Ok fine, the iPad is better than this.

Photo credit: Phil Campbell

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Just when you thought the Apple Cosa Nostra couldn’t have its fingers in more pies (or i’s) the iPad arrived to fill the void in your life that you didn’t know you had. Marketed with Apple’s customary élan, the iPad seems set to achieve world domination despite the very obvious question which no one seems to be asking: how are men going to carry it around? Are we going to finally see widespread uptake for the man bag?

Doug and Stan have got themselves a pair of iPads. Strictly speaking, they ought to be blogging about it, but it’s my turn to write a post so I’m hijacking their topic. So far it seems they love their new toys, and although they’ll deny it, Apple’s branding must have a lot to do with it.* The appeal of the coquettish lower-case i is so irresistible the designers must be hugging themselves (whilst carting another wheelbarrow-ful of cash to the bank).

Like the iPhone, the iPad can do just about everything except bump off your mother-in-law: music, films, video, unrivalled on-the-go internet access –it’s a veritable smorgasbord of entertainment and future models will undoubtedly exhibit hundreds of other handy features. All this can leave you feeling like the Apple progeny are taking over the world. They are, of course, but don’t let that worry you.

It’s worrying the people at Adobe though. Unless you live under a stone you’ll know that the iPad doesn’t do Flash. AdMob has also joined the ranks of companies who have incurred Apple’s imperial displeasure. Sure, Apple should be allowed to do what it likes with its own stuff – but only up to a point. Econsultancy’s Meghan Keane pointed out that Apple’s move to force developers to use iAd is anti-competitive and could land Apple in trouble with the regulators.

I’d argue that Apple’s general behaviour is becoming increasingly anti-competitive; it’s not just confined to AdMob. What’s frustrating is that Apple doesn’t need to behave this way. It’s already got the edge in terms of innovation, usability, and design. Sure, it’s still a little pricey but that actually only helps its brand image. It doesn’t need to act like the bully in the playground – acting that way just makes it look a bit… paranoid, frankly. Paranoia and bullying are signs of weakness. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Jobs has been quite seriously ill: that would be enough to make anyone fearful about losing their edge.

Apple’s behaviour doesn’t fit with its brand image: laid back, cool, sleek, and user-friendly. If it’s not careful it’ll destroy that: people are already disappointed about the lack of Flash. Of course Flash has its flaws, and it’s good to try and innovate to make poorer alternatives vanish into oblivion, but there’s a difference between offering new things and marketing them, and imposing your will on the market. It’s a difference Apple seems to have lost sight of.

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*I shouldn’t be smug because it works on me too.

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Post tags: Add new tag, Advertising, Branding, Corporate Positioning, design, Marketing, Technology Marketing

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We’re always talking about how important a story is in marketing — but now someone has finally proven it with an ingenious experiment.

As summarised in a recent DoubleThink post, the experiment (by New York Times columnist Rob Walker) is called Significant Objects and the idea is really simple:

• Buy cheap things on eBay
• Give each one to a writer and ask them to tell a story about it
• Put each item back on eBay with the story attached
• Analyze the data

So, what’s a story worth? Quite a lot as it happens. The first 100 objects sold were bought for $120 and sold for $3,612 — a markup of 2,776%. The video of Rob Walker presenting the experiment at the PSFK conference is here.

And take a few minutes to browse around DoubleThink, an excellent blog on ‘Insight, Analytics and new Marketing’  by Dimitri Maex and Colin Mitchell, top strategists at Ogilvy.

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Post tags: Add new tag, analytics, B2B content marketing, B2B marketing, Copywriting, insight

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Thought you might enjoy it.

© Doug Kessler for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B content marketing, Thought Leadership

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In B2B as in life, there’s a whole genre of pains-in-the-arse that nobody ever talks about: things that are really annoying but not quite annoying enough to actually force you to do anything about. This class of arse-pain needs a name. I hereby suggest ‘Plaque’.

Plaque clogs up your life, degrading its quality without ever actually demanding your full attention. Like barnacles on a hull, plaque slows you down but never stops you dead in the water.

A smashed windscreen is an emergency. A slightly cracked windscreen is plaque.

A gushing pipe is a call to action. A dripping tap is plaque.

Some people have a low plaque threshold and spring into action the moment something happens to make their toaster or doorknob or light switch sub-par. I happen to have a very high plaque threshold. I can ignore almost anything until it’s a genuine emergency — except I’m not really ignoring it at all, I’m registering it, logging it, making that tooth-suck sound about it and regretting the hell out of it. (I tell myself that this is because I ‘have a life’ but really it’s because I just can’t be arsed.) (Is an American allowed to use the word ‘arse’ twice in one blog post without some kind of UK tax kicking in?) (What about three times?).

Anyhoo: here’s where I segue towards some semblance of relevance for B2B marketers like you: every B2B marketing department suffers from an accumulation of plaque.

The About Us page on  your website doesn’t reflect what you do any more. The last press release in the News section was dated 1987. The logo on the powerpoint template is WAY too intrusive.  The list goes on and on. And, here’s why all this kind of matters: while no single bit of plaque will seriously undermine your performance or cripple your KPIs, Gartner estimates (or surely will one day estimate) that, taken together, accumulated plaque can suck away 10-20 hard-earned Brand Mojo points. Fact.

So here’s a Velocity Two-Step Action Plan™ for your own personal War Against Plaque:

1) Every time you notice a bit of plaque, write it down on a whiteboard, flip chart or wiki page for all to see.

2) On the 3rd Friday of every month, spend one hour removing plaque – you can call it Floss Friday if you really want to.

Are you with me? I hope so — because I visited your website recently and there are some howlers on there. No offense.

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Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons by kate*

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Post tags: Add new tag, B2B, B2B marketing, digital marketing, Web Marketing

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Apologies to one G. Chaucer, who’s probably revolving in his grave as we speak and shouting ‘What foul travestie ys thys?’

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,*
Than longen folk to goon a-marketinge,
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Richemond they wende,
The agency Velocitie to seke,
That them wil helpen, whan that they are stucke.

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*’When April with his sweet showers/Has pierced the drought of March to the root’

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Thanks to Satguru for the photo of Dunstable Road

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© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B marketing, Content, Content Marketing, design, infographics, Thought Leadership

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We’re always a bit sceptical about the jargon du jour. But one buzzword keeps cropping up and we think there might be a reason: Tacit Knowledge.

Tacit knowledge, first conceptualised by Michael Polanyi, is knowledge that is hard to put into words — the stuff that’s difficult to articulate and transfer to another person.

Companies and individuals accumulate tacit knowledge over time through front-line experience — often they don’t even realise that they have it. In contrast, explicit knowledge can be easily described in words and transferred to another person (think software demo).

Very often it’s the tacit knowledge that gives successful companies their competitive edge – (or ‘sustained competitive advantage’ for jargon lovers).

It can live in a number of places in organisations – but most often with employees who have a way of doing things that works but find it hard to explain exactly how or why.

It’s what goes on in the head of that great salesperson or that unassuming techie who can crack a problem in minutes (but explain how in hours). It can even be dispersed across a group of people doing things a particular way. Like that business unit that consistently outperforms every other– what do they have that the other units don’t?

It’s a knack, its an insight, its in their gut. It comes with experience. The good news is – it can be brought out and shared. It’s hard but not impossible.

That’s where marketing plays an important role. If tacit knowledge is indeed so important to gaining and sustaining that competitive edge, then its marketing’s job to identify what tacit knowledge the company has, where it is, how to bring it out and make it easy to understand – not only to use internally but also to communicate the advantage it brings to customers.

There’s no short cut: marketers need to get up close and personal with these experts. Talk to them about their work, how they go about it day to day, observe them doing it then question them hard (but lovingly). Fall in love with the word “Why”. Find ways to articulate their knowledge. To make the tacit explicit.

This will take time, patience and most of all a genuine interest in finding out your experts’ hidden pearls of wisdom. But one thing is certain – put in the hard work and the results will be worth it.

Image Copyright Zitona

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Post tags: Add new tag, B2B marketing, Marketing, tacit knowledge, Thought Leadership

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Fortunately, it’s very rare that we ever get a client who doesn’t understand that you can’t have all three at once. Yet it’s still something that a lot of agencies come up against. But perhaps these problems wouldn’t arise if we marketers explained ourselves properly.

All our clients are lovely, but Doug and Stan could tell you some stories from the days before Velocity that would make you sleep with the light on for a month. There are plenty of reasons for this. Your contact at the client company has a boss that makes Pol Pot look like a fluffy bunny and is in constant fear of being fired. Or they’re a recent addition to the company and are out to prove their worth. Or they really are being squeezed on all sides. Or they’re just an arse.

Or, more likely, it’s a mismatch between expectations and delivery. There are reasons why we can’t do right, cheap, and quick all at the same time, and it’s not because we’re sitting around drinking soya lattes and doing tantric navel-gazing.

So what do you actually do all day?

We spend a long time researching and getting to know our clients. We talk to their friends, their partners, the lady who makes the tea… And we listen. We even take notes. Then we go away and produce websites, e-books, identities, white papers, videos, interviews, site tours, and all kinds of other content marketing goodies.

We’re also perfectionists. ‘Good enough’ just isn’t good enough. We want to do the best job we can: because it’s a matter of pride, and because we like our clients and want them to succeed. So doing a thorough job and keeping our clients happy takes time. Perhaps we ought to get over ourselves a bit, but we take pride in doing a good job and (out of selfishness, arguably) we don’t want to have our name on some poor work.

And because all this takes time and we work hard, it tends not to be cheap. We do aim to be value for money though, and generally subscribe to the ‘under-promise and over-deliver’ model of project management. That way people usually have a bit more than they thought they were getting, which makes everyone feel good.

Occasionally of course, you do get that magic combination of good, quick, and, if not cheap, excellent value for money. Without wanting to brag too much, it’s something we’ve managed every now and again at Velocity.

We don't often riot

Original photo from Frihedsmuseets fotoarkiv; Frihedsmuseet, Copenhagen, Denmark. Image is in the public domain under the Danish Consolidated Act on Copyright 2003.

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Post tags: Add new tag, B2B marketing, Client relations, Content Marketing, Copywriting, Online PR, Web Relations

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Velocity Partners, the B2B marketing agency for technology companies, has announced the completion of the first phase of their project to reposition IBS, the Distribution Resource Management specialists.

IBS was in turnaround following a major re-think of its structure and services. Velocity simplified and focused IBS’s story helping position them as leaders in wholesale distribution management software. The agency also rationalized IBS’s product portfolio, tailoring each product to specific sectors.

“IBS had gone through massive change and things were rapidly improving for them, but they still had trouble getting their message out there in a clear and easily understood way”, said Neil Stoneman, Velocity Client Services Director, “Creating powerful messages is essential for IBS to capitalize on the turnaround. That’s what we do”.

As an integral part of this process, Velocity designed and built a new website in record time. The site is a platform for generating leads and running outbound campaigns. Ruthlessly logical in its structure, it manages to be both informative and engaging thanks to a killer combination of snappy copy and well-designed visuals.

Velocity also incorporated thought leadership content into the programme, offering opinion and views on the market. The initial piece is an eBook on ‘margin killers’ in wholesale distribution, the first in a five-part series on the value drivers of wholesale.

“As always with a website project, it wasnt just a website project. I wanted it to be the catalyst for lots of things; yes, a new website, but also a new message, to re-energise people, and to bring us into the 21^st C. The Velocity team have been great. They quickly got under the skin of the market, helped us craft a crisp story, oh and yes, they built a great website too.” –Andy Bailey, CMO

About Velocity

Velocity is the B2B marketing agency for technology companies.

Website: www.velocitypartners.co.uk

Blog: www.velocitypartners.co.uk/our-blog

Twitter: velocitytweets

Contact: Neil@velocitypartners.co.uk

About IBS

IBS is the world leader in distribution resource management software – business applications for the wholesale, distribution and manufacturer/distributor markets.

Website: www.ibs.net

Contact: info@ibs.net

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Post tags: Add new tag, B2B marketing, Distribution management, Technology Marketing, Web Marketing

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When we met them in 2009, IBS, the specialist ERP vendor, was in turnaround. They’d just finished a major restructuring to focus the entire global business on one sector, wholesale distribution, and asked Velocity to clarify their positioning, develop a new story and take it to market.

As part of this process they needed a swish new website and some fast thought leadership content and campaigns.

The Project:

The Consulting Bit:

We came in, made a lot of notes, drank a lot of their coffee, and listened really hard to what they (and their customers) had to say. Then we:

· Simplified and focused the story – to position the company as leaders in the distribution business

· Gave IBS a new language – so they can talk about their products and services clearly ad compellingly – including their new category name: Distribution Resource Management

· Rationalized their product portfolio – so customers know exactly what’s on offer

The Web Bit:

As the first step in getting the new story to market, we:

· Ran analytics and content audits – using personas to develop the site navigation, architecture and SEO

· Wrote and designed a new website – to work as a lead generation platform – all in 6-8 weeks. Which isn’t bad.

· Helped move to a new CMS – by EPiServer, the best CMS on the planet (and a Velocity client)

The Thought Leadership Bit:

Leaders share their views on the marketplace with their customers and prospects. We’re helping IBS with a range of content marketing campaigns including:

· Web pages that are more than just product descriptions – they offer opinion and views on the market

· A series of eBooks –the first one on ‘margin killers’ in wholesale distribution is just the start

· Web video –our perennial favourite — in this case for a user conference series. With more on the way.

The Future Bit:

The foundation is in place. Now it’s time to build:

· Lead nurturing – we’re exploring using tools like Marketo to automate campaigns, and build a marketing funnel

· A customer portal – a mini-Facebook for customers to share their ideas with each other

· Blogging and social media – to promote IBS and engage in the web conversation

· More video – because it really is a fantastic way to tell stories. Just ask George Clooney

The bottom line

It’s too early to report hard results but the new story is getting real traction in the market, the website KPIs are all trending (or leaping) up, and Neil can’t stop smiling.

We have to say this is our ideal kind of project –plenty of tough challenges to get our strategic and creative teeth into, working with great people who are really on our wavelength.

‘’As always with a website project, it wasnt just a website project. I wanted it to be the catalyst for lots of things; yes, a new website, but also a new message, to re-energise people, and to bring us into the 21st C. The Velocity team have been great. They quickly got under the skin of the market, helped us craft a crisp story, oh and yes they built a great website too.” –Andy Bailey, CMO

© lucy for Velocity Partners, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Add new tag, B2B, B2B marketing, B2B technology marketing, Content Marketing, Web Design, Web Marketing

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