version 2.0 | 103 posts since 11.03 | 
Increasingly, clients are looking at ways to outsource big parts of the marketing, PR and/or marcom function. It’s a trend that current economic and technological underpinnings support and one that’s likely to to accelerate, so figuring out what works and what doesn’t should be on every manager’s to-do list.
Some things to consider: Read more …
While going through some old articles I clipped, I came across The Half-Truth of First-Mover Advantage, written by Fernando Suarez and Gianvito Lanzolla, and published in the April 2005 Harvard Business Review.
It’s a gem of a piece, and should be required reading for anyone looking at market-entry or market-creation strategies. The short version of their well-argued treatise is this: The mythical first-mover advantage is more than a business fairy tale but no where near a sure thing, and the clearest predictors of success come from looking at the pace of change, both in the market and in the underlying technology behind the market.
This is more than material for the C-level set; it’s the kind of strategic business analysis more marketers should bring to the table as as a defense against costly mistakes.
The article is behind a paywall, but well worth the $6.50 it’ll cost you to get it here. Want to know a little more before you lay down the cash? I’ve adapted two of the article’s graphics into a summary after the jump. It’s a lot of information and, frankly, it’s worth keeping around, so here’s a link to a PDF as well.
I’m going to talk about the importance of authenticity in communications. But on the way to that point, I have to touch on movie piracy, economics and lobbying — come along for the ride!
The folks over at NBC Universal, like so much of Hollywood, have a piracy problem. (There’s a conflated problem in that much of their product is crap, but that’s a different discussion.)
So what does a big business do when it has a problem? If it’s smart, it lobbies. As Jonathan Rauch (one of my favorite policy journalists) pointed out more than 10 years ago in Reason, lobbying pays huge returns.:
In a developed economy, a marginal dollar invested in a new die-cutter or inventory-control system might produce a return of, say, 10 percent a year. Compare that with a shrewd investment in lobbying. In 1992, The New York Times reported that a handful of sugar refiners donated $8,500 to Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (R- N.Y.) and received his successful support for a tariff rebate worth $365 million–a return of about 4 million percent. Only a fool would pass up such an investment, or even the occasional shot at one. “If I throw in a million here or a million there, I might get a hundred million back,” a Washington lobbyist once told me. “And there are probably enough cases like that so they keep throwing money in.”
A colleague from another shop and I recently talked about hiring and how you ferret out talent in an interview. We traded interview questions and, while I don’t want to post his without permission, you’re more than welcome to use mine.
Read more …
Over at The McKinsey Quarterly, Eighty-four percent of the executives polled agreed that their companies should pursue not only shareholder value but also broader contributions to the public good; most said their companies could handle sociopolitical issues more successfully, as well.
I haven’t chugged the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Kool-Aid as much as some of my colleagues, but it doesn’t take a Harvard MBA to see that the principles of doing well by doing right can be applied strategically rather than merely as a tactical response to activists or isolated market pressures.
But how to go about it? McKinsey resarchers offer some helpful guidance:
Read more …
Talk to PR and marketing agency types, and you’ll hear all manner of moans and groans over Requests For Propopsals (RFPs) or their lesser-seen siblings, the Request For Information (RFI) or Request For Quote (RFQ).
Why? Well, part of it is just Pollyanna-ish thinking about how business comes in the door — a surprising number of agencies grow their practices through purely organic networking and word-of-mouth marketing. This isn’t a bad move (more on that in another post), but it’s hard to be known by all the right people all the time. Now and then, a great piece of work will come up and you’re going to have to walk through the beauty pageant just like everyone else.
But the other reason agencies sometimes shy away from competitive bids is a little more basic: There are a lot of unreasonable, unclear or otherwise undesirable RFPs out there. And it doesn’t have to be that way.
