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Date: Thur, 3 August 2006 00:22:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - August 3




                                SuitWatch -- August 3
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  Making Peace (if not also Products) With Marketing

   The July 31, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek has an excellent feature story
   titled "The Phone Companies Still Don't Get it",
   http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_31/b3995070.htm by Mark
   Gimein.  It opens with the story of Gimein's visit to a "customer" home in
   San Antonio, where he was brought by the new AT&T (formerly known as SBC) to
   witness the wonders of the company's Project Lightspeed, which promises to
   bring what we used to call cable TV to homes over new fiber optic cabling.
   Here's how he reports what happened:

     You would think rounding up a bona fide customer for two reporters
     shouldn't be impossible, but the proud homeowner who meets me at the door
     is wearing brightly polished cap-toed oxfords and a blue button-down
     shirt, an odd outfit for a guy sitting around his own house waiting for a
     reporter to stop by.  And so we make our greetings and I sit down in front
     of the TV.  In the armchair next to me Jeff Weber, the AT&T vice-president
     in charge of Project Lightspeed, grabs the remote control.  He presses a
     button.  The channel changes (much faster, he points out, than on a
     conventional cable system).  He hits another button.  It changes again.

     He gives a little flourish and gestures to the set.  "TV," he says.  "It
     works."

     I ask if this brand-new system will let me record one show while watching
     another, as TiVo (TIVO ) or my own cable box at home do.  Sure, says
     Weber, as soon as AT&T gets the new generation of set-top boxes built and
     delivered.

     Meanwhile, the homeowner has remained standing, watching me watch TV.  So
     I try to break the ice, asking what he does, assuming he doesn't work for
     AT&T.  Actually, he corrects me, he does.

     "So what exactly do you do?" I ask.

     "I'm the architect of Project Lightspeed." For a few seconds I take this
     in, wondering why nobody bothered to tell me.

     It's a classic moment, an illustration of where the power lies in telecom.
      It is tough -- no, make that impossible -- to think of another ostensibly
     technology-focused industry where the chief technical architect of a
     planned multibillion-dollar, company-changing project does not merit so
     much as an introduction.  In fact, in San Antonio, that architect, John
     Kirby, neatly managed to dispel any confusion about the status of
     engineering at the company when, after clarifying what it is he does, he
     explained that when it came to big new projects, "marketing dreams it up,
     and then I have to design it."

   Keep that last sentence in mind as we visit the nameless company that
   employs the cartoon character Dilbert
   http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20060727.html.  In three
   daily Dilbert strips last week (starting July 27), the character Alice -- a
   competent, under-appreciated and violence-prone engineer -- relates to
   marketing people by banging their heads on furniture.  In one strip she
   tells a prospective employee, "I'm going to bonk your head on the table.  If
   it sounds empty, you'll work in marketing."

   These two stories mark two ends of a range of ways that marketing can relate
   to engineering.  At one end are companies where marketing tells engineers
   what to do.  At the other end are companies where engineering is the core
   competency and marketing "leadership" is an absurdity.

   It was toward the second extreme that I addressed my last SuitWatch,
   Markets Without Marketing, http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000063 as
   part of my preparations for giving a tutorial at OSCON titled Open Source
   Clue Training -- How to Market to People Who Hate Marketing
   http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_sess/9317.

   The talk went well.  The room was full.  (Later I was told that it led OSCON
   tutorials in attendance.) Simon Phipps http://www.webmink.net/, the Chief
   Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, brought many people from his team.
   There was lively discussion afterwards, which continued into the halls and
   at dinner that evening.  I was even asked by a number of marketing executives
   if I'd be willing to come talk to their teams.

   (Here are the visuals from the tutorial:
   http://searls.com/doc/presentations/2006oscon/.)

   Some of the response afterward was positive.  Jim Grisanzio wrote
   http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jimgris?entry=helping_doc,

     I'm not in marketing, but I can think of many examples from the
     OpenSolaris project.  But I wouldn't term them as "marketing" because they
     were all done by a mixture of program managers, engineers, executives,
     marketers, and non-Sun developers and system administrators.  Also, they
     were all based in simple, open, and direct communications.  Messages were
     rejected.  Focus groups were rejected.  Press releases were largely
     silent.  Top down dictatorial management was absent.  There were very few
     filters, and almost none as the project matured.  Engineering led the
     effort, and engineers made all the important decisions since the program
     was designed to engage developers.  Interactions were done in the open in
     a variety of forums -- conferences, blogs, mail lists, customer briefings
     -- and were diversified and distributed horizontally, not vertically.
     Launch activities were discussed with the community on open lists, and the
     engineers led the launch in every important way with literally hundreds of
     blogs.  Anniversary activities were planned and implemented openly as
     well.  Highly technical SCM discussions and evaluations are taking place
     in the open as well as governance and development discussions.  Again, no
     filters.  Now, was it all perfect? No.  We got more open as we learned and
     experimented, and we got better at it as we went along.  But was it a big
     step for a big corporation? Absolutely.  Was it marketing? No.  But did
     marketing participate? Yes.  And that's the key.  Participation in a
     market no longer takes place through a funnel.  It's distributed and
     multidimensional, and there's probably no need to call it "marketing" any
     more.

   And some was negative, including the majority of comments below Markets
   Without Marketing.  Mark Collier's comment was titled "Sorry Doc, but you're
   wrong".  He explained,

     Ever seen a woman spend all day at a shopping mall and come home
     empty-handed, and completely satisfied with how she spent her day?

     Doc might not need marketing, but the markets need and WANT marketing.

   LostFlierBoy lamented the loss of silo'd choices:

     I have a fear of "Viral" or "ooze" or "community" or whatever marketing...

     My fear is that someone with online influence discovers my product or
     service and does not like it.  In "traditional" marketing the worst that
     happens is that your marketing is ignored (ads, news releases, trade show
     booth, etc.) and people may talk about what they don't like about you
     among friends.

     In the environment of the web if a blogger does not like what you offer
     they can chew you to pieces, sometimes without fact or communication, and
     influence thousands of people who influence thousands of others.  They say
     that what you have to offer is not worth the money, time or effort.  The
     posts and links and follow ups stay around for a long time making it very
     difficult to overcome what a blogger or two has done to what may be a
     great thing.

   In her blog http://www.horsepigcow.com/, Tara Hunt wrote a post titled
   It's not an Us vs Them
   http://www.horsepigcow.com/2006/07/its-not-us-vs-them.html, and provided
   three good examples of marketing and engineering working together.  She
   concludes,

     No, we don't need marketing as it has been understood for a long time.
     But rather than tossing it out altogether, the role of marketing has to
     change...and engineers and product managers and customer service and
     marketing has to be a seamless process...a team...with every single one of
     them touching both the customer and the product.

   In Emergence Marketing, Francois writes
   http://www.emergencemarketing.com/archives/2006/07/the_problem_is_choice.php

     It is true that many marketers are clueless and deserve the bad rap that
     they are getting.  But more often than not, that behavior comes from the
     very top - with CEO's, CFO's and other VP's expecting marketing folks to
     do unnatural acts, and getting rid of them if they do not deliver the same
     old stuff.

     Of course, marketing needs to get out of the way.  It cannot be a
     bureaucratic wall between the customer and the company.  But there is a
     huge gap between hearing what the customer says, and building successful
     products.  Engineering has to have first line of communications with the
     customer.  But while that may bring many advantages - ranging from a
     better understanding of customer needs by the people who are actually
     building the product, to better morale in the engineering team - this by
     itself will not lead to great product plans! You need very special skills
     and training to be able to turn market opportunities into successful
     product strategies.

     And of course, we need to get rid of no-value web sites and replace them
     with linkages to the information sources that matter and enhance them with
     tools to enable various people inside and outside the company to talk and
     communicate with one another.  But shouldn't you have someone in charge of
     that? Or do you believe that a free-for-all environment will result in an
     infrastructure where the customer will find what they need in a timely
     fashion?

     And yes - marketing is too often focused on "capturing and holding
     customers, rather than "finding and satisfying customer needs"." As
     John Hagel says,
     http://www.emergencemarketing.com/archives/2006/06/marketing_the_view_from_s_1.php
     they need to move from the 3I's (intercept, insulate, and
     inhibit) to the 3 A's (attract, assist, and affiliate) - no question about
     it! But shouldn't you have someone take the lead in that?

     Look, you can argue that you do not really need a marketing department -
     and for practical reasons, I think you do.  But you cannot argue that a
     company should have no marketing.  Marketing is what a company should do.
      Everyone within the company should wear a marketing hat!

   Market was a noun long before we made it a verb.  And it probably a verb for
   a while before we nouned that verb into "marketing".

   So let's go back to the noun.  Companies operate in markets.  Those markets
   might be demographics, or categories, or appetites, or locations, or whole
   regions.  In most cases today, the Internet has profoundly changed
   conditions in those markets.  Perhaps I went overboard in characterizing the
   old world as a matrix-like one.  But I don't think I was far off in
   characterizing every individual today as a Neo.

   We all want to be free -- as employees, as customers, as specialists, as
   original and autonomous authors of whatever we do in a world we no longer
   merely inhabit, but actually make.

   Marketing, whatever it becomes, needs to be part of making the world.  It
   needs to be connected and constructive. Building silos is easy.  Building a
   free and open marketplace in unfamiliar, unprecedented conditions? It's a
   challenge.  But it should be fun, and marketing should have just as much fun
   as everybody else who's building it.

   If you're up for it, see what you think the constructive new roles for
   marketing might be.  I don't have the answers.  I just know we've got a lot
   to build.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The
     Cluetrain Manifesto.  He is also a Visiting Scholar at the University of
     California, Santa Barbara.
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