Tag: iPhone

Why B2B marketing will become more visual, vocal, and mobile

December 11, 2009 by Chris Koch

The mobile phone has long been an object of affection and obsession for people who like to talk incessantly. But now that mobile phones have become computers that happen to ring, they have become irresistible.

There’s something about having this little device in our pocket that makes it so much more personal—dear, even—than any phone or laptop. (Desktops? I haven’t loved a desktop since my Mac Classic; besides, you can’t even really call them desktops anymore because we do everything we can to hide them from view under our desks, so no love there.)

More than smart
We root for our smart phones to become gifted. I’ve never been as vigilant about new application development as I have since the App Store came along.

And which apps really make us catch our breath? The ones that give us more freedom of time and place. Mobile also drives a craving for immediacy. Inevitably, it’s going to drive us back to our roots as visual storytellers. And that is important for marketers. Increasingly, we are going to have to deliver our messages visually for mobile devices. Here are some reasons why:

  • Mobile drives substitutions for the written word. I’ve often cursed Steve Jobs for not making an external keyboard that would attach to the iPhone (that would be the end of my laptop altogether). But when you see an iPhone app that lets you dictate voice into text with reasonable accuracy (for free), you start to wonder. And when it’s possible to do live, streaming video from your iPhone, you start to realize why Jobs isn’t making the keyboard a priority.
  • The cloud drives mobile to the center of computing. The emergence of the cloud is making these devices more independent. Google is offering offices in the cloud so that corporate IT systems become little more than sync devices for all the work being done away from a desk.
  • Mobile drives an urge for immediacy. The hottest collaboration applications on mobile are those that duplicate the immediacy of a phone call. One of the great lures of Twitter is that we know that it is always changing. IM and texting would be nothing without the real-time dynamic.
  • Mobile makes everything visual. Why have the iPhone and the Droid taken off? Because we can now see into our phones. We can see what others are doing. Even the words are visual now. Would you dream of Twittering without a profile photo or image? And who can resist the river of content that moves before your eyes? Twitter is every bit as visual as it is textual. And nowhere is the visual more dramatic than on your personal mobile device.

What does it mean?
For B2B marketers, this means that video and interactivity are something we need to be thinking about and doing now. Our target audience is ready. For example, a Forbes survey found that C-suite executives are more likely to make the time for a video than other executives. Sure, there are technical issues. Video search isn’t great yet, though it’s improving. But video case studies and interactive product demos—even for B2B services—are going to become more popular on mobile devices. And as mobile devices become our computing devices, that means B2B buyers are going to have a greater appetite for the visual.

What do you think?

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Apple's marketing arrogance

June 17, 2009 by Chris Koch

It’s marketing 101: don’t hold your needs above those of your customers—and don’t defy the expectations that you set with them.

Apple has violated both of those rules this week, and I’m sure they could care less—Apple long ago concluded that their products are so much better that customers will overlook the arrogance with which they treat customers. Here’s what happened: Those customers, (like me, ordering my first smart phone ever) who ordered an iPhone 3Gs over the web last week (Apple sent me an email inviting me to order—I didn’t pursue them) were promised that they would receive their phones “by June 19.”

So far, so good. But then Apple sent out confirmation emails to its customers listing a UPS tracking number link to track the progress of the shipment. I love the e-supply chain so I clicked to see UPS’s cool codes and see where they would ship the phone on the way to me (Anchorage, AK—how cool is that?). I was happily surprised when the manifest said I would receive it on June 17.

Then, this morning I saw the TechCrunch story about how Apple is having UPS hold the iPhones at the Louisville, KY hub until Friday—Apple’s official launch date. It makes sense when viewed from the Cupertino Ivory Tower: Why would Apple want customers to get the products they have purchased before we told the world they should have them?

But of course, true to Michael Porter and Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema’s principle of business strategy: companies only do one thing really well while trying to maintain parity with competitors on the things they don’t. Apple creates great products. The rest? Meh. UPS delivers packages efficiently—it is all about operational efficiency and supply chain.

So you won’t be surprised to learn that UPS took those iPhones and delivered the heck out of them. While Apple, which is all about product, didn’t pay enough attention (as usual) to that part of the business. Which meant that after UPS announced delivery dates to its customers, Apple stepped in to put the brakes on—and ordered UPS to go slower.

Can you imagine the looks on the faces of the folks at UPS central in Louisville as the word spread that they had to mothball the phones for two days and not do what they do best—deliver packages fast?

And can you imagine the arrogance of marketers telling their customers that a launch date matters more than satisfying their needs? I can’t. Can you?

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How Can B2B Use Apple's "Skim and Penetrate" Strategy?

April 17, 2008 by Chris Koch

Apple is on the verge of making real inroads into the business market, say analysts and academics in this Knowledge at Wharton article.

Yeah, we’ve heard this before.

But maybe this time it’s really going to happen. We’ve all heard about the encroaching consumerization of IT, as the lines between home and work blur and employees bring their applications from home—the most successful of which worship at Apple’s altar of intuitive interface design—into work with them.

Apple is riding this wave with its iPhone. As a marketer, you can’t help but wonder if there was a method to Apple’s madness of making the initial iPhone irresistible to consumers but nearly unusable for businesses. Think about it. Apple is nowhere in the enterprise today. Which do you think would work better as a strategy for breaking into that market:

1. Another cry wolf declaration from Apple that (yet again) it has a product that works as well for businesses as it does for consumers—which falls on deaf ears in the IT department, or

2. Optimize the product for consumer use and convert vice presidents of sales into frothing iTards who start peppering the CIO with emails about how great the phone is and demanding that they equip the sales force with a PDA (which the iPhone is, after all) that actually works and is easy to use.

A Wharton professor, Peter Fader, has anointed the latter as a bone fide strategy, calling it “skim and penetrate.” Here’s the core part of the article that you should memorize:

“Fader calls Apple’s approach a “skim and penetrate strategy” in which Apple “skims” a group of early consumer adopters—say CEOs enamored of a new gadget—and later hopes that these adopters will evangelize the product and help it reach broader adoption.”

My question for you is, how can this strategy work for B2B providers that have not burnished a shiny reputation with consumers? Strip Apple’s allure down to its essence and you get two things: ease of use and elegant design. Two attributes that haven’t exactly caught fire in B2B.

Okay, so consider the skim and penetrate part of this. How could B2B players get “consumers”—i.e. business people who matter–to evangelize your products to the organization? I’m going to get a little silly to jog your thinking. Could there be a “home” version of your software that’s free to use—and that may not even come close to mimicking its enterprise functionality. Indeed, it may have different function entirely, but simply introduces people to you and and your products?

In B2B, the attraction and evangelizing is reversed. IT falls in love with a B2B product and tries to sell it to the business. It’s usually a disaster, because what’s optimized for IT—I’ll categorize this loosely as rational appeal—rarely works for business people, who respond to emotional appeal: look, feel, application to their personal goals.

Yet what is optimized for the consumer can be made to work well for IT.

Is Apple on to something here that we have missed?

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