizable templates.
The above image is the infographic on Curriki I created.
Figure out what information you want to convey and develop a graphic representation of your story. It’s easy and it’s fun. Post a link below and share!
Cindee specializes in value proposition/messaging development, PR-AR-social and demand generation activities; she is a published author in several outlets, including Harvard Business Review.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m obsessed with food. A while back, I was listening to a weekend radio show that featured Food Maven Joyce Goldstein. She was describing a celebrated pastry chef who spent hours and hours making an elaborate dessert that used all sorts of gadgets – a huge slicer, a dehydrator, gellan gum, instant freezer, etc. – while showing off his finely-honed kitchen skills.
But the chef was far too technical. “Where’s the soul, man!” exclaimed Goldstein. She felt there was no passion, “no sensuality” to his cooking. She called it “machine food.”
The same can be said about some high technology marketing. Especially with products rich in technical depth and where the benefits are not intuitively obvious. Oftentimes, technology companies will take a “clinical” and (overly) technically accurate approach when describing their offerings, resulting in a lack of passion and emotional appeal to the buying customer. In these instances, the relevance and benefits to the buyer are noticeably absent – they’re either missing entirely, or buried in mounds of mind-numbing technical detail.
When it comes to messaging, extreme precision and being overly comprehensive can be the enemy. Too often, we have a tendency to list everything for fear of leaving something out. If you want your message to stick, keep it simple. Concentrate on 1-2 points that deliver the greatest value to the customer.
Just for fun, I used the Buzz Word Generator tool to come up with some “jargon-ese” that is typical of the technology industry. I’ll bet you’ve seen similar phrases before:
What do you think of these phrases? Impressive or just “noise?” In order to be effective, our messages must cut through the clutter.
Technology is an incredible enabler, but sometimes we communicate in ways that fail to connect with the buyer. How would you assess your ability to communicate the value of your offerings?
Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons
Cindee specializes in value proposition/messaging development, PR-AR-social and demand generation activities; she is a published author in several outlets, including Harvard Business Review.
If you’re a screenwriter, you need to successfully pitch your idea for a new film or TV show to Hollywood producers. Likewise, if you’re a start-up, you need to sell your idea using an original and compelling pitch.
“Good in a room” is a Hollywood term referring to creative people who are experts at pitching their story in high-stakes meetings. I often refer to former MGM Director of Creative Affairs Stephanie Palmer’s book Good in a Room for techniques that Hollywood writers, directors and producers use to get financing for their projects, since these techniques can work well in other business settings too.
But a great pitch is easier said than done, right?
After visiting several technology websites, I often find that I honestly don’t understand what a company does or why anyone would buy a particular product or service offering.
I find this start-up pitch that won the 2011 YouPitch competition refreshingly simple – it’s one example cited by Stephanie Palmer:
“We’re Clear Ear and we’re here to solve the earwax problem. Everyone produces earwax, but for 35 million Americans earwax buildup is so large that it closes the ear canal causing symptoms such as hearing loss and ringing in your ears.
To get treated today, patients undergo a burdensome 45-minute procedure. The patient first puts on a drape as protection from the oncoming mess. A nurse the uses a syringe to shoot water into the ear canal not only once, but 20 times. Worse of all, the nurse can’t see where the water is going. This is a blind procedure causing complication rates as high as 38%. If you’re a nurse or a patient, would you want to go through this long messy procedure?
Enter Clear Ear.
With our patent-pending earwax removal system, nurses can see into the ear canal while injecting water–thus avoiding complications like eardrum puncture. The nurse only has to fill the water supply once, flip the ‘on’ switch and target the earwax. Ten minutes later, all the wax is collected in a disposable container. No messy clean up– it’s quicker, it’s safer, it’s easier. Happier nurse, happier patient.
Clear Ear aims to deliver the solution to 350 million people suffering from earwax problems worldwide.”
If we take apart the Clear Ear pitch, we can isolate the key elements that make this pitch effective. Here are a few observations that you can apply to the business stories you create.
Do you have an example of a great technology pitch? If so, please share it and get community feedback!
Cindee specializes in value proposition/messaging development, PR-AR-social and demand generation activities; she is a published author in several outlets, including Harvard Business Review.
Marketing without strategy is like throwing mud against a wall and seeing what sticks. Strategy brings focus and focus drives execution and execution delivers results with improved marketing ROI.
We have all worked on marketing programs without a clear strategy or vision consequently the results have been poor and the fix has frequently been to spend good money after bad. In today’s economy it is critical to implement metrics for success and establish accountability for ROI marketing. To do this it is critical to have a clear vision and strategy for the program. In fact, the marketing program supports tactics that in turn support the strategy. But, do not back into the strategy. Rather strategy is the starting point. Also, establish clear metrics for success that are measured throughout the program. Again, don’t wait until the end because by then it is to late to make changes. By measuring throughout the execution stage you will test the strategy and tactics and can make mid course corrections if you are missing the target. At the same time if you are exceeding the metrics then do more.
The lack of strategy is a common mistake as the belief is that he product does everything and the market is everyone. The good news is that this can be fixed with a well thought out marketing plan. This will allow you time to develop the target market, supporting messaging, value proposition and differentiation, competitive landscape, etc. Execute the program and watch the ROI improve with increased sales.
Steve brings a unique blend of expertise to the technology industry. He has held senior VP positions in sales & marketing for HPC and Enterprise vendors including Sun Microsystems and Hitachi. He’s also worked with early stage technology and Internet start-ups helping to raise over $300M for clients.
We’re all familiar with stories – they’re the tales you tell upon returning from a trek in Costa Rica, or the chilling story you tell your teenager about the perils of drinking and driving.
But how do you tell a business story?
Even in business, we tend to understand things better when they’re presented in story form. Stories give context to a narrative and help put a “face” to an impersonal corporate entity. And since they’re often built upon personal experiences, stories cut through the meaningless jargon that’s so common in the technology industry.
The best storytellers are those who have lived through rich and memorable experiences (good and bad). So “business storytelling” comes easiest to those who are in constant contact with customers – sales people, service reps, executives or field engineers. If you’re sitting in an office in a product unit or a marketing department, seek out opportunities to observe or talk to customers.
Most of us are familiar with the product pitch that goes something like this:
Our Ergo ES.4 and EXP.36 servers deliver superior performance, reliability and efficiency for all your enterprise web-tier applications. Enabled with SuperSpecial™ technology, Ergo ES.4 servers not only provide the highest power-to-server efficiency than any server on the market today, they are ideal for unpredictable scale applications, allowing customers to confidently scale to more than one million concurrent users.
But wait! A story can be far more effective. In this case, the product doesn’t dominate the conversation and instead becomes the silent hero in our story:
I was at the Major Gaming Leagues Pro Circuit tour last week where the best videogame players from all of North America were battling it out for bragging rights and $100,000 in cash. Things were going well until a bunch of gamers launched a massively, multiplayer online game testing the latest pilot of HALO 4 and I thought they were going to bring the network to its knees. Luckily, our servers were able to instantly scale to accommodate this sudden peak need, easily supporting nearly 1 million concurrent online gamers!
Yes, the story is a little longer, but isn’t it more memorable? And instead of claiming to solve every customers’ problem, the story gives the listener a solution to his/her own problem by way of inference.
Why are stories so effective? Because they’re concrete, they’re authentic and they’re memorable. The most effective stories touch on human emotion and use equal doses of information and entertainment to impart information.
In reality, you may not always have a customer story to tell when you communicate information about your offerings. If not, think of an analogy that can help to personalize and ground your offering in reality. Can you recall a business story that “stuck” for you?
Cindee specializes in value proposition/messaging development, PR-AR-social and demand generation activities; she is a published author in several outlets, including Harvard Business Review.